SOURCE: Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien. “Earthly Utopia or Armageddon?” Commonweal 99, no. 17 (1 February 1974): 442-43.

In the following review, Steinfels criticizes Beyond God the Father, noting Daly's “effort to decimate patriarchal religion, language, and ideas.”

Earthly utopias, in books or in Vermont, are works of the imagination that allow us to fantasize alternative ways of living our lives and organizing the world. You are interested in a society of abundance, restraint, and civility, based on a credit card economy? See Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. You are “into” common property, communal life, and connubial freedom? Check out John Humphrey Noyes' Oneida Community. You want a house without a kitchen? Read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics. But we need not dally in the 19th century; most radical writings of the last decade were excursions into the better way in a different world. And Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father is of this...