Daly, Mary

(b. 1928)

   Theologian.

   Daly was educated at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and has taught theology at Boston College in the United States of America. Her earliest book on the church, The Church and the Second Sex, was written ‘in anger and hope’, in response to the activities of the Second Vatican Council. Subsequently she disowned it as the work of a ‘reformist foresister’. Beyond God the Father was written in 1973 and argued for the death of God the Father, beyond Christidolatry and for Sisterhood as antichurch. By the time she produced Gyn-Ecology in 1978, she had accepted that the notion of God cannot be separated from masculine imagery and she has since embarked on a post-Christian journey towards selfacceptance. Daly has proved an influential figure in the secular, as well as the Christian, women’s movement and her uncompromising condemnation of the innate sexism of the Christian religion has not passed unnoticed.

   Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973);

   Mary Daly, Gyn-Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978).