Outercourse: The be-dazzling voyage : containing recollections from my Logbook of a radical feminist philosopher (be-ing an account of my time/space travels and ideas--then, again, now, and how) ebook

I see no reviews by women here so will put my take on this book.

In 1992, Daly wrote this autobiography, whose title she explains thus: "My true Course was and is Outercourse - moving beyond the imprisoning mental, physical, emotional, spiritual walls of patriarchy, the State of Possession." This book was for me probably the most enjoyable and easiest to read of her collection. It isn't just the story of her life, but of her thinking as well. She was the only child of solid working-class Catholics in Schenectady, N.Y., who sensed at an early age that she wanted to be a philosopher, not realizing that to become one, she would break a Terrible Taboo. (She intentionally uses upper case as a mode of giving importance where she feels it is due and vice versa.) Her graduate study took her to Switzerland. (Women couldn't get a degree in philosophy in the Catholic education system.) Boston College hired her and fired her and, after student demonstrations (at that time all male students), rehired and promoted her and gave her tenure. This was not the end of problems for her at Boston College, but when asked why she stayed there, she noted it "is where I choose to Stand my Ground." In her early 40s she was the first woman to preach at Harvard Memorial Church and "turned the occasion into a Call for an Historic Exodus from patriarchal religion." Hundreds walked out. Daly never went back, deciding that "oppressive tendencies are not aberrations but the very stuff of christianity" (lower case intentional). Her vocation then became Radical Feminism, seeing the women's revolution about participation in Be-ing, an ontological movement. As outsiders, "women are especially equipped to confront the structured evil of patriarchy . . . are in a unique sense called to be the bearers of existential courage in society." She uses Paul Tillich as a springboard here. She talks of how she wanted to keep the word "God" but finally found it "hopelessly, irremediably inadequate." Daly most often contemplated the divine essence as a verb, Be-ing itself, so that worship is "not kneeling in front of a so-and-so but swirling in energy."

She talks of feeling a lot in common with the cow who jumped over the moon in the nursery rhyme. The cow didn't know exactly where she was going, but she knew she had to do it. No matter if all the dogs in the world are laughing at her. The cow was probably fed up with domestication. If she had jumped the fence, she would have been caught and dragged back. That rumination of Daly's so inspired me that I had a dream that night of flying. I was carrying my cat, and when we came to a steep cliff we took off, using the cat's wings (!?) and flew. Here is part of a poem I wrote about the dream:

On cat wings -
Too far, too steep to walk
This journey calls for flight.
Flying high to see through the unrealities of now
And to see the Ancient Essences
Then to sound the courageous clarion call
Awakening Laughter, Joy, and BE-ING
Throughout the cosmos.

Daly says that 1975 was the year the backlash began and that the Montreal massacre in a university classroom in 1989 ushered in an age of escalating gynocide. I'm not going to list the statistics of rape, battering and murder of women here, but most shocking is how "business-as-usual" such things continue to be. Mary's life was a call to wake up.

Mary Daly (1928-2010) was a radical feminist philosopher and theologian who taught at Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years; she retired in 1999, after a discrimination claim was filed against the college by two male students who claimed to want to be admitted to her advanced Womens Studies courses. She also wrote the books The Church and the Second Sex,Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation,Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism,Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy,Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language,QUINTESSENCE: Realizing the Archaic Future A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto, and Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big.

She wrote in the Introduction to this 1992 book, "As I Re-member my own intellectual voyage as a Radical Feminist Philosopher, I am intensely aware of the struggle to stay on my True Course, despite undermining by demons of distraction that have seemed always to be attempting to pull me off course. These I eventually Dis-covered and Named as agents and institutions of patriarchy, whose intent was to keep me... within the stranglehold of the foreground, that is, fatherland. My True Course was and is the Outercourse---moving beyong the imprisoning mental, physical, emotional, spiritual walls of patriarchy, the State of Possession."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"I did not yet understand that for a woman to strive to become a philosopher was to break a Terrible Taboo." (Pg. 22)
"Another---and more important---advantage was that I was now basically equipped to see through all the myths of male intellectual superiority---forever. It would not be possible for me to be tricked by patriarchal propaganda on that subject, ever. This was possibly the most important lesson I learned in high school. What I could not understand was how anyone could possibly believe such outrageous propaganda." (Pg. 37)
"I brooded, not for the first time, over the possibility that I was a little odd---perhaps downright peculiar. Maybe I was a misfit?" (Pg. 39)
"At that Moment I understood, not for the first or the last time, what it means to be a cognitive minority of one." (Pg. 53)
"I had to learn the rules extremely well in order to break them with precision." (Pg. 75)
"In the future some christians would try to claim me as perhaps a post-modern, secularized, gnostic, new age/old age catholic or christian... But... I was becoming OTHER than christian." (Pg. 153)
"I had to voyage far on the Subliminal Sea before I could understand the deepest meaning of my Quest, which was to be my own kind of philosopher; that is, to be a Dis-coverer of Elemental Feminist Philosophy." (Pg. 324)
"My mantra for Outercourse: 'Keep going, Mary. Go!'" (Pg. 335)

Much has happened since this volume of Mary Daly's radical feminist corpus appeared, but this autobiography sings with a lyric that even a male, such as myself, cannot avoid finding attractive. It has prompted me to want to read her dissertation; it's on order. I expect that I will find it necessary to cut her some slack there as I do in reading her witch's rage in Outercourse.

That her painful personal struggle finds her, at this stage, singing in blossoming poetic inventions fulfills Emerson's goal of the teacher "to raise and cheer." Daly's unhesitating acceptance of witchery will put many off. But singing is always better than shouting. I found this long text a pleasure to read, with lucidity and appeal on every page.

It bears the mark of the artistic originality that creates the new world we now live in. The story of Daly's voyage to that new world harmonizes such variegated experiences that I am left profoundly changed. Enough to share her new world? Only if I can make a similar voyage for myself. If there's a message to Daly's method, it's "Do your own work." Go, go, go for it!