As one who has long followed the career of the late radical feminist theologian Mary Daly, I was disappointed by her obituary in the New York Times a couple weeks ago. As a summation of Daly’s outsize life and work, it was inexplicably drab.
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Though Times obituarist Margalit Fox acknowledged that “Daly’s ideology placed her outside mainstream academic and religious life,” her profile definitely knocked a lot of bark off of its proudly gnarly subject. Fox cited Daly’s academic attainments (two PhDs in theology and one in philosophy, all from top-flight institutions) but not the categorical contempt she later expressed for scholarly credentials and canons. Fox summarized Daly’s first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), a historical analysis of the Catholic Church’s role in the oppression of women, without mentioning that Daly later apologized for its embarrassingly “liberal” character in relation to her subsequent work, most of which concerned her imagined travels to future times and distant galaxies. Fox referred to the support Daly received from the still all-male student body of Boston College during her landmark 1970 antidiscrimination campaign to wrest tenure from that Jesuit-run institution, but not to Daly’s later espousal of “a drastic reduction in the population of males” as an efficient way to effect a “decontamination of the Earth.”
“Are you saying that men who insisted on clinging to patriarchal beliefs and behaviors became obsolete and ‘died off’?” asked Mary.
