With a heavy heart, yet grateful beyond words for her life and work, I report that Mary Daly died this morning, January 3, 2010 in Massachusetts. She had been in poor health for the last two years.
Her contributions to feminist theology, philosophy, and theory were many, unique, and if I may say so, world-changing. She created intellectual space; she set the bar high. Even those who disagreed with her are in her debt for the challenges she offered.
When I return from vacation at week’s end I will post more. But I want WATER colleagues, of which she was a stalwart one, to know this now. She always advised women to throw our lives as far as they would go. I can say without fear of exaggeration that she lived that way herself.
May her spirit soar and her ideas endure.
Mary E. Hunt
Hoechenschwand, Germany
I’ve read some of Daly’s Wickedary – a quite thought-provoking dictionary for women/feminists. Weirdly enough, the thing I remember most from the Wickedary is the Seal of Approval: A little seal clapping her flippers in approval… Daly was tremendously important in feminist theology, a direction of feminism I dabbled in as a teen and young adult.
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