Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Daly

Daly’s line doesn’t flatter feminism as a “movement”; it frames it as an apocalyptic event in the literal sense: an unveiling. “Courage to be” is a direct jab at the forces that make women’s existence conditional - acceptable only when it’s quiet, pleasing, or useful. She borrows the cadence of existential theology (the right to exist without apology) and welds it to feminist insurgency. The point isn’t that courage is admirable. It’s that survival itself has been politicized, and that reclaiming personhood is already an act of revolt.

The phrase “revelatory power” is where Daly’s theologian’s instincts show. She treats patriarchy not just as a social arrangement but as a kind of false religion: a story about reality that’s been naturalized until it feels like God. Revelation, then, isn’t private enlightenment; it’s the public cracking of that story. Feminism becomes a counter-scripture, exposing how “neutral” institutions - church, family, medicine, law - have often functioned as sanctified control.

Context matters: Daly wrote in the wake of second-wave feminism and amid fierce battles inside Christian theology over whether women could speak with authority at all. Her work famously escalated from reformist critique to open revolt against patriarchal religion. The subtext is uncompromising: you don’t get liberation by being invited into the room. You get it by insisting on your being, even when the room was built to deny it. Courage is the key because the revelation carries a cost: social exile, spiritual confrontation, and the terror of rewriting meaning from the ground up.