Do Daly’s and Fritz’s assertions remain relevant today? Or have the intervening decades created a friendlier relationship between Christian faith and feminism? In Thinking Like a Woman, Fritz wrote that Christian women in the west are “unloved, unrespected, unnoticed by the Heavenly Father, condescended to by the Son, and fucked by the Holy Ghost.” Forty years later, the question of whether and how Christianity and feminism go together remains unanswered. Other second-wave feminists in the U.S., such as Andrea Dworkin and Leah Fritz, also focused their critical lens on the inherent anti-feminist nature of Christianity.
There Daly distanced herself from The Church and Second Sex, calling its author a “foresister” with whom she sharply disagrees.Īlthough Daly’s newer ideas scandalized religious communities, she certainly was not the only feminist who considered faith and feminism irreconcilable at the time.
But Beyond God the Father, Daly’s second book, written just a few years later, represented a dramatic break with her previous work.
In fact, her earlier book, The Church and Second Sex, was a feminist critique of Christianity in which Daly exposed the anti-woman elements of the faith and promoted a feminist Christian theology. She had previously identified as a reformist Christian working within the Catholic tradition and had endeavored to make religion a more welcoming space for women. First, she called herself “postchristian,” and declared that all religions “are infrastructures of the edifice of patriarchy.” Then, she called for “the castration of sexist religion,” and demanded “the death of God the Father.” Daly, who held two doctorates-in religious studies and theology-worked as a professor at Boston College.
In the early 1970s, the radical feminist theologian Mary Daly made some startling pronouncements.
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