Day, Dorothy (1897–1980)

Dorothy Day is best known as the cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement. In 1932, Day and Peter Maurin established a radical, pacifist organization rooted in the Catholic tradition that provides direct services to the poor and promotes social justice through nonviolent protest and activism. By her own recognition, her life was divided in two parts. Her early years were marked by her devotion to radical causes, as well as a bohemian lifestyle that included love affairs, an abortion, a common-law marriage, and the birth of a child out of wedlock. This phase ended with her conversion in 1927 to Roman Catholicism, an act that was the culmination of nearly a decade of spiritual searching, shortly after the birth of her daughter. Her extraordinary gifts began to reach their full fruition 5 years later when with Maurin she married her deep commitment to Catholicism and her radical beliefs by establishing the Catholic Worker movement. A journalist throughout her life, she is well regarded for her substantial body of writing (much of it first printed in her daily column in the movement's newspaper, the Catholic Worker). At the time of her death in 1980, she was widely heralded both for her activism in service of the poor and for her singular contribution to American Catholicism in the 20th century.

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 8, 1897, the third of five children. Early in Day's life, her family moved briefly to San Francisco, but after the earthquake in 1906 they settled permanently in the Chicago area. Although she was baptized as an Episcopalian, Day later actively rejected religion. She attended the University of Illinois for 2 years, but dropped out prior to graduation in order to move to New York City in 1916 to become a writer for a variety of socialist publications. She joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), participated in numerous protests, and was jailed while demonstrating in favor of women's suffrage. Her friends and companions included activists, artists, writers, and journalists who supported radical and socialist causes, including Jack Reed, Malcolm Cowrey, and Eugene O'Neill. Even during this period of agnosticism, however, she would often follow a night of drinking in a Greenwich Village saloon with friends like O'Neill with silent participation in mass at St. Joseph's Parish across the street, as she reports in her autobiography The Long Loneliness.

In 1918, she worked briefly as a nurse's aide in Kings County Hospital. While there, she met an orderly with whom she had a brief affair, resulting in a pregnancy, which she terminated. She drifted after this, traveling and working as a journalist. In Chicago, Day worked on a communist newspaper, and while staying in an IWW flophouse she was mistakenly arrested as a prostitute in a raid. She documented this experience, as well as other prison stays, in her writing, which to this day remains a vivid account of the indignities experienced daily by the poor in the criminal justice system.

Although she did not mention her union in her own accounts of her life, recent biographies of Day establish that this period was followed by a very brief failed marriage when she returned to New York. It hardly lasted as long as her honeymoon trip to Europe. The great love of Day's life was Forster Battenham, an anarchist and biologist whom she would later call her common-law husband. In 1924 she published a novel, The Eleventh Virgin, which was largely based on her own life, including her abortion. With the proceeds of this unremarkable book she was able to buy a small cottage on Staten Island near the ocean, in a colony known as the Spanish Camp. Here she lived a bohemian existence with Battenham, Cowley, Caroline Gordon, and others.

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