Uncategorized 04 Jan 2010 02:24 pm
Mary Daly 1928-2010
Mary Daly has died. It was with mixed emotions that I learned that this afternoon. When I read Gyn/Ecology and Wickedary in 1991 or so, I thought they were the biggest piles of bullshit I’d ever seen, in content and in form. Having started in on that line of thought, I could hardly help pursuing it — her work was such irresistibly loopy, maddening crap, so fractally obnoxious in ways that cast unexpected light on what I thought, felt, and knew. I didn’t give a good goddamn for her status as a grande dame of feminism; she had bats in the attic, all right, and I set out in a private fury to identify them, bat after bat.
That’s how Mary Daly wound up being important to my development as a young feminist, not to mention my development as a person who can fail to give a good goddamn. Even almost twenty years later, rereading a little of Gyn/Ecology‘s preface, I find ways in which she is juicily wrong. I feel lucky to have had her work to react against. For all her flaws — and there’s a vast taxonomy of them, as I recall — she was brave as hell, and her work scratched open a small, new opposing bravery in me. Ave atque vale, old Lunatic.
on 04 Jan 2010 at 5:20 pm 1.Tamara Vining said …
I met her in the late 70s in Washington, D.C., and Gyn/Ecology was the first feminist book I bought, I think. She was quite a character, and had a following all around her when she was out. I got to sit and talk with her, but I was very young, and didn’t really know what I was talking about. Didn’t become a follower, and haven’t re-read Gyn/Ecology in decades. Maybe I’ll go look at it tonight. Thanks for posting this.
on 04 Jan 2010 at 9:46 pm 2.Cam Sculpin said …
I might get it out of the library and re-read it too. I’m so nostalgic now, remembering sitting in a corner of the library and going “GRAR GRAR GRAR” at it.
Well, maybe more like, “GRAR GRAR whoa trippy GRAR GRAR.”
on 05 Jan 2010 at 8:31 am 3.McJulie said …
That’s funny, clearly I didn’t take enough radical womyn’s studies in college because I had never heard of her. So I looked up Gyn/Ecology and saw that the subtitle was “The Metaethics of Radical Feminism” and started chuckling to myself. Then I saw that one of the Amazon rave reviews started with “Goddess, I loved this book” and started chuckling harder.
I think I do have to read it now. Thanks for the elegy.
on 05 Jan 2010 at 12:46 pm 4.Cam Sculpin said …
Heh. Oh, Julie, would I ever like to know what you make of those books.
Heck, I’m curious to see what I’d make of them now. I think my take would be a lot different, and probably kinder. There were some things going on in my own life then that very likely primed me to be pretty damn stabbity.
If you’re checking out Daly, you might also want to look into Audre Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly” published in Sister Outsider.