As the eighties wore on, Daly also became synonymous with the reductive excesses of what Alice Echols and Linda Alcoff call "cultural feminism," so named because it calls for a countercultural feminine and feminist project devoted to an ideology of reverence for the female nature. While Lorde shared Daly’s desire to recuperate a goddess tradition for the purposes of feminist devotions, she was perturbed that Daly drew only from the Western tradition in her construction of a new pantheon, neglecting long histories of goddess worship in Africa. The first came in 1980 in the form of excoriating public criticism from Audre Lorde, who charged Daly with racism. However, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Daly’s work received two core critiques. As such, she has enjoyed the devotion of those who embrace her Wiccan-inspired manifestos. Daly’s work is mystical and polemical, proudly separatist and essentialist. I track these responses, arguing that they offer an important source for the intellectual history of feminist thought. Daly is a polarizing figure who inspires enmity, devotion, and trenchant criticism. The object of this article is to contextualize Mary Daly’s mixed reception within feminist scholarship in order to read her status within the larger project(s) of feminist thought in recent history.
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