GYN/ECOLOGY. MARY DALY. 1978
'This book is primarily concerned with the mind/spirit/body pollution inflicted through patriarchal myth and language on all levels.' (p9)
The book Gyn/ecology1 is a rite of exorcism. The demon possessing us is patriarchy itself, and Daly is the priestess ready to break his spell through the magical act of naming him. In other words, Gyn/ecology is about patriarchal myth, and Daly hopes to undo its power by revealing its disguises and describing it clearly.
Daly believes we need changes in thought and feeling, not merely in institutions. This is partly because of women who identify with men and do the work of patriarchy. They do so because they are trained by patriarchal myth. Daly says 'as long as that myth (system of myths) prevails, it is conceivable that there be a society comprised even of 50 percent female tokens: women with anatomically female bodies but totally male-identified, male possessed brains/spirits. The myth/spell itself of phallocratism must be broken.' (p57)
To undo the workings of patriarchal myth at a truly intuitive level, we must also utilise myth. Daly therefore creates her own vocabulary and symbolism. For example, the usual patriarchal definition of “hag” is an ugly, old, evil woman. But Daly reminds us that “haggard” also means wild and untamed—especially of hawks. It is fitting, then, that feminists be called hags, for they are wild and untamed.
One redefinition I object to, however, is Daly's use of “lesbian” for women who withdraw all their energies from men and have friendships and relationships only with other women (p26). She uses “gay women” or “homosexual females” to describe actual lesbians, who may or may not be feminists, let alone separatists. It is one thing to invent new words or rediscover old meanings, but this is an act of linguistic poaching—Daly has taken a word that is already in use by another group of people. In doing so, she reduces their linguistic resources for their own journeys and explorations. This is wrong, and it is one of the same reasons I object to the ameliorative redefinition of the word woman to include men who identify as such.
On the other hand, Daly says she doesn't see her book as finished or definitive, but as one step on an ongoing journey, one note in the song that we all contribute to. I think this is a beautiful way to view everyone's contributions, as it allows for disagreement without resentment. 'I had set free this book, this bird, in the hope that its song would be Heard and that it would harmonize with the works of other women, whose melodies, of course, were coming from different Realms of the Background.' (pxxx)
The book is divided in three “passages”. In the first passage, Daly names and reframes themes of patriarchal myth and culture. In the second passage, she considers five forms of extreme violence against women in different cultures across the world, and identifies seven characteristic features of this “gynocidal” violence. In the third passage, Daly describes the feminist journey and the steps we must take after losing our ignorance about patriarchy. We will look at each passage in turn. But first, an aside on war and “naming the enemy”.
AN ASIDE ON WAR Enemies and Allies
'It is men who rape, who sap women's energy, who deny women economic and political power. To allow oneself to know and name these facts is to commit anti-gynocidal acts.' (p29)
Daly writes that women are the enemy targeted by patriarchy and men in an endless global war. In a “patriarchal reversal”, feminists are accused of hating men and considering them the enemy. Daly says that naming male violence is treated as “anti-male”, and that we are encouraged to hide the awareness of male violence from ourselves. Even some feminists are 'unable to name their oppressor, referring instead to vague “forces,” “roles,” “stereotypes,” “constraints,” “attitudes,” “influences.”' (p29)
I think the war against women is a powerful framing. The demonstrably extraordinary scope of male violence against women doesn't seem to elicit the urgent response it deserves. Perhaps we desperately want to believe we are not under attack by our fellow citizens. So we tell ourselves it is in the past, or in another country, or it's those men but not these ones. But there is no woman who is reliably safe from male violence, and if all men who are willing to harm women wore a uniform, it would be the largest army on earth. But such men wear no uniform and we often mistake them for friends and allies, since they appear identical at first glance. It is an awful situation to reflect on, so we don't.
In response to this state of war, Daly invites women to completely withdraw their energies from men, and to prioritise women instead. I gather she is espousing what is now called political lesbianism or separatism. Unlike Greer, Daly never mentions the possibility of men resisting patriarchy or becoming allies to women. Nor does she share any vision of a post-patriarchal society in which harmony exists between men and women. Her favoured outcome is one in which women separate completely from men. This is unlikely to be appealing to women who have beloved fathers, brothers, sons, partners and friends. I believe that women need and deserve separate spaces in private and public, for our safety, dignity, privacy, consciousness raising and political organisation. I also feel that feminism must be for all women, including mothers and heterosexual women, who make up the majority. Although patriarchy may distort our search for sex, love and companionship, or the way we build our families, I don't think the search itself is constructed all the way down, or that it needs to be eliminated. That, too, would be a distortion. So separatism should be an option, but not a requirement.
Daly doesn't say it explicitly, but she seems to have no hope that men can change. I prefer Greer's more optimistic take on our future together. Even as I am aware of the long history and ongoing ubiquity of male cruelty to women, my best guess is that a large minority of men are violent or actively misogynistic, not a majority—though it seems a majority of men and women alike accept and reproduce at least some misogynistic values. This situation is bleak enough without assuming that men are innately and incorrigibly cruel. I believe we have some allies amongst men, but my suspicion is that, as with other issues, there will always be a few who do what is right regardless of cultural norms, a few who do what is wrong regardless of cultural norms, and a vast majority who mostly comply with social norms. Therefore, while I believe separate spaces and other strategies are needed to address male violence and domination, I also feel that changing our shared social norms is vitally important in the long term.
THE FIRST PASSAGE: PROCESSIONS Patriarchal Myth
Patriarchal myth is the core theme of the book. Daly says myth is defined as symbolism that opens up truth on levels that are usually inaccessible to us—intuitive or normative levels, perhaps. But she also points out that patriarchal myth closes off reality to us at these non-literal levels, and prevents us from accessing deeper truths. In the first passage, Daly examines some frequently found patriarchal, mythical themes. She replaces patriarchal framings with her own interpretations, inviting us to view them from a different, woman centred point of view. She focuses on western culture, especially ancient Greek and Christian myths, though she mentions some others. I will discuss a few of the themes that I found intriguing.
Athenas, token women and painted birds
A regularly occurring character in Daly's work is the “roboticized” or “tokenized” female who identifies completely with male interests. The ancient Greek goddess Athena is Daly's primary example. Born not from her mother but from her father, Zeus, she carries out his orders, wages his wars, and betrays other women and goddesses, siding always with males. In another example, Daly recalls a novel in which a man 'vents his frustration upon birds by painting their feathers.' (p333) The other birds no longer recognise their painted fellows, and attack them. But as Daly points out, under patriarchy, the situation is reversed; it is the normal state of women to be “painted” with cosmetics and other markers of femininity. Such painted women will attack feminists who free themselves. Daly says we are conditioned into this empty, male-identifying state as children, and receive regular “injections” of further mind control. Men are controlled, too, but they are given ego-inflating “uppers” while women are given ego-destroying “downers.” (p54)
I found this section very helpful. I have noted that some women call themselves feminists while they support the sexual objectification and commodification of women and girls as “choice” and “empowerment”. Self-identified “feminists” also passionately defend men who identify as women, applauding the poaching of women's language and encroachment on women's spaces as “inclusive”. Feminists who non-violently critique the sex industry and gender ideology are accused of being prudish, mean, cruel, bigoted, hateful, extreme, hysterical, obsessed, etc. Daly insightfully notes that 'In a social situation in which there is pressure to nod approvingly in the direction of feminism, it is highly probably that the Athena will call herself a “feminist.”' (p335) She further suggests that such a figure likely enjoys approval from contemporary patriarchal scholars (or is one, I might add!). Pseudo-feminists can be strict enforcers of patriarchal requirements, but their main weapon is the exhortation to be nice and accommodating and agreeable. I think Kate Millet2 would say those are exactly and not coincidentally the traits needed to keep women subordinate. Daly would say they are electrodes of fear implanted in us to prevent progress on our journey.
Gender Bending “Escape”
Another theme that Daly explores is men temporarily escaping from masculinity by donning femininity. Daly explains that in ancient Greek myth, Apollo is the masculine god of rules and order, while Dionysus is the feminine (but still male) god of chaos. Some men seek relief from the Apollonian strictness of masculinity by playing at femininity for a time. They escape briefly into the Dionysian realm of playfulness, emotions, and sexual liberation. Women are also invited to partake. But Daly insists this is a trick, because the femininity offered by Dionysus is still man-made and serves male interests. Men can put it on for a while and play at being the victim, but they're still in charge. She says 'The phenomenon of the drag queen dramatically demonstrates such boundary violation. Like whites playing “black face,” he incorporates the oppressed role without being incorporated in it.' (p67) The fact that men can be feminine obfuscates the fact that femininity is a man-made phenomenon that serves men, regardless of who performs it. Like Millet, Daly uses “femininity” to mean the artificial and patriarchal conditioning of our appearances, behaviour and personality. She is clear that femininity is neither necessary nor sufficient for womanhood.
Daly discusses many other patriarchal themes in Christian and post-Christian myth. They include: the trivialisation and appropriation of traditional female goddesses, powers and symbols; the rape of the goddess, which can be symbolic of the overthrow of female culture and power; and the myth of “male auto-motherhood” in which the power of birth is attributed to men who birth or rebirth themselves.
Daly's interpretations of Christian themes are no more provable or disprovable than the original themes themselves, since they are symbolic expressions of values rather than statements about facts. Regardless, Daly's reframings were thought provoking and some resonated intuitively with me. Though in some cases she attributed motivations that were too specific and exaggerated to be persuasive, such as a patriarchal love of death or the desire to bring about doomsday. I feel that de Beauvoir's exploration of the mundane emotional benefits that men gain from their myths about women was more realistic and convincing.
In any case, I have rarely seen a serious attempt to counter and reframe patriarchal myth on the mythical level outside of fiction, and I thought it a very worthwhile and valuable exercise. I now believe that feminist work should involve not only rational argument and theory, but also deconditioning and reconditioning at the mythical and intuitive levels.
THE SECOND PASSAGE: GODDESS MURDER Patriarchal Violence
'The true sin under patriarch rule/ritual, that is, remembering that as long as we are alive, the Goddess still lives… The deed can be revoked by “forgetting” to kill female divinity, that is, our Selves.' (p111)
In the second passage, Daly looks at patriarchal violence against women, which she names gynocide, goddess murder, or the sado-ritual. Goddess murder is a key symbolic theme of patriarchal myth, but men and women are trained to act it out in reality, on the bodies of women and girls, in the form of torture, mutilation, rape and murder.
In five chapters, Daly examines five examples of patriarchal “traditions” in different regions: Indian suttee, Chinese foot binding, African FGM, European witch burning and American gynecology. She identifies seven components that characterise Goddess murder. First, there is an obsession with purity. Second, the conceptual framing of these acts erases male agency and responsibility, making it appear that the violence is required by god, culture, or women themselves. Third, the practices confer status and thus tend to spread, like fashion, from the elite to the middle and lower classes. Fourth, women are used as “token torturers”, which further disguises male agency and destroys female solidarity. Fifth, a focus on detailed ceremonies, rules, and regulations distracts participants from the true horror of their actions. Sixth, acts that would be obviously wrong in any other context become good and required through ritual and social conditioning. Seventh, “objective” patriarchal scholars legitimate the acts while pretending to disapprove them.
There are many useful insights in the second passage, but I want to focus on the erasure of male agency in “objective” Western scholarship. Using examples, Daly shows that male authors often prefer to define acts of violence against women and girls as “culture,” “tradition” or “custom”. For example, child rape by older men is described as “marriage” or “consummation”. Scholars also make it appear that girls and women choose and prefer the harms that are inflicted on them. 'The victims, through grammatical sleight of hand, are made to appear as the agents of their own destruction.' (p117) Bland and apparently neutral descriptions powerfully minimise male sadism and female suffering. Daly describes such pseudo-objective text as “writing that erases itself.” (p120)3 To be more precise, what it erases is awareness of its own powerful biases.
Daly shows that in the cases of footbinding and FGM, the violence is presented by scholars as a cultural, religious, or fashionable necessity that is demanded particularly by the mothers of girls. The focus is on the mothers who help meet men's demands, and never on the men making the demands; never on the fact that men have built societies in which women have few other opportunities to achieve safety and economic security. In one particularly odious example, Daly cites scholars David and Vera Mace who say that, although many widows who were burned to death in the suttee had no alternatives, it would nevertheless be 'gravely mistaken' and a 'grave injustice' for us to explain their sacrifice in terms of duty or lack of freedom, or to say they 'knew less of true love than their Western sisters.' (p124)4 Daly say the Maces want us to feel guilty for our natural abhorrence of violence against women, and they are manipulating our fear of appearing culturally or racially judgemental. To me it seems the Maces believe the primary crime is not the vicious murder of women and girls, but rather the feminist refusal to believe the flimsy cover story of noble choice. I notice that the exact same argument plays out today in “liberal” defences of the sex industry. In both cases, a thin notion of “choice” is held up as justification, while the electric fence of economic and social coercion that determines women's and girls' extremely limited “choices” is invisible, and the sadistic male demand that drives the industry is completely disappeared from sight and mind.
The European witchburnings also enjoy scholarly minimisation. Daly explains that the purpose of witch trials was not the control and “purification” of marriageable girls, but the torture and murder of unmarriageable, unmanageable women. With the justification of Christian demonology, it was spinsters, healers, wise women, and old women who were raped, tortured and murdered as witches. Daly quotes the scholar Midelfort, who says that the trials may have been “functional” and “therapeutic”, since they defined how much eccentricity was acceptable to society, and expressed society's fear of disruptive or “socially indigestible” women who were “without patriarchal control” (p184)5. (Midelfort wrote in 1972, in case the reader is wondering when it went out of fashion to openly admit that murdering women who are outside of patriarchal control is socially useful.)
Gynecology is again a different phenomenon. Under the term gynecology, Daly includes the literal meaning of medicine related to female reproductive health and sickness, but also psychiatry and psychotherapy (which she names “mind gynecology”). It may be counterintuitive to see medicine presented as a gynocidal crime, but Daly reveals a shocking amount of brutality done to women in these fields. For example, the doctor J. Marion Sims, father of gynecology, surgically experimented on enslaved black women and poor white women (without anaesthetic) to develop his techniques. Clitoridectomy was promoted in the late 1850s as a cure for female masturbation. Ovariotomies were promoted in the 1870s to cure “insanity” (AKA disobedience). Manifold interventions have been used on women although inadequately tested for safety, and the side effects have been concealed or ignored. Nor is this all in the past. There are unfortunately many recent scandals regarding medical mistreatment of, and dangerous experimentation on, women. Consider, as just one example, the fact that nonconsensual vaginal examinations on unconscious women who are in hospital for unrealted procedures (AKA medical rape) is legal in 45 states in the USA. For anyone who wants to know more about medicine's long, ignoble history of abusing women, there is a recent book Unwell Women6 by Elinor Cleghorn, on precisely this topic.
Daly admits there are some healers amongst the butchers and profiteers, but insists that they heal in spite of the medical paradigm, not because of it. For me, since the benefits of medicine are already generally well known and accepted, it was interesting to see how consistent and persistent the abuse of women has been: it never ends, it just changes. And we forget, over and over. While I would never write off medicine completely, due to its undeniable usefulness, it now appears to me that unconditional trust in medical authorities is inappropriate. The question, then, is how does a lay person develop the skills and knowledge to tell true healers and useful treatments from risky and harmful interventions and manipulative or careless practitioners? I don't yet have an answer.
THE THIRD PASSAGE: SPINNING The Feminist Journey
The third passage is about the feminist journey; about what happens after we lose our ignorance about patriarchal myths and violence. Though rage is a normal reaction to our discoveries, Daly says we cannot stay angry all the time, but need to begin our own journey, which decentres men, recentres female bonding, and calls forth our creative energy. 'If she does not constantly convert the energy of this rage to creativity it pro-occupies her, pro-posesses her.' (p348)
Daly introduces four concepts she calls spooking, enspiriting, sparking, and spinning.
“Spooking” is the subliminal patriarchal conditioning we're trained not to notice or name. Daly writes that male obscenity and fetishisation of women takes place through both direct misogynistic language, and indirect messages. One important form such messaging takes is pornography. Daly says the destruction of an image is a form of “sympathetic magic”, intended to harm the person whose likeness it is. This is what pornographic images do to women: 'These mutilate and destroy women's image, and the intent of this technological voodoo is to effect the death of the female-identified self.' (193) This and other sexism is the continual “background music” that fragments our consciousness, “spooking” us. We must exorcise the ghosts and refuse to be possessed. I love the fact that Daly gives a name to this phenomenon. With a clear label, it's easier to identify and resist the subtle ways in which sexism undermines our self esteem and wellbeing.
'Enspiriting is hearing and following the call of the wild… to transfer our energy to our Selves and Sister Selves.' (p343)
“Enspiriting” is when we start being authentic and withdrawing our cooperation from patriarchy. It is the process of letting go of implanted fear and guilt. 'The Self enspirits the Self and others by encouraging, by expanding her own courage, hope, determination, vigor.' (p340) Daly says hags can use new words, clothes, gestures, and body language on their journey, gaining a sense of power and control and escaping from limiting femininity. Hags become less dependent on male approval and prefer a natural, unpainted state to the “natural” look created by cosmetics.
Another important part of the journey is “re-membering”. Daly says the professions and academia disappear the women's movement, their achievements and their history. Women new to feminism have to rediscover everything. This perfectly matches my own experience. So often in my education, histories of ideas were presented as complete when they were in fact highly selective histories of male ideas and interests. Feminist work is treated as niche, rather than central, to moral and political theory. Meanwhile, libertarian and consumerist distortions of feminism were presented to me as the real thing, which prevented me from finding real feminism for some time.
Next, “sparking” is real female friendship and bonding, not self-sacrificing but self-accepting. Daly says that patriarchal male bonding is based on the humiliation and defeat of women. The solution is 'rejecting all identification with the myths, ideologies, and institutions which name our Selves The Enemy.' (p365) Daly notes that women are invited to join the male-initiated bonding, and indeed a key goal of patriarchy is to make women into feminized tokens for their army, which involves 'the radically unrewarding handing over of their identity and energy to individual males—fathers, sons, husbands—and to ghostly institutional masters.' (p375) The two ideals of tokenism and self-sacrifice must be exorcised.
Lastly, “Spinning,” according to Daly, is the feminist journey that begins with seeing and naming patriarchal violence, but continues with our own creative work. Daly writes that patriarchy splits the consciousness, and this splitting finds its expression in sadomasochistic culture. Spinning, on the other hand, is a process of regaining integrity and wholeness. An important aspect of our spinning work is naming and analysing things clearly. We must make explicit all the subliminal misogynistic messages, to reduce their power: 'We weave them into visibility/audibility/tangibility. We force them out of the shadows into our sight; we magnify the volume of their eerie whispers—removing their haunting inaudible mystery; we cool down their ghastly gases into puddles of liquid, so that we can bottle and label them, disable them. By this righteous objectifying of those whose intent is to objectify us we come to know the limits of their reality.' (p408)
I love the idea of feminist work as spinning, and I believe Daly is right about the need to actively name and describe patriarchal forces and unweave their effect on us.
CONCLUSION
There was a great deal of material I was unable to cover due to the length of the book. I appreciate how Daly dives deep into linguistics and mythology, presenting alternative, woman-centred framings. Anyone who needs to feel inspired and to undergo a spiritual cleansing from the “mind pollution” of patriarchy should read Gyn/ecology for this mythical/spiritual imagery and reframing.
Another treasure was Daly's revelation of the patriarchal nature of so-called “objective” and “professional” scholarship, and how it downplays patriarchal crimes, erases male responsibility and brutality, and elides its own bias, appearing “neutral”.
I was surprised to see that Daly was so critical of the contraceptive pill, and that her opinion of health care is so universally negative. Her alternative to contraception is “Mister-ectomy”—eschewing men—but this depends on every woman becoming a separatist whilst simultaneously avoiding rape, which seems a rather insecure solution.
I have already noted that I disagree with Daly's poaching of the term “lesbian” to refer to separatist feminists, and that I feel that a life of complete separatism or political lesbianism is likely not the right solution for most women. I can, however, agree with Daly that we must make a conscious effort to prioritise other women in order to undo some of the damage of our patriarchal conditioning. Perhaps we can find out what issues most affect women in our country, and make this a priority when we vote, for example. Perhaps we could start treating the horrific global sex trade with the moral urgency it deserves. And we should defend women's right to separate spaces in many areas of public and private life, even if most of us don't choose total separatism.
Lastly, the book is upsetting and grim at times, especially when the reader is forced to acknowledge the sheer duration, intensity and breadth of violence against women. We often treat crimes against women as one-off examples of interpersonal violence by troubled or monstrous men. But Daly points out the pattern, explaining that male violence against women is not random but the inevitable expression of patriarchal values. Her conceptualisation of a global war, lasting thousands of years, is distressingly plausible. This isn't even a criticism. It's just my acknowledgement that sometimes, reading this book was uncomfortable.
In sum, I felt that Daly's Gyn/Ecology was powerful, shocking, and provocative, but also healing, nourishing, and enspiriting. It was not without flaws, but there is nothing else quite like it. I thoroughly recommend that everyone read it and find out if it sparks something.
Daly, Mary. 1990. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.
Millett, Kate. 2016. Sexual Politics.
Daly notes that this term came up in a conversation with Jane Caputi
Mace, David, and Vera Mace. 1960. Marriage: East and West. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. 1972. Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684; the Social and Intellectual Foundations. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Cleghorn, Elinor. 2021. Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. New York: Dutton, Penguin Random House LLC.