Known For: Radical Journalist, Founder of Catholic Worker movement
Dates: A.H.: 1314 - 1400
C.E.: 1897 – 1980

Faith: Christianity
Country: United States

About

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897. Her father worked as a journalist and her brother wrote for the radical publication The Day Book, which pushed for working-class reforms including women’s right to vote. From that newspaper she learned about the great labor leader Eugene Debs and the work of organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World. During her college years at the University of Illinois she studied the socialist works, joined the American Socialist Party, and read the speeches and writings of William Haywood, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Carlo Tresca. She became interested in anarchist ideas from her favorite author Peter Kropotkin’s depiction of the plight of the poor, as well as the work of Francisco Ferrer, and Emma Goldman.

Pursuing the journalist profession of her family, Day started a position at the socialist journal, The New York Call, in 1916. For an assignment she interviewed the Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist Leon Trostsky, living in exile on the Lower East Side, and became close friends with fellow Call writer Michael Gold. In 1917 she joined a radical journal called The Masses, edited by Max Eastman.

Day also joined the women’s suffrage movement and worked closely with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage (CUWS). The militant tactics of the CUWS included organizing large demonstrations and the daily picketing of the White House. In November 1917, Day was one of the historic 168 women arrested and jailed for “obstructing traffic”. The women went on hunger strike, forcing Woodrow Wilson to order their release.

Governmental pressure ceased publication of The Masses in 1917, and Day left journalism to enroll in nursing training in Brooklyn. She also started attending St. John’s Catholic Church, drawn to Catholicism as the “church of the poor.” In 1932 she established the Catholic Worker journal with Christian Brother Peter Maurin to publicize Catholic social teaching. The newspaper encouraged trade unions for a more equal economic system and argued for the Catholic pacifism at the heart of the Gospel. It became a medium for creating a national social movement, leading to 33 Catholic Worker Houses, charitable self-help communities for sufferers of depression, starting around the country by 1936. Today there are 130 in the US and internationally. Due to pacifism during the Spanish Civil War, the Catholic Worker lost a majority of its readers. Day retained this unpopular stance through the Second World War, and dwindling volunteer support caused 15 Worker Houses to close.

After the war in 1945 Day established the Direct Action magazine with David Dillinger and Abraham Muste, in which Dillinger caused political unrest by openly criticized the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1950s Day became involved in the campaign against nuclear weapons, which led to several arrests for several times for civil disobedience. She also participated in the campaign for black civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War.

She wrote over 1,000 articles for the Catholic Worker, and additionally penned several books including, Houses of Hospitality (1939), an account of the Catholic Worker movement, an autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952) and On Pilgrimage: the Sixties (1972).

Day died in 1980.