(3) By the early 1990s, the rejection of essentialism, as well as the identification of Daly with the concept, was so complete that thereafter Daly's work was widely regarded as irrelevant to feminist theory except as a foundational antitype. But Daly's work served as the original flashpoint for the issues that came to predominate in these attacks over the course of the decade. This controversy was about the racism of her third work, Gyn/Ecology (1978), and the status of that work as 'essentialist.' Essentialism was of course the central preoccupation of feminist theorists during the 1980s, and their attacks on it took many forms.

(2) The defining controversy of Daly's career, however, was one that occurred within the feminist community itself, one in which Daly ultimately figured more as a symbol than as a discussant. Her policy provoked a lawsuit from a student and a reprimand from Boston College, and she was effectively forced into retirement in 1999.

Beginning in the 1970s, Daly refused to teach male students in her formally organized classes. Her initially unsuccessful promotion to associate professor, in 1969, became a cause cé1èbre, a rallying point for feminists who saw her bid for academic recognition as testing the nature and extent of the modern academy's feminist commitments. Despite her formal repudiation of the Catholic Church in the early 1970s, Daly spent virtually all her professional life teaching at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution. As her own kind of Wiccan-influenced radical feminist, Daly was unique even among iconoclasts, and her career was fraught with controversy. At the time of her death, Robin Morgan hailed her as 'a central figure in twentieth-century feminism.' (1)Īs a feminist emerging out of a Catholic context in the 1960s, Daly was a true iconoclast. In 2007, feminist theologian Caryn Riswold compared her to Martin Luther as a reformer whose ideas left an 'indelible mark' on the religious tradition from which they emerged. Her second, Beyond God the Father (1973), extended the critique begun in The Church and the Second Sex and marked Daly's formal repudiation of Catholicism in favor of a feminist religion of her own, one she elaborated thereafter in numerous essays and six books, including a memoir and a dictionary. Her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), was one of the earliest and most comprehensive radical feminist critiques of Catholicism. THE FEMINIST THEORIST AND THEOLOGIAN Mary Daly died in January of 2010, at the age of eighty-one.

Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly