Interviewing Mary Daly, Unapologetic Feminist Theologian

I think there is a lot of academic research that supports the idea that women do a whole lot better in higher education at all women colleges. There is much academic research that suggests that girls suffer in high school because of male domination of classes. Amazing what is not said about the men who tried to sue Boston College.
They were funded by a right wing group, the two male students had not fulfilled prerequisit classes and were unqualified to take Daly’s class, but cowardly Boston College just caved. I don’t think a male scholar of her calibre would have ever been treated as shabbily, but who is going to remember those small minded men, when Mary Daly’s work and influence on modern feminism will live as long as women desire to protect her from patriarchal erasure. A woman of conviction, a woman who stood up for women 100% all the time. She never failed us, and I will always miss her great mind, her clever and hysterical words, her passion! Not just a dull academic, a real woman with an absolute passion for learning and teaching. They don’t make them like that anymore!

Daly’s stand about men in classes was a change. When I was at Boston College, 1967-1971, her students were men, and they–we–, were enthusiastically there: Daly’s courses were tough, and for one of them I took, each of the two exams was a one-on-one oral, an astounding commitment of a professor’s time. It became, at least, a commonplace that Daly was a shrew, but nothing could have been further from my experience with her. She endured with patience and friendliness, over one semester’s course on the theology of Paul Tillich, a litany of my questions, in class and during office hours. She was reserved always by temperament, but always friendly and focussed on the subject at hand. Her later decision to proscribe male students always saddened me: it was, I felt, their loss. I will always remember her as one of my most memorable Boston College professors. I will never forget the excitement of reading The Church and the Second Sex or Beyond God the Father. Ave atque vale.

I was not aware of Mary Daly until the 1999 brouhaha but at around the same time she came to give a public lecture at my state university. One of the preconditions of her appearance was that men would not be allowed to ask questions following the presentation. It was this outrageous gesture and the lack of objection to it from feminists, the media and the university that brought about my final alienation from feminism, with which, as a male, I had once naively thought I could identify.
Mary Daly, in the final phases of her career, was not just “eccentric” or “boundary-pushing”, she was dangerously crazy, an unapologetic female supremaciist who calmly endorsed the idea of mass extermination of males to bring about her gynocentric utopia. What saddens me most is that amidst all the posthumous accolades no prominent feminist or media figure is willing to step up and call attention this simple fact. In a world where the creation of an androcidal pathogen would appear to be a likelier means of cleansing the planet of male “contamination” (as Daly sweetly puts it) than the gyno-spiritual energies or extaterrestrial intervention she placed her hopes in is it unreasonable to ask whether Professor Daly, given the opportunity, would have been willing to open the bottle?

Yes,this is about so much more than not letting male students into a classroom in violation of Title IX (according to the female judge who ruled on the case, whom Daly bitterly referred to as an “Aunt Tom.”) It is about whether American feminists are concerned about equal rights or solely with womens’ rights, or rather with womens’ interests.

I have no beef with anyones theology but I don’t think it is legitimate to look at the “liberating” aspects of a person’s thought and ignore the distateful parts. Many people no doubt found Heidegger liberating. Once,I found Jung “liberating”. When I found out that he was a woman -beater and a racialist I changed my view of him. In my book, Daly’s hateful views on male “contamination” of the planet are not theology, but insanity. There can be no argument that Dr. Daly was an influential twentieth century thinker but although she may once have cited Tillich and Thomas Aquinas her deeper affinities lie with Valerie Solanas and Pol Poht.

I was a sole male nurse in a very female orientd workplace. I received nothing but help from fellow nurse but received nothing but cr4pp fro the nurses union which was and stillis full of men hating lesbians.
thank God they dont make many like that anymore. I dont think that people who supported her realised they were being criminal and could have been jailed.She should have been.
If a man did it they would be burnt alive at the stake.