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Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson
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- BIOGRAPHIES: MARY DALY
- SONIA JOHNSON
Mary Daly and Sonia JohnsonProgressive thinkers seek to promote new values. They engage in discourse about how to view the world, the harms and advantages of various perspectives, and how action follows thought. The belief is that values guide and influence our actions. Values serve as lenses with which to view the world. If I believe that we should value hierarchy and competition over equality and cooperation, I am both more likely to take actions supporting elitism, and more likely to view world events from a perspective which normatively judges existing social arrangements to be desirable. Moreover, values form a framework of rhetoric, the way in which we seek to persuade others. The impact of values on rhetoric is significant. We choose our words based on our values. We interpret the words of others in the same way. The very act of naming something in terms which denote desirability or undesirability has an impact on how we engage the world. Naming is very important. We can kill and save lives with names. This essay concerns the attempts of two feminist activists, Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson, to re-think values, and in doing so, to find new names and new concepts for the challenges they see. Daly and Johnson see patriarchy--a set of metaphysical assumptions as well as material social practices--as being overarching and far-reaching in its impact on humanity. As an alternative to patriarchy, Daly and Johnson seek to instill "feminist" values onto the world. Feminist values reject patriarchy: specifically, feminist values reject aggression, war, capitalism, elitism, and the inequality of hierarchy. Feminist values support cooperation, nurturing, the affirmation of life, and the community of women who sustain such norms. In what follows, I shall give a brief description of the lives and struggles of Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson. Then, I will describe their conception of feminist values and how those values are designed to replace current patriarchal norms. After discussing the implications of these projects on value debate, the essay will conclude with a synopsis of the potential problems of feminism and possible objections to Daly and Johnson's projects. BIOGRAPHIES: MARY DALYMary Daly was born October 16, 1928, in New York, to working class Irish-Catholic parents. She exhibited a love for books at an early age, and decided she wanted to be a philosopher by the time she was in high school. However, her life would be filled with frustration because, in the first half of the 20th century, such a profession was simply not available to most American women. Daly attended an all-woman's college in Albany, New York. There, she learned that women could be powerful instructors, even though they were limited in what they were allowed to do and say. Without any money, Daly was limited in her post-graduate options. She opted to pursue an MA in English at the Catholic University of America, and then went on to study theology at St. Mary's college in Indiana. At the age of 25, she received her Ph.D. in religion. Denied admission to the University of Notre Dame solely because she was a woman, Daly took a teaching position at a small catholic school in Massachusetts. Eventually, Mary Daly discovered she could study philosophy outside the United States. In 1959, she went to Switzerland on an exchange scholarship to study philosophy at the University of Fribourg. She stayed in Switzerland for seven years. Later, returning to the United States, she accepted a position as assistant professor at Boston College, where she has been battling the administration ever since. During that time, Daly has published a plethora of feminist manifestos. These writings are eclectic and challenging. They often play with words and change the elemental meanings of those words, so as to show her readers how words mix with values. The title of her most important work, for example, is GYN/ECOLOGY--a play on the medical science of gynecology and the ecology of feminism. Her life, like her work, has been filled with attacks on patriarchy, and a defiant insistence on the power of exclusively female communities. SONIA JOHNSONSonia Johnson was born in Idaho and was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints (Mormons). She recalls that early in her life she learned that opposition to the Church was simply unthinkable, and that its teachings stretched into every corner of members' lives. Johnson attended Utah State University, where she met her future husband Richard. For many years after her marriage, Sonia Johnson lived the stereotypical life of a conservative housewife. Soon, however, after she and her family moved to Virginia, they began to read feminist literature. Although Johnson didn't realize at first that she was being affected by this literature, things would quickly change. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the nation was immersed in a battle between proponents and opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the U.S. constitution which was to read simply: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." This seemingly innocent amendment, however, was the center of controversy for many liberals and conservatives. Conservatives took the amendment to be an encroachment on the freedom of local communities to deal with gender issues as they saw fit. Anti-ERA activists contended that the amendment would force women to go into combat if they were in the military; that it would call for unisex bathrooms; that it would regulate who could be promoted or hired by private businesses, and so on. In July, 1978, Sonia Johnson joined thousands of other women for a march on Washington, D.C., urging passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. For her increasing involvement with this cause, she was excommunicated from the Mormon Church in 1979. In 1980, Johnson and several other women chained themselves to a building in Washington to protest the Republican Party's abandonment of ERA. In 1981, she joined seven other women in Illinois on a hunger strike. In 1984, she was the Citizens' Party's candidate for U.S. president. During and after that time, Johnson wrote several books calling for a shift in values from patriarchy to feminism, and for the empowerment of women's communities. 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