Quintessence: A radical elemental feminist manifesto

Readers in 2048 will like Mary Daly's new book, Quintessence. That's Daly's prediction, and the book is filled with comments from a radical feminist from that year who likes the book and conjures Daly back to discuss it.

Daly's faith in the future bespeaks her isolation, and the isolation of many radical feminists, in the present. She is rightly angry that some radical feminist books are no longer in print and numerous women's bookstores have gone out of business. But when Daly is angry, she is never simply angry. Always she finds joy as well as rage in radical feminist knowledge; always she leads beyond the anger to the joy.

Quintessence is the final element, beyond earth, air, water, and fire. She seeks it in a time when men are trying to find ways to use everything in the universe -- every plant, every star -- for theirpurposes. Everything exists only to be used, they think. Daly is rightly horrified at this ethic of exploitation.

Daly writes of the scattering of radical feminists because they must disperse to find a living (especialy those who teach college). This dispersion, a major cause of the feelings of ioslation, she names a diaspora. The divisions among women she also calls a diaspora. I think the term is appropriate, not too strong. But she sees good in the dispersion of our ideas this creates. Similarly, remaindering of our books causes them to be sold at lower prices to women who might not be able to afford the original price, Daly notes. Her publisher has recently taken three of her books out of print.

If we feel dispair, we must name it, not call it depression, which too easily suggets that it is an illness that can be treated, Daly writes. We must as that the condition of women under patriarchy is a state of dispair. Seeing the hopelessness of reform under patriarchy can help us leap to hopefulness about going beyond it, she says. "In our," Aloneness, Spinters Rage Together," Daly says.

Daly sees grief as passive; she tries to transform it into rage, which can move us to creative action. We must have the Courage to Create, she writes. Out of despair, we may take Desperate Actsthat will inspire change.

At the age of five, we are all philosophers, asking "Why?" until we are squelched, Daly writes. Citing an experiment, she says that if we hear that people are brilliant, we will start seeing them as brilliant and their performances will be brilliant. We should proclaim our Elemental Female Genius and believe in it, she writes.

The boundaries between feminist theory and fiction have always been hazy, and Daly deftly blurs them. In her vision, patriarchy crumbled around 2018 because of the powerful energies emanating from a few thousand radical elemental feminists. Men who did not decide to reject patriarchy just faded away, as did women who were too wedded to patriarchy. At this point, I almost wished this was entirely fiction, rather than theory, because I don't have enough of what Daly calls Hopping Hope to believe in this vision.

Beautiful graphics by Sudie Rakusin, who has been illustrating Daly's books for years, have the same "feel" as Daly's text.

In around 2018, the Anonyma Network found/founded a lost continent, perhaps Atlantis, which they call the Lost and Found Continent.Women from all over the world flock to live there. Other radical elemental feminists live scattered across the world

Daly is a little clearer in this book than in previous ones that men can reject patriarchy, and she names John Stoltenberg, author of Refusing to Be a Man, as one such man. Those men who reject patriarchy survive.

On the other hand, she praises Elizabeth Gould Davis, who wrote in The First Sex that Y chromosomes are defective and men are mutations. Daly wonders whether men's works saying that Y chromosomes are breaking down have been men's inspiration for cloning, or the fear that led to it.

Daly praises Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, but finds more satisfying Davis's hypothesis that women are "the first sex." Daly does not believe that men have always been able to subordinate women. Her subtitle, Realizing the Archaic Future, suggests that the past--a distant, gynocentric past--provides the basis for the future, if we only recall it.

She believes that women once reproduced by parthenogenesis (without men), and her women of the future ponder this as an option.

Counting the women of the past and the future, and animals, radical elemental feminists are not a cognitive minority but a majority, Daly says.

Daly is horrified by the abuse of animals, which is growing to unimaginable dimensions. She cites researchers who expect to "create" a headless chicken to produce eggs. Those who do not believe that such abuse of animals will be turned on human beings are naive, she says. She criticizes "bioethicists" who say that cloning is acceptable as long as it doesn't involve human beings, but only (other) animals.

It's certainly understandable for Daly to be-longing for quintessence, which she describes as the ultimate harmonious integrity of the universe and Source of Ecstasy. She says that we can find the State of Natural Grace through many means, such as looking at a sunset, talking with a friend, or lovemaking.