Mary Daly
A Catholic theologian who left the Church to become one of the most radical voices of lesbian feminism.
Mary Daly grew up in a working-class Catholic family in New York State. Because American Catholic universities did not allow women to study theology at the highest level, she went to the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where she earned doctorates in theology and philosophy.
In 1968 she published “The Church and the Second Sex”, a critique of the Catholic Church’s treatment of women. Boston College, a Jesuit university where she taught, tried to dismiss her; after student protests she was given tenure instead. In “Beyond God the Father” (1973) she broke with Christianity altogether, arguing: “If God is male, then the male is God.”
Daly described herself as a radical lesbian feminist. Books such as “Gyn/Ecology” (1978) invented new words and attacked patriarchy in religion, medicine and culture. She admitted only women to her advanced courses, which eventually led to her forced retirement from Boston College in 1999. Her work was also criticised: the poet Audre Lorde accused her of ignoring Black women, and later critics have pointed to hostility towards trans women in her circle.
She died in Massachusetts in 2010, aged 81.