Mary Daly's later writings tend to make late twentieth-century feminist readers uncomfortable. Her later works are sometimes praised for their poetic, visionary, or “destabilizing” style and imagery.¹ Far more often, though, these works are sharply criticized for containing essentialist and dualistic concepts of gender and ahistoric and undifferentiating analyses of patriarchy.² Why do scholars in women's studies so often choose Daly's works to expose faults and slips in radical feminist thinking? I believe this is mainly due to the many religious connotations and reminiscences that permeate her work. For what are we to think of “patriarchy as a worldwide religion,” for example, or of invoking “elemental faith” to resist the “spells of male demons”?

Critiques of Daly's writings have repeatedly suggested that her controversial feminist concepts are related to her adherence to traditional theological and philosophical frameworks.³ Indeed, classic Christian theology and philosophy undeniably inform Daly's feminist writings, and her later, so-called post-Christian, works are still rife with religious concepts and imagery, which is no doubt due to Daly's Roman Catholic upbringing and theological training. However, this angle offers little challenge as a research perspective, for it almost inevitably points to the question Did Mary Daly Really Leave Christianity?⁴ At best, this question leads to contemplation of classic christian views of ‘virtues’ or ‘passions’ at the heart of Daly's later work. But more often than not, it calls Daly's credentials into question. The narrow scope of the “Did-She-Really” question precludes a more refined view of the complex role of religious faith in Mary Daly's oeuvre, a complexity which is the focus of this article.

That Daly's work is so well suited to what Teresa de Lauretis has called “upping the anti [sic] in feminist theory” is, I believe, closely connected to the problematic status of religious faith in the frameworks of critical Western science that feminist reflection draws upon.⁵ I see feminism as a movement that, in a practical and political sense, strives for the emancipation and liberation of women, while at the theoretical level historifying and deeply problematizing gender. It is a movement that unmistakably continues to propagate the ideals of the Enlightenment.⁶ The Enlightenment ideals intrinsic to the feminist agenda are emancipation, self-determination, democratization and (historic) relativization of (religious) traditions. These are all matters that encourage the processes of secularization. Philosopher Alice Jardine has suggested that feminism, with its battle against what are perceived as “false images” of women, may be seen as the final secularization of the West. Feminism “is necessarily bound to some of the most complex epistemological and religious contradictions of contemporary Western culture.”⁷ Feminism has prompted many women to distance themselves from religious traditions, but it has also engendered a passionate struggle to liberate and renew religious faith.

Quite early on, in Beyond God the Father (1973), Daly observed that it was far from evident to most feminists why one should care about God or religious faith at all.⁸ But to her, as a theologian, these were all-important issues. Through all her writings, she has held a certain religious faith very dear. Although her theoretical frameworks and her language changed drastically, she described this faith in various contexts as “a passion for transcendence.” In Pure Lust, for example, she wrote: “[O]ur struggle and quest concern Elemental participation in Be-ing. Our passion is for that which is most intimate and most ultimate, for depth and transcendence.”⁹ She is convinced that this passion for transcendence is of great importance for the continuing development of a feminist attitude and conduct.

As a feminist and a theologian, Mary Daly's position on religious faith changes through the course of her oeuvre. In this chapter, I explore these changes. With this approach, I hope to achieve two things. First, I aim to analyze the meaning of religious faith and theology in Mary Daly's work while avoiding the usual prejudices and interpretations applied to her work. To understand and value the role that religious faith plays in Daly's feminist writings, we need to raise issues that can deconstruct established modes of interpretation, such as “feminism versus traditional Western theology and philosophy,” issues that can uncover conflicts and differences that resist subsumption into these standard approaches. Second, I will contribute to the discussion of what religious faith means to feminism. These two aims are interrelated; identifying the many, often contradictory, meanings of religious faith to feminism and to the women's movement may contribute to a (re)valuation of Mary Daly's feminist theological project—and vice versa.

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

Looking back on her college years in Fribourg, Switzerland (1959-67), Mary Daly described her experiences there as bizarre:¹⁰ like Alice in Wonderland, she found herself in a totally clerical world, devoted to neo-scholasticism—the study of Saint Thomas Aquinas's texts to defend Roman Catholicism against the philosophy of Modernity. However, Daly's de facto marginalized position in Fribourg—as a non-European, a layperson in the Roman Catholic church, and above all, as a (young) woman—must also have given her a certain intellectual advantage. She could engage in modern philosophy and liberal theological debate with relatively little to fear, because she was outside the Roman Catholic power structure and thus could not be punished for deviating from “official” views. Evidence of this relative freedom can be found in Daly's two neoscholastic dissertations dating from the early 1960s.¹¹

In these studies, Daly not only showed her capabilities in neoscholastic “logic,” but also gave voice to contemporary concerns in a remarkably strong and consistent way. But Daly did not attempt to reconcile Christianity and modernity on the level of neoscholastic discourse itself, as some other young Roman Catholic theologians tried to do at that time.¹² She alternated expressions of religious faith in an “Infinite Being” with skepticism toward the complacency of people who continued to speak in theological terms as though nothing had changed since the Middle Ages. Her notions of God, theology, and religious faith were neoscholastic. At the same time, she spoke for a new generation in the increasingly secular Western world: the men and women who were interested in religion, but uninspired—or even turned off—by traditional Christian language and logic. In this context, Daly also openly discussed the specific problems faced by women like herself. In the abridged version of her theological dissertation, Daly explicitly pointed out her own exceptional position as a woman striving for a theological doctorate.¹³ In this publication, she also discussed the meaning of theology to “non-clerical people” and criticized the exclusion of women from higher theological education.¹⁴

In her theses, Daly argued in favor of “speculative theology,” an inductive method based on “positive knowledge of God through creatures.” Neither the explanation nor the proclamation of the content of biblical revelation for modern people, but rather gaining access to God oneself from the position of “modern man” formed her line of approach. By reflecting upon their own “sense of being,” their self-awareness and their actual existence, human beings can grasp, by way of analogy, God's Being. According to Daly, this Thomistic view of theology was “fundamentally open to historic reality and to the experiential world.” Daly hereby placed a remarkable emphasis upon the rational moment in theology. Unlike her young male colleagues who were increasingly coming to regard the immense abstractness of neoscholastic theology as a problem, she did not consider this to be an obstacle to the vitality or relevance of Thomistic theology.

I believe that Daly emphasized the rationality of theology because she reasoned from the position of all women and those laymen and modern believers who lack the philosophical and historical education necessary for independent theological reflection. In various ways, the emphasis on “speculative theology,” on the rationality of theology, gives women the opportunity to participate in theology: “positive knowledge of God through creatures” supposes an understanding of theology in which nobody is excluded, either as a subject or as an object of theology. With these views, Daly was clearly thinking along different lines from those of most other advocates of women's emancipation in the Catholic church around that time. Daly's primary concern was not the equal access of women to ecclesiastical offices, but an autonomous, unmediated access to the “knowledge of God,” for as many people as possible.¹⁵

FOR THE SAKE OF THEIR SOULS

Daly made a plea for speculative theology as positive knowledge of God through creatures and for participation in this theology by men and women who are not part of the clergy. In terms of content, this plea is akin to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanist and emancipatory debates on opening up the study of theology to women. It was not until the twentieth century that women were admitted to theological studies at the university level, and Roman Catholic women had to wait until the 1960s before they were allowed in. However, many women did not see the importance of being permitted to study theology. It was especially their nonscholarly interaction with religion that earned them the praise of church and society. In her research on learned women in European history, historian Patricia Labalme concludes: “(Not until the twentieth century was there a female doctor of theology.) … The world of the university was beyond the reach of women. There was a world, however, always within the reach of women, the world of eternal truth. Piety might be a highroad to religious wisdom. … Religious endeavor both encouraged and limited the literary productivity of learned women. But none wrote on theology: that is for the Doctors, said St. Teresa.”¹⁶

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, there was a great respect for a number of women who gave voice to religious matters in the devotional, rather than the scholarly, genre. As a rule, these women belonged to religious orders and their orthodoxy was unquestioned. The church authorities emphatically promoted their prayers and visions, and in their introductions to these women's writings “invariably emphasized the woman's talents for prophesy, inspiration, Christian devotion, and genuine religiosity, not her acuity, erudition, or literary gifts.”¹⁷ The church stressed that these women were merely a vehicle of divine inspiration (something that many women were eager to corroborate) and that God had chosen the weak to confound the strong. This was how the phenomenon of lay and female mystical inspiration could be explained “away.” Underlying this explanation is an ancient belief in women's abilities as mystics, prophets, and oracles and in their proclivity for religious fervor.

Women's access to theological studies did not become a public issue until the seventeenth century. It coincided with another question that divided academia at the time: the (in)dependence of philosophy and science from religious tradition (Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza). Sparked off by the Querelle des Femmes—the Renaissance polemics about “the nature of women”—women's participation in theology became the subject of debate. As a result of the humanist ideal and the Renaissance cult of erudition, women—often clergymen's daughters, sisters, or cousins—began entering the field of theology. Among scholars of theology, both in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, pleas were heard for opening the study of theology to women (Anna Maria van Schurman, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz).¹⁸

Those who formulated these arguments, written mostly by women themselves, take the position that intellectual development and religious perfection go hand in hand. They therefore recommend the study of theology, but are clearly detached from the question of whether women should be able to practice a profession, acting as, for example, a clergy-woman or a teacher of religion. Studying theology would simply contribute to women's personal religious education and facilitate its transfer to children and other members of the family.¹⁹

The Enlightenment itself did not give rise to debates on whether women should be allowed to study theology. In religious terms, women seem to have felt more appreciated and included in counter-Enlightenment movements: Pietism and Romanticism. Religious women did not take Mary Wollstonecraft's and John Stuart Mill's rational feminist line. The nineteenth century saw wide acceptance of the idea that women were “by nature” religiously and morally superior, a notion held even by women themselves. As a result, women started to actively take part in congregations, missionary work, church-run social welfare work, and charities. This involvement also led to calls for admitting women to the ministry. However, the thought that women would become “better” people and Christians through education and studies, by developing their mental powers and enriching their minds, did not reappear in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussion about women and theology.²⁰ In terms of content, Mary Daly's plea for speculative theology as positive knowledge of God through creatures is a continuation of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century appeals for women to be allowed to study theology; according to these arguments, since women were given a brain they should not be denied “the bliss of understanding the highest, divine insights.”

I think it is too reductive to attribute this point of view solely to Daly's Roman Catholic background. After all, some of Daly's contemporaries, including Roman Catholic women, were calling for allowing women into the priesthood. I think that Daly's humanist and emancipatory approach reflects a modern awareness of the value of higher education and that it is part of the belief in the American dream that must have been of great importance in Daly's Irish Catholic immigrant family. Daly's approach also shows her to be one of a new generation of well-educated Roman Catholics who had outgrown their traditional religious upbringing because of their academic education²¹ and were looking for a more intellectual religious life. In addition, I think her neoscholastic education itself contributed to her point of view, since Thomistic theology presupposes “fides quaerens intellectum,” religious faith that searches for insight.

Mary Daly's early writings criticize institutions, people, and (theological) ideas that hamper a “well-developed” and individual approach to God. However, Daly does not question religious faith as such. Her views on faith and theology are derived from the internal neoscholastic debate and do not confront or deal with the modern suspicion of religious faith that was highlighted by the Enlightenment. In her dissertations, Mary Daly manages to find a positive connection between the neoscholastic concepts of theology and religious faith, and women's and laypeople's emancipation. She continues this line in Beyond God the Father when she starts speaking about God as Be-ing and Verbing from a feminist perspective. She assumes a close and mutual link between “sense of being” and “knowledge of God,” between “being” and “participation in Be-ing.” “When women take positive steps to move out of patriarchal space and time, there is a surge of new life. I would analyze this as participation in God the Verb who cannot be broken down simply into past, present, and future time, since God is form-destroying, form-creating, transforming power that makes all things new.”²² In her later work, we find the same idea cloaked in the term “elemental faith,” religious faith that promotes feminist awareness and women's independent action. But Daly's later writings contain numerous attacks on “patriarchal religion” and the “phallocratic belief system” that hampers women's ability to have faith in themselves. Modern suspicion of religious faith gained a firm foothold in Daly's later work and brought her to sharply demarcate and distinguish between “good” and “bad” faith. How did this change of viewpoint come about?

EXEMPLARY

From an in-depth analysis of Mary Daly's oeuvre, I conclude that Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism, and particularly her gendered concept of ‘bad faith’ must have had a major impact on Daly's concept of religious faith.²³

As Daly said many times, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) greatly influenced her feminist thinking.²⁴ However, in Daly's first feminist study, The Church and the Second Sex (1967), her resistance to Beauvoir's feminist analyses outweighed her admiration. She felt the need to dispute Beauvoir's feminist attack on the Roman Catholic church. But in repudiating Christianity in the name of women's autonomy, and accusing the Roman Catholic church of overt misogyny, Beauvoir had turned to historical facts, which Daly could hardly deny. Daly's only way out was to point to impending “historical changes” in the Roman Catholic church of the 1960s.²⁵

At the same time, Daly discovered that Beauvoir had been inconsistent in her indictment of Christianity and the Roman Catholic church as active oppressors of women. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir made several references to women “achieving transcendence through religion.” For example, she stated that the power of religious orders had brought women such as Teresa of Avila to “heights that few men ever reached.”²⁶ Daly interpreted Beauvoir's remarks to mean that the church as a social institution could provide “the needed condition for a St. Teresa to rise above the handicap of her sex.”²⁷ Daly also noticed Beauvoir's pronounced admiration for Teresa of Avila. Beauvoir praised Teresa for “living out the situation of humanity” in an exemplary fashion. “As for the psychological leverage which produced this phenomenon, Beauvoir does not explain further,” Daly remarked. “The one indisputable fact is that Teresa of Avila was a Christian mystic.”²⁸

Daly was well aware of the discrepancy between Beauvoir's merciless portrayal of someone like the French mystic Marguerite Marie Alacoque—whom she described as neurotic, overemotional, and narcissistic—and her almost “lyrical” description of Teresa of Avila, whom she credited with “achieving transcendence.” Daly seemed, however, not to be interested in exploring the reasons behind this discrepancy. In fact, she seemed only too happy to accept Beauvoir's suggestion that Teresa of Avila somehow took up an exceptional position in the ranks of Christian mystics. In The Church and the Second Sex, Daly turned Teresa into a precursor of modern Bible interpretators and of proponents of women's emancipation. “Apparently, as a consequence of mystical experience, Teresa's understanding rose above the common interpretation of Pauline texts concerning women,” Daly concluded, echoing both Beauvoir's views and her language.²⁹

GENDERED CONCEPT OF BAD FAITH

In contrast to Daly, I am very interested in possible reasons for the ambivalence in Beauvoir's views on Christian religion and women's autonomy, or “transcendence,” as expressed in The Second Sex. Beauvoir wrote this comprehensive antiessentialist study with the intention of demythologizing opinions on women and “femininity” commonly held in her own social and intellectual milieu. She exposed and analyzed the androcentric bias with which women are classified as “the other” and as subordinate to men. She argued that this phenomenon pervaded not only the Western literary canon, but also myths, morals, and rituals worldwide. Beauvoir showed that both Western, Christian, “enlightened” civilizations and “primitive” cultures were rife with prejudice against women. Yet she also stressed the historical and contextual nature of “femininity”; in her view, women are not “feminine” by essence or nature. On the basis of many examples, she identified the social and psychological processes whereby women learn to act “feminine.”

For a critical interpretation of these processes she turned to the central analytical frameworks of the existentialist philosophy that she and Jean-Paul Sartre had developed. L'être et le néant (1943), the first major product of their collaboration, and which appeared solely under Sartre's name,³⁰ described in great detail how individuals shrink from reaching their full potential and thus give up their freedom. Instead of striving to transcend a given situation, they cling to certain positions and states of mind that prevent them from taking their freedom and from “actualizing the self.” This “inauthentic” or “self-deceptive” way of living was termed mauvaise foi, or bad faith.³¹ But whereas L'être et le néant only discussed the individual factors that act as impediments to self-actualization, in The Second Sex Beauvoir argued that women's failure to achieve transcendence also had its roots in a shared social situation. Women's social position seemed to engender an almost inevitable, permanent condition of bad faith.

According to Beauvoir, women's position was characterized by the fact that they grow up, live, and make their choices in a world where men have cast them as the other. “They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego which is essential and sovereign.”³² Beauvoir eventually linked this subjection to the other to women's reproductive role, or more precisely, to their complete immersion in the sustenance of life itself.

In terms of religion, The Second Sex also expands upon the frameworks of the existentialist philosophy set out in L'être et le néant. Although L'être et le néant firmly denounced religious faith (or, to be precise, God's existence) because of its incompatibility with the individual's radically infinite freedom,³³ Beauvoir's The Second Sex offered a far more complex view. Beauvoir endorsed the existentialist “rational” refutation of God's existence,³⁴ but also admitted—albeit with mixed feelings—that religious faith sometimes made women autonomous and helped them transcend the gender-related boundaries imposed on them. It is quite remarkable that religion was the only field where Beauvoir found examples of “self-actualized” women, as Mary Daly was quick to observe in 1967. Therefore, it seems appropriate to investigate in more detail why religious women such as Joan of Arc, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa of Avila were given such special status in The Second Sex.

RELIGION OF LOVE

In The Second Sex, there are two distinct trains of thought about women and religion. First and foremost, there is Beauvoir's main point of view: a strong conviction that religion affirms and legitimizes women's “immanence.” She points to the blatant way in which Roman Catholicism achieves this: it provides saintly role models and uses symbols and rituals of kneeling and of women/mothers who are subservient to, and bow for, men/fathers representing God, the Almighty Father. Besides deepening women's dependency and powerlessness, religion also mystifies their fundamentally lower social status by granting them the illusion of transcendence. Christianity does this in a particularly ingenious way: ostensibly, it grants women an equal status: as creatures of God, both men and women possess eternal souls, bound to heaven. Simultaneously, Christianity, and particularly Roman Catholicism, offers women a magic universe filled with objects and activities to occupy their time and resign them to their fate: “Religion sanctions woman's self-love: it gives her the guide, father, lover and divine guardian she longs for nostalgically; it feeds her daydreams; it fills her empty hours. But, above all, it confirms the social order, it justifies her resignation, by giving her the hope of a better future in a sexless heaven. This is why women today are still a powerful trump in the hand of the Church; it is why the Church is notably hostile to all measures likely to help in woman's emancipation. There must be a religion for women; and there must be women, ‘true women,’ to perpetuate religion.”³⁵

But these mechanisms are at work not only in historical Roman Catholicism. According to Beauvoir, even contemporary Christianity has the same effect: “In modern civilisation which—even for woman—has a share in promoting freedom, religion seems much less an instrument of constraint than an instrument of deception. Woman is asked in the name of God not so much to accept her inferiority as to believe that, thanks to Him, she is the equal of the lordly male; even the temptation to revolt is suppressed by the claim that the injustice is overcome. Woman is no longer denied transcendence, since she is to consecrate her immanence to God.”³⁶

The second train of thought on women and religion in The Second Sex concerns the idea that (certain) women can achieve transcendence through religion. Both girls and adult women can gain autonomy through religious faith.³⁷ It is significant that, in this context, Beauvoir speaks of “mysticism” or “mystical experience” rather than religion. She is not interested in mysticism as a special religious experience, but rather as a special sort of erotic love. Beauvoir devotes an entire section to “the woman mystic.”³⁸ This section forms the conclusion of an analysis of the ways in which women practice bad faith.³⁹ In Beauvoir's view, narcissism, erotic love, and mystical love have common characteristics. The gender specificity in how women forsake freedom lies in their rendering themselves—actually or imaginarily—totally dependent on men. Women practice a disastrous “religion of love”:⁴⁰ a boundless devotion to divine men and masculine gods.⁴¹

Love has been assigned to woman as her supreme vocation, and when she directs it toward a man, she is seeking God in him; but if human love is denied her by circumstances, if she is disappointed or overparticular, she may choose to adore divinity in the person of God Himself. To be sure, there have also been men who burned with that flame, but they are rare and their fervour is of a highly refined intellectual cast; whereas the women who abandon themselves to the joys of the heavenly nuptials are legion, and their experience is of a peculiarly emotional nature. Woman is habituated to living on her knees; ordinarily she expects her salvation to come down from the heaven where the males sit enthroned.⁴²

Love of God can bring women to extremes of self-denial and self-abasement. Some female mystics even practiced automutilation, or physical self-neglect. But somehow this did not apply to Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila. In their cases, mystical experience rendered them autonomous; it empowered them and opened the gate to self-actualization in projects as important as those of men of power. “But the story of St. Catherine of Siena is significant: in the midst of a quite normal existence she created in Siena a great reputation by her active benevolence and by the visions that testified to her intense inner life; thus she acquired the authority necessary for success, which women usually lack.”⁴³ Why are these women so exceptional? Why did Beauvoir consider them the only women to transcend their gender-specific boundaries and, what is more, to reach heights few men ever reached?

RESISTING SUBJECTION TO MORTAL MEN

Beauvoir remained rather vague about the “self-actualization” of her great women mystics. She confined herself to stating that these women held their own against their male peers. I believe that Beauvoir's appreciation of these mystics' transcendence and self-actualization' is not based on an interest in their spiritual life or their actual social achievements. I think she held these women in high esteem because, as religious women, they were not bound by masculine authority, or at least they did not consider themselves to be. They did not recognize male authority and acted with amazing authority themselves.⁴⁴

To Beauvoir, the importance of these mystics lay not only in their lack of ties to men, but also in their total lack of interest in men. In The Second Sex, one of Beauvoir's main concerns is the way in which women assent to their subjugation and objectification by men. In her quest for autonomy, independence, and self-actualization, the women mystics serve as paragons of womanhood, since they remained free of the bonds of earthly love and did not devote their entire lives to the sustenance of life itself.

Their unique status in Beauvoir's eyes results from her belief that the struggle for autonomy and the effort to resist subordination to men are intertwined with religious faith in a very concrete way. This link is evident not only in The Second Sex, but also in Beauvoir's Memoirs and other autobiographical texts. In one of the latter texts, there is an explicit reference to the direct link between the search for autonomy and self-awareness, and the experience of denying God's existence.⁴⁵ When asked in an interview what had made her aware of her position as a woman, Beauvoir answered by describing the time and place when she discarded her belief in God.⁴⁶ In interviews and in her Memoirs, Beauvoir confessed that her relation with Sartre had given her a fundamental security in life and a justification of her existence that she had previously only experienced in her relationship with her father and with God.⁴⁷ In The Second Sex, Beauvoir widened the scope of this interchangeability of father, God, and lover, and put the role they play in the process of “becoming a woman” in a wider context.

According to Beauvoir, a young girl's father “incarnates that immense, difficult, and marvelous world of adventure: he personifies transcendence, he is God.” The girl's relationship with the eternal father is based on her relationship with her real father. All her life she may “longingly seek that lost state of plenitude and peace” that came from her father's affection. “The emotional concern shown by adult women toward Man would of itself suffice to perch him on a pedestal.”⁴⁸

The unique status of the women mystics in The Second Sex can be clarified by regarding the following two interrelated paradoxes as the core issues of Simone de Beauvoir's reflections on women and religion: (1) even women who have ceased to believe in God the Father may still put their faith in men as if they were gods; (2) by loving God “as a woman” women can radically break with their dependence on and subjugation to “mortal men.” The first paradox describes Beauvoir's own position, while the second describes the position occupied by the great women mystics.

JOAN OF ARC

In The Church and the Second Sex, Mary Daly steered clear of the hazardous topic of women's autonomy, love, and religion as explored by Simone de Beauvoir. Nevertheless, there are some indications that Daly did not miss Beauvoir's point after all and took good note of her conclusions and dilemmas. In the final chapter of The Church and the Second Sex, titled “The Second Sex and the Seeds of Transcendence,” Daly assessed the results of her attempts to “disprove” Beauvoir's rejection of Roman Catholicism. She chose a curious epigraph for this chapter, a statement she borrowed from Joan of Arc: “I do best by obeying and serving my sovereign Lord—that is God.”⁴⁹

This epigraph seemed to contradict all the issues Daly had presented and emphasized in the preceding chapters; she had previously argued in favor of a religious language that refrains from gendering God and had advocated total equality and “partnership” between men and women at all levels of church and society. Terms such as obeying and serving hardly fit into this scheme. However, the epigraph does make sense in light of Beauvoir's double paradox. It fits in well with the second paradox, which is that women could make a radical break with their dependence on men and their subordination to men, by loving God as a woman. By quoting Joan of Arc, Daly affirmed Beauvoir's argument, supporting autonomous religious women; and yet in the very same breath, she distanced herself from Beauvoir by declaring that she, Daly, did not need to turn her back on Christianity and the Roman Catholic church.

With this epigraph Daly confirms Joan of Arc's religious faith and autonomy toward earthly lords and sovereigns, as well as her own. Daly did not identify with the great women mystics, such as Teresa of Avila, whose outspoken, erotic mysticism Beauvoir had paid much attention to. By quoting Joan of Arc, Daly allied herself with a strong religious woman who was neither a member of a monastic order, nor involved in a (heterosexual) “mysticism of love.” Joan of Arc was a sort of maverick: her autonomy was extreme and her actions were radical, as was her interpretation of a divine vocation. But unlike any of the other female mystics Beauvoir mentioned, Joan of Arc had had to pay a high price for her “radical transcendence”: she was burned at the stake.

Daly later assessed this element of autonomy in her epigraph. In her 1975 “Post-Christian Introduction” to The Church and the Second Sex, she commented on her choice of epigraph (writing about herself in the third person): “It struck me as curiously fitting that the lead citation was from Joan of Arc. Joan had at least made a partial escape from patriarchy (as had Daly, in her own way.) … Of course, Daly's attention was focused not upon this ultimate “obeying and serving” but upon Joan's escape from the earthly masters.”⁵⁰

PATRIARCHY AS A RELIGION

Simone de Beauvoir criticized Christian faith in general and Roman Catholicism in particular for having a negative impact on women's emancipation. Although Daly initially resisted this point of view, she eventually adopted it herself. I believe that she came to accept it precisely because Beauvoir had recognized that religious faith had an ambiguous impact—both positive and negative—on women's autonomy. Beauvoir's frame of reference allowed Daly her first opportunity to embrace modern criticism of religion in the name of feminism. This criticism, dating back to the Enlightenment, boils down to a renunciation of religious faith on the grounds that it, by definition, blocks people's autonomy. In this view, religious faith requires people to subject themselves to a higher being and to institutions claiming to represent this being. A concern of modern criticism of religion is to be free and protect human autonomy from the heteronomy intrinsic to religious faith in general and to institutionalized religion in particular.

As I mentioned before, existentialist philosophy strongly supported this criticism. It explicitly called any betrayal of one's own autonomy and self-actualization mauvaise foi, or bad faith. Daly took this modern criticism of religion much further: for example, to the point where she concluded that patriarchy as such was a religion. She put Beauvoir's remarkable comparison between (heterosexual) romantic love and religious faith as instruments of oppression at the core of her notion and critique of patriarchy. In a nutshell, Beauvoir had found that both love and religion force women to accept their status as the other in relation to men and to become “objects” instead of “realizing their potential.” Deep veneration for divine men and masculine gods is women's particular—and particularly disastrous—form of bad faith.

Daly's later, rigorous critique of patriarchy in all its manifestations the world over is essentially an elaboration of this existentialist-feminist construction of gender-specific bad faith, culminating in the controversial thesis that “[p]atriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet.”⁵¹ In tracing the development of this thesis through Daly's writings, one finds that Daly, in her initial definition of patriarchy, mainly stressed the wider social processes responsible for the imbalance in power between the sexes.⁵² In Beyond God the Father (1973) Daly started to use the term patriarchy to describe a feminist analytical concept and defined patriarchy by comparing it to India's caste system:

[T]here exists a worldwide phenomenon of sexual caste, basically the same whether one lives in Saudi Arabia or in Sweden. This planetary sexual caste system involves birth-ascribed hierarchically ordered groups whose members have unequal access to goods, services and prestige and to physical and mental well-being. Clearly I am not using the term “caste” in its most rigid sense, which would apply only to Brahmanic Indian society. I am using it in accordance with Berreman's broad description, since our language at present lacks other terms to describe systems of rigid social stratification analogous to the Indian system.⁵³

However, Daly's declaration that patriarchy is “the number one religion of the entire planet” is not a simple extension of her critical sociological observations about religion. In Gyn/Ecology, Daly worded her point of view as follows:

Patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet, and its essential message is necrophilia. All of the so-called religions legitimating patriarchy are mere sects subsumed under its vast umbrella/canopy. They are essentially similar, despite the variations. All—from buddhism and hinduism to islam, judaism, christianity, to secular derivates such as freudianism, jungianism, marxism and maoism—are infrastructures of the edifice of patriarchy. All are erected as parts of the male's shelter against anomie. And the symbolic message of all the sects of the religion which is patriarchy is this: Women are dreaded anomie. Consequently, women are the objects of male terror, the projected personifications of “The Enemy,” the real objects under attack in all the wars of patriarchy.⁵⁴

Here, one of Beauvoir's observations is taken to the extreme: that women are turned into the other in relation to men, emphasizing that patriarchy functions and legitimizes itself in exactly the same way that religion does.

Daly presented a further development of her analytical concept of patriarchy as a religion in Pure Lust (1983). She wrote of a “phallocratic belief system” and a “universal religion of phallocracy” that prevents both men and women from believing in women's power and holiness.⁵⁵ The results are continued objectification and rape of women.

In discussing the effects of patriarchy as a religion, Daly pointed to Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of women's religious masochism. Beauvoir used the exalted and extreme acts of self-denial by the French Roman Catholic mystic Marguerite Marie Alacoque to exemplify how patriarchal religion fosters feelings of guilt and brings women to “masosadism.”⁵⁶ According to Daly, Roman Catholicism is not unique in this respect; every type of patriarchal religion, in fact patriarchy as such, is guilty of the same. Continual objectification causes a nagging doubt at the core of woman's mind, identity, and self. Women consumed by this doubt are prone to masosadism in a “sadosociety.” Neither they, nor anyone else, are able to believe in the power and holiness of women's lives.

EMERGING TWO-TRACK VIEW OF RELIGION

Simone de Beauvoir's ambivalence about the impact of religion on women's autonomy also offered Daly the opportunity to maintain her positive stance toward religious faith, based on a neoscholastic concept of God. Beauvoir's ambiguous views allowed Daly to remain a theologian and to develop her theological insights further. In Beyond God the Father, Daly processed Beauvoir's ideas in a way that is still quite similar to classical Christian theology. Daly sees feminist criticism of religion as criticism of idolatry—a well-respected and important Judeo-Christian point of view. This criticism of idolatry serves to liberate and innovate religion itself:

The passive hope that has been so prevalent in the history of religious attitudes corresponds to the objectified God from whom one may anticipate favors. Within that frame of reference human beings have tried to relate to ultimate reality as an object to be known, cajoled, manipulated. The tables are turned, however, for the objectified “God” has a way of reducing his producers to objects who lack capacity for autonomous action. In contrast to this, the God who is power of being acts as a moral power summoning women and men to act out of our deepest hope and to become who we can be.⁵⁷.

In Beyond God the Father, feminist criticism of religion is inseparable from a dynamic interpretation of religious faith that supports feminism; these are two sides of the same coin. Later, when Daly renounced Christian theology altogether, feminist criticism of religion and feminist religious faith became increasingly separate topics in her work. From Gyn/Ecology onward, she voiced sharp criticism of any type of faith—religious or otherwise—that turns women into “objects under attack.” At the same time, but on a different track, she continues to develop a thea-logy which supports women's autonomy and “self-realization.”

In 1990, Iris Marion Young characterized Daly's Gyn/Ecology both as a repudiation of femininity along the lines of Beauvoir's brand of “humanist feminism” and as an example of the type of gynocentric feminism that Young considered the antithesis of humanist feminism. She regarded the two as irreconcilable because women either want to be like men or they do not, but they cannot dwell in between. Young therefore classified Gyn/Ecology as a transitional work: “In it Daly asserts an analysis of the victimization of women by femininity that outdoes Beauvoir, but she also proposes a new gynocentric language.”⁵⁸

I find Young's solution of calling Gyn/Ecology a transitional work rather inadequate. After all, the same “contradiction” is present in Daly's 1983 publication Pure Lust and other later writings. Gyn/Ecology is not an inconsistency in Mary Daly's work. I believe that it is consistent with Beauvoir's ambivalent view of religion in relation to women's independence. In Gyn/Ecology, Daly uses Beauvoir's gendered concept of bad faith to demonstrate how women are turned into the other and how, acting in bad faith, they turn themselves into objects and shrink from realizing their potential. Daly's subsequent comparison of patriarchy to religion is still in keeping with Beauvoir's concept, but it provides Daly with a framework that allows her to do more than just analyze women's victimization and compliance: it also enables her to design strategies for resistance to and escape from patriarchy.

In line with Beauvoir's ambivalence toward religion, Daly starts to outline a “feminist faith” that supports this struggle. Basically, this faith is an unconditional affirmation of women's autonomy, transcendence, and self-actualization. Daly endorsed Beauvoir's finding that women have neither a history nor a religion of their own. She therefore reinvented this feminist faith by deconstructing patriarchal religious myths and imagery and reclaiming the fragments of women's lost or suppressed religious heritage in a gynocentric context. Daly's feminist faith is about establishing a subject position to counteract the objectification, silencing, and crushing of women. Hence, this faith both shapes, and is shaped by, a gynocentric language and context. Gynocentrism is necessary because women had been denied the power to name, as Daly concluded from her struggle with classic Christian discourse in Beyond God the Father. In Daly's post-Christian feminist writings this feminist faith manifests itself as an impressive amount of recaptured religious and mythical imagery rendered in an overwhelming, “scholarly” newspeak. In Pure Lust, Daly defined this feminist faith as “elemental faith.” “Elemental” refers to all spiritual and material realities that have been attacked, suppressed, erased, or annihilated by the “phallocratic belief system.”

Daly's seemingly contradictory combination of antiessentialist and gynocentric views can be accounted for by her ambiguous stance toward the role of religion in women's struggle for autonomy and “self-actualization.” This brings her time and again to discern sharply between bad and good faith, between religion as an addiction (“opium”) or a mystical experience (transcendence) and between religion's power to tempt women into total subjection or its role in empowering them to occupy a subject position. Her positive or affirmative view of religious faith enables her to emphasize women's subject position (gynocentrism), while her negative or critical view of religion allows her to put forward a cultural and religious critique (antiessentialism).

SUBJECTIVITY

Rather than exploring the (possibly contradictory) notions of gender and gender differences, I would like to focus on the various notions of subjectivity present in Daly's later writings. I think that this angle might best highlight Daly's unique significance as a theologian.

In Daly's later works, the affirmation of religious faith is used mainly to empower women as subjects. To describe what she means by such empowerment, Daly borrows terminology from her study of theology and philosophy (subject/object, self/other, being/nonbeing, being/Be-ing), as well as from popular psychology (power, energy, center, life, integrity, authenticity) and from her own, mythical female language (Hag, Crone, Spinster, Voyager, Witch, Goddess). Daly describes women's becoming subject first and foremost as self-realization, which raises the question of whether this is anything but an uncritical adoption of the androcentric notion of the autonomous self as embraced by existentialist philosophy.⁵⁹ Daly thought of many equivalents for women's “Self” and a variety of qualifications with reference to this self; these show us that Daly's notion of female self-awareness can be equated neither with self-determination (“being independent”) nor with autonomy (“being free of foreign authority”). She speaks of the Self, the subject, being, presence, awareness, soul, source, force, integrity, wholeness, strength, centering, and so on.

Women's Self as evoked in Gyn/Ecology is characterized by the fact that it is not a given or state of being. It must (still) be actualized; it is a matter of becoming. Daly's point of departure is the absence and fragmentation of the Self. This point is further elaborated in Pure Lust. Here, Daly raises the question of to what extent women have “something of their own,” a self, despite patriarchy's crushing and deadly effects. Some claim that women have nothing of their own; Daly disagrees.⁶⁰ She does not believe that women have been oppressed to the point where they have no self left. The problem is that they are obstructed from realizing this, from realizing their self. Among the obstacles are violence against women and “patriarchal lies,” but Daly also mentions the lack of solidarity among women (violence among women, the token woman) and individual women's inner fragmentation (“patriarchy's presence in our own mind”).

In Pure Lust, however, Daly provides a more profound exploration of women's lack of self-actualization. This text provides a consistent, multifaceted inquiry into what constitutes and reinforces inner cohesion. Daly discusses three aspects of inner cohesion: consciousness, power, and “lust/longing,” or, in other words, identifying one's self, asserting the self and extending the self. These aspects are dealt with in three major parts or “Spheres” of Pure Lust, focusing on reason, passion, and lust, respectively. Daly also establishes a strong correlation between achieving inner cohesion and naming the self, the world, and God.⁶¹

But where exactly should we place this treatment of women's self that hinges on achieving and promoting inner cohesion? Is this a continuation of the androcentric philosophical notion of the autonomous subject, or a break with it? In some respects, Daly's approach resembles that of feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, who aligned themselves with the poststructuralist attack on the dominant Western notion of the subject.⁶² This resemblance is evident mainly in the importance assigned to the level of language, to deconstruction, to deviant readings and different semantic connotations in order to establish and affirm oneself as a woman.⁶³ Daly refers to Monique Wittig's works, but actually gives them a very different twist.⁶⁴ Wittig argues that it is impossible for women to say “I” in phallocentric discourse; Daly regards this as an example of the fragmentation of women's self-awareness. In line with Virginia Woolf, Daly believes this fragmentation is healed only in “moments of being,” in epiphanous experiences during which an I is created when the severed parts of the individual suddenly and fleetingly come together.⁶⁵ Unlike the French feminist philosophers, Daly does not consider the unity and identity of the subject problematic as such. To her, rather, the main problem is the absence of focus and the lack of re-membering; she considers the moments when women experience the constitution of a Self to be “revelations.”

Daly's later writings contain two different and seemingly contradictory notions of subjectivity. In her criticism of patriarchy and religion, she argues that women need to construct an autonomous Self. But what she actually does and achieves and calls for in her writings, while naming, punning, and associating, constitutes a dismantling of this notion of subjectivity. She sings and associates, speaks in different voices, places herself outside any system, shows anger, pleasure, and analytical depth, draws on and cites Western theology, philosophy and mythology as well as contemporary culture; in so doing, she spins and weaves new tapestries of meaning. Insofar as Daly identifies and names her way of thinking, she provides new images of the Self as an intricate knot, consisting of many threads/links:⁶⁶ a thinking, feeling, listening and naming entity, which both integrates and reaches out, is self-supporting but also connected to others. These are concepts of the Self that are no longer caught in the opposition between the androcentric notion of the autonomous self and the criticism of this notion by feminists and French deconstructionists.

Daly is definitely not out to adopt this androcentric autonomous self, as she herself explains most lucidly in her treatment of the difference between her own “elemental feminist philosophy” and the androcentric ontology of Western philosophy and theology. Daly describes this ontology as follows: “The ontological question, the question of being-itself, arises in something like a ‘metaphysical shock’—the shock of possible nonbeing. This shock often has been expressed in the question: ‘Why is there something; why not nothing?’”⁶⁷ Daly considers the opposition generated in the second half of this ontological question unjustified: why would amazement about “being” be linked to bewilderment at the thought of “non-being”? Daly feels this automatic link points to a static notion of being, to a reified ontology which first and foremost sees being as the ability to stave off nonbeing. According to Daly, this idea reflects the position of phallic thinkers who sense the terror of the negation of everything that is—and therefore of their own, privileged position as well. The ontology that informs the primary questions of biophilic women is not based on this fear of nonbeing, but on the quest and longing for being (more).⁶⁸

Daly posits a notion of subjectivity that resides in the tension between “being” and “Be-ing more.” This tension does not arise from the shocking, distressing, or “impinging” experience of finiteness, individuality, and exclusiveness, but from the “unlocking,” affirmative experience of “broadening,” participation, and belonging.⁶⁹

I believe that Daly derived this definition of subjectivity—which is not based on a modern, individualist, and androcentric opposition between autonomy and heteronomy—from premodern Thomistic religious ontology. This religious ontology assumes that there are various degrees of fullness or intensity of being. An increase in intensity means that people or matters are more involved in an all-transcending or encompassing reality: the fullness or completion of all that is in God. In this view, the way a being actualizes herself (more) is not by resisting or avoiding this all encompassing reality, but by opening herself up to this reality and knowing herself to be part of it.

CONCLUSIONS

Mary Daly's post-Christian writings have been interpreted in very different ways. On the one hand, her later work is often characterized as shying away from the actual ongoing conflicts, political issues, and difficult battles the women's movement faced after the euphoria of the first successes.⁷⁰ On the other hand, Daly's Gyn/Ecology formed the basis for Sonia Johnson's green, leftist political program for Johnson's U.S. presidential campaign in the early 1980s.⁷¹ Daly's later work is interpreted as an unconditional and unmediated affirmation of “the feminine”: the body, emotions, “the natural.”⁷² But Daly's later writings have also been interpreted as expressing a disdain for the actual lives of women and an overemphasis on rationality.⁷³ In the same vein, it has been concluded that immanence and “Diesseitigkeit” characterize the religiosity that Daly's work has testified to since Beyond God the Father,⁷⁴ while it has also been maintained that her work stresses transcendence.⁷⁵ Similarly, there are those who believe that Daly's writings since Beyond God the Father hinge on female spirituality and the rewriting of “matriarchal religious imagery,”⁷⁶ whereas others point to the fact that Daly, in her later writings, no longer identifies the divine with the female.⁷⁷

I believe this polysemic ambiguity is characteristic of Mary Daly's later writings and that it is of little use to try to reduce her work to one unambiguous statement. I have shown that her work contains two widely divergent positions on religion, which are inspired by the ambivalent views of Simone de Beauvoir on religion's importance to the women's movement. I find Daly's work especially intriguing in those places where the positive and negative aspects of religion cause tension and friction. I have given an example of this by showing how Daly, as a theologian, remained faithful to a premodern notion of religious faith. This notion allows her to define subjectivity without getting caught in the modern androcentric opposition between autonomy and heteronomy in which the subject is represented as “the Self in juxtaposition with the Other” and as “the Self inferior or superior to the Other.” Neoscholastic theology has provided her with another concept of subjectivity that, in some respects, better defines what happens when women occupy a subject position. This concept hinges on the absence of subjectivity and lack of inner cohesion rather than an opposition between Self and Other. It is more closely connected to Thomistic religious ontology than to modern androcentric existentialist ontology, which—through Sartre and Beauvoir—has also informed much of feminist theory.

Incidentally, I find Daly's work interesting not only because of these new feminist interpretations of her old, theological inheritance, but also because of her ongoing critical interpretations of Christian discourse. I choose the word interpretations because Daly reinterprets classical theological themes incorporated in texts of a postmodern signature—in itself an unusual mode for theological discourse. Daly's later writings are characterized by the use of more than one kind of logic and several voices directed at different readers.

As I mentioned earlier, some critics—such as Young—consider Daly's post-Christian writings a catalog of women's victimization. For example, her detailed descriptions in Gyn/Ecology of the atrocities that women all over the world are subjected to have been interpreted as an overstatement to prove women's victimization. However, I believe that Daly had something more in mind than proving that women are victims. I believe that Gyn/Ecology is Daly's multilayered way of revealing, reflecting, and meditating on physical violence against women. As such, this book discusses suffering, sin, evil, and (the hope of) salvation from a woman's perspective—a well-known theological track from an unusual angle.

It is remarkable that Daly's self-declared farewell to Christian theology and philosophy coincided with the introduction of the theme of violence against women in her writings. She had touched upon this theme earlier. In Beyond God the Father, she included it in her discussion of the necessity of replacing phallic morality. In her attempt to deconstruct androcentric Christian morality, she mentioned the unholy trinity of rape, genocide, and war as the three-headed monster to be faced and fought. To write of rape in the academic, theological context of 1973 was an act of true courage because Daly thereby presented herself as a professional theologian who openly took women's experiences seriously. However, the manner in which she dealt with the subject in Beyond God the Father was still very impersonal and abstract.⁷⁸

In Gyn/Ecology, this had radically changed. Here, she described every physical detail of various, systematic acts of violence against women, such as rape, genital mutilation, foot-binding, widow-burning and hysterectomy. I read Gyn/Ecology primarily in light of this fascination with the violation of women's bodies. Feminist theologians have suggested that Gyn/Ecology is a women's tale of salvation or a female version of the Passion of Christ. Instead of Jesus, women are nailed to the cross. I agree that Gyn/Ecology deals with this central christian story, but I believe that it does so in a very profound and dialectical way. One of Daly's distinguishing characteristics is precisely that she rejects any direct or positive correlation between the Passion of Christ and women's suffering. She is truly scandalized by the suffering caused by violence. Therefore, she is shocked to the core by the fact that Christian theological discourse does acknowledge suffering due to physical violence in the case of Jesus—or God incarnate—but is often oblivious to women's suffering from physical violence. Christian theological discourse seems not only to be indifferent to women's suffering; it is also unable to recognize how the discourse itself propagates this suffering. It condones the hidden violence toward women that is central to many of its own religious images and parables. Therefore, a feminist reinterpretation of Christian passion stories does not suffice. The discourse needs to be altered by the inclusion of other stories of passion and resurrection, in particular of those who have been excluded from and hurt by androcentric theological discourse.

In her introduction to Gyn/Ecology, Daly stated that she had exchanged theology for ethics. According to her, Gyn/Ecology contains the “Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism.” However, besides it being a feminist exploration of ethics, I consider this book as much an extraordinary form of theology. Daly's self-confessed reversal to ethics seems to me an epistemological move inherent in a shift in feminist position. As Sandra Harding commented in a 1986 publication: “For feminists, it is a moral and political, rather than a scientific, discussion that serves as the paradigm of rational discourse.”⁷⁹ In my opinion, Gyn/Ecology deals directly with the moral and political discussion that, from a feminist point of view, must be included into theological discourse, the main issue being “How can we ensure that women are done more justice?” rather than “What can we know about women?”

One might argue that this is precisely the point where theology turns into ethics. I disagree; the way in which Gyn/Ecology deals with “evil” is every bit as religious as it is ethical. One need only consider the book's central premise: the act of turning women into objects to be abused, or even destroyed, far too often goes unrecognized as fundamentally wrong or evil. And Mary Daly considers this, the deliberate obfuscation of what should be regarded as evil, one of the main “sins” of all patriarchal religions and societies. A call for ethics alone will not do, because ethics has been distorted by phallic morality. In this situation, “deliver us from evil” seems to be an indispensable prayer for women.

Certainly, women have always cried and struggled for “justice.” The thwarting of this longing and struggling gives rise to the birth pangs of radical feminist awareness. But only when the knowledge that something is not “right” evolves into uncovering the invisible context of gynocide and, beyond this, into active participation in the Elemental context of biophilic harmony and power can there be great and sustained creativity and action. To Name this active Elemental contextual participation, which transcends and overturns patriarchal “justice” and “injustice,” Other words are needed. Nemesis is a beginning in this direction.⁸⁰

… [U]nlike “justice,” which is depicted as a woman blindfolded and holding a sword and scales, Nemesis has her eyes open and uncovered—especially her Third Eye. Moreover, she is concerned less with “retribution,” in the sense of external meting out of rewards and punishments, than with an internal judgment that sets in motion a kind of new psychic alignment of energy patterns. Nemesis, thus Named, is … a relevant mysticism which responds to the tormented cries of the oppressed, and to the hunger and thirst for creative be-ing.⁸¹

Notes

1. See Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 207-12; Carol P. Christ, “Embodied Thinking: Reflections on Feminist Theological Method,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 1 (1989): 7-15; Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 50; Sharon D. Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 1-10; Welch, “Sporting Power: American Feminism, French Feminisms, and an Ethic of Conflict,” in Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, ed. C. W. Maggie Kim et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 171-98; Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Changing the Subject: Women's Discourses and Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 46-47.

2. Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984), 66-71; Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984); Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” in Feminist Theory in Practice and Progress, ed. Micheline R. Balson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 295-326; Jean Grimshaw, “Autonomy and Identity in Feminist Thinking,” in Feminist Perspective in Philosophy, ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margareth Whitford (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 90-108; Morwenna Griffiths, “Feminism, Feelings, and Philosophy,” in Griffiths and Whitford, Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, 131-51; Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Women: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 123-25; Amy Hollywood, “Violence and Subjectivity: Wuthering Heights, Julia Kristeva, and Feminist Theology,” in Kim et al., Transfigurations, 81-108, especially nn. 14 and 108.

3. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (London: SCM Press, 1983); Sheila Greeve Davaney, “The Limits of the Appeal to Women's Experience,” in Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson et al. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 30-48; Davaney, “Problems with Feminist Theory: Historicity and the Search for Sure Foundations,” in Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values, ed. Paula M. Cooey et al. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 79-96; Ruth Groβmaβ, “Von der Verführungskraft der Bilder: Mary Daly's Elemental-Feministische Philosophie,” in Feministischer Kompaβ, patriarchales Gepäck: Kritik konservativer Anteile in neueren feministischen Theorien, ed. Ruth Groβmaβ and Christiane Schmerl (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1989), 56-116; Ellen T. Armour, “Questioning ‘Woman’ in Feminist/Womanist Theology: Irigaray, Ruether, and Daly,” in Kim et al., Transfigurations, 143-70.

4. See also Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk; Mary Jo Weaver, New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985); Groβmaβ, “Von der Verführungskraft der Bilder.”

5. Teresa de Lauretis, “Upping the Anti [sic] in Feminist Theory,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 255-70.

6. The lasting impact of these Enlightenment ideals on feminism is evident in the prevalent categorization of feminist positions into the main political movements based on these ideals: liberal (or emancipatory) feminism, social (or sociological) feminism, and radical feminism (cultural criticism). See Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, 214-34; Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Rosemary Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 1989); Carolyn Merchant, “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 100-105.

7. Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 100-101.

8. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 28-33.

9. Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), vii. See also Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (London: Chapman, 1968), 223; and Daly, Beyond God the Father, 28-29.

10. Mary Daly, “Autobiographical Preface to the Colofon Edition,” and “Feminist Postchristian Introduction,” in Daly, The Church and the Second Sex: With a New Feminist Postchristian Introduction by the Author (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 5-14, 15-51; Daly, “Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe von Beyond God the Father,” in Daly, Jenseits von Gottvater, Sohn & Co: Aufbruch zu einer Philosophie der Frauenbefreiung (Munich: Frauenoffensive, 1980), 5-10; Daly, “New Archaic Afterwords,” in Daly, The Church and the Second Sex: With the Feminist Postchristian Introduction and New Archaic Afterwords by the Author (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), xi-xxx; Daly, “Original Reintroduction,” in Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation; With an Original Reintroduction by the Author (Boston: Beacon Press: Beacon Press, 1985), xi-xxix; Daly, “New Intergalactic Introduction,” in Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism: With a New Introduction by the Author (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), xiii-xxxv; Daly, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (San Francisco: Harper, 1992).

11. Mary Daly, “The Problem of Speculative Theology: A Study in Saint Thomas” (Ph.D. diss., University of Fribourg, Switzerland, 1963); Daly, Natural Knowledge of God in the Philosophy of Jacques Maritain (Rome: Officium Libri Catholici, 1966).

12. Edward Schillebeeckx, “Het niet-begrippelijke kenmoment in onze Godskennis volgens Thomas van Aquino,” Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 14 (1952): 411-53; Schillebeeckx, “Het niet-be-grippelijke kenmoment in de geloofsdaad: probleemstelling,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 3 (1963), 167-94; Schillebeeckx, Openbaring en theologie [Theologische Peilingen; 1] (Baarn: Nelissen, 1964). Johan Baptist Metz, Christliche Anthropozentrik: Ueber die Denkform des Thomas von Aquin (Munich: Koesel, 1962).

13. In the summary of her theological dissertation Daly states: “[The author] would like also to acknowledge her debt to all of the professors of the Faculty of Theology, who by opening for a woman the door to a doctorate in theology expressed openness of mind and spirit.” Mary Daly, acknowledgments to The Problem of Speculative Theology, (Boston: Thomist Press, 1965). In her philosophical dissertation, Daly focused particularly on the philosophical and theological writings of women. Daly referred to the writings of Raissa Maritain—wife of Jacques Maritain, whose writings are the subject of her second dissertation, and to Raissa's role in her husband's philosophical development. Raissa Maritain, Les grandes amitiés: Les aventures de la grâce, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Editions de la Maison Française, vol. 1, 1942; vol. 2, 1944); Maritain, Situation de la poésie [in cooperation with Jacques Maritain] (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948). Daly also praised Laura Fraga de Almeida Sampaio C. R. for her interpretation of Jacques Maritain's philosophical works, titled L'intuition dans la philosophie de Jacques Maritain (Paris: Vrin, 1963): “This enlightening and scholarly work is a most important aid to understanding Maritain's thought” (Daly, Natural Knowledge of God, 32 n. 76). Also, Daly favorably reviewed Sister M. Elisabeth I.H.M.'s publication “Two Contemporary Philosophers and the Concept of Being,” Modern Schoolman 25 (1947/48), 224-37. “The author makes an interesting comparative analysis of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange and Maritain” (Daly, Natural Knowledge of God, 20 n. 34). In addition, Daly pointed out yet another publication, by Sister Aloysius S.S.J., “The Epistemological Value of Sense Intuition,” Philosophical Studies 5 (1955): 71-78.

14. Daly, The Problem of Speculative Theology, 41-47.

15. For a further elaboration of the central thesis of Mary Daly's theological dissertation about the importance and relevance of “speculative theology,” based on (rational) “knowledge of God through creation,” see Anne-Marie Korte, Een passie voor transcendentie: Feminisme, theologie en moderniteit in het denken van Mary Daly (A Passion for Transcendence: Feminism, Theology, and Modernity in the Thinking of Mary Daly) (Kampen: Kok, 1992), 55-59, 82-85.

16. Patricia H. Labalme, introduction to Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 3-4.

17. Katharina M. Wilson, ed., Medieval Women Writers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xvii.

18. See Elisabeth Gössmann, ed., Das Wohlgelahrte Frauenzimmer [Archiv für philosophie- und theologiegeschichtliche Frauenforschung; 1] (Munich: Indicium, 1984); Gössmann, ed., Eva—Gottes Meisterwerk [Archiv für philosophie- und theologiegeschichtliche Frauenforschung; 2] (Munich: Indicium, 1985); Anna Maria van Schurman, Opuscula Hebraea, Graeca, Latina, Gallica, Prosaica et Metrica (Leiden: Ex Officina Elseviriorum, 1648); Beatriz Melano Couch, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: The First Woman Theologian in the Americas,” in The Church and Women in the Third World, John C. B. Webster and Ellen Low Webster, eds. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 51-57; Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., Women and Religion in America, vol. 2, The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), xv-xvi, 46, 65-68.

19. See Anne-Marie Korte, “Een gemeenschap waarin te geloven valt: Over de spirituele en de politieke betekenis van het geloof van vrouwen aan de hand van de ‘ommekeer’ van Anna Maria van Schurman en Mary Daly” (M.A. thesis, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1985), 41-57.

20. See Moltmann-Wendel, ed., Frau und Religion, 11-38; Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., Women and Religion in America, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).

21. This issue was raised by Mary Daly herself in the short version of her theological dissertation. Mary Daly, The Problem of Speculative Theology, 41-43.

22. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 43.

23. Korte, Een passie voor transcendentie, 86-187.

24. Daly's first reference to Simone de Beauvoir appeared in a 1965 issue of Commonweal, a North American Roman Catholic journal: “Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, manifested a strange mixture of insight and understanding when she wrote that Mary kneeling for her own Son represents the supreme victory of the male over the female. Catholic readers, shocked by this, protest that Mlle. de Beauvoir simply does not understand. It may well be true that she does not have a sympathetic understanding of Catholic theology, but in fact she understands its abuses only too well. It is unfortunately not difficult to find examples in Catholic writings about women which manifest the vision of man-woman relationship which Simone de Beauvoir is talking about. (The tortured use of symbolism can be seen in Gertrud von le Fort's The Eternal Woman, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, as well as in countless other places.) We might well ask where the true culpability lies for Simone de Beauvoir's misunderstanding of Marian doctrine, and incidentally be grateful for her insight into the perversion thereof.” Daly, “A Built-in Bias,” Commonweal 81 (January 15, 1965): 509-10.

    In 1984, Daly wrote:

    In the late 1940s the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's great feminist work, The Second Sex, made possible dialogue among women about their lives. For many years this work functioned as an almost solitary beacon for women seeking to understand the connections among the oppressive evils they experienced, for they came to understand the fact of otherness within patriarchal society.

    There were other feminist works in existence, of course, but these were not really accessible, even to the “educated” women. The Second Sex helped to generate an atmosphere in which women could utter their own thoughts, at least to themselves. Some women began to make applications and to seek out less accessible sources, many of which had gone out of print. Most important was the fact that de Beauvoir, by breaking the silence, partially broke the Terrible Taboo. Women were Touched, psychically and emotionally. Many women, thus re-awakened, began to have conversations, take actions, write articles—even during the dreary fifties. (Daly, Pure Lust, 374)

    See also Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 56 and Daly, “Feminist Postchristian Introduction,” 16.

25. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 192-223.

26. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 130.

27. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 68.

28. Ibid., 69.

29. Ibid., 100.

30. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'être et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Guillimard, 1943). For a recent critical study of Beauvoir and Sartre's collaboration, see Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth Century Legend (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).

31. Sartre, L'être et le néant, 93-108.

32. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xli.

33. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1946).

34. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 632.

35. Ibid., 624.

36. Ibid., 621.

37. See ibid., 104; 622, 673-74, 678.

38. Beauvoir, “The Mystic,” in The Second Sex, 670-78.

39. Beauvoir, “Justifications,” in The Second Sex, 629-78.

40. Dorothy Kaufmann McGall has shown how Beauvoir in Le deuxième sexe outlines the pitfalls of romantic love for women by comparing it to religious devotion: “If every man, for Malraux and for Sartre after him, dreams of being God, woman, as Beauvoir portrays her in this chapter, dreams of being His beloved. For Beauvoir it is the woman most avidly seeking transcendence who is often most vulnerable to the religion of love. Denied the transcendence of action and adventure offered to the male, she seeks transcendence by losing herself in a man who represents the essential which she cannot be for herself.” For the origins of this comparison Kaufmann refers to Beauvoir and Sartre's existentialist philosophy and to Beauvoir's personal history: her Catholic upbringing and her relation to her father, God, and Sartre. However, Kaufmann's reconstruction largely ignores the ambivalence in Beauvoir's comparison between love and religion. Dorothy Kaufmann McGall, “Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, and Jean Paul Sartre,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (1979): 209-23, especially 216.

41. In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Friedrich Nietzsche ironically compared women's (heterosexual) love to religious faith, “the only faith women have.” For a detailed analysis of the mainly Marxist and existentialist philosophical origins of Beauvoir's gendered comparison between heterosexual love and religious faith, see Korte, Een passie voor transcendentie, 149-54.

42. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 670.

43. Ibid., 104.

44. See also ibid., 622.

45. Beauvoir herself considered religion a primary influence on her life and on her growing awareness of her position as a girl and a young woman. She stated that girls from southern Europe grow up with a religion that has an importance in their lives incomprehensible to women from an Anglo-American background. See “Une interview de Simone de Beauvoir par Madeleine Chapsal,” in Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir: La vie—L'écriture. Avec en appendice: Textes inédits ou retrouvés (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 381-96.

46. “Une interview de Simone de Beauvoir,” 383.

47. Dorothy Kaufmann McGall investigated Beauvoir's opinions on love and autonomy in light of her real life relationship with Sartre. She concluded: “Her ties to Sartre, however, have been as knotted and difficult in meaning as any tie to husband or family.” Kaufmann McGall, “Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, and Jean Paul Sartre,” 223. For research on heterosexual and lesbian love in The Second Sex, see also Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 128-42; Jo-Ann Pilardi, “Female Eroticism in the Works of Simone de Beauvoir,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 18-34; Toril Moi, Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Karin Vintges, Filosofie als passie: Het denken van Simone de Beauvoir (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1992).

48. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 287-90, especially 288.

49. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 220.

50. Daly, “Feminist Postchristian Introduction.”

51. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 39.

52. The concept of religion Daly used in Beyond God the Father is derived primarily from critical sociologists such as Peter Berger and Herbert Marcuse. In their definition, religion's main function is to stabilize dominant social structures and to uphold norms and values that confirm the social status quo. Religious imagery and rituals make people “remember” and “internalize” the behavior expected of them. According to Daly, women in particular are socialized to consume and internalize religious images.

53. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 2.

54. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 39.

55. Daly, Pure Lust, 31, 35-77; 170, 339.

56. Ibid., 57-66.

57. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 32.

58. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 82.

59. Griffiths, “Feminism, Feelings, and Philosophy,” 131-51; Weaver, New Catholic Women; Grimshaw, “Autonomy and Identity in Feminist Thinking,” 90-108; Grimshaw, Feminist Philosophers, 146-61; Jean Grimshaw, “‘Pure Lust’: The Elemental Feminist Philosophy of Mary Daly,” Radical Philosophy, no. 49 (1988): 25.

60. Daly, Pure Lust, 136-38.

61. The term “Self” (“Self is capitalized when I am referring to the authentic center of women's process” [Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 26]) is introduced in Gyn/Ecology in close connection with a number of other, new expressions: gynocentric terms for God, consciousness and “living as a woman,” namely “ultimate be-ing,” “integrity of be-ing,” and “gynocentric be-ing” (Daly, Gyn/Ecology, xi-xviii). This interrelatedness points to the fact that women's “Self” cannot be reduced to one of these three key notions; what is at stake is a woman's affirmation of her self, which is related to all three of these aspects of Be-ing. Compare the use of the term Self in the following instances:

    The finding of our original integrity is re-membering our Selves.

    (Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 39)

    The murder/dismemberment of the Goddess—that is, [of] the Self-affirming be-ing of women.

    (111)

    Our refusal to collaborate in this killing and dismembering of our own Selves is the beginning of re-membering the Goddess—the deep source of creative integrity in women.

    (111)

    The Goddess within—female divinity, that is our Selves.

    (111)

62. Luce Irigaray, Speculum: De l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974); Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977).

63. See for example Johanna Hodge, “Subject, Body, and the Exclusion of Women from Philosophy,” in Griffiths and Whitford, Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, 154, 167 n. 7.

64. See Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 19, 327, 350; Daly, Pure Lust, 177.

65. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited, introduced, and annotated by Jeanne Schulkind (New York: University Press Sussex, 1976), 86-100.

66. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 406.

67. Daly, Pure Lust, 159-60. Here, Daly refers to Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (London: Nisbet, 1953), 181.

68. Daly, Pure Lust, 30.

69. For descriptions of this ontological experience, Daly turns to Virginia Woolf's writings (“moments of being” as ontophanies [Daly, Pure Lust, 171-78]) and Sonia Johnson's work (the “breaking open process” as an epiphany [236-37]).

70. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language, Power, and Meaning,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology ed. Nannerl O. Keohane et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 135; Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 21-26.

71. Ynestra King, “Healing the Wounds,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 124, 136-37 n. 22.

72. Joan L. Griscom, “On Healing the Nature/History Split in Feminist Thought,” in Women's Consciousness, Women's Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics, ed. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen et al. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 85-98.

73. Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections, 231; Weaver, New Catholic Women, 170-78.

74. Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM Press, 1982), 155-59; Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, introduction to Moltmann-Wendel, ed., Frau und Religion: Gotteserfahrungen im Patriarchat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 14; Susan Brooks Thistlethwaithe, Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White (New York, Crossroad, 1989), 16.

75. Brooke Williams, “The Feminist Revolution in ‘Ultramodern’ Perspective,” Cross Currents 31 (1981): 311; Weaver, New Catholic Women, 176-77.

76. Groβmaβ, “Von der Verführungskraft der Bilder,” 56-116; Anne Kent Rush, Moon, Moon (New York: Random House, 1976), 355.

77. Wanda Warren Berry, “Feminist Theology: The ‘Verbing’ of Ultimate/Intimate Reality in Mary Daly,” in Ultimate Reality and Meaning 11, no. 3 (1988): 212-32; Korte, Een gemeenschap waarin te geloven valt, 162-65.

78. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 98-131. See also Korte, Een passie voor transcendentie, 284-90.

79. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 12.

80. Daly, Pure Lust, 275.

81. Ibid.

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