Lessons from Mary Daly

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Lessons from Mary DalyAuthor(s): Judith PlaskowReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 100-104Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of FSR, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.28.2.100 .

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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28.2100

Lessons from Mary DalyJudith Plaskow

A few years ago, in a talk on the geopolitics of Jewish feminism, preeminent Israeli feminist Alice Shalvi commented that Standing Again at Sinai could have



Special Section in Memory of Mary Daly 101

been written only in the country of Mary Daly. Alice’s words were right on the mark. Mary’s work has had a profound and abiding influence on my thought. I need to state up front, however, that the Mary who made my own work possible is the Mary of the Second Spiral Galaxy: the Mary who led the walkout from Memo-rial Church and who wrote Beyond God the Father. I stopped reading her work in the middle of Pure Lust because I found myself deeply impatient with what I experienced as its disembodiment, dualism, and abstraction from the real possi-bilities open to women in this always-ambiguous world in which we actually live.

That said, what have I learned from Mary? On the most basic and significant level, Mary has kept me honest about the deeply patriarchal nature of Judaism. I can still taste my intense excitement when I heard her deliver “After the Demise of God the Father,” a précis and foretaste of Beyond God the Father, which she gave as the opening paper to the first meeting of the American Academy of Religion’s Working Group on Women and Religion in 1972. The room was much too small to hold the many people packed into it, and I have a clear image of sitting on top of a tall table that was against one wall, my mind leaping and expanding as I listened. In February 1973, four months later, I gave a speech entitled “The Jewish Feminist: Conflict in Identities” at the National Conference on Jewish Women—the first-ever Jewish feminist conference—held at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. As I de-scribed being torn between the deeply androcentric Judaism in which I was raised and the excitement and new possibilities opened up by my experiences of feminist community, I cited Mary’s statement that women have had the power of naming stolen from us and said that we did not yet know what Jewish words might also be women’s words.1 Preparing for the session for today made me realize that there is no way to disentangle my own thinking from Mary’s influence because she was with me from my Jewish feminist debut. In 1973, the year that Beyond God the Father ap-peared, I was a research associate at Harvard Divinity School, working on my femi-nist dissertation on Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and charged with the absurd task of trying to get the theology department to integrate a feminist perspective into its curriculum. I was a kid in the belly of the patriarchal beast! Mary helped me to name that beast and also to name the alternative sources of energy and insight available through feminism that were to be my lifeline that year and in the years to come.

Obviously, I did not walk out of Judaism in the way that she advocated walking out of Christianity. When I say that she kept me honest, I mean that she made me realize that my decision to struggle as a feminist within the Jewish con-text could not be predicated on the claim that Judaism was fundamentally liber-ating. I like to think that I am sharp and clear-sighted in critiquing the patriar-

1 The speech appears in The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), and is reprinted in The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Juda-ism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003, ed. Judith Plaskow with Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 36.




chal elements in Judaism; that is not where Mary and I disagree. Mary quipped that a depatriarchalized Bible might make a nice pamphlet; I have argued that a depatriarchalized Bible would not exist because the warp of its patriarchal elements is inseparable from the woof of whatever liberating insights it might contain. I choose to be part of the project of the feminist transformation of Juda-ism because my Jewishness is a central part of my identity and because Jewish feminist community is the place where my many commitments most fully come together. But thanks to Mary I made that decision cognizant of the depth of women’s otherness within Judaism. This awareness imposes on me the obliga-tion not to look away from the places where my tradition is oppressive, but on the contrary, to highlight and expose them. My insistence that the goal of Jewish feminism is not equal access for women to the rights and responsibilities of Jew-ish life but a thorough transformation of Judaism that begins with acknowledg-ing its deeply patriarchal nature is something that I learned from Mary.

That is the single most important thing I have taken from her work. But there are numerous particular insights that have spoken to me deeply and that I have found myself returning to over the years. One, I already mentioned, is the notion that women have had the power of naming stolen from us.2 That image condensed for me and for many others the fundamental dilemma we confront as feminists: that most of the mechanisms available to us for the repair of wom-en’s subordination were created by men, and so it is not clear that any of them can provide a vehicle for women’s authentic speech. It’s no coincidence that the feminist bookstore opened in Cambridge in 1973 was called New Words, both as an homage to Mary and a proclamation that the feminist books sold inside had taken back the power of naming and were speaking in a new idiom.

A second key image of Mary’s—the converse of the idea that the power of naming has been stolen from women—is the notion that “feminism is an ontological revolution.”3 I don’t know whether this phrase makes any sense to someone coming upon it for the first time in 2010, but it perfectly captured the experiences of many of us involved in the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. We felt that we were challenging everything we had ever been taught—indeed, everything women had been taught for centuries. As Rosemary Ruether put it, we were picking up the ground on which we were standing.4 I remember a woman in my consciousness-raising group, in 1969, confronting what Mary was later to describe as “the experience of nothingness”: the intense anxiety and the threat of meaninglessness that comes with question-

2 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 8.

3 Ibid., 6. 4 Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Becoming of Women in Church and Society,” Cross Cur-

rents 17 (Fall 1967): 418–26, esp. 418.



Special Section in Memory of Mary Daly 103

ing long-accepted and long-internalized social roles and expectations.5 “If I am not defined by being a wife and mother, who am I?” the woman kept asking. Looking into the abyss of nonbeing, we were creating new ways of being in the world that we believed had the power to reconfigure all of human relations. Part of me laughs now at the naïveté of that conviction. But the feminist insis-tence that another world is possible has also been a continuing base point for my work, leading me to resist any framework that leaves no room for women’s agency and to root myself in an alternative vision of what it can mean to be.

A third insight of Mary’s that has been important to my own work is the no-tion that the essence of a patriarchal ethic is the “failure to lay claim to that part of the psyche that is then projected onto ‘the Other.’”6 Mary certainly did not invent the notion of projection, but I think I first encountered it in Beyond God the Father. I have found it an indispensable tool in many contexts, from some of my early work exploring the persistent association of women with body in much of Western thought to my articles on Christian feminist anti-Judaism, to its use-fulness in providing insight into the dynamics of racism and the sexualization of lesbians, gays, and other marginalized groups.

Fourth, the notion that woman-centered space is located “on the boundary” of one or another patriarchal institution has very much shaped the way that I think of my relationship to Judaism.7 I know all feminists wrestle with the ques-tion of how to relate to the patriarchal institutions that—despite the feminist on-tological revolution—still structure most aspects of our lives. I have deliberately chosen to center my Jewish life in a variety of small groups—different havurot (fellowship and prayer groups), and a Jewish feminist spirituality collective—that operate on the boundaries of the larger Jewish community and that seek to cre-ate here and now the Judaism that we would hope someday to see more widely accepted. I think Mary is exactly right both that that space is invisible to those who have not entered it and is therefore inviolable and that it communicates a power beyond itself that is very different from power in the usual sense. I am repeatedly amazed at the extent to which music, poetry, and liturgy created in these small, alternative spaces—music and poetry that express a very different view of God and spirituality from that of the traditional prayer book—have made their way into significant sectors of the mainstream Jewish community.

The last point I will mention is Mary’s reminder that theology should be a “naming toward God.” She points out that it is not the task of the theologian to fix names on God; rather, through the very process of naming ourselves, women reach toward the endlessly unfolding God of myriad names.8 With this state-ment, and her related insistence that God should be thought of as a verb rather

5 Daly, Beyond God the Father, 23–24. 6 Ibid., 10. 7 Ibid., 40. 8 Ibid., 33.




than a noun, Mary opened up a space for a wealth of feminist names for God that reflected the diversity of women’s experiences and social locations. She and I have chosen different names and different contexts in which to name toward God, but her influence on my thinking has been so profound that it is difficult for me to imagine what my work would have looked like without her.



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Lessons from Mary Daly