The Gift of Arguing with Mary Daly's White Feminism

Abstract

The Gift of Arguing with Mary Daly’s White Feminism Traci C. West (bio) As a religious studies major in college during the late 1970s and early 1980s, I wrote a senior thesis on contemporary Christian ethics and theology. I decided that a fundamental goal of my thesis would be an exploration of the most radical critiques that I could find of racism and sexism in Christian theology and church practices. By my senior year in college, I had already taken the initial steps in my ordination process in the United Methodist Church. I had been impatiently waiting to begin this process since I was fifteen, when I first announced to a somewhat skeptical male pastor that I had the desire to become a minister. As a college senior I was excited about entering seminary the following year. While writing my senior thesis, I remained the stubborn, black feminist campus activist I had been throughout my previous years in college. I sought scholarly discussions for my thesis in Christian religious studies that substantively engaged politics and offered insights about systemic injustices. My conceptualization of systemic injustice was fed as much by my campus activism as by the texts that I had been studying for classes. My activism focused on anti-apartheid corporate divestment by my university, a procedure to address sexual harassment of women students by their professors, and other institutional justice issues that preoccupied me and a cohort of troublemaking students. For the most politicized critique of the church combined with the most expansive vision of post-Christian feminist religiosity I naturally turned to Mary Daly. I focused mainly on her The Church and the Second Sex with a New Feminist Post-Christian Introduction and her Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.1 Therefore, at age twenty-one, I had the [End Page 112] astonishingly good fortune to devote a major portion of the academic energy my thesis requirement demanded on analyzing these innovative texts by Mary Daly. I celebrated the cutting-edge religious feminism in her work and rejected the white racial myopia also found there. No other author that I could locate so trenchantly and thoroughly assailed the deification of maleness in the church. Daly employed her wordsmithing genius to depict the history of women’s mistreatment by the institutional church. She seized upon some of the worst psychic fears attached to maleness in her repeated demand for “the castration of sexist religion.”2 She shocked audiences with her complete rejection of Christian idolization of maleness when calling for “the death of God the Father.”3 It is hard to recapture how shocking that language sounded to Christian ears in the 1970s. Most likely, it would still be shocking today if anyone dared to use this rhetoric among Christians. I found Daly to be at her best when she pointed out the utter absurdity of the patriarchal logic that saturated both church practices and long-standing Christian theological tenets. My nascent black feminism was inflamed by the boldness of her critiques. At the same time, I had sharp differences with some of the ideas I found in her writings. My ability to criticize white racist feminism in my chosen field of religious studies was launched as I discerned the right words to articulate my disagreement with Daly. It was a rare opportunity, I now realize, to have had her radical feminist ideas about religion to spark my dissenting reflections. Daly, like many other white feminist authors at the time, compared blacks and women as two categories of experience. She used this comparison to add dramatic flourish to her description of the evolution of her feminist ideas. To illustrate her views on the struggle for women’s equality in the church, for instance, she employed a racial analogy in one of her retrospective prefaces to The Church and the Second Sex. “Why, I wondered would anyone want ‘equality’ in the church? In a statement that I had given to the press only three or four woman-light years distant from now, I had explained that a woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding...