The Church and the Second Sex

Mary Daly's 1968 first book — Catholic-feminist critique of the patriarchal Church

Tradition: Catholic feminism / second-wave radical feminism / post-Vatican-II theology

Daly's 1968 'Church and the Second Sex' — Catholic-feminist critique of patriarchy in the Roman Church (later renounced)

Published by Harper & Row in 1968 (with a 1975 expanded edition adding the famous 'Feminist Postchristian Introduction' in which Daly substantially revised her own earlier position), 'The Church and the Second Sex' is Mary Daly's first book and the founding work of Catholic feminist theology. The title deliberately echoes Simone de Beauvoir's 'Le Deuxième Sexe' (1949) — Daly was applying Beauvoir's analytical framework to the Roman Catholic Church specifically. The 1968 edition's central thesis: the historical-sociological evidence shows the Catholic Church to be a profoundly patriarchal-misogynist institution (the book documents the misogyny of major Church Fathers — Tertullian, Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas — and traces its consequences across Catholic theology, canon law, ecclesial structure, and pastoral practice); but reform is possible from within (Daly was still teaching at Jesuit Boston College when she wrote the book and writing as a Catholic). The book provoked immediate controversy — Boston College tried to fire Daly in 1969, but student protests led to her reinstatement and tenure in 1972. By the 1975 second edition, however, Daly had concluded that reform from within was impossible: the new introduction explicitly renounces the reformist position of the 1968 edition and declares Daly's post-Christian position. The book is thus a doubly important text: as the founding work of Catholic feminist theology (in its 1968 form) and as the founding moment of post-Christian-feminist theology (in the 1975 'Postchristian' edition). The trajectory across the two editions — from reformist to revolutionary — is itself a paradigmatic case in late-twentieth-century religious feminism.