Radical feminist of fierce intellect and 'uncompromising soul'

Mary Daly: MARY DALY, who has died aged 81, was an American-born feminist philosopher of Irish origin.

Daly's book The Church and the Second Sex(1968) made her a significant figure in the women's movement.

The work documented the history of misogynism in the Catholic Church and explored the limitations placed on women’s development by the church’s insistence that women are destined to be self-sacrificing, passive and docile and that motherhood, either physical or spiritual, is their true vocation.

Such was the controversy that followed the book’s publication that she almost lost her job teaching theology at Boston College.

Her career at the college, which began in 1966, eventually ended over what the authorities, and many commentators saw as her policy of exclusivity.

After the college became co-educational in the early 1970s, she admitted only women to her classes, teaching a few men privately. She said that the presence of men clouded the learning environment, and insisted that women-only conformed to the concept of academic freedom.

Matters came to a head in the late 1990s when a male student took legal action challenging his exclusion from her classroom.

The college tried to force her into retirement and she countered by suing for breach of contract.

She reached a settlement with the college in 2001 and, at 72, agreed to retire.

Her supporters insist that despite the acrimonious dispute, her reputation as a feminist philosopher remained intact.

“She had a fierce intellect and an uncompromising soul . . . She called herself a feminist philosopher, and she really was – she was the first,” said Robin Morgan.

Describing her as a “great trained philosopher, theologian and poet”, Gloria Steinem said she used her learning to “demolish patriarchy – or any idea that domination is natural – in its most defended place, which is religion”.

She attracted a large audience when she spoke at the third international Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in Dublin in 1987.

But her remarks were not uniformly well received, and The Irish Timesreport of the proceedings did not flatter her. A spirited exchange of views in the pages of the newspaper ensued.

Born in 1928, she grew up in Schenectady, New York, where her father was a travelling salesman. Her mother, herself an early school-leaver, was determined she would go to university.

In her second book Beyond God the Father(1973) she took patriarchal religion to task, arguing that its myths and theological constructs, by legitimating male superiority and displacing evil on to the female as the prototypical "Other", not only oppress half the human race but foster social structures and ways of thinking that produce racism, genocide and war.

"Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin," she wrote in Sin Big, a 1996 autobiographical article for the New Yorker.

“The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-’, meaning ‘to be’.

“When I discovered the etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’.”

Mary Daly: born October 16th, 1928; died January 3rd, 2010