The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 2 (Spring, 1999) of the APA Newsletters

How, for example, can we challenge the work of established colleagues without appearing disrespectful, or as Daly rightly worries, without contributing to the erasure of feminism? What distinguishes between an honest disagreement, a criticism, and an attack? What ethical guidelines should govern critique made publicly accessible? How often, especially with respect to reports of public addresses, are we required to remind our reader that of course our reflections are our own, and of course we are responsible for them? Is there something that there is to be a feminist, a philosopher, or a lesbian worthy of engagement? What governs the expression of disappointment with a sister’s work? How responsible are we as writers to make sure that our ideas are understood? For me, however, the crucial question is this: What can we as feminists do to create the conditions under which the many strands of our discourse and work can receive critical and constructive attention, and within which we can all be assured that respect forms the bedrock of our engagement with each other?

In the Spring of 1988 I was 28 years old, pregnant with my fourth child, and a graduate student at Marquette working in the library to help support my family, studying, as one does at a private Jesuit institution, lots of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas—and I was grateful to be there. For someone whose adult life had been spent in a devastating early marriage, factory labor, welfare dependency, and the loss of custody of two children, education represented nothing less for me than a chance at life. But for as important as this was, the decision to risk a shot at a career in philosophy was all the more so, first because it was made against the prevailing tide of "well-intended" advice received from family and friends about what I should settle for (beautician, secretary, remarriage), and second, because philosophy offered me something whose value I regard as inestimable—the liberation of ideas and the opportunity to think them.

Still, the price of this liberation was a high one in that what philosophy seemed to require was the nearly wholesale discounting of my experience as a woman, as a mother, as not-a-mother, as poor, etc. It was made clear to me in any number of subtle and no so subtle ways that experience was not the appropriate "stuff" of ontology, metaphysics, or epistemology, maybe not even ethics, and for a time I no doubt found this acceptable, probably even attractive given where I’d been. In short, I stored that part of my life away. Imagine, then, what it was like to discover the work of Mary Daly, as I did one day shelving books (Dewey Decimal, 305.5 to be specific). Drawn originally by the titles, Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust, I plopped myself and my swelling belly down on the floor between the stacks and inhaled the incendiary ideas of what became one of my first feminist heroines. Indeed, unbeknownst to me then, that day turned out to be crucial to the albeit late-blooming birth of my feminist conscience and the gradual translation of my experience from resignation to political activism.

Reading Daly, and then Marilyn Frye, Audre Lorde, Naomi Scheman, Donna Haraway, Alison Jaggar, Iris Young, Sarah Hoagland, Claudia Card, Maria Lugones, among others taught me that as opposed to the dross which must be discarded before any "real" thinking can take place, messy, joyful, anguished, and always embodied experience matters. It informs and situates that place from which to critically and self-critically evaluate the institutions, ideas, and practices which form, as Wittgenstein and Haraway might put it, the epistemic locations within which thinking about the true, the knowable, and the good (or the "true," the "knowable," and the "good") are made possible. Daly’s words—vivid, exuberant, rankling—helped me to begin to see women as knowers, agents and creators for the first time, and her biting critique of gynecology and other practices supplied me with some of the first tools I had for "dismantling the master’s house." Her reclaimed use of words like "Nemesis," "Revolting," and "Crone," made me laugh with a newfound sense of self-worth, and gave form and forum to my anger and frustration with men, enabling me to recognize injustice not only as it had occurred in my life but in those of countless other women and girls. And Daly along with other feminist "Hags," moved me to think long and hard about the privileges I enjoyed, the heteropatriarchal institutions I participated in, and the possibility of another kind of life, a chosen life much richer than what I had known. The liberation offered me by philosophy was revolutionized through feminism—even during the 1980’s, even without the benefit of on-the-spot feminist philosophers to talk to, even when publicly embracing the "F-word" endangered my tenure, even as the Promise Keepers came to my town, and even as I now watch my ten-year-old daughter, Carley Aurora, reject the Guerrilla Girls in favor of the Spice Girls. Feminist philosophy and politics changed my world and made me braver, and for this I owe thanks to Mary Daly.

In the ten years since that day in the Marquette library I have come to expect a lot from my feminist heroines and from myself. I have added many more names to this list and have been fortunate enough to count myself as having a modest place at what I think to be the most creative, bountiful, beautiful, and—even with a whole lot further to go—diverse table philosophy has ever set. Hence, it was with just this weltanschauung on my sleeve that I waltzed into the Morse Auditorium of the University of Boston to hear Mary Daly for the first time under what for me could not have been more propitious circumstances, namely, a plenary session of the International Association of Women Philosophers "Lessons from the Gynaeceum." It just doesn’t get any better than this.

Or so I thought. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Perhaps I somehow missed "the point." Perhaps I misperceived the looks on the faces of those around me. But what I want to report is that Daly engaged her audience with the glittering insight and biting good humor of "pure lust." What I want to say is that Daly’s utopian vision is sure to win over a new generation of RadicalLesbianFeminists. What I want to say is that Daly’s new work, Quintessence, is likely to raise important questions in new ways, and spur feminist philosophers to think and rethink issues in, for instance, ecological feminism, feminist postmodernism, lesbian philosophy, separatism, feminist critique of science, feminist theories of knowledge, multiculturalism, feminist spirituality, and so on. What I want to believe is that I came away from this session reenergized and ready to continue to live and work as a feminist.

But I can’t and I didn’t. In fact, the session left me confused, angry, and disappointed. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone here. I have struggled a good deal in the weeks since to come to terms with how I ought to approach the writing of this report. Part of the difficulty is that in some very real sense there is nothing to report; I have gone over and over my notes in search of arguments and can find none. This is not to say that Daly made no valuable claims, nor is it to suggest that there weren’t some kernels and gems of insight to cull from the ballast. But it is to say that whatever gems there may have been to cull were largely lost amidst the alienating if not hostile tone of her delivery, not to mention the self-righteousness of her repeated references to herself as potentially "the last radical feminist left standing." Did she really call ecofeminism "wimpy"? Did she really call all of feminist postmodernism "obscene"? What did she mean by "and don’t start telling me about all of those ‘isms’"? Has Daly’s legitimate rage rigidified into, well, cranky defensiveness?

There were gems: I think Daly is dead-on right to howl as loudly and dissonantly as she can about environmental devastation and about the conceptual and political connections which link the oppression of women, lesbians and gays, indigenous peoples, non-human animals, and the environment itself; but I think she is just as dead-on mistaken to paint all of science, especially the biological sciences and bio-technology, as uniformly "evil" or "necrophilic." To oversimplify the myriad and complex issues that confront us here as if they could be typed in either/or terms provides us with neither helpful explanation nor political direction. An apocalyptic "war cry" is no substitute for perhaps less vivid but ultimately more compelling arguments.

I also think Daly is right to call for serious reflection and attention to the disinterest, even outright rejection, of feminism by younger women; I sometimes find myself in near despair over my students—women and men—who are either (a) indifferent to matters of justice, preferring Howard Stern over National Public Radio, or (b) gratified by the prospect that they could turn out to be more religiously, economically, and politically conservative than their parents. Daly is right, this is really scary; but she’s also wrong. So long as there was a single young women "left standing" in her audience ready to hear Daly out despite the alienating atmosphere epitomized by her claim that the feminist movement has failed, it hasn’t. Daly owes young women more than this. Daly owes me more than this. I worked too long and too hard collectively with other feminists for a Women’s Studies minor at Bloomsburg to be told that Women’s Studies is "dull" and "dead." This is not to say that something valuable isn’t expressed in Daly’s refrain that "the hearts of truth-saying women are broken." I count myself among such women, truth-saying being the "rough ground" of the autobiographical approach I have taken here. The trouble is that fervor without reason wins few converts to any cause, and, to use the infamous words of Rush Limbaugh in the satirical fashion Daly taught me, that’s how it ought to be.

Toward the end of the evening, Daly wondered aloud whether anyone was listening, and I gather she meant this both literally and metaphorically in that , like the bibilical John the Baptist crying out in the Wilderness, she is calling us to a kind of redemption from the sins of Phallocracy. Here too Daly has something important to say, and I was listening: It may well be "now or never" in the sense that the continuing failure to address profoundly serious issues like global warming, antibiotic resistance, cloning, the potential health effects of electromagnetism, human overpopulation, religious fundamentalism, biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons development, poverty, deforestation, water and air pollution, and on and on, may well, to be blunt, kill us all. And she may be right that the first step is to name the culprit(s) responsible for these dilemmas. But this is only the first step, and it will hardly do to imply—as if it were all the explanation needed—that there exists a single more or less monolithic phallocratic order engaged in the execution of a globally scaled, historically evidenced conspiracy. Men surely don’t deserve credit for the work that this would require, nor is it fair to condemn all men as co-conspirators. I can no more rationally believe that all men are willfully evil than I can believe that all women are unwittingly victims, and the kernel of truth that we may be able to sift from such pronouncements doesn’t make up for the hard work of understanding the many "isms" she would seem to dismiss so blithely.

As many feminists have convincingly shown, heteropatriarchal institutions are complex and differentiated along many axes—economic, cultural, ethnic, ecological, spiritual, and sexual. And while a kind of easy opprobrium can be crafted from conspiracy theories, such a glossing over of difference gets us not one wit closer to creating the very thing Daly most fervently advocates: real, substantive and positive change in the ways in which we think about and perceive ecosystems, nonhuman animals, women, lesbians, and children. Moreover, it leaves Daly open to the criticism that for however much she may protest to the contrary, she does not really take seriously the roles of such axes in the experiences and lives of women.

Among the many feminist values I have actively sought to incorporate in my "be-ing" over the years is the willingness to reexamine and revise what I think and do in light of my experience, particularly in interaction with others. In that spirit then, I secured a copy of Quintessence and read it. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this report to conduct anything like a full book review, and I am happy to leave this to more qualified Daly scholars. But I do have a couple of modest observations. Set in the fictional future 2048 Biophillic Era, Quintessence moves back and forth between Daly’s "original" 1998 edition of the book and a commentary composed in dialogue form by Annie, a member of the future "Anonyma Network," an informal network of women and girls living on Lost and Found Continent, a kind of post-patriarchal Atlantis. An imaginative premise, Daly quickly engages her reader in the familiar iconoclastic "Dalyan" prose we’d expect. Nonetheless, I looked as much as I had listened, and can still find little argument of any substance to report.

Setting aside a number of questions about how Daly conceives such things as extrasensory perception (Elemental Sensory Perception), time travel, magical powers (the Fifth Cause), parthenogenesis, and electromagnetic fields (Elemental Magnetism), and granting that the book is littered with the same gems that I’ve attempted to filter from her address, I still came away disappointed. And worse. In several passages Daly articulates her vision of the right kind of inhabitant of Lost and Found Continent in a way that leaves me cold. Not only are there no boys or men, but my hunch is that many of the women and lesbians in her audience—like me—wouldn’t last long in her fictional "utopia" either:

I [Annie] answered, "Those women who refused to release themselves from the phallocratic dependencies and the habits that had been embedded in them under the old system were in effect refusing to evolve. So they could not survive in the New energy field" (p. 67).