Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This title aims to offer a journey into the interior of language. The author reveals the patriarchal construction of language and religious imagery, offering alternatives.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

As in Gyn/Ecology (1979) Daly delights here in word-play--the title itself is double-edged. ""For it Names not only the 'thrust of the argument' that assails women and nature on all levels. . . but also the way out--the vigor, eagerness, and intense longing that launches Wild women on Journeys beyond the State of Lechery."" On Daly's journey, there's considerable fun and refashioned philosophy as she enthusiastically guides us past patriarchal obstacles (foregrounds) toward her three realms of Archespheres, Pyrospheres, and Metamorphospheres. Tightly-argued, it's not: rather, ""In keeping with the tradition of Methodicide, this book is a work of studied errata. . . ."" It is based primarily on women's experiences, and secondarily on texts from Aristotle to Arendt. And it is bitingly perceptive, as when Daly reviews the male flight from lust into asceticism, calling up examples from St. Jerome to T. E. Lawrence. Or when she warns against false mothers held up as pseudo-archetypes--including the Papal Great Mother John Paul Two (""Championing many of the values of the vacuous eighties, such as imprisonment in the family, fetal rights, and discreet christian genocide. . .) and the ""fetal"" embassy hostages ("". . . a media-staged Odyssey, re-enacting the myth of separation and return. . .""). The answer to such ""sado-sublimination"" is feminism, conceived as a verb and distinct from ""pseudofeminism,"" taken to be a reified state, which some women then consider themselves to have ""moved beyond."" ""But if one understands feminism to mean the radical, ontological process of Realizing female Elemental potency, one does not move 'beyond' it. One moves with it."" Drawing on Arendt, Daly discusses the evil of banality and rites of appeasement--taking into account what women, as the touchable caste, share with the untouchable caste (including the translation of injustice into justice, coercion into choice, the association of loathing, disgust, and pollution). To break out, women need rename and reclaim the classic virtues (prudence as right reason, courage as heartfelt, passionate strength). They need to trade ""tidy demons"" for ""tidal muses""; they need to enter the third realm, the Metamorphospheres, where they may engage in Be-Longing, Be-Friending, and Be-Witching. ""The code-breaking of a Metamorphosing woman enables her to protect the trunk, roots, branches of the Tree of her Life. . . . It enables her to find and create her own Code."" Worth the decoding--especially for those looking for fresh insights into patriarchal society and inspiration as to feminist alternatives. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

A radical feminist theorist and theologian, Daly was educated at Catholic schools in the United States and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She has also taught at Boston College since 1969. Shortly after she received her advanced degrees, Daly ceased to be a traditional Catholic and began challenging the church's conservatism from a feminist and radical or "new Catholic" perspective. She finally broke completely with the church during a period of profound disillusionment following the events of the Second Vatican Council, in which significant feminist and other liberal reforms were not enacted. This disillusionment is reflected in the influential The Church and the Second Sex (1968), which articulates a critique of the systemic sexism and intolerance of the church as an institution and a body of doctrinal texts. Patriarchy, she argues, relies on Christianity.

Realizing that her feminism and lesbianism would never find an effective voice within the confines of the church or within the society at large, Daly began to purge what she saw as the influence of patriarchy in her language and her spiritual beliefs. Her first "post-Christian" book, Beyond God the Father (1973), takes as its starting point a rejection of the essential misogyny of Western Christianity in favor of a broader-based spirituality that allows for women's expression, including lesbian expression. Although Daly sees the possibility of a feminist revolution as dependent upon the physical, emotional, and spiritual connections among women, she is nevertheless somewhat suspicious of the notion of lesbianism, because it may be a limiting definition imposed upon women's experience by patriarchal culture. Indeed, for Daly, all language is suspect because it embodies a patriarchal vision of reality that it therefore helps to reproduce. She argues that female spirituality and sexuality cannot be reconstructed unless language itself is reconstructed and suggests that vocabulary should replace the masculine vocabulary that paralyze feminine spirituality.

Daly's theses about language are most forcefully presented in her best-known work, Gyn/Ecology (1978), in which she asserts that women must create a "gynomorphic" language in order to cultivate "gynaesthesia," the ability to perceive the interrelatedness of things that women develop when they become feminists and work in women-only collectives. "Gyn/Ecology" is Daly's name for the new kind of knowledge that results; it replaces the patriarchal medicalization and objectification of the female body. Daly's insistence that women have been robbed of the human power of naming of the self, the world, and God, which they must reclaim in order to realize their human potential, informs her later works, in which her feminist wordplay intensifies: Pure Lust (1984) and Webster's First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987).