Religions are her province and as a professor of theology she knows them well. The extinguishing of the Goddess has been a long and vicious process. The hatred heaped on women by men over the ages is a well documented chronicle of mental and physical atrocities. Daly describes for us just some of the more obvious ones. Reading about them in new perspective is so distressing that I could only keep going for a few pages without a break.
Scholars often dismiss such violence against women with culturally relative objectivity.
William Rossi in his recent book, The Sex Life of the Foot and the Shoe, explains that Chinese regarded the bound foot as the most erotic and desired portion of the entire female anatomy. No detached, mock-objective critic is Mary Daly. She rides through the entire book on high anger and searing irony. Daly is proud of her writing as political work. In the beginning, Mary Daly tells us, is the hearing.