Mary Daly 1928-2010

This news is very fresh and the post is intended partly as a prod to look for other obituaries. Here are the items that landed in RantWoman's email and that popped out of her first search engine check:

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2010/01/mary-daly-death-of-feminist.html



Subject:RE: [Water-l] Mary DalyDate:January 3, 2010 6:34:05 PM EST

This is indeed a loss for spiritual women. I met Mary Daly in Boston. She was brilliant, insightful and a pioneer in feminist theology/thealogy. Her books, "The Church and the Second Sex" and "Beyond God the Father" were powerful works that changed lives as well as thought. She had a gift for wordplay and a wicked wit--one of the funniest women I've ever met (she also had two Ph.D.'s). Her Wickadery and her book Gyn/ecology are wonderful, as are her later books. She was kind--made herself part of the group she was in, not a star. She was insistent on defining and demanding women's space, something that did not endear her to the priests at Boston College, where she taught until she was 70 and where she drew students internationally who wanted to study with her. Google her name and enjoy. And say a prayer of thanks for her life.
Nancy Whitt
________________________________________On Behalf Of Mary E. Hunt Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 3:59 PM
Subject: Mary Daly
With a heavy heart, yet grateful beyond words for her life and work, Ireport that Mary Daly died this morning, January 3, 2010 inMassachusetts. She had been in poor health for the last two years.
Her contributions to feminist theology, philosophy, and theory weremany, unique, and if I may say so, world-changing. She createdintellectual space; she set the bar high. Even those who disagreedwith her are in her debt for the challenges she offered.
When I return from vacation at week's end I will post more. But I wantWATER colleagues, of which she was a stalwart one, to know this now.She always advised women to throw our lives as far as they would go. Ican say without fear of exaggeration that she lived that way herself.
May her spirit soar and her ideas endure.
Mary E. HuntHoechenschwand, Germany
Mary E. Hunt
WATER
8121 Georgia Ave. #310
Silver Spring, MD 20910 USA301 589-2509. Fax 301 5893150

RantWoman had two extended intellectual encounters with mary Daly. One time RantWoman met a bunch of Catholic Worker women at a protest. They were all very hot about Mary Daly, whom they had been referred to by their nuns!

The other encounter was in college when RantWoman and some of her peers organized a studen initiated seminar in The Theory and Practice of Nonviolence. A very game professor from the philosophy department agreed to sponsor the course. We composed our own reading list and course requirements.

(RantWoman remembers writing a lot in a class journal. Lonstanding logorrhea anyone?)

The class was somewhat less than half female. For RantWoman's alma mater at the time the ratio was notable. It was the dawn of Women's studies as an organized discipline. Somewhere midway through the course the women in class all mutinied and decided we needed to add Mary Daly's Gyn/ecology to the reading list.

The women all thought it was brilliant and wonderful. Well RantWoman thought it was a really fun read and it was good for getting a clear alternavie line of thinking into the conversation. Are there much better feminist perspectives specifically on nonviolence. Heck yes. Are there other better, less incendiary analyses of gender-based differences in conversational dynamics, constructions of social priorities, and multitudinous other question. Oh heck yes too. Did all the perky college guys trying gamely to use the book as a basis for dialogue survive the encounter. Last time RantWoman checked...

RIP