SOURCE: Ruether, Rosemary Radford. “Theology by Sex.” New Republic 169, no. 19 (10 November 1973): 24-6.

In the following review of Beyond God the Father, Ruether finds flaws in Daly's conception of women and her notion of castrating “phallic morality.”

Mary Daly's new book [Beyond God the Father] is a bold effort to found a theology for the women's movement. Many will find this book startling and even repugnant. Mary Daly has little respect for orthodoxies, either Protestant or Catholic. She strives to break not only with orthodox theology, but also with the traditional logic and meaning of language, in order to reveal a new meaning over against the “insane sanity” of conventional rationality. For Dr. Daly, women are the ultimate outcasts of history, the submerged sexual caste within every class, nation and race. The liberation of women must break with established structures in a more radical way than any other movement...