"As well as being explicitly transphobic, Daly’s universalisation of womanhood and female purity, contrasted against male destructiveness, is implicitly racist. As Audre Lorde’s now famous open letter to Daly highlights, Daly fails to understand the intersectional nature of women’s oppression: the assumption that the herstory of white women can represent the realities and life experiences of all women is prevalent throughout Daly’s texts. Moreover, when Daly does discuss women of colour, they appear solely as victims of patriarchy, their histories, myths, religions, and symbols of strength rendered invisible, ignoring, for example, the powerful African female Gods. Indeed, Elizabeth Hedrick notes that Daly’s adoption of the early modern witch as the ultimate symbol of female power and autonomy in prehistoric matriarchies relies upon a culturally specific context that is Western European and implicitly white. Lorde, therefore, charges Daly with misusing her words, or ignoring the texts written by women of colour altogether, and failing to understand that although all women are oppressed under patriarchy, these experiences are not identical. Indeed, the failure to acknowledge these differences distorts commonalities as well as variations."
— Helen Clarke, "Revisiting the legacy: the historical influence of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Shelia Jeffreys on ‘gender-critical’ feminism."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2530259