Talk:Mary Daly

message: Can you explain why you opined that Bitch is "probably not a reliable source"? It's not exactly obvious. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:07, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: It's been a few years, but if I had to guess, I'd say I probably wasn't aware of WP:RSOPINION. I've removed the tag. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 02:12, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why not RS? 

message: On whether  argued against sexual equality in Gyn/Ecology", these quotations are from Gyn/Ecology (Boston: 1990 (6th [printing?], printing[?] of [19]98)), in the order cited in the article before the recent revision:
Page 384: ". . . Hags do not haggle over 'equality,' for we know there is no equality among unique Selves." Context: ". . . . This uprising of Amazon Fire . . . is the hellfire deserved and dreaded by the Grand Inquisitors. . . .  is simply the expression/expansion of gynergy for its own sake, and this transcendence of Fury itself is the Renaissance of Fire. . . . This is . . . his  patriarchal  Last End. . . . As this Sparking communication occurs, Hags do not haggle over 'equality,' for we know there is no equality among unique Selves. Noting that one definition of the term equal is 'capable of meeting the requirements of a situation or a task,' Jan Raymond observes that what each asks of the other is that she be equal to the task at hand." The endnote is omitted here.
P. 375:  . . . is guised as Equal Rights, . . . which yields token victories".
P. 376:  . . .  to assimilate woman-for-woman erotic love. . . .  very meaning of sexuality has been dwarfed to fit patriarchal standards."
At p. 375, she appears to have equated "'unselfconscious inclusion'" with "tokenism" and argued that   to pollute the sense of sisterhood" and therefore it (along with another quality) should be "thoroughly exorcised".
P. 384 states an argument that equality is about being equal to a task and the context makes clear that Daly did not consider men to be equal to that task (they would have had their "Last End") while women, at least potentially, are. Therefore, she argued against the two genders being equal to each other; one (men's) might have had more power than the other had but the other had at least the potential for having more power than the first. In feminist discourse, equality generally means equality of power. Thus, in her view, they were not equal to each other.
Paraphrases are generally preferred in Wikipedia to quotations.
On p. 375, she put equal rights, which, it is generally agreed, refers to rights of equality between the genders, down as "tokenism" and, on p. 376, put tokenism by extension beneath "patriarchal standards". Her treatment of what is usually termed equal rights as between the genders as mere tokenism and her argument against tokenism is an argument against sexual equality as widely understood in feminism. Thus, pp. 375–376, while not being the main support for the Wikipedia passage in question, do support p. 384 and all three pages thus support the Wikipedia passage in question, the part supported by what was then note 28, "[s]he argued against sexual equality".
In the larger view of her views, whether her argument "against sexual equality" was tactical is not important except insofar as being tactical means it being only temporary. No doubt her view was partly tactical; but, in her text as cited by either of us, her argument was not that it was just tactical and therefore to be terminated in favor of "sexual equality" before other changes, essentially revolutionary, had been implemented. For the time she was writing of, she advocated against equality of either gender with the other.
On whether Daly  . . . that women ought to govern men" and "Daly advocated a reversal of sociopolitical power between the sexes", the following quotations are from the same printing as that for the Gyn/Ecology above:
P. 15: "Women traveling into feminist time/space are creating Hag-ocracy, the place we govern. To govern is to steer, to pilot. We are learning individually and together to pilot the time/spaceships of our voyage. The vehicles of our voyage may be any creative enterprises that further women's process. The point is that they should be governed by the Witch within—the Hag within."
P. xxvi: "My Time Traveling adventures and my life as a Pirate have been possible because of my Craft. . . . My own particular Craft involves writing and the forging of philosophical theories. . . .  under phallocratic rule are confined to the role of vessels/carriers, directed and controlled by men. Since that role is the basic base reversal of the very be-ing of Voyaging/Spiraling women, when we direct our own Crafts/Vessels we become reversers of that deadly reversal." I don't think there's any doubt that she wanted women to become those reversers. She did not want women and men to mix together in a way that would ignore their respective genders or devalue women's. She wanted the roles to be reversed, so that women's would be the more powerful role, thus that women would be more powerful than men. She did not deny that men would exist; she did not describe men being only where women would not be; and she did not describe men and women being in the same place and time and yet not, at least sometimes, exercising power over each other. There is thus no interpretational choice but that when "we [women] become reversers of that deadly reversal" women will be  . . . and  . . . men" and that she was advocating for that, "a reversal of sociopolitical power between the sexes".
You were using the 1991 edition, which, I understand from worldcat.org as of last April 22, was published in London, rather than in Boston. I assume its text and pagination are the same as those in the edition I quoted from in this reply, but feel free to report any differences. I was next in line for a library copy of the 1978 edition but, according to the library, it seems to have recently been lost. I have borrowed what appears to be the 1st printing of 1990 and, at a few glances, it seems to have the same text and pagination as what I quoted above.
Daly did not "argue that the sexes are unequal [specifically as] moral agents or [specifically as] unequal under law" (re pp. 384 & 375–376) (your words except the bracketed are mine) but argued that "we know there is no equality among unique Selves" (supra) and that means that, in her view, there was "no equality" between the "unique Selves" of one gender and the "unique Selves" of the other gender, the genders being subsets of all the "unique Selves". (A potential argument that in her view "unique Selves" existed only among women and that men could therefore be equal seems difficult to sustain.) Whether the inequality was specifically moral or legal is beyond the scope of the Wikipedia fragment in question and of its sourcing (various kinds of inequality existed, regardless of whatever she may have written on it), but less-specific inequality was in the page-particular sourcing and therefore could be in Wikipedia.
She has written about reversals in stories. But pp. 15 and xxvi do not limit the concept of reversal to stories. She explicitly speaks of "the place we govern" (supra), what governing means, and that it may be through "any creative enterprises that further women's process" (supra). She sought to reverse "phallocratic rule" (supra), and that kind of rule is not restricted to phallocratic views, which is what phallocratic stories express. Rule is more wide-ranging and Daly wrote of "control" (supra), so she meant more than story reversal. This does not appear to be a editorial error in the manuscript but an intentional area of coverage in her book.
She was indeed writing of a "female-centered culture" (your words), but that is not necessarily, or usually, a female-only culture. Several writers have written of female-only cultures, at least in genres of fiction and theory, and it's hard to imagine that such a possibility had not occurred to Daly before writing either p. 15 by or in 1978 or p. xxvi by or in 1990. And we don't have to imagine that it did not or did occur to her; we can go by her words. Her words are not limited to the realm of story.
I was not suggesting that citations should be found elsewhere rather than according to the citations in Wikipedia for the now-deleted content but that the book might offer pages supporting the points you raised about content you described.
I read the book years ago. It did not appear to have been written as a tactician's guide or a political organizer's handbook but as an aspiration for the kind of world Daly wanted to find. Others may have read it as an organizer's guide or as describing an interim phase in human societal development, but that would have been their reading of it, their interpretation, and not inconsistent with Daly's intentions (I don't think she opposed political organizing in principle), but that was not Daly's main writing in this book (I think there's an organizer's short passage somewhere in it, but I don't recall that or anything else in the book contradicting the now-deleted content).
I am not arguing that what you wrote for the article is wrong, but it addresses different points. (I think parts of what you wrote should be in the past tense, since Daly is dead, but, relatively speaking, the tense issue is minor. I would also move them out of the Views on Men section, perhaps into a new section, like Views on Feminist Equality.) Therefore, what she wrote about men per se is now missing, being accurately sourced content that was deleted without replacement on point. The passages were properly supported and sourced and were neither wrong nor misleading, but perhaps the connection with the sourcing could have been written more clearly. Restoration, perhaps in a different form, is therefore appropriate and edits and suggestions to that end are welcome. It may be a good idea to clarify that, for instance, the inequality may not be explicitly and narrowly moral or legal but was, in her argument, an inequality and one that should be reversed in favor of women (not necessarily temporarily). It may also be appropriate to quote rather than paraphrase for portions.
Nick Levinson (talk) 02:53, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: There having been no further discussion, I'm implementing the last paragraph above by moving the new content to a new subsection, Views on Feminism, since that is what all of that content is about, and by editing the tense for Daly's statememts, since she is dead. Also, I'm adding commas, straightening quotation marks and apostrophes, capitalizing template names to prevent redirects, replacing some soft spaces with nonbreaking spaces, replacing parameters for single pages with params for multiple pages, and replacing hyphens in page ranges with en-dashes. Nick Levinson (talk) 00:31, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  deleted paraphrases were accurate 

message: The article says:
:In an interview with journalist Brittany Shoot, Ida Hammer criticized Daly as transphobic for these views.
Ida who? Brittany who? Should I know? Should I care? Should the reader? Brittany Shoot is evidently a freelance journalist. In 2010, she wrote "Ida Hammer has been writing The Vegan Ideal for several years". Could be, but the domain veganideal.org is for sale, and Hammer evidently lost interest in the site in 2011. Google found nearly 13,000 results for "Ida Hammer", some of whom may (or may not) be the same woman but most of whom are definitely not. What makes her an expert on Mary Daly or transphobia, and why are we promoting her opinion as if it mattered? — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 02:38, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Ida Hammer]] and [[Brittany Shoot]] 

message: HI, I just searched for instances of "parthenogenesis" in Gyn/Ecology and it doesn't seem to refer to women literally doing that(although I haven't read the whole book). Since if the author doesn't hold this view, it wouldn't be fair to add it. I think it should be deleted until a source, preferably with quotes is added.Samiwamy (talk) 02:31, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I also didn't find the word "lusty" in the book.Samiwamy (talk) 02:33, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Might be misleading