SOURCE: Ratcliffe, Krista. “De/Mystifying Herself and Her Wor(l)ds: Mary Daly.” In Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, pp. 65-106. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Ratcliffe provides an overview of Daly's radical feminist critique of patriarchal language and discusses the rhetorical strategies of intervention by which she exposes male oppression embedded in language and attempts to reclaim and liberate women's discourse from male domination.

[T]his book is primarily concerned with the mind/spirit/body pollution inflicted through patriarchal myth and language at all levels.

—Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

As a feminist philosopher, theologian, and political activist, Mary Daly is deeply concerned with Bathsheba's dilemma; however, she defines it in slightly different terms than does Woolf. Daly argues that the patriarchal categories constructed through language result in “a kind of gang rape” of a woman's...