Paean to Women
Santoni, Ronald E.
Paean to Women BEYOND GOD THE FATHER: TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF WOMEN'S LIBERATION, by Mary Daly. Beacon Press. 225 pp. $8.95. reviewed by Ronald E. Santoni For reasons which this book attempts to...
...And her vision seems myopic...
...Sexism, not capitalism, poverty, racism, or war, is the fundamental obscenity...
...For Daly, the women's revolution is hardly to be identified with the "sexual revolution...
...they must castrate the phallic ethics of "patriarchal authoritarianism...
...Women must castrate the language, myths, and institutions of supermasculine dominance...
...Here is one case, among a number, where Daly assesses a position by how it has been misused rather than what it is struggling to say...
...Santoni is professor of philosophy at Denison University...
...The "passive ethic" of sacrificial love, redemptive suffering, and humility—idealized by Christianity—has reinforced women's role as victim and stifled their self-actualization...
...Her assessment of every philosophy and theology, for example, in terms of whether it has dealt with the women's question or recognized sexism is both limiting and dogmatic...
...Despite its flaws—and there are more—this book penetrates the depths of our existence...
...they have been reduced to "the Other," to powerless-ness, to "nonbeing...
...To say the least, her apparent view that every problem of dehumanization is a product of patriarchy is questionable...
...root of all other major forms of oppression...
...It offers an intuition of integrated, "androgynous" being...
...At times Mary Daly's assertions are not becoming to her discerning scholarship...
...But in Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly, associate professor of theology at Boston College, does just that...
...Women must exorcise from their consciousness the internalized male superpresence...
...The result is one of the more important works of our generation...
...The myth of the Fall, for instance, has projected a distorted, guilt-producing image of the nature of women which remains imbedded in the contemporary psyche...
...In seeking personal wholeness, the women's movement offers healing and reaches for the completeness of human being in both sexes...
...Above all, they must reject, and affirm themselves against, the "nonbeing" (objectification) imposed upon them by a sexist world...
...What is needed is massive "exorcism" and "castration...
...One thing is painfully clear in Daly's book: patriarchy is perceived at the...
...Mr...
...Even to suggest that a male opposing abortion is necessarily sexist—by virtue of his "privileged status" and "vested interest" in the sexual caste system—is to entertain presumption, faulty logic, and counter-objectification...
...they must expunge the guilt, inferiority, di-visiveness, and self-hatred which have developed from it...
...reviewed by Ronald E. Santoni For reasons which this book attempts to elaborate, "Few women, even among the gifted, have managed to challenge the society's prevailing vision of the 'nature of reality' with vigor, consistency, and persistence...
...In this "world," women have had the power of their indigenous speaking and naming stolen from them...
...For Daly, the "everyday world" is basically a world of sexual domination and violation, a world in which women are victims of sex-role socialization and segregation, a world in which they have internalized the superordinate consciousness and sickness of their masters...
...Given her wish for a "psychically androgynous being," her appeal to the "authority" of feminine experience regarding certain issues seems one-sided and dangerous...
...To be sure, it is a radical critique of the structure of our consciousness and institutions, past and present...
...It demands from us nothing less than thorough honesty and openness, hearing and listening...
...It presents a dynamic model for liberation and "an intimation of the endless unfolding of God...
...This degradation of women has been generated and nourished by patriarchal, "Father-God" religion and phallo-centric morality...
...It is a work of creation —an attempt to create theology and philosophy out of, and appropriate to, the current women's revolution, the "becoming of women...
...While sexual revolution is yet another extension of the patriarchal consciousness of rape, women's revolution calls forth a new consciousness and a new being...
...As brilliant and prophetic as this book may be, it obviously is not without shortcomings...
...they have been unable even to experience their own experience...
...Daly sees radical feminism as the beginning of women's—and consequently of men's—becoming themselves...
...To ignore this book—even with its defects and problems—is to miss an occasion for growth as a human being...
...It challenges the polarization of human characteristics represented by sex-role identities and points to ultimate meaning beyond the "idolatries" of sexist society...
...It calls for women to "create" their own world out of their own experience and communal self-awareness...
...but it is more...
...If God is male, then male is God," she says, overlooking a number of philosophical distinctions...
Vol. 38 • May 1974 • No. 5
