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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
Interesting in terms of understanding the thought processes of feminists who came before you. Did enjoy many parts of it. However, the focus on demonizing gay men and transgender women was very off putting and soured the book for me.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
A groundbreaking analysis of womens oppression drawing on evidence from different times and cultures about male control and violence against women, and how religion, culture, mythology shape a male dominated society. She encourages women to rethink, to be creative, to spin into our own ideas and reality. Its tough to read about how women have been oppressed but she offers us a route to liberation
Mary Daly is a terf. don't read this. while her overall analysis of many subjects is very interesting and written in a way that is easy to understand, it is hard to look past the blatant transphobia. i did enjoy her writing up to the point where she started being transphobic, but from there it all went downhill.
challenging
dark
funny
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
DNF at 100 pages. This was my second try at this book and it looks like it might take a third (and fourth and fifth...) to plow all the way through it. I have mixed feelings -- when Daly speaks clearly about oppression, it's really up there among the theory I've read. She indisputably knows her stuff backwards and forwards, but the writing is just so 70s that I get bogged down. I understand Hag-ography and Crone-ology (.... I think), but I trip over them, and the excessive alliteration and the matriarchal far history she talks about -- I've checked a few but not all of her sources and it just seems more hopeful than real to me. Also the persistent transphobia is like stubbing a toe each time. I think there's a lot in Gyn/Ecology that's worth the work, but I need to work up to it some more.
Very (white) Second Wave (in the worst ways)--transphobic, white supremacist, etc.
But some critiques of civic/imperial Christianity hold up.
But some critiques of civic/imperial Christianity hold up.
Daly was a clever woman who came to some stupid conclusions. If this book does sound interesting to you, read it. If it doesn't, don't. End of. Most of it is complete bullshit, but as anyone who reads philosophy regularly knows, that's no reason to ignore it.
So, I absolutely devoured this book. I think I read it in such a sprint because the meat of this book was really about ills of patriarchal society I already knew about - FGM, footbinding, etc. I was hoping to come away with something new, something I could take home with me, but it never really amounted to that, for me personally.
I had already read "The Myth of Mental Illness" by Thomas Szasz earlier this year, and Daly incorporated a lot his themes into one of the more controversial elements of this book - her derision of therapuetic practice, or "mind-gynecology." It's a bitter pill to swallow, but I'm glad she said it.
I think Daly is still too far ahead of her time and unfortunately, it seems current feminists are not welcoming to her ideas due to the silencing and deplatforming of second wave feminists who do not adhere to current gender politics, ie. transgenderism (or, in Daly's day, transsexualism). If any of today's feminists read this book, they will see right through today's gender politics and understand it is just a reiteration of the same thing Daly, her contemporaries, and our foremothers had to deal with - a whitewashing of our feminist history, a way to disconnect us from our past and further divide and suppress our movement.
I do encourage all women to read this book, not because I think they'll agree or because I think it's unflinchingly good, but because it's necessary for us to hear each other out. It's also a good bit of fun, too, if you like stuff that's a little 1970s-era acid trippy.
I had already read "The Myth of Mental Illness" by Thomas Szasz earlier this year, and Daly incorporated a lot his themes into one of the more controversial elements of this book - her derision of therapuetic practice, or "mind-gynecology." It's a bitter pill to swallow, but I'm glad she said it.
I think Daly is still too far ahead of her time and unfortunately, it seems current feminists are not welcoming to her ideas due to the silencing and deplatforming of second wave feminists who do not adhere to current gender politics, ie. transgenderism (or, in Daly's day, transsexualism). If any of today's feminists read this book, they will see right through today's gender politics and understand it is just a reiteration of the same thing Daly, her contemporaries, and our foremothers had to deal with - a whitewashing of our feminist history, a way to disconnect us from our past and further divide and suppress our movement.
I do encourage all women to read this book, not because I think they'll agree or because I think it's unflinchingly good, but because it's necessary for us to hear each other out. It's also a good bit of fun, too, if you like stuff that's a little 1970s-era acid trippy.
Maybe this book is somewhat dated now, and somewhat tainted by Daly's overlong plenary address at the American Academy of Religions conference in 1991 or 1992, in which she stole time from the Black feminists who were to follow her, and debunked her essentialism with her whiteness. But when I read it, I suffered under the permanent change it was effecting in me. It really threw me for a loop.