Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher and theologian.
38 Facts About Mary Daly
2.
Mary Daly retired from Boston College in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women's studies classes.
3.
Mary Daly allowed male students in her introductory class and privately tutored those who wanted to take advanced classes.
4.
Mary Daly was born in Schenectady, New York, on October 16,1928.
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Mary Daly's mother was a homemaker and her father, a traveling salesman.
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Mary Daly was raised in a Catholic environment; both her parents were Irish Catholics and Mary Daly attended Catholic schools as a girl.
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Early in her childhood, Mary Daly had mystical experiences in which she felt the presence of divinity in nature.
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Mary Daly taught classes at Boston College from 1967 to 1999, including courses in theology, feminist ethics, and patriarchy.
9.
In 1989, Mary Daly became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.
10.
Mary Daly brought suit against the college disputing violation of her tenure rights and claimed she was forced out against her will, but her request for an injunction was denied by Middlesex Superior Court Judge Martha Sosman.
11.
The college maintains that Mary Daly had agreed to retire from her faculty position, while others assert she was forced out.
12.
Mary Daly maintained that Boston College wronged her students by depriving her of her right to teach freely to only female students.
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Mary Daly documented her account of the events in the 2006 book, Amazon Grace: Recalling the Courage to Sin Big.
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Mary Daly protested the commencement speech of Condoleezza Rice at Boston College, and she spoke on campuses around the United States as well as internationally.
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Mary Daly published a number of works, and is perhaps best known for her second book, Beyond God the Father.
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Beyond God the Father is the last book in which Mary Daly really considers God a substantive subject.
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Mary Daly laid out her systematic theology, following Paul Tillich's example.
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In Wickedary Mary Daly provides definitions as well as chants that she says can be used by women to free themselves from patriarchal oppression.
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Mary Daly explores the labels that she says patriarchal society places on women to prolong what she sees as male domination of society.
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Mary Daly's work continues to influence feminism and feminist theology, as well as the developing concept of biophilia as an alternative and challenge to social necrophilia.
21.
Mary Daly was an ethical vegetarian and animal rights activist.
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Mary Daly was a member of the advisory board of Feminists For Animal Rights, a group which is defunct.
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Mary Daly created her own theological anthropology based around the context of what it means to be a woman.
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Mary Daly created a thought-praxis that separates the world into the world of false images that create oppression and the world of communion in true being.
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Mary Daly labeled these two areas foreground and Background respectively.
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Mary Daly considered the foreground the realm of patriarchy and the Background the realm of Woman.
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Mary Daly argued that the Background is under and behind the surface of the false reality of the foreground.
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The foreground, for Mary Daly, was a distortion of true being, the paternalistic society in which she said most people live.
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Mary Daly called the male-centered world of the foreground necrophilic, hating all living things.
30.
At the beginning of her career, Mary Daly had been a practising Roman Catholic.
31.
Mary Daly repudiated the Christian faith and regarded organized religion as inherently oppressive toward women by the time she wrote Beyond God and Father, stating that "woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan".
32.
Mary Daly eventually gave up on theology, believing it to be hopelessly patriarchal, and she turned her efforts towards philosophical feminism.
33.
Mary Daly saw the Catholic Church as fundamentally corrupt, but it still had some value to her, as was evidenced by her love for her copy of Summa Theologica in her later days.
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Mary Daly's argument was that the equality framework serves to distract women from the radical goal of altering or abolishing patriarchy as a whole, directing them instead towards gaining reforms within the existing system.
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Mary Daly argued that the "equality" framework de-centers women from feminist thought when it encourages women to assimilate into male-dominated movements or institutions.
36.
Mary Daly wrote that women and men were created equal.
37.
Mary Daly was the dissertation advisor to Janice Raymond, whose dissertation was published in 1979 as The Transsexual Empire.
38.
Mary Daly contributed the piece "Women and the Catholic church" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan.