Two Golden Oldies Left Us

I’m not sure Howard Zinn and Mary Daly even knew each other, but they shared their departure date, January 27,2010 and both lived in Boston.

He, the son of Jewish immigrants in the poorest section of Brooklyn. She the only daughter of a working class Irish couple in Schenectady. He got turned on by Charles Dickens at 17. Young Communist neighbors encouraged him to join them at a political rally on Times Square. The police knocked him unconscious and he became “ferociously indignant.”

Returning as a bombardier from Europe, he had second thoughts about war, stashing his medals and ribbons. He worked blue collar as he earned degrees from New York University and Columbia. My guiding light, first son Michael, turned me on to his first classic, "A People’s History of the United States,” which he privately printed in an edition of 5,000 in 1980. An underground sensation in which "he charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picking apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and celebrating workers, feminists and war resisters,” (NPR, at Sam Smith, prorev.com, 1/27/10).

By 2003 his left wing version of American history had grossed over a million copies. In 1956 the black women’s Spelman College in Atlanta made him history chair. He stood behind the students when they integrated the Georgia Assembly as well as their public libraries—until the brass took away his tenure for being a perennial pest! He “graduated” to Boston University where he tried the patience of that perpetually hypersensitive president, John Silber.

Zinn had a quick eye to the end. For example, when Libs began to grumble about the Big Bailout, he recalled that the constitutional convention of 1787 had as its immediate agenda to redeem the speculators' bonds at full value! "Democracy," he reminded his readers, "grows from the bottom up, not vice versa."

Chum Noam Chomsky, not known for hyperlatives adjudged, “He’s made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture. He changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way.”

So did Mary Daly, at the nearby Jesuit Boston College, the world’s first feminist philosopher—if you don’t include the eleventh century German nun Hildegard von Bingen. She was the first (1953) to get a Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Notre Dame, after which she gained Ph.D.’s in Switzerland in philosophy and theology. (Women could not enter such programs in the U.S. at the time.)

Her notoriety began with the publication of “Gyn/Ecology” (1978) where she explored such then hidden topics as cultural and sexual violence against women, female genital mutilation, and foot binding. In 1969 she riled the brass at Boston College with her book, "The Church and Second Sex” which exposed misogyny in the Roman Catholic Church. She was being denied tenure, until 1,500 male students took up her cause for four months.

She won! She created another firestorm in 1998 when she excluded males from a new course in feminist ethics! She like to lecture in hiking clothes and mocked her academic assailants as bore-ocrats afflicted with academentia! The Jebbies gladly took her retirement in 2001.

Let us pray that there are many young Zinns and Dalys ready to step forward and give some more backbone to those gutless time-servers who too often dominate faculties. R.I.P. (Rejoice in Provocations!)