Clooney on Daly
Fr. Francis Clooney, SJ, posted a reflection on his late colleague Mary Daly at America’s “In All Things” blog. It combines his personal perspective with a big-picture look at who she was and why she mattered.
I would guess that if she ever read or thought about any of my writings, she mostly likely would have seen me as still part of, caught in, structures she thought had to be overturned. The situation in which we found ourselves in at BC was one in which we could not easily talk to one another. But she, unlike me, probably felt that distance and non-communication were necessary visible signs of an extreme and extremely unjust situation, while I felt that there is no situation in which we cannot do better by finding ways to talk to one another, vulnerable even to one another’s hard words.
Do read it. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Fr. Clooney’s review of Luke Timothy Johnson’s new book Among the Gentiles, in the current Commonweal. Read that too!
Don’t miss a fascinating comment there from someone who (coincidentally) has the same name as I do. He scores a point against someone who says a man at Boston College wouldn’t have been able to get away with excluding women from his classroom.
I do have to say that I am amazed at the sympathetic treatment Mary Daly is receiving from many quarters, considering the fact that she was a radical lesbian feminist who abandoned not only Catholicism, but Christianity, for paganism, and wanted the earth to be “decontaminated” so that the male population would be only 10 percent.
David — does that David Nickol have your facility with quoting lyrics from “The King and I”?
Not only can he quote the lyrics, but he can sing all the songs. And that includes the duets. (From South Pacific, too.)
The following answer to a query of why Daly would not take questions from men makes it clearer to me now. Let them feel what it is like. All men who are offended by women who seem hostile to males should read this. I really got it fully for the first time reading this statement.
“When finally one of the women in the audience asked her why, she replied that it was important for men to have the experience of being ignored, overlooked, not allowed to speak. I didn’t have a question for her that evening, but appreciated her point: unless we ourselves experience marginalization, the brute force of power imposed on us, we really won’t be able to get what it is like to be a perennially demeaned and oppressed person.”
“she replied that it was important for men to have the experience of being ignored, overlooked, not allowed to speak”
‘it’s important for pro-choice people to have the experience of seeing what a dead and dismembered fetus looks like. Unless we ourselves experience this, we really won’t be able to get what it is like to kill a baby in the womb.’
it’s important for pro-choice people to have the experience of seeing what a dead and dismembered fetus looks like. Unless we ourselves experience this, we really won’t be able to get what it is like to kill a baby in the womb.
And it would be nice if pro-lifers got to spend time as poor girls/women or girls/women in incest or abusive relationships or in authoritarian societies who have little control over their own bodies.
Before we get off track; was struck by the uncommon wisdom and graciousness of Fr. Clooney in explaining, describing, and thanking Ms. Daly for her vision, dissent, and particular gifts even when these made him uncomfortable, questionning, alienated, etc.
Found his comments to be extremely fair, broad-minded, and gave a window into how he handles emotional discomfort, professional disagreements, etc. without the usual knee jerk defensiveness or partisanship.
Bill,
She didn’t seem hostile to males. She was hostile to males. There is simply no defending her behavior. We may get insight into it, and we may have some sympathy for why she went off the deep end. She not only rejected St. Paul and called him vulgar names. She rejected Jesus and Christianity.
And there is a big difference between being truly demeaned and oppressed and being a professor with tenure. I am terribly sympathetic to women who feel oppressed by the Catholic Church, and as a gay man I certainly know what it is like to be demeaned by the Church. If anyone is going to be sympathetic to criticisms of St. Paul, it’s going to be me (Romans 1, and all that). But she went way too far. And how do you explain away the comments about earth needing to be decontaminated to have only a 10 percent male population?
Jim,
There are some things that aren’t about abortion, and this is one of them. In fact, most things are not about abortion. And your analogy really should be it is important to be a dead and dismembered fetus, since what Mary Daly was speaking about experiencing something, not looking on as an observer.
Jim,
Now that I reread the above, it seems to have more of a bite (or a bark, or something) than I intended. Apologies.
Yes, Bill deHaas, Fr. Clooney’s post is gracious, and much appreciated. For a much less gracious effort, see today’s Wall St. Journal’s article about “As the Flame of Catholic Dissent Dies Out” — meaning Daly, Schillebeeckx et al.
See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704586504574654282563939764.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
The oldest comments are from the JPII generation quite pleased to see their demise in influence; mercifully the newer posts provide some counterpoint.
Are we a dying relic, or a less visible groundswell of change to come? Temporarily out of power but not defeated long term?
I acknowledge Daly went far beyond to make her point, but I am glad she challenged what she found.
David –
I’m with you. Ms. Daly seems to have been sincere, but that being the case she also sounds not a little unbalanced.
I wish there were as much examination of the Church’s exclusion of women from having any institutional prerogatives as there is of a single female professor trying to give men an idea of what it means to be marginalized.
I don’t blame Daly for trying something to shock men into examining the way they tune the voices of women out of the conversation, but the way she went about doing it was almost certainly counterproductive. It’s very tough to teach the relatively powerful a lesson.
Another thread on this crazy witch (opps. they prefer “Wiccan”)? And Schillebeeckx didn’t even get a nod when he died over Christmas, and he was everything that Commonweal should aim for: liberal, devout, Catholic, a top-notch academic, a leading voice in progress.
All I get the impression of Mary Daly was that somewhere along the way she and the media mistook being controversial with being brilliant. Her opining on reducing the male population to 10% being an interesting suggestion (do I get to be part of the 10%, sounds fine to me) but ignoring the correlary to that which would be polygamy. And I highly doubt she would have come out in favor of that (though I doubt she would see marriage as anything but a patriarchal expression of male ownership of women).
I think I will implement the same policy and forbid my female students to speak so they can “have the experience of being ignored, overlooked, not allowed to speak” given that none of my female students have ever experience systematic oppression here in Canada. I think the same argument holds true, unless she ascribes to some concept of innate shared/communal knowledge/experiences. In which case as a Ukrainian I demand restitution from the Mongols for the pain and suffering inflicted on my people.
For the record: this isn’t a “thread on” Mary Daly; it’s a link to a thoughtful reflection on her life and work. Don’t think she’s worth discussing? Good news! There’s no need to participate.
As for Schillebeeckx, he was hardly ignored in “Commonweal” during his life. Now that he’s been called home to God, I don’t think he’s suffering for lack of a nod on this blog — in fact, some might consider our failure to provide a forum for comment our way of paying tribute.
Francis Clooney’s thought article about Mary Daly was the only article or blog I read where a man really got what she was doing. Mary Daly was about changing the balance of power, and she was making a profound statement about women’s right to freedom of speech, and also what it takes for women to actually make their voices heard within male supremacy.
The irony, no doubt not lost on Dr. Daly, was the Catholic church and its monumental exclusionary policy towards women. I don’t see any outrage over the institutionalized contempt the church has shown women for eons. Mary Daly was about teaching women, giving women access to the highest levels of philosophical study. Nationwide, and internationally, her old students are gathering to memorialize her. You won’t see TV specials, or documentaries about Mary Daly. It took NPR several days before they even did a tiny report. Han Kung dies, and you can bet there will be coverage, Ted Kennedy killed a woman and he is lionized. That’s ok, because it’s famous men. Mary Daly, well, we rely on feminist blogs now. In that, she’ll be happy to be celebrated by the women she spoke for.
Mary Daly said the church, and all patriarchal religions abuse and oppress women. Even poor Clooney still is in the church, because he is a man and a priest. He never faced the clerical abuse that Dr. Daly put up with. But he did get what her tactics were all about, and that makes him perhaps the one man on the Internet who did have half a brain.
To celebrate women, and to focus all your attention on women translates to men as hatred of men. But I’ll remember the incredible message of liberation that I learned from Mary Daly, and count myself lucky to have heard her lecture several times. We’ll miss you Mary Daly, but we know you are now in the fifth dimension spiraling in the universe with Virginia Woolf, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Sappho, and with all the women who were burned and tortured by a womanhating church. She is alive now in women’s world, and she’ll be alive in the hearts of all women who will not compromise in the cause of freedom. She’s having the last laugh on the snools, prickers, and bore-o-crats.
“I think I will implement the same policy and forbid my female students to speak so they can “have the experience of being ignored, overlooked, not allowed to speak” given that none of my female students have ever experience systematic oppression here in Canada.”
Have you asked them? Because this woman, however high achieving she appears to be, knows exactly what it means to be “ignored, overlooked and not allowed to speak.” Not all the time, not by all men, and not as a result of explicit means, but if you think the women in your class haven’t felt this then it’s either because you haven’t asked or they wouldn’t tell you even if they had. It’s amazing how men don’t seem to get this, even men who really do try to be fair and enlightened in their treatment of women.
But the real point is made by Audrey: To silence and exclude women is perfectly acceptable because it is classified as theology, whereas, to silence and exclude men can never be acceptable, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose, and is a sign of downright inhumanity.
Carolyn’s point about the Wall Street Journal Op Ed reminded me that the Parliament of Relions and the “Elders” (including Carter and Tutu) focused on the issue of women’s equality.The wisdom of the older folk may be diminsaihing in numbers but not in content.
Getting that message through, as Barbara notes, is indeed hard, while the young conservative think tanks pile out a message that this issue and others are dying off.
The system of silencing women is not about individuals, it is about how male supremacy operates. Male supremacy can’t tolerate women’s voices, and does everything in its power to keep women from even speaking. I go to conferences all the time where only white men get to speak. I complain about this very loudly only to be completely ignored by all the men in the room, who don’t ever give a damn. What Mary Daly did was say, we have had enough of men ruining our thoughts, destroying our dialogue, and silencing us as we are trying to fomulate thoughts.
What men do is tune out women. And they routinely “joke” that is attack women. I don’t think they know how awful this looks to women. I made a vow that I won’t go to groups now if there aren’t enough women in the room to support my sanity.
Remember, in patriarchy, the number one sin is for women to speak unhindered and unpoliced by men. When there are no men, there is no police force, and women behave in a radically different way when no men are present. It is a giant relief for us to be able to study and talk in peace. Remember, all of theology and all of men’s studies (history and theology) is about centuries of denying women education or advancement. Remember, the entire Catholic church excludes women, that’s what that institution is all about. Why this small detail is lost to men is perfectly clear, they simply have no humanity when it comes to the full personhood of women on our own terms. They want to fashion plastic women, but they don’t want to see the real intellectual woman.
Dr. Daly describes in detail how the other male professors at Boston College treated her in faculty meetings. She decided that she would not suffer that abuse and belittling treatment and so eventually just refused to go to any of the male dominated meetings. I invite all men to attend groups of all women, where the women do all the talking, and where the men sit in silence. You won’t be able to last one week.
The problem with the kind of radicalization of feminism that Mary Daly exemplified is that it leaves the rest of the women of the world to fend for themselves.
Consider our Catholic community, which does belong to women as well as men despite all protestations to the contrary. I wondered where all the feminist voices went when Pope Benedict rehabilitated Bishop Williamson of the SSPX (who believes women shouldn’t receive an education), or when the Pope brought back the pre-Vatican II liturgy (which excludes females from the liturgical roles they have in the liturgy that followed Vatican II). Did anyone speak up? I expected an outcry.
Maybe I missed something, but I heard nothing. Of the four articles in Commonweal about Summorum Pontificum, I believe mine was the only one that even mentioned the exclusion of women in the older rites. Are feminists so ghettoized that they can only talk to one another on feminist websites?
So fine, go off and talk amongst yourselves. But by doing so, you leave behind the greater community of women whose interests you supposedly share. Wash your hands of patriarchal Catholicism if you want. But I can remember at least one episode in the New Testament where hand-washing was a betrayal.
Audrey,
Here’s the big question in my mind about those who praise Mary Daly. How far are we to go in following the path that she laid out? She not merely rejected patriarchy in the Catholic Church, but she also rejected the Church itself. As a Catholic, she must have at some point believed in the Trinity, and she must have believed that Jesus was the Son of God. But not only did she reject that, she rejected all the world’s religions:
She didn’t merely call for an end of patriarchy. She endorsed the idea that the earth should be “decontaminated” and have a population of 10% men and 90% women.
Now, I admit all of that is based on reading a small sample of what she said and what has been written about her, but it seems to me she was advocating the replacement of patriarchy with matriarchy. The mistake of the human race, she seems to think, is not that women have not had equality, but that they have not been permitted to dominate.
I invite all men to attend groups of all women, where the women do all the talking, and where the men sit in silence. You won’t be able to last one week.
Women are not as unbearable as you claim. I have worked since 1972 for what has grown to a very large publishing company. I was hired by a woman. I have had one male supervisor in all that time, and I currently report to a woman. In the department where I work, the head supervisor is a woman, and the three groups she oversees are all headed by women. The CEO of our corporation is a woman. It is rare for me to attend a meeting in which women are not in the majority, and sometimes I am the only male in attendance. As in any workplace, not everything is sweetness and light all the time, but I can honestly say that when women are spoken about as women and in derogatory terms, it is actually more likely that the people using the words I can’t repeat here are other women.
I am not for one moment claiming that patriarchy doesn’t exist, and indeed I remember one of my former bosses telling me that at another company where she was highly regarded, a new spot opened up that would have been a promotion for her, and they told her, “We’d really like to promote you . . . but you’re a woman.” (And she was supposed to take that as a compliment!) What I am saying is that in my entire career, I have seen men and women working together without a battle for dominance going on between then, and without the male minority tearing out their hair and screaming, “WOMEN!” I don’t think it is an inherent trait of men (as Daly seemed to believe) that they must dominate and silence women.
“Now, I admit all of that is based on reading a small sample of what she said and what has been written about her…” David why don’t you leave it at that. Daly makes a point by exaggeration. It is not why she would not let men into her class but why men would not let her get a degree. For which she had to travel to another continent. Secondly, don’t take it personally. If you feel you are not the person she is addressing leave it at that and go after your male peers to change.
What Bill said.
Rita –
I’m with you. It’s feminists like Mary Daly who exaggreste outlandishly who give feminism a bad name.
I have known academic exclusion — Notre Dame refused to accept me in their doctoral philosophy program simply because I am a woman. But their philosophy faculty did try to get the rule changed. And Catholic University did accept me. Further, the univerfsity I got my B.A. from (a secular one — Tulane) actually sent word to me that there was a fellowship available to me if I was interested, but I wasn’t. I am of Mary Daly’s generation, so I simply cannot agree with all of her accusations. She exaggerated mightily.
Bill,
Exactly how much of what Mary Daly advocated are you defending? Is Christianity so objectionable in its treatment of women that it should be junked (along with the rest of the world’s major religions)? Does feminism somehow disprove the truth claims of Christianity? She said, “Stop wrestling with it; it’s not interesting. Get out of it. That would be my approach to it. Misogynists! Hateful! All of them! I studied them. And finally I just didn’t try to reason with it anymore.” Are you willing to dismiss Catholicism? I am not even sure I would describe myself as a Catholic, and I wouldn’t go that far!
You seem often to want to appeal to what Jesus said and what the very early Church stood for. Daly was willing to throw all that on the trash heap. I don’t understand the value in that. She wasn’t calling for reform of the Catholic Church. She wanted it to go away.
How can you defend that?
David,
Jesus condemned the leaders of his day. The male leaders of the church have done a very bad job of representing Jesus. What Mary Daly, and others, protest, is that terrible leadership. It is a leadership which has sided with tyrants and even bowed before them. We worship God through Jesus Christ. Not the Vatican nor triumphal, dominant hierarchy. Only people like Daly have stood up to them. Let God judge Daly. Certainly people who compromised themselves, of either sex, should be ashamed as they ridicule Daly.
Further, rareley will you see a female leader in the church not quote Daly in some way. Chittister nailed it. Maybe you should read her article three or four times. Or more.
Bill,
You are evading the question. I don’t doubt that Daly was brilliant, or that she broke new ground, or that she raised important questions about women in the Church. But the question is whether the path she ultimately recommended is to be approved. She rejected not only Christianity, but all the other major religions, and became a self-described pagan. I don’t doubt that she was courageous, but she didn’t challenge the Catholic Church to change. She rejected it and advised others to do so. How she can be claimed as a Catholic hero baffles me. She left the Church and denounced it.
Let God judge Daly.
So I am to join you in condemning nearly two millennia of Church leadership, but I must not express an opinion about Daly?
I greatly admire people who stand up to power, but when she ejected that male undergraduate from her class, that was just bullying the weak. And sadly, she is now more remembered for that than for her work.
Jesus has done pretty well in two thousand years. The other guys is another question.
I must admit that after a while, discussions like this seem to become depressingly predictable.
Re: Ann and Rita — it was not up to Mary Daly to validate the decision of her “fellow” women not to reject the power structure any more than it was the duty of those women to follow her out the door. They are capable of standing up for themselves.
Re: David — it was not up to Mary Daly to validate your decision to stick with Catholicism or Christianity. Her decision was not personal to you.
It is perfectly in line with the discourse of power that many see Daly’s rejection of the church, rather than the church’s diminution of their status, as the real problem, because, however much they may dislike elements of the Church, there are many who want, above all, the power structure to survive and close ranks quickly when someone actually and totally gives up on the institution. But in reality, the lesson to be learned is this: the more an institution refuses to change, the more likely it is that people will really have to be agents of their own change, and the more likely it is that they will, indeed, give up on the institution, its good and bad parts alike.
This is said with a fair amount of sadness, not anger. Anyone who has lived with an addict knows what this is like.
What Barbara said.
Re: David — it was not up to Mary Daly to validate your decision to stick with Catholicism or Christianity. Her decision was not personal to you.
Barbara,
It would be difficult for you to know whether I have made a decision to stick with Catholicism or Christianity, since I don’t even know myself. What I do know is that I don’t reject out of hand Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — “all of the so-called major religions” — as sects of patriarchy to be left behind in a quest for something that doesn’t merely grant perfect equality to the sexes, but “decontaminates” the earth so that men are only 10% of the population.
I may or may not be a Christian, but I do acknowledge that this is a Catholic forum, and it doesn’t seem out of line for me to suggest that it is odd in such a forum to have people maintaining that although Mary Daly did’t merely criticize the Church, but condemned it and advised others to put it behind them, it is illegitimate to say anything critical about her.
I would never suggest that she deserves no criticism, I just find it very striking how much of the criticism is aimed at her unwillingness to continue accommodating herself to a Church she clearly thought was unjust beyond reform.
My turn: what Barbara said.
And I would never criticize her for feeling so oppressed she felt she could not stay in the Church. My point is that she can’t be claimed by Catholics as a “Catholic hero.” It might make some sense for Catholics to feel that by her critique and eventual departure from the Church, she gave the Church a much needed wake-up call. But it was not her intention to give the Church a wake-up call, and it seems to me she would not be pleased with all the kind words written about her by Catholics. I her later years, she did not maintain that Catholicism was a good thing that needed to be reformed. She felt it was to be rejected wholesale.
If she was right, the Catholic Church is not so flawed it should be reformed. It is so flawed it shouldn’t exist. It’s raison d’etre is patriarchy. It is not tainted by patriarchy. It is patriarchy in one of its many guises.
“The problem with the kind of radicalization of feminism that Mary Daly exemplified is that it leaves the rest of the women of the world to fend for themselves.”
I can sympathize with Rita Ferrone’s sentiment here, as well as with her exasperation at the failure of masses of Catholic women to notice, apparently, the implications for them in the drive toward a “reform of the reform.” But I have sat on enough cross-university academic committees run by men who didn’t (yet) know me to recognize what Audrey and Barbara are describing. It is a disconcerting experience for someone who might have thought she had won a place at the table to be treated as a non-person. But that place at the table, it seems, must often be freshly negotiated, over and over again. Like Ann, I try to be resilient, and to “work around” obstacles rather than opting out. But I know how Mary Daly must have felt.
Just for the record, I haven’t found this discussion at all “depressing” or “predictable.” Watching Bill Mazzella go to bat for feminism, David Nichol defending Christianity, Audrey praising Clooney for having “half a brain” and more, has been lively.
Barbara and Bob, at the risk of depressing you further with my predictable comments, I’d like to take issue with the claim that this is all about having Mary Daly “validate” somebody. Not true. Neither I, nor, I think, Ann, nor David, have asked that Mary Daly “validate” our experience or our personal decisions or stay with the church she thought was unjust beyond reform. Rather, some general points have been made about solidarity, ongoing challenges, and the implications of some of the stands for which MD was famous have been discussed. I don’t see anything wrong with this.
Susan Gannon, thank you for your comments.
Oops — that should have been Jimmy above, not Bob. Sorry, Jimmy.
Barbara –
I didn’t criticize Daly for leaving the Church. I criticized her for her exaggerations. My second criticism, not made clear, is that it was unreasonable of her, given her exaggerations, to expect anyone to take her seriously as a scholar. She mght have been a splendid rhetorician, but she wasn’t a splended scholar.
Hi Ann, I agree that people who exaggerate should lose credibility. However, I can’t help but notice that it’s only some people who actually do lose credibility — So when, for instance, the Pope exaggerates without restraint on any potential social impact of gay marriage (not just untraditional but downright anti-environmental!), I may give him even less credence than I formerly did, but then, I already crossed the bridge out of the Catholic Church and have deliberately chosen that my children should NOT be Catholics, so that probably isn’t saying much. Nonetheless, after a while I find it kind of infuriating that even those who disagree with him find it necessary to argue the point on grounds of logic and theology instead of dismissing it with a few choice Internet slang abbreviations, which in my view is what it deserves. That’s how power begets hypocrisy, giving exaggeration the full benefit of the doubt, while those without power, especially women, are rubbed out like a pencil mark with an eraser as soon as they stray from the path of reason and onto the path of rhetoric.
Hi, Barbara,
I agree with most of what you say, and it’s infuriating. Being ignored is so provoking that my instinct is to become irrational about it and just call names — loudly. But that would be losing the battle. Letting myself appear as the Irrational Woman, the Over-Emoional Woman would just confirm the stereotype we’re opposing. Also not all men are unwilling to be fair, and some are fair to us, but they’re mostly the younger ones.
It can get so complicated for them. One of my colleagues, a Cuban and a very fair man, admitted that he remained macho relative to people of his own generation even as he supported women’s lib for his daughter’s. “It actually hurts my heart when I have to go near a stove!”, said he
I think the Pope is one of those old men with mixed emotions about a lot of things. I think there are two very different sides to him, one loving and fair, the other narrow, unsympathetic and unfair. It’s why he can write truly extremely fine encyclicals about the fundamentals of the Faith — the nature of love and hope, yet be the enforcer at the CDF. Yes, he needs a good psychiatrist. Most of the powers in the Church seem to. I mean that literally. They have been reared in a culture which seals off questioning, and the culture of the Vatican reinforces their neuroses. But I have never “believed in” the popes. That would be idolatry, and a very serious sin. I believe *that* the Church is God’s own in some way and I believe that popes have a very special function in it — to be the guardian of the Faith as best he can discover what Jesus’ messages actually mean.This requires consulting the other bishops, the theologians, the historians and, yes, the faithful.
It’s having a pope that I think makes the Roman Catholic Church special. Without a center, however flawed, history shows the the churches tend to fracture inevitably. But I digress.
Having daughters has a way of initiating change even among the hardest of the die hards. Likewise, if Mary Daly had a son, she might have been more willing to keep her skin in the game.
I agree with Barbara that the people in your life make all the difference. After following this thread yesterday, I played Joan Baez’ Bread and Roses on YouTube:
“As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.”
I know it’s sappy, but I really like the song and the sentiment..
“she ejected that male undergraduate from her class, that was just bullying the weak.”
My recollection is that he was in league with a conservative campus organization that had Daly and her no-male policy in its crosshairs. He registered for the class knowing full well he’d be refused admittance in order to provoke the dispute.
Here is what seems to me a very balanced and objective article on Mary Daly from glbtq.com, “an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender & queer culture.” I am reproducing the whole thing rather than giving a link, since the advertising on the site might be offensive to some.
Jim Pauwels: I see your point, but I still think the policy of excluding boys from her classes was taking a stand at the expense of weaker people. My husband tells me that any boy who isn’t good at sports completely understands what it is to feel marginalized. I believe most of us don’t need lessons from others on what it feels like to be excluded, ignored- we’ve all been there. People have a lot of reasons to admire Mary Daly, but I don’t believe that policy was one of them.
The womanist movement is an interesting counterpoint and critique of the path that feminism took in the mid- to late 20th Century. I am no expert on this, so others may want to correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that one of the issues was the individualism that characterizes (predominantly white) feminism (see “fend for yourself” discussion above), and another was the refusal of black women to regard men as “them” in an us-against-them struggle.
The reason I bring this up is to note only one of the variations and sub-groups within the women’s movement that have emerged since the heyday of Mary Daly, all of whom advocate for women in some fashion, but which have real differences and distinctions among them.
So when I hear Cardinal Rode, for instance, saying that one of the goals of the investigation of women religious in the U.S. is to root out feminism, I wonder if he knows at all what he is talking about or how the land lies today–even remotely. I think of Carol Lee Flinders, who writes about medieval women mystics, or Carol Gilligan on moral decision-making, and plenty of others…
Rita,
I think you’re right about the divisions in feminism. Just check out the Wikipedia page. I think of myself as a sort of John Stuart Mill/Michael Kimmel equality feminist … try expalining that to someone :)
Irene, the key difference is “isn’t GOOD at sports.” Mary Daly was GOOD at theology and found herself excluded nonetheless, and she understood, no doubt that many women who are actually GOOD if not BETTER than male peers in a variety of pursuits are nonetheless marginalized within a class. That’s not to say that the possibility of empathy between the two is non-existent, but that the experiences are fundamentally not the same.
Nonetheless, what I find interesting is that she herself felt that she could not conduct her class in ways that controlled for this very real phenomenon. I had a women’s studies professor who intentionally made her class enrollment small, hence always oversubscribed, and forced all prospective students (male and female) to write an essay, due in the second class, for why they wanted to take the class and what they could contribute.
It must have been sometime around 1950 that Mary Daly wanted to go for a PhD in theology. Did American schools simply say, “Sorry, we don’t accept women in advanced theology programs?” Apparently so. When did this stop being the case, or are there still schools that would turn a well qualified woman down if she wanted to study advanced theology?
Thank you, Barbara. I went to a co-ed college and I saw that dynamic play out in classes at times. And had professors (male and female) who sometimes managed it well, sometimes not.
I am finding it difficult to pin down exact statistics, but women now make up about 57% of undergraduates, with projections that undergraduates will be 60% woman and 40% men by 2021. Wikipedia says
Something has begun working in women’s favor.
“I am finding it difficult to pin down exact statistics, but women now make up about 57% of undergraduates, with projections that undergraduates will be 60% woman and 40% men by 2021.”
Sounds like a problem brewing to me. The US experience has been that unemployable men are a terrible problem.
Let me respond a bit to this. Of course, it’s hard to see this as bad news for women, but in other discussions on this point, when you look into the details, you find a lot of lurking variables.
First, women may go to college with higher frequency and earn more degrees because they need a higher level of education to match the earnings of men (which they still do not, on average).
Second, and in keeping with the first, men still have more options (though fewer than previously) for earning a living wage without college (not that women couldn’t become plumbers or electricians or certified Microsoft engineers, but they typically don’t). The traditional pink collar jobs almost all require at least some college, and many, like teaching and nursing, require degrees. At least where I work, secretaries and most administrative staff positions are filled by women and they almost all have college degrees.
Third, looking only at science and math related fields would yield strikingly different results.
Fourth, looking only at four year degree programs, especially in “higher tier” schools would also yield strikingly different results, especially if you controlled for nursing and education programs.
I do think that more and more boys are having problems on this front, but I don’t want to overstate it. My conclusions are that girls have gotten the message that they need to compete with boys, whereas boys still don’t seem to get or respond to the message that they are in competition with girls. But in many cases, they aren’t, so maybe there is a bit of self-selection going on.
Sounds like a problem brewing to me. The US experience has been that unemployable men are a terrible problem.
Jim,
Here is the first few paragraphs of a long article from today’s Washington Post that may (or may not) be related.
Should be: Here are the first few paragraphs . . .
David –
In 1963 a friend of mine began her doctoral studies at Catholic U. She was the first woman to be allowed to do so. This was at the same time Notre Dame wouldn’t accept me in their doctoral program in philosophy, but Catholic U. did. I suspect that this was around the time that things started to change for us in many schools.
Oops — That should have been: She started her doctoral studies in theology at Catholic U in 1963, the first woman to be allowed to do so.