Mary, on the Contrary: The New York Times obit made radical feminist theologian Mary Daly sound downright sane

Article here. Excerpt:

'As one who has long followed the career of the late radical feminist theologian Mary Daly, I was disappointed by her obituary in the New York Times a couple weeks ago. As a summation of Daly's outsize life and work, it was inexplicably drab.

A pioneering figure of "eco-feminism" and a major draw on the campus lecture circuit in the 1980s and '90s, Daly was probably best known in the secular world for her long-standing refusal to admit men to some of her undergrad courses at Boston College. This unilateral deviation from coeducational policy made national headlines in the late 90s, when a libertarian-conservative "public interest law firm" threatened to sue the college on behalf of an undergrad who felt his Title IX rights were being violated. In what Daly termed an instance of "rapism," the college administration used the threat of litigation to maneuver her into retirement in 1999.

...Fox referred to the support Daly received from the still all-male student body of Boston College during her landmark 1970 antidiscrimination campaign to wrest tenure from that Jesuit-run institution, but not to Daly's later espousal of "a drastic reduction in the population of males" as an efficient way to effect a "decontamination of the Earth."

"People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore," said Daly in 1999 to an interviewer uneasy about her proposed planetary "Mister-ectomy." But Daly exhibited no such qualms, which is why I think she would agree that Fox's obit was kind of a whitewash. Daly, however, would have surely found a way to blame its shortcomings on "the patriarchy," whereas I construe them as the consequence of Fox trying to register Daly's stature as (in the words of former Ms. editor Robin Morgan) "a central figure in 20th-century feminism" without giving the average lay reader the impression that she was a flaming moonbat.
...
She elaborated this scenario in a dialogue between her time-traveling self and a first-person alter ego called Annie, her primary guide to the wonders of the Lost and Found Continent:

"Are you saying that men who insisted on clinging to patriarchal beliefs and behaviors became obsolete and 'died off'?" asked Mary.

"Yes, they rapidly became extinct," I said.

"And what became of the patriarchally assimilated women who identified with the roles and rules of patriarchy?" asked Mary.

I answered, "Those women who refused to release themselves from the phallocratic dependencies and habits that had been embedded in them . . . were in effect refusing to evolve. So they also could not survive in the New energy field."'