Mary Daly

[Gokkun]

I have two questions about Mary Daly, which I would like to hear your thoughts on.


Firstly, do you agree with the following comment which she made?

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.



And secondly, do you think she was justified in discriminating against male students at Boston College?


Judge Denies Daly's Bid for Injunction

A Massachusetts judge sided with Boston College this week in a crucial early round of a lawsuit brought by a self-described radical feminist theologian who refused to accept male students in her class.

Assoc. Prof. Mary Daly (Theology) told the University earlier this year that she would resign or retire before complying with its demand that she open her classes to men.

Boston College, which has stood by its non-discrimination policy, accepted her agreement to retire. Negotiations ensued and were completed between the University and Daly.

[AyeRobot]

Nice user name

[TeiTetua]

The first quote is pure fantasy. Mary Daly was notably imaginative.

The second question hinges on that word "justified". What she was trying to do was just plain illegal, and the college didn't let her get away with it (US law says that if a college admits both women and men, it has to allow everyone access to all programs). But should she have tried it, if the situation were different? Maybe. But in other places, it wouldn't have caused much of a stir.

[sakura]

Unfortunately it's not pure fantasy that males are getting their wish to drastically reduce the population of females. they have always tried to do this using the most aggressive means possible. IN India females are 20% reduced thanks to their culture being so woman-hating that it's acceptable to abord foetuses because they're female.

But yes, it's pure fantasy that society would ever become as male-hating as it is woman-hating. WOmen would never hate males as much as men hate women.


Men are the oppressors with a big O. The oppressors made it illegal for the oppressed to not allow the oppressors in their spaces The sense of entitlement never ends when it comes to men does it?

[sethstarkaddersmackerel]

I'm reading Gyn/Ecology, it's an incredible book.

it has already changed forever the way I will read certain types of academic literature.

[sakura]

she was one helluva woman, wasn't she? from the moment you read the opening passage in Gyn/Ecology and the tale of her sporting her terrifying Tiger T-shirt at the Second INternational Symposium on Belief in Vienna, you know you're in for a ride. And her smoking cigars with her mates "passed out on silver trays, together with champagne, by female servants in black uniforms to the men present", chatting aggressively to Cardinal Konig himself

[TeiTetua]

Boston College is nominally Catholic, in fact Jesuit, but it doesn't train priests. It has a reputation as a "party school" meaning that the students like to drink a lot. Look the place up on its own website or Wikipedia. They might not mention the booze.

I'm not sure if Mary Daly did manage to have all-women classes for a while, but the college put a stop to it. She offered to teach men separately, but she was told it wasn't legal. Eventually they encouraged her to retire.

Back when Boston College was all male, as it was until 1970, it was the male students who supported Daly (from Wikipedia):
Daly was first threatened with dismissal when, following the publication of her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), she was issued a terminal contract. As a result of support from the (then all-male) student body and the general public, however, Daly was ultimately granted tenure.