Day, Dorothy

The life of Dorothy Day serves as a model of religious and spiritual development across the human life span. Her life as a journalist, pacifist, and reformer makes her a role model to many—her involvement in social issues stretched from the women's suffrage movement to the Vietnam War. She is best known as a cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Born on November 8, 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, she was the third of John and Grace Satterlee Day's five children. The family moved often due to John Day's work as a journalist and experienced spells of both poverty and moderate affluence. As a teenager, Day often found herself wandering the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago and New York, discovering her compassion for the plight of the poor and beauty in the midst of urban desolation. An avid reader, Day fueled her growing social conscience with books such as Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. Along with social concerns, organized religion intrigued Day. She was fascinated by the piety and spiritual discipline she witnessed in neighbors and roommates. While she disagreed with Church doctrines supporting charity over justice, she felt drawn to the Catholic Church because of its connection to immigrants and the poor.

In 1914 Day began attending the University of Illinois in Urbana, supporting herself with scholarships, domestic labor, and freelance writing. Her social outlook continued in a radical direction, and she dropped out of college after only 2 years. Soon after, she moved to New York and found a job covering labor strikes and demonstrations as a reporter for The Call, a socialist paper. After several months, she moved on to writing for The Masses, a socialist journal that was shut down for sedition within a few months of her arrival.

As a young woman, Day lived what she called a bohemian-like existence: moving from city to city, writing for different papers, living among the poor, and associating with young radicals. Day participated in, as well as wrote about, demonstrations and rallies regarding social conditions. In 1917 she went to prison for protesting in front of the White House about the exclusion of women from voting and holding public office. While in prison, she participated in a hunger strike to bring attention to the inhumane treatment of prisoners. Day and her suffragette companions were eventually freed by order of President Woodrow Wilson. She was jailed several more times in her life for acts of civil [Page 111]disobedience, including refusing to take part in civil defense drills in the 1950s and participating in a banned picket line when she was 75 years old.

Day's first novel, The Eleventh Virgin, published in 1924, included autobiographical information about a love affair she had had that resulted in pregnancy and an abortion. In 1924, with the money she obtained by selling the movie rights to the novel, Day bought a beach house on Staten Island where she sought emotional healing. She lived there for several years with her common-law husband, Forster Batterham, until the birth of their daughter, Tamar Therese, in 1927. Batterham shared Day's radical social views but opposed marriage and religion. As Day blossomed as a mother and seriously pursued her attraction to Catholicism, her relationship with Forster suffered. After Day and their daughter were baptized in 1928, Batterham left the family permanently. So began Day's concerted effort to reconcile her radical social views with her Catholic faith.

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