SOURCE: Mollenkott, Virginia R. “Against Patriarchy.” Christian Century 96 (11 April 1979): 417-18.

In the following review of Gyn/Ecology, Mollenkott commends Daly's critique of patriarchal oppression, but objects to her judgmental and intolerant perspective.

Mary Daly, associate professor of theology at Boston College and leading philosopher-theologian of the radical feminist movement, proposed in her second book that feminists speak of God-as-a-Verb (Beyond God the Father, 1973). In Gyn/Ecology, she repudiates the term “God” altogether, as representing “the necrophilia of patriarchy,” and speaks only of the Goddess who “affirms the life-loving be-ing of women and nature.” Because she says they reductionistically include and really exclude “gynocentric being/Lesbianism,” she also rejects terms like “androgyny,” “homosexuality,” “humanism” and “human liberation.”

Daly makes clear that she regards all Christian or Jewish feminists as mere reformists, “roboticized tokens” whose ineffectual efforts have been “actively promoted by the patriarchs.” Asserting that orthodoxy's agenda is “toward...