Abstract

Contemporary white U.S. feminist theorists have not, to date, responded adequately to the challenges of racism and ethnocentrism in feminism raised by U.S. feminists of color in the late seventies and early eighties. To understand this widespread failure I suggest a return to a critical moment of exchange between Mary Daly and Audre Lorde. In 1978, philosopher Mary Daly published Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, in which she argued, the contemporary radical feminist movement must be understood in historical context as a global, ontological, epistemological, metaethical, "Metapatriarchal Journey." In Part I, I present Daly's project in Gyn/Ecology, from the perspective of the Western gynocentric tradition of Matilda Joselyn Gage and Virginia Woolf. In response to Gyn/Ecology, poet and essayist Audre Lorde published "An Open Letter to Mary Daly," in which she argued, the white European perspective of Gyn/Ecology erased and distorted the traditions of nonwhite, noneuropean women. Daly never responded in kind to Lorde's letter. In Part II, I read Lorde's letter, drawing insights from her other writings and from the political writings of other radicals at the time, including Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and Robin Morgan. I conclude that Lorde's letter is an attempt to effect a shift in Daly's thought which would strengthen Gyn/Ecology and help realize the radical feminist vision they share. Daly's failure to respond in kind has left the misguided impression with many that Lorde's challenges call for the abandonment of Gyn/Ecology and radical feminism generally. In Part III, drawing from Lorde's criticisms, I argue that while the racial and ethnic politics of the text are "color evasive" and ethnocentric, Lorde's challenges call for a "reconstruction," rather than an abandonment of Gyn/Ecology. Part IV charts a new "Metapatriarchal Journey" which I call "Radical White Western Feminism." My contribution to this reconstruction, what I call "A-mazing World-Traveling," is offered toward the development of an anti-racist, anti-imperialist radical feminism that can be practiced by white Western women in complex consciousness of their/our historical, cultural and racial locations