“Is It Not Possible to Be a Radical and a Christian?” Dorothy Day Navigates the

Patriarchal Worlds of Journalism and Catholicism

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

of Master of Science

Bailey G. Dick

August 2018

© 2018 Bailey G. Dick. All Rights Reserved. This thesis titled

“Is It Not Possible to Be a Radical and a Christian?” Dorothy Day Navigates the

Patriarchal Worlds of Journalism and Catholicism

by

BAILEY G. DICK

has been approved for

the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism

and the Scripps College of Communication by

Michael S. Sweeney

Professor, E.W. Scripps School of Journalism

Scott Titsworth

Dean, Scripps College of Communication

ii Abstract

DICK, BAILEY G., M.S., August 2018, E.W. Scripps School of Journalism

“Is It Not Possible to Be a Radical and a Christian?” Dorothy Day Navigates the

Patriarchal Worlds of Journalism and Catholicism

Director of thesis: Michael S. Sweeney

This thesis examines the journalistic and nonfiction work of radical Catholic activist and journalist Dorothy Day, and her ability to be both faithfully Catholic and fully radical in her writing and work. Day founded The Catholic Worker newspaper and its accompanying movement. Although Day did not self-identify as a feminist and criticized the second-wave feminist movement, Day’s lifelong commitment to sharing the viewpoints of the marginalized, as well as her understanding of suffering, reflected beliefs that are in line with both feminist theoretical approaches and are reflective of

Catholic teaching. As this thesis demonstrates, through her leveraging and adherence to traditions and teachings, Day was able to access male-dominated spaces, gain legitimacy within the patriarchal structures, and later share her more radical, yet faithful, beliefs with readers and the Church in order to create change from within in both the Church and the newspaper industry.

Through a use of primary documents found in Day’s personal papers, this thesis applies historical research methods to make the case for Day as an example of an authentically Catholic and simultaneous feminist life vis a vis the Catholic theory of personalism and the application of feminist standpoint theory.

iii Dedication

To all “self-possessed girl[s] of twenty, cool-mannered, tweed-wearing, drinking rye whiskey straight with no discernable effect and smoking like a chimney at a time when women weren’t allowed to smoke in public.” Like Dorothy, your long loneliness (and

your ability to drink and smoke like that) won’t last forever.

iv Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Phillip Runkel, archivist of the Dorothy Day Collection at

Marquette University, for his help and hospitality as I combed through all of Dorothy’s papers. The library and the Catholic Worker collection proved to be the heart of this thesis, and without it, my study would be incomplete.

Thanks are also due to the folks at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in

Washington, D.C., the White Rose Catholic Worker Community in Chicago, and Jonah

House in Baltimore for baptizing me by fire in all things nonviolence, resistance, and hospitality. To Loyola University Chicago’s Campus Ministry Department, thank you for sending me—in so many ways.

This thesis would not be done without my A-Team committee: Drs. Mike

Sweeney, Aimee Edmondson, and Katherine Jellison. They are the goodest of people, wisest of brains, and my privy council. I owe you all my life.

To my Thursday night family dinner crew: Natascha Toft, Tess Herman, Jeff

Zidonis, Allie White, and David Lee. You are my chosen family. Thank you for making my house a home. To Molly, Chris, Finn, and Annie Roach: Thank you for being my

Athens family, and for always making sure I had Friday night plans and leftovers to eat.

To my family: Thank you for not disowning me when I quit my job to go back to school. To my mom, Kelly: Thank you for pushing me. You were and are, in perpetuity, right. To my dad, Dan: By having an open ear for the last twenty-seven years, you have made a tough life easier to live. To my brother, Liam: You are wise, brave, and I am endlessly proud of you. And to my sweet pup, Frances Bean. Without you, life itself would not be possible— and significantly less adorable.

v Table of Contents Page

Abstract ...... iii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Introduction ...... 7 Chapter 1 ...... 15 Chapter 2 ...... 45 Chapter 3 ...... 69 Chapter 4 ...... 104 Chapter 5 ...... 130 A Note on Sources ...... 144 Bibliography ...... 147

vi

Introduction

When septuagenarian Dorothy Day headed to Newark in 1975, she was already on edge. Day knew she would be testifying in front of a handful of the American

Church’s1 most prominent bishops during a hearing of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ bicentennial program, and she hated public speaking. But when she arrived, Day learned she would be speaking not just to three or four bishops, but to nearly twenty bishops.

When she sat down to face them, Day’s anxiety was compounded by a microphone that refused to work. One of the bishops sprung up to help her. Day fiddled with the microphone again and was met with silence. With each adjustment of the microphone,

Day was joined on stage by yet another bishop eager to help the woman—and perhaps eager to make a good impression on her. Historian David O’Brien wrote that these over- eager bishops were “at least as nervous as she was.” And with good reason: The bishops were standing before a woman who had come to demand authority, even from the

Church’s most influential, entirely male leadership. Through her decades of work as a newspaper editor, radical activist and leader of a social movement, Day came to command attention from not only that panel of bishops, but from the Catholic Church writ large. As O’Brien said of Day’s appearance that morning, “If there was authority and indeed if there was power in that room, it sat in her chair, not up there with the bishops

— And they knew it.”2 Since then, Day has been called “the most influential, interesting, and significant figure” in the history of American Catholicism,3 as well as its “radical conscience.”4

While Day and her life have been long admired by activist-types and the social

7 justice wing of the Catholic Church, her complex life and legacy remained unknown to many Americans for decades. When Pope Francis addressed a joint session of Congress in 2015, he spoke of four “great Americans”: theologian Thomas Merton, Martin Luther

King Jr., Abraham Lincoln—and Dorothy Day. In just hours, Day’s name was Googled

100,000 times in the U.S., and 31,000 people had posted about her on Facebook.

Day spent more than six decades in the newspaper industry, starting as a “stunt girl” reporter covering economic injustice and social upheaval. She later penned deeply personal and theological columns published continuously from 1933 to 1980 as the founder and editor of The Catholic Worker, a newspaper that reached a circulation of more than 100,000, and which still sells for just a penny per copy. Day’s personal life and tumultuous early years, marked by multiple failed marriages, an abortion, a child out of wedlock, and two suicide attempts, profoundly influenced her work, her writing, and her faith. Day’s life of seeming contradictions and paradoxes, the profound suffering she experienced, and subsequent action on behalf of others who suffered as well, displays profound nuances that played out in her writing and work, and prove that Day was not typical of the journalists, women, or Catholics of her time.

What perhaps sets Day apart from her activist contemporaries, as well as other

Catholic leaders of the era, is a combination of her deep faith and her identity as a woman. As a young woman, Day’s radicalism was almost en vogue, as she lived and worked among the bohemian set in 1920s New York. Yet, as her writing and her beliefs evolved, Day’s radicalism and activism became grounded in a deep commitment to the

Catholic faith. Day lived out her beliefs daily, initially through acts of defiance and involvement with well-known radical groups outside the conventional structures and

8 norms for women of her time. Later in life, Day committed small, quiet, daily acts of hospitality and radicalism that challenged societal norms for what a woman’s—and journalist’s—life should be.

During her fifty years helming the Catholic Worker, Day was aware of other mainstream and niche-publication reporters covering social and economic issues, and of the way in which the Church was mirroring news trends of the time by reaching out to believers via diocesan publications. Day also was cognizant of, influenced by, and in contact with secular social and political movement leaders throughout her decades of activism. Day saw a unique place for herself at the intersection of these movements, and saw an untapped audience of disillusioned, economically disadvantaged, and spiritually and politically hungry workers she would be able to reach.5 While Day’s role as a journalist and leader of the Catholic Worker Movement evolved over time, she maintained a lifelong commitment to, as she wrote, “write in response to what we care about, what be we believe to be important, what we want to share with others.”6 Day was continually self-aware of her unique position as a female movement leader, a woman newspaper editor, and as a Catholic woman operating within a patriarchal Church structure. Day’s legitimacy in a seemingly paradoxical role for a woman of her time was rooted in her radical devotion to the Catholic faith, to her own social and religious philosophy, and a movement that provided a moral compass and editorial anchor for The

Catholic Worker that began with its founding and still exists today. Day and the Catholic

Worker Movement came under greater scrutiny from two of the most powerful enforcers of patriarchal social, occupational, and religious norms of the time: the newspaper industry and the Church. Yet Day’s commitment to the Catholic faith led her from being

9 seen by many in the Church as an unruly radical to a potential saint.

When Day and Maurin began planning the first issue of The Catholic Worker,

Maurin was under the assumption that the paper would be primarily full of his writings and essays. This was not the case, and Day decided without consulting Maurin that his works would be called “Easy Essays.”7 It was clear from the beginning of the joint venture that although Maurin had approached Day about creating a newspaper, it would be Day, not Maurin, who would be at the paper’s helm as its leader. As Roberts noted, the paper was “Day’s special endeavor. She chose the articles, wrote much of the copy, and designed the makeup and headlines at times. A shrewd manager, a forceful editor and publisher committed to high journalistic standards, Day communicated authority.”8

Further, in the early days of the paper, Day did much of the writing, including a bevy of unsigned pieces. As Roberts notes, the exact number of articles Day wrote for the paper is perhaps uncountable, as Day was responsible for most of the articles in the paper without bylines.9 While Maurin brought to the Catholic Worker Movement his expertise in Catholic social teaching, as well as Catholic theology and philosophy, Day’s personal experiences, ones that were often fraught with suffering, brought an authentic, gritty realism.

Day occupied a unique position, as she experienced a profound amount of personal suffering while also having close proximity to the suffering of others through her social movement work and occupation as a reporter covering profound social, political, and economic suffering. Given Day’s personal, lived experience, her time spent in relationship with others who suffered, and her understanding of the Catholic Church’s understanding of suffering, Day wrote frequently, at length, both publicly and later

10 privately about her interpretation of the meaning of suffering.

While Day never self-identified as a feminist, and even wrote that she disapproved of many aspects of the second-wave feminist movement that emerged at the end of her life, she often exhibited a response to and understanding of suffering that could be understood in a contemporary context as a feminist one. Day’s views on gender roles and Church teachings were simultaneously traditional and forward-looking: As this thesis will show, through her leveraging and adherence to traditions and teachings, Day was able to access male-dominated spaces, gain legitimacy within the patriarchal structures, and later share her more radical, yet faithful, beliefs with readers and the Church in order to create change from within in both the Church and the newspaper industry. Dorothy

Day, as a breed of reporter all her own, was able to simultaneously maintain her status as a faithful Catholic, female radical, and leader of a unique, journalism-rooted movement.

This thesis, through an examination of Day’s life and career, will make the case for Day as an example of an authentically Catholic and feminist life vis a vis the Catholic theory of personalism and the application of feminist standpoint theory. In addition to existing scholarship on Day and The Catholic Worker, this thesis will examine Day’s own writings, including her public work in The Catholic Worker and her memoirs, as well as her personal writings, including letters, diaries, and journals. While this thesis is rooted in historical research methods, it also employs elements of biographical, theoretical, and theological approaches in an attempt to understand the forces that drove

Dorothy Day and her writing.

Chapter 1 will center Dorothy Day in the existing literature of broad themes, including socialism, Catholicism, and the press, as well as focused scholarship about Day

11 herself. It will demonstrate that there is a need for more updated and nuanced academic work on Dorothy Day and her journalism, and then detail the methods of this historical study. Chapter 2 will provide a brief biography of Day, weaving together secondary and primary sources, including Day’s own articles. Chapter 3 will examine the ways in which

Day, as a radical Catholic activist and journalist, was able to navigate the social, political, religious, and occupational structures she inhabited by both subverting and leveraging gender norms of her time. It will begin with her confrontations and recognition by

Church and government authorities, then move through her establishment as a leader within her own movement and through her involvement of others in this success, and finally proceed through the Catholic Worker’s establishment as a reputable organization and Day as its voice, as recognized by the mainstream press, and her inward turn toward the end of her personal life. Chapter 4 will draw upon the feminist theory found in

Elizabeth Spelman’s Fruits of Sorrow, Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, and Susan

Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others to understand how Day’s writing moved from an attempt to make sense of her own suffering through that of others, to a fuller understanding of herself and her suffering, used to attain a greater sense of solidarity and empathy with the women whom she protested and worked with, and about whom she wrote.

It is worth noting at this point the importance of Dorothy and her life to me as the writer of this thesis, and being transparent about how I came to this topic. As a practicing

Catholic and self-identified feminist, I have looked to Dorothy as an example and guide for me.

12 As an undergraduate at Loyola University Chicago, I was a student leader for the

Campus Ministry Department’s Alternative Break Immersion program, and spent my spring breaks at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C., and

Jonah House in Baltimore, Maryland. Before and after those trips, I also spent time with the White Rose Catholic Worker Community in Chicago. It was through my experience with the ABI program that I began to appreciate the role of the Catholic Worker and radicalism in the Catholic Church.

I sought to make my faith and my passion for journalism an integrated part of my life, and have worked prior to graduate school on a number of progressive and leftist political and issue campaigns. The experience that crystalized the role of women’s leadership and voices in the Church was my work as the media coordinator and press advance lead on the six-week Nuns on the Bus “We the People, We the Voters” bus tour in 2014.

What I saw from the Catholic Workers I spent time with in college and from the sisters I worked with on the Nuns on the Bus tour was an ironclad commitment to not just the Catholic faith, but also to using their platforms and identity as people of faith to tell the stories of marginalized populations. These people’s vocations were intimately tied up in embodying standpoint theory and personalism, whether or not they were cognizant of it. And I saw Dorothy Day as the genesis of this kind of activism through storytelling and solidarity. In this sense, I came into my research with preconceived ideas (or perhaps a theory) of the roots of radical, story-based Catholic activism. It is my belief that my working theory of Catholic activism has the potential to be expanded to include a number of other Catholic women, and that my personal experiences are an asset to this study.

13

NOTES

1 This paper capitalizes “Church” as a stand-alone reference to the Roman

Catholic Church. While this does not conform to Chicago style, it is in keeping with

Day’s own understanding of her Church’s eternal truths.

2 Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1984), 84-85.

3 David O’Brien, “The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Day,” Commonweal 107

(December 1980): 711-15.

4 Stephen Krupa, “Celebrating Dorothy Day,” America, August 27, 2001, http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=1140.

5 Sara Mehltretter, “The Vernacular Rhetoric of The Catholic Worker,” (paper presented at the annual convention of the National Communication Association

Convention, Chicago, November 15-18, 2007).

6 James Allaire and Rosemary Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of

Dorothy Day,” The Catholic Worker Movement (blog), n.d., http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/life-and-spirituality.html.

7 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 35.

8 Ibid., 83.

9 Ibid., 71.

14

Chapter 1

In this chapter, the background and historical precedent for a newspaper and movement such as the one Dorothy Day created will be explored, and the need for more scholarship on feminism, Catholicism, and the press will be explicated.

Dorothy Day was not the first individual to use the press to push for faith-based social and political change. Efforts to communicate with the public about social and theological issues via the mass media can be traced to the first printing press, upon which

Johannes Gutenberg produced the first book—his famous forty-two-line Bible—using interchangeable type in 1455. Within sixty years, the power of the press to affect public opinion became manifest in the rise of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.1

Use of the printing press allowed Luther to produce and disseminate copies of his message by the thousands, and his ability to capitalize on press technology limited the

Church’s ability to respond or counteract Luther’s message.

The press as a tool of religion and social change found broad expression during the explosion of the first truly mass medium of news, the penny press in the United States in the nineteenth century. The first penny paper, the New York Sun, debuted in 1833 and was followed by the New York Herald and New York Tribune. The penny press, so named because it cost one cent instead of the usual six cents per issue, caught on with laborers and other potential audiences thanks to its focus on stories that appealed to immigrants and the working classes. Into this environment came a wave of Catholics from Europe in the nineteenth century. At the time, the United States was still a predominantly Protestant nation, and anti-Catholic sentiment ran high.2 Protestants controlled most major

15 newspapers—as well as government offices, schools, and public service agencies—so

Catholic churches, schools, hospitals, and social service enterprises provided a welcome respite from widespread anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic sentiment. That environment gave birth to Catholic newspapers, which provided a reliable source of news from immigrants’

European homelands, a familiar language, and a feeling of tradition that was not found in their local newspapers.3 As the number of immigrants skyrocketed between 1822 and

1850, Catholic newspapers grew at a rate of one per year. In official proclamations in

1837, 1860, and 1884, American bishops affirmed support for Catholic publications of all stripes, even those “not officially sanctioned by us.”4

Even as the turn of the century approached, the Catholic press still focused primarily on immigrants, leaving those Catholics who were not as immediately tied to those communities without a regularly published connection to their Church. One editorial in 1911 noted that the American Catholic press had three daily and 115 weekly contingents written in “German, French, Polish, Bohemian, Italian, Slavonic, Magyar,

Dutch, Croatian, Spanish and Indian,” yet a daily Catholic paper written in English was

“still a dream.”5

American bishops began to realize the widening gap between their press outreach to immigrant and native believers. In 1920, the National Catholic Welfare Council was established by the Church, and with it, the Catholic Press Association (CPA). The organization not only aimed to influence public opinion through publication of news, but also to lobby Congress in support of Church-approved programs.6 In forming the organization, bishops knew they would have to compete with the mainstream secular press, and sought the input of reporters from those outlets. The first director, Justin

16 McGrath, was a reporter and editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York

Times, as well as the managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, before coming on board. The CPA also relied on reporters across the country to cover Catholic-centric events near them as quasi-bureau reporters.

With a new press arm in place, the American Catholic Church had a strengthened ability to reach a wider audience. While some dioceses were able to fund and produce their own newspapers, others relied on newspaper chains. Our Sunday Visitor was established in Indiana in 1912 “to educate Catholics in the faith and to resist anti-

Catholicism, but also to show Protestant America that Catholics could be good

Americans.” The Catholic Register chain began in Denver not long after.7

For diocesan newspapers, the publication’s tone and content often reflected the tastes of the local bishop, who typically saw the paper as a public relations tool rather than a source of unbiased news.8 At times, some bishops themselves were editors of these publications; a notable 22 percent of the bishop-editors had previous journalism experience.9 Few graduates of Catholic colleges entered the journalism field, and the first

Catholic journalism school appeared at Marquette University—now home to Dorothy

Day’s private papers—in 1915.10

As the Catholic press established itself in the United States, another faith-based group posed its own set of solutions to the public. The Social Gospel movement, which began in the mid-1800s and continued until 1920, was rooted in the belief that Christians had a duty to apply their faith, beliefs, and values to societal issues,11 and embraced the press as a necessary tool for spreading its message. The Social Gospel movement founded two publications, The Independent (begun in 1848) and The Outlook (begun in

17 1870), which printed works by prominent Social Gospel leaders, preachers and writers.12

Social Gospelists saw the press as “a powerful arbiter of public opinion at the core of social reform,” and sought to counteract the often profit-driven, salacious reporting they so loathed.13 A notable figure in the movement, William Jennings Bryan, told newspaper reporters in 1906 that the country was experiencing a “great moral awakening” and that journalists couldn’t allow themselves to be subject to “the selling of consciences for a salary.”14 However, the Social Gospel Movement remained distinctly Protestant, and even anti-Catholic. A move by the Church hierarchy to increase attention on social and economic issues was not simply a response to a growing movement by Protestant Social

Gospelists, but was rather a proactive and concurrent response to the same social and political upheaval, and one that was perhaps more friendly toward established labor organizations.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII released the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of

Revolutionary Change”), still widely regarded as the definitive Catholic Church document on social and labor policy. Rerum Novarum, written in large response to the working conditions faced by laborers during the Industrial Revolution, “clearly upheld the right of the worker to receive a living wage and to associate with his fellows for legitimate common purposes” and contained a “powerful condemnation of individualism” and “equally powerful defense of worker’s associations stimulated the growth of a Catholic labor movement and Catholic participation in non-denominational unions in nations where religiously based bodies were impractical.”15 In the encyclical,

Pope Leo XIII writes,

It has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked

18 competition. . . . To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.16

The encyclical calls it “right that extreme necessity be met by public aid,” that employers “respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character,” and says that “to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers—that is truly shameful and inhuman.”17 Leo XIII, in writing Rerum Novarum, thus made it official Church teaching that, as historian David O’Brien described it, “the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the workmen’s earnings, whether by force, by fraud, or by usurious dealing,” that “the rich should tremble at the threatenings of Jesus Christ,” and reminds the faithful that “God Himself, chose to seem and to be considered the son of a carpenter—nay, did not disdain to spend a great part of His life as a carpenter Himself.”18

When the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference was established in 1919, it was led by a group who “helped give a progressive tone to episcopal pronouncements and who used the educational facilities at their disposal to propagate a progressive social program.”19 That same year, “labor priest” Father John A.

Ryan, who with the help of James Cardinal Gibbons and Father Peter Dietz, helped give

“the Catholic Church a reputation as a friend of the American labor movement,”20 created

The Bishop’s Program of Social Reconstruction. This program and its corresponding pastoral document endorsed the right of labor to organize.21 Over the next decade and through the tumult of the Great Depression, the American Catholic Church hierarchy

“continued to endorse unionization and collective bargaining in general terms while urging the formation of joint bodies, occupational group, to settle labor-management

19 disputes,” while warning against the use of “violence, coercion, and intimidation” in strikes and labor conflicts.22 Labor organizations, including the industrial Congress of

Industrial Organizations, felt strong support by not only Catholic lay working people, but also from individual members of the Church leadership. Chicago’s George Cardinal

Mundelein was a supporter, as was Auxiliary Bishop Bernard Sheil and Monsignor

Reynold Hillenbrand, all of whom advocated for a progressive stance on unions and labor.23

Given the Church’s increased focus on both press outreach and the working conditions of the faithful, Catholic periodicals spread. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, publications such as The Labor Leader, published by the Association of Trade Unionists, and Work, published by the Catholic Labor Alliance in Chicago, became the face of the

“increasingly influential” Catholic labor press movement.24 During this era, labor issues dominated the attention of Catholic social activists, given the push for a reconstruction of social order by Pope Pius XI.25

In 1931, Pope Pius XI released Quadragesimo Anno (“In the Fortieth Year”), forty years after Rerum Novarum, and in the midst of worldwide economic strife. Pius XI formalized the notion of a living wage into Catholic Church teaching, and proposed a social order “based on a structure of vocational or occupational groups through which capital and labor could jointly determine standards of wages and working conditions, ending ruthless competition and replacing it with social justice,” according to O’Brien.26

The document, however widely accepted, left much for believers to interpret for themselves. On one hand, Catholic social thought in the United States during the 1930s featured near-uniform acceptance of social doctrine, there was still much disagreement,

20 some of it pointed, as to what those teachings meant and how they were to be applied.

Yet, Quadragesimo Anno has been hailed as “probably the most impressive and far- reaching” of Catholic Church documents proposing solutions to social and political problems by Catholic writer George Shuster.27

It was into this increasingly progressive environment of growing focus on work and press that the Catholic Worker emerged. In large part, the early focus of Day’s work reflected that of the Church and the broader Catholic press. In a 1931 document,

American bishops wrote of the objective of Catholic social action as “an equitable distribution of the income and wealth of the country and the world,”28 and a focus on just wages was a primary concern.29

It is also important to understand the climate of the Catholic Church in which

Dorothy Day lived, worked, and practiced her faith as a woman. Two decades into her leadership at the Catholic Worker, Day demonstrated an expanded independence and assertiveness reflective of the broader atmosphere for Catholic lay women in the 1950s.

In what was indeed a more conservative, restrictive time for all women in America, women like Day “continued to articulate the Catholic theory of the differences of the sexes, while her activities suggested a growing disjuncture between ideology and practice.”30 This suggested a stark contrast of the actions of Catholic women from previous decades who, as scholar James Kenneally pointed out, could, “despite the restrictions of Catholicism . . . achieve intellectual independence, a sense of self-worth, dignity, and happiness.”31 Despite a lack of “significant Catholic feminist criticism” during what scholar Jeffrey Burns called “absurdity of the 1950s,” many Catholic lay women adopted radical lifestyles, and a “new breed of Catholic woman developed in the

21 1950s—middle class, college educated, devoutly Catholic, activist in spirit and articulate.”32

In this vein, the Catholic Church has long been portrayed as the antithesis to progressive views of women and their place in society. One such myth, that of the

Council of Macon, posits that during the fifteenth century, Church officials debated the question as to whether women had a soul.33Albeit a hoax, such questions about the stance of the Church on the position of women continued throughout Dorothy Day’s lifetime.

For example, there was never an official Catholic Church position on suffrage, and most

American Catholics were opposed to it despite laypeople, priests, and a few bishops who spoke in favor.34 Leaders of the suffrage movement, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, thought the Catholic laity would fail to understand the concept of individual liberty.35

Still, Catholic Church leaders referred to female saints and heroines as proof that the

Church was ahead of the Protestant faithful on issues of gender. Yet the laity ultimately failed to become enthusiastic about the concept of suffrage, or what one Catholic woman described as suffrage’s “ugly attendant”: feminism.36

It is imperative to understand at this juncture of the thesis two theoretical perspectives: personalism and feminist standpoint theory. The first is integral to an understanding of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker’s mission and organizational philosophy. The latter is key to my own personal interpretation of Day’s work as a female reporter and newspaper editor. As I will later argue, the two philosophies are complementary and offer insight into how Day’s understanding of her faith is necessarily tied to her career and her gender identity.

Personalist philosophy draws heavily from Catholic thinkers and centers on the

22 dignity of the human person. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, personalist thinkers believe that “personhood carries with it an inviolable dignity that merits unconditional respect. . . . Stressing the moral nature of the person, or the person as the subject and object of free activity, personalism tends to focus on practical, moral action and ethical questions.”37 The school of personalism grew out of the thirteenth- century writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who “saw the individual person as among beings because of reason and self-mastery,” and, five hundred years later, the

Enlightenment philosophy of German Immanuel Kant, who “regarded dignity as

‘intrinsic worth.’”38 Personalist thought is in part a reaction to “impersonalist” or dehumanizing thought, including the idealism of German philosopher Georg Hegel that gave way to “equally impersonalist forms of materialism, culminating in Marxism.”39

Key thinkers in the personalist school were Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) and

Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950), both of whose writings profoundly influenced Catholic

Worker co-founder Peter Maurin, and eventually, Dorothy Day. Both Maritain and

Mounier “proposed the human person as the criterion according to which a solution to the crisis [of economic collapse and political and moral disorientation] was to be fashioned.”40 For Mounier, there was no solution to materialism in traditional political or religious reaction, but rather, a revolution in which “the bourgeois ideal of ‘having’ would yield to Christian ‘being,’ a being in communion with others” was necessary.41

Mounier advocated for individuals being “committed witnesses to the truth, who through their own interior renewal and living faith would galvanize the masses into a new communal structure,” and “the Christian experience of ‘tragic optimism,’ colored both by the drama of Christian existence and by the certainty of eschatological victory.”42

23 Maritain, who was a peer of Mounier and had a hand in drafting the 1948 United Nations

Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was something of an ambassador of French personalism to the United States—and by extension, to Catholic Worker co-founder

Maurin. Maurin, as with Mounier and Maritain before him, “preached a revolution, but a personalist revolution. . . . It proceeded toward community rather than fragmentation.”43As former Catholic Worker managing editor Tom Cornell put it, “Peter and other intellectuals of the period opened [Day] to a wealth of Christian and Catholic radical tradition and insight which coalesced with her secular radical background into the synthesis that is the Catholic Worker philosophy.”44 It is worth noting here that at the time she and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker Movement, “Dorothy knew nothing of

. . . the church’s teachings on social justice.”45

As seen in the work of the Catholic Worker Movement to provide basics such as food, clothing, and shelter for the needy, as well as the commitment to active solidarity with the poor, Catholic Worker philosophy is rooted in the belief that all individuals have inherent dignity. According to this school of personalist thought, “Every person without exception is of inestimable worth, and no one is dispensable or interchangeable. The person can never be lost or assimilated fully into the collectivity, because his interrelatedness with other persons is defined by his possession of a unique, irreplaceable value.”46 Day reflected this in her daily interactions with individuals at the Worker.

Fellow Catholic Worker Judith Gregory recalled Day would “[c]all people by name whenever she could (she seemed to know and value the confirmation this gives).”47 For

Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, as with other personalist thinkers, “human dignity as such does not depend on variables such as native intelligence, athletic ability,

24 or social prowess. Nor can it result merely from good conduct or moral merit. It must rather be rooted in human nature itself, so that on the deepest level, despite variations of moral conduct and the resultant differences in moral character, all members of the species share this dignity.”48

This approach is reflected in the wide variety of people who visited and revered

Day and the Catholic Worker, including political leaders Joseph and John F. Kennedy, writers Evelyn Waugh, and W.H. Auden,49 and financial supporters who included, according to a New York Times article, “a member of one of America’s richest families, a

Broadway producer, hundreds of workingmen and their families, a labor union and members of the clergy.”50 Individuals with all sorts of differences in social status and moral character crossed paths at the Worker—just as Day preferred it. When Mother

Teresa of Calcutta visited Maryhouse, the Catholic Worker House in New York City, in

1979, one indigent guest, Lena Rizzo, asked the now-saint for a cigarette. When Mother

Teresa declined, Lena remarked, “Well, then what good are you!”51 Such interactions are

“never superfluous or optional to the person, but are constitutive of his inherent make-up and vocation,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 52 and certainly part of the ideals of personalists whose lives were dedicated to living with the poor, like both Mother Teresa and Day devoted themselves.

Over the course of Day’s life, personalist thought continued to develop, particularly Catholic personalist thought under the leadership of Poland’s Karol Wojtyla, later and better known as Pope John Paul II. Wojtyla advocated for a “theological renewal based on the personalistic nature of man,” and repeatedly referenced and advocated for a personalist worldview both during his pontificate and in encyclicals that

25 became official Church teaching.53 John Paul II, using his knowledge of and devotion to personalist thought, became the pope “who most fully developed Catholic social teaching’s ethic of solidarity.”54 The Catholic Worker Movement, whose entire existence is predicated on a life of complete solidarity with and for the poor, reflects perfectly the personalist-rooted solidarity John Paul II describes as helping the world “to see the

‘other’—whether a person, people, or nation—not just as some kind of instrument, but as an equal partner sent by God to share in the ‘banquet of life’ and stewardship of God’s creation.”55 Through personalist thinkers such as John Paul II, the concept of solidarity— with the poor, with marginalized populations, with people in positions of social, political, and economic disadvantage—became less of a term of avoidance and solidly into the mainstream vernacular of accepted Church teaching. As solidarity scholar Gerald J.

Beyer notes, “In the modern era, Roman Catholicism moved slowly towards explicitly referring to solidarity, which it had eschewed, possibly due to its association with socialism . . . feminist, liberationist, and particularist perspectives have also provided fresh understandings of solidarity.”56

Beyer posits that the emergence of solidarity as a well-accepted, and later official part of Catholic social teaching vis a vis John Paul II, his personalist roots, and, as I would argue, its embodiment in the Catholic Worker Movement, and by extension, its newspaper, contains three key aspects:

[1] solidarity as anthropological “datum,” [2] solidarity as an ethical imperative, and [3] solidarity as a principle concretized in legislative policies and institutions. . . . “[F]actual solidarity” entails the recognition that human beings are by nature interdependent. The good of individuals is predicated on the development and good of the whole community . . . mutual empathy among members of a community, becoming aware of their deep similarities and interdependence, and deepening them by experiencing the needs of others just as we experience our own needs. This recognition of a shared humanity and fate disposes us to “hear

26 the cry of the wounded” among us. This experience involves the “discovery of the reality of the poor.” This aspect of solidarity can be conceived of as the first “moment” of solidarity if we think of the actualization of solidarity taking place in sequential steps. . . . The reality of interdependence should have ethical implications for all human interactions in the economic, cultural, political, and religious spheres of social life. This second “moment” of solidarity moves from recognition/acknowledgment to an initial response. . . . Barring such extreme circumstances, or when these circumstances have been alleviated, solidarity’s response moves in another direction: it attempts to understand the cry of the wounded through contemplation.57

Beyer argues that “solidarity in the Catholic tradition necessarily entails a conversion of the heart,” and that “action that flows from the contemplation of the causes of suffering and calls for the participation of the sufferer/oppressed comprises the third

‘moment’ of solidarity.”58 Further, Beyer notes that Catholic social teaching suggests a highly inclusive solidarity forming within and across classes, genders, races, and nations.59 He adds, “The contemporary Catholic notion of solidarity embraces the difference of the other, rather than erasing it.”60

The structure of the Catholic Worker as a movement is inherently tied up in

Catholic social teaching, personalist philosophy, and solidarity. As sociologist Grace

Yukich notes, Catholic Workers’ “Christ-like personalism encourages them to cultivate openness to . . . encounters with outsiders, leading them to share food, space, and spirit with the concrete ‘other.’”61 As Yukich correctly points out, much of the Catholic

Worker identity is based on people working, helping, and, in concrete ways, loving “the other.”62 But solidarity and personalism are not mere philosophical, academic, or theological concepts for Catholic Workers. These are lived, concrete actions: “They stress the importance of doing these things personally, arguing that in the gospel story of the feeding of the multitudes, Jesus told his disciples ‘You give them something to eat.’”63

As Yukich writes, the key tenets of Catholic Worker life—living, eating, serving,

27 praying—are all done with the personalist notion of communio in mind:

Love is actively constructed and affirmed through various concrete practices, with the ideology of personalism—meeting other people as whole persons, with one’s own whole self—encouraging Workers to cultivate openness to others no matter who they are. . . . More specifically, these types of encounters are cultivated through concrete, embodied practices of welcoming the whole other—namely, the practices of sharing food, space, and spirit.64

Personalist philosophy meshes well with feminist standpoint theory as the former underscores the ideal of dignity for all individuals, while the latter provides an epistemological basis for the value of experiences of marginalized groups—including women and the poor. Developed in the 1980s by feminist social scientists and rooted in a

Marxist philosophical perspective, feminist standpoint theory “analyze[s] how patriarchy naturalizes male and female divisions, making it seem natural, right, unremarkable that women are subordinate to men.”65 Feminist social scientists Nancy Hartsock and Sandra

Harding, the two foremost feminist standpoint theorists, developed the school of thought out of a need to “negotiate the world of the privileged . . . at the same time as she is grounded in a community whose marginal status generates a fundamentally different understanding of how the world works.”66 As with personalism, feminist standpoint theory has connections to Hegelian thought. The theory is rooted in the belief of a unique standpoint, one that is “earned through critical reflection on power relations and through engaging in the struggle required to construct an oppositional stance.”67 As theorist Julia

Wood writes:

Feminist standpoint theory offers a critique of existing power relations between women and men and the inequality they produce. It does so by developing an epistemology for constructing knowledge from women’s experiences. Standpoint theory asks what we know if we start from a subordinated group’s experiences. Feminist standpoint theory asks what we know if we start from women’s lives. Starting from women’s lives—from the material, everyday routines that compose them—immediately raises questions about what counts as knowledge.68

28

Individuals can have multiple standpoints, given their identity as part of groups marginalized and defined by race, gender, sexuality, or economic status. As such, those living in “subordinate social locations are more likely than privileged social locations to generate truth claims that are ‘more accurate’ or ‘less false’ . . . members of marginalized groups are more likely to understand both their location and the social location of more powerful groups than the converse.”69 This knowledge echoes the philosophy of postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard, in that it is inherently political. A commitment to the kind of critical consciousness demanded by a feminist standpoint worldview necessitates “a move away from liberalism and toward something like what Lyotard calls

‘thought,’ or ‘writing,’ namely thinking (which is also listening and writing) that attempts to bear witness to the singularity of the event.”70 Adopting a feminist standpoint, for theorist Margaret Grebowicz, “may be better conceived as a verb than as a noun—critical consciousness is something we do, not something we are.”71

This emphasis on action stems from a desire during the second wave of the feminist movement to make legitimate the authority of women’s narratives in interpreting how women experience social and political situations. It was thus part of an effort to build theory for women’s knowledge production as “distinct” from that of men.72 Similar to the beliefs of the Catholic Church, feminist standpoint theorists assert that “there are psychological and social differences between men and women attributable to their sex,” and that as “masculinity and femininity relation underpins this structure of dualism, it becomes the mark of phallocentric society and social theory where phallocentric means masculine is the defining norm.”73 As such, feminist standpoint theory is descriptive and normative: It reveals how the world operates, but also how it could be improved through

29 better construction of knowledge.74

While today feminist standpoint theory has been eschewed by postmodernist and poststructuralist thought, and is “frequently regarded as a quaint relic of feminism’s less sophisticated past,”75 according to feminist scholar Susan Hekman, other feminist thinkers continue to assert that feminist standpoint theory can still be categorized as “as a counterhegemonic discourse that works to destabilize hegemonic discourse.”76 One of the central criticisms of feminist standpoint theory is the understanding of truth. As feminist theorist Susan Hekman writes, “Ultimately, every woman is unique; if we analyze each in her uniqueness, systemic analysis is obviated.”77 Further, Kristina Rolin notes, “Whereas the assumption of essentialism is that all women share the same socially grounded perspective in virtue of being women, the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege is that epistemic advantage accrues to the subordinate automatically, just in virtue of their occupying a particular social position.”78 Yet, Rolin points out that feminist standpoint theory provides a remedy for what she terms “hermeneutical injustice.” By this she means “the injustice of having one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a lacuna in collective hermeneutical resources.”79

Such injustices can be remedied, as I would argue, in two ways—one theoretical

(personalism) and one practical (journalism). As for the implications of standpoint theory in the realm of journalism, Australian media scholars Bunty Avieson and Willa

McDonald note, “When journalists go undercover to report on the lives of those on the lowest echelons of society, they are attempting to put aside their own lived privilege to understand the lived reality of the people whose stories are being told.”80 As Day and her fellow Catholic Workers did, and do, through their participation in a movement so

30 intimately tied to the production of a newspaper, they take part in what Avieson and

McDonald describe as “creating the circumstances to experience that lived reality. . . .

[I]mmersion can supply new lines of evidence context, and attempts at understanding disadvantage in relation to the dominant culture and power structures.”81

Day, through her own experience and years of reporting on social, economic, and political injustices through “stunts,” undercover work, and later at The Catholic Worker through traveling and writing about the conditions she saw in her columns, was able to produce work that has direct parallels to Avieson and McDonald’s understanding of standpoint theory at work in reporting. They write:

It is not possible to live another’s experiences, but it is possible to develop one’s own empathy and compassion through sharing them, deliberately entering circumstances of disadvantage and marginalization. . . . Rather than shining a spotlight from above, which would describe the more usual process of journalist as investigator, they took a torch into the situation and held it there, offering a sustained insider account of systemic disadvantage, marginalization and disempowerment.82

More than a dozen biographies83 have been written about Day. As Day biographer

William Miller wrote in his obituary of her, “Psychobiographers, with all of their dexterity in fitting the person into the patterns of history’s necessity, would ultimately exhaust their categories in trying to ‘explain’ her.”84 As Day’s granddaughter pointed out in her own biography of her grandmother, “Many writers—scholars, historians, and theologians—have chosen to tell the story of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker . . . but it seems to me that those who knew her best are often the ones most fearful of trying to write about her in all her complexity, richness, and contradictions.”85

Books on Day’s spirituality and prayer life have also been published, as well as her influence on feminist philosophy and the emergence of retreats as a spiritual

31 practice.86 The Catholic Worker Movement as a whole has also been written about extensively, including the practices of specific Catholic Worker communities, writings from Catholic Workers both during Day’s life and after, a number of first-person accounts of those who have spent time in the communities, the impact of the Catholic

Worker Movement on activism and collectivism, on race relations, and on lay activism in the church.87

Scholarly studies of The Catholic Worker Movement include its agrarian and communal life movement,88 the movement’s place in history,89 particularly the Great

Depression90 and wartime periods, the movement’s longevity, as a vehicle for propagation and understanding of papal encyclicals91 and other Church teachings,92 and dozens of first-person accounts in the form of narratives, oral histories, and analyses.93

Some, but not extensive, scholarship has taken place on Dorothy Day, The

Catholic Worker, and the movement. Day has been examined in relation to fellow literary journalist Meridel Le Sueur,94 who also wrote of social plight during the Depression.

Day’s film criticism, and her role as a female film critic has been studied,95 as has her response to the Cold War96 in her writing. The motives of Day’s works have been written about to some extent, including The Catholic Worker’s role as a voice for the movement, and Day’s efforts to establish diverse readership through common-ground topics. Many of Day’s perspectives can be found in her memoirs.97 Unfortunately, researchers are left wanting for some of Day’s work, which is either lost or went unsigned by Day herself.

Her earliest writings, journals, an unfinished novel, a bevy of letters, and a poem she co- wrote with Eugene O’Neill and Max Bodenheim went up in flames in 1935 when her

Staten Island cottage caught fire.98 And Dorothy wrote many of the Catholic Worker’s

32 unsigned pieces. As her brother Donald remarked, “[E]ither she was writing the entire paper or everyone at the Worker was starting to sound like her.”99 It is also imperative to note why Miller’s Dorothy Day: A Biography was not used in this study: Day herself rescinded her permission for Miller to publish the biography, but he published anyway.

Day’s decision was in large part due to factual errors on Miller’s part, including his decision to simply insert what he believed to be the correct names of real people into

Day’s semiautobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin.100

It is also worth noting the depth and breadth of intellectual, philosophical, and theological interpretations of the Catholic Worker, both newspaper and movement, not limited to the understanding of personalist philosophy and feminist standpoint theory used here. As scholar Mary Segers notes, “Usually, a movement which draws its ideas from so many different sources and intellectual traditions gains wide appeal at the cost of intellectual coherence, consistency and rigor. There is, however, an internal consistency to the intellectual and social vision of the Catholic Worker movement.”101 And as her granddaughter Kate Hennessy writes, “One of the greatest impediments to understanding

Dorothy, I have come to believe after years of listening to academics, theologians, clergy, historians, biographers, and pundits speak of her, is this desire to define her in ways that make us feel more at ease with her. To make her less complicated, less complex, whether in order to revile her or praise her.”102

This work is complicated by the fact that Day “wrote three accounts of her own life. . . . In addition to the written sources, there are the oral-history recordings and hundreds of acquaintances and friends ready to regale any listener with a Dorothy story. .

. . Because of the tone of so many suggest that something much more crucial is at stake

33 than historical accuracy.”103 While this particular study does indeed aim for historical accuracy, it is worth considering the ways in which her admirers, fellow Catholic

Workers, biographers, and Day herself portray Day’s life. As June O’Connor points out in her account of Day’s life, “[T]he female tradition in autobiography emphasizes the personal over the historical and family life over career, and that is expressed in a disjunctiveness of forms rather than in the progressive narratives that characterize men’s autobiographies.”104 Thus, attempting to ascribe or prescribe a certain theory, philosophy, or theology to such an enigmatic woman and her movement, to a person described by

Dwight Macdonald in The New York Review of Books as “one of those frequent, indeed chronic, irruptions of the unexpected . . . shows history is not a well-trained valet to any system of ideas but a chancy affair.”105 In short, my aim is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

This thesis is the first to examine Day’s identity as a woman journalist and lay leader within the male-dominated structures of the Catholic Church and newspaper industry, and how Day leveraged her gender to create change from within those systems.

Further, this thesis combines research and thought from a number of disciplines, as befits

Day and the subject. As Day historian Anne Klejment once remarked,

Studying the history of the Catholic Worker movement . . . provides an outstanding liberal arts education (that includes) cultural pacifism, criticism, philosophies of work and technology, romanticism, spiritual renewal, neo- scholasticism, personalist politics, and New Left radicalism. . . . To trace the sources of Dorothy Day’s thought, her synthesis of radical Catholicism, and her influence on the American church and culture, one finds oneself involved in exciting discoveries, self-explorations, and creativity.106

This study uses a close reading of Day’s personal papers at Marquette University, including correspondence, diaries, journals, and manuscripts, as well as Day’s own work

34 published in The Catholic Worker and her early reporting for other news outlets. These primary documents supplement her letters contained in the books The Duty of Delight:

The Diaries of Dorothy Day,107 All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy

Day,108 and oral histories published in Voices from the Catholic Worker,109 and newspaper articles written about Day’s life to examine the ways in which Day navigated and understood the patriarchal systems of the Catholic Church and the newspaper industry. The primary focus guiding the inquiry was to find and detail the ways in which

Day, as a radical Catholic activist and journalist, was able to navigate the social, political, religious, and occupational structures she inhabited by both subverting and leveraging gender norms of her time.

NOTES

1 D.G. Hart, “The Printing-Press Prophet,” The Wall Street Journal, January 9,

2016.

2 Sabrina P. Ramet and Christine M. Hassenstab, “The Know Nothing Party:

Three Theories about Its Rise and Demise,” Politics and Religion 6, no. 3 (September

2013): 570-95, doi.org/10.1017/S1755048312000739.

3 Malachy R. McCarthy, “From Reliquary to Relevance: Creating an American

Catholic Union List of Newspapers and Serials,” Catholic Library World 77, no. 3

(March 2007): 216.

4 Michael Real, “Trends in Structure and Policy in the American Catholic Press,”

Journalism Quarterly 52, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 265.

5 Edward Spillane, “The Catholic Press,” America 5, no. 19 (August 19, 1911),

438.

35

6 McCarthy, “From Reliquary to Relevance,” 220.

7 Greg Erlandson, “Catholic Media Needed Now More than Ever,” Priest, May

2010, 16.

8 William J. Thorn and Bruce Garrison, “Institutional Stress: Journalistic Norms in the Catholic Press,” Review of Religious Research 25, no. 1 (September 1983): 49, doi:10.2307/3511311.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Gina A. Zurlo, “The Social Gospel, Ecumenical Movement, and Christian

Sociology: The Institute of Social and Religious Research,” The American Sociologist 46, no. 2 (June 2015): 178, doi:10.1007/s12108-014-9231-z.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 David O’Brien, “American Catholics and Organized Labor in the 1930’s,” The

Catholic Historical Review 52, no. 3 (October 1966): 325.

16 Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum,” May 15, 1891. http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo- xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 O’Brien, “American Catholics and Organized Labor in the 1930’s,” 324.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 326.

36

22 Ibid., 340.

23 Ibid., 341.

24 Heinz Eulau, “Proselytizing in the Catholic Press,” Public Opinion Quarterly

11, no. 2 (Summer 1947): 192.

25 O’Brien, “American Catholics and Organized Labor in the 1930’s,” 323.

26 Ibid. 327.

27 George Shuster, “Only One Candle in an Immense and Impenetrable

Darkness,” America, December 13, 1980.

28 O’Brien, “American Catholics and Organized Labor in the 1930’s,” 331.

29 Ibid., 332.

30 Jeffrey Burns, “Catholic Laywomen in the Culture of American Catholicism in the 1950s,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5, no. 3/4 (Summer-Fall 1986): 385-400.

31 Ibid., 389.

32 Ibid., 392.

33 Kathleen Sprows Cummings, “Do Women Have Souls? Catholicism, Feminism

& the Council of Macon,” Commonweal, September 11, 2009.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, “Personalism,” The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personalism/.

38 Ibid.

37

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 William Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace,’” America,

December 13, 1980.

44 Tom Cornell, “Faith to Sustain a Vision and to Communicate It,” America,

December 13, 1980.

45 Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate

Portrait of My Grandmother (New York: Scribner, 2017).

46 Williams and Bengtsson, “Personalism.”

47 Judith Gregory, “Remembering Dorothy Day,” America, December 13, 1980.

48 Williams and Bengtsson, “Personalism.”

49 June O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day: A Feminist Perspective

(New York: Crossroad, 1991), 28.

50 Will Lissner, “$15,540 Donated to Help Shelter,” New York Times, March 22,

1956.

51 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 303.

52 Williams and Bengtsson, “Personalism.”

53 Ibid.

54 Gerald Beyer, “The Meaning of Solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching,”

Political Theology, Unsung Americans, 15, no. 1 (2014): 7–25.

55 Ibid.

38

56 Ibid., 12.

57 Ibid., 15.

58 Ibid., 16.

59 Ibid., 18.

60 Ibid., 20.

61 Grace Yukich, “Boundary Work in Inclusive Religious Groups: Constructing

Identity at the New York Catholic Worker,” Sociology of Religion 71, no. 2 (June 1,

2010): 176, doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srq023. 176.

62 Ibid., 186

63 Ibid., 182.

64 Ibid., 187.

65 Julia T. Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory and Muted Group Theory:

Commonalities and Divergences,” Women and Language 28, no. 2 (2005): 61–64.

66 Margaret Grebowicz, “Standpoint Theory and the Possibility of Justice: A

Lyotardian Critique of the Democratization of Knowledge,” Hypatia 22, no. 4 (Fall

2007): 16–29.

67 Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory and Muted Group Theory,” 61.

68 Ibid., 62.

69 Ibid., 63.

70 Grebowicz, “Standpoint Theory and the Possibility of Justice,”16–29.

71 Ibid., 27.

72 Nadine Changfoot, “Feminist Standpoint Theory, Hegel and the Dialectical

Self,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 30, no. 4 (2004): 478.

39

73 Ibid., 483.

74 Karen Houle, “Making Strange: Deconstruction and Feminist Standpoint

Theory,” Frontiers-A Journal of Women’s Studies 30, no. 1 (January 2009): 172–73.

75 Susan Hekman, “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited.”

SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22, no. 2 (1997): 341–65.

76 Ibid., 355.

77 Ibid., 341–65.

78 Kristina Rolin, “Standpoint Theory as a Methodology for the Study of Power

Relations,” Hypatia 24, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 218–26.

79 Ibid., 221.

80 Bunty Avieson and Willa McDonald, “Dangerous Liaisons: Undercover

Journalism, Standpoint Theory and Social Revelation,” Media International Australia

163, no. 1 (2017): 137-50.

81 Ibid., 139.

82 Ibid., 140.

83 Jim Forest, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 2011); Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; Robert

Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Reading, MA.: Perseus Books, 1999); Jim

Forest, Love Is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day (New York, NY: Paulist Press,

1986); Patrick Jordan, Dorothy Day: Love in Action (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,

2015); Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1984); William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography

(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982); William D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love:

40

Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (New York: Liveright, 1973); Jim

O’Grady, Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor. Unsung Americans (Staten Island, NY:

Ward Hill Press, 1993); and Rosalie G. Riegle, Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who

Knew Her (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006).

84 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

85 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, xiv.

86 Dozens of books have examined some portion of Day’s life. For a complete bibliography of books on Day and the Catholic Worker, consult the movement’s website: http://www.catholicworker.org/about/bibliography.html.

87 Dissertations and theses on Day have focused on topics including her relationship with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing; the involvement of both women and families in the Catholic Worker movement; the movement’s organizational structure, concepts of voluntary poverty, radicalism, conservatism, anarchism, and antimodernism within the movement; specific Catholic Worker Communities, both geographically and in terms of their work focus; and the movement’s place within larger contexts, including the

Catholic Church, the social work profession, and personalism. Additional scholarship on

Day herself has focused on a few general topics, including her favorite authors’ and novels’ influence on her work, her relationship with her contemporaries (including

Thomas Merton, Jane Addams, Joseph Kessel, and Cesar Chavez), her impact and influence on the larger context in which she lived and worked, including literary journalism, as a religious woman and Catholic laywoman, the retreat movement, the radical, anarchist and protest movements, and on social work as a profession. While Day had many roles throughout her life, some scholars have chosen to study her through one

41 specific title. Day as a mystic, an autobiographer, educator, social welfare reformer, and

Catholic convert have been analyzed. Her spirituality, personal philosophy and opinions on topics as broad as social and theological ideas to as specific as her own canonization have all been written about at length.

88 Paul V. Stock, “The Perennial Nature of the Catholic Worker Farms: A

Reconsideration of Failure,” Rural Sociology 79, no. 2 (June 2014): 143-73, doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12029.

89 Paul V. Stock, “Consensus Social Movements and the Catholic Worker,”

Politics & Religion 5, no. 1 (April 2012): 83-102, doi.org/10.1017/S1755048311000642.

90 Neil Betten, “The Great Depression and the Activities of the Catholic Worker

Movement,” Labor History 12, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 243, doi.org/10.1080/00236567108584163.

91 In the Catholic Church, an encyclical is a document or letter, typically released by the pope, and is usually focused on a specific Church teaching or doctrine.

92 Ashley Beck, “Making the Encyclicals Click: Catholic Social Teaching and

Radical Traditions,” New Blackfriars 93, no. 1044 (March 2012): 213-29 doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2011.01477.x.

93 George M. Anderson, “Visiting a Catholic Worker Farm,” America 187, no. 4

(August 12, 2002): 15, https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/398/article/visiting- catholic-worker-farm.

94 Nancy L. Roberts, “Meridel Le Sueur, Dorothy Day, and the Literary

Journalism of Advocacy during the Great Depression,” Literary Journalism Studies 7, no.

1 (Spring 2015 2015): 44-57.

42

95 Richard Abel, “‘Zip!-Zam!-Zowie!’: A New Take on Institutional American

Cinema’s History Before 1915,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 29, no. 4

(December 2009): 421.

96 Nancy L. Roberts, “Journalism and Activism: Dorothy Day’s Response to the

Cold War,” Peace & Change 12, no. 1/2 (April 1987), doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-

0130.1987.tb00090.x

97 Dorothy Day, From Union Square to Rome (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,

2006); Dorothy Day, House of Hospitality (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor

Publishing Division, 2015); and Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 1997).

98 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 83.

99 Ibid., 103.

100 Ibid., 278.

101 Mary Segers, “Equality and Christian Anarchism: The Political and Social

Ideas of the Catholic Worker Movement,” The Review of Politics 40, no. 2 (April 1978):

196-203.

102 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, appendix.

103 Sandra Yocum Mize, “Studies on Dorothy Day and the Soul of American

Catholicism,” U.S. Catholic Historian 16, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 36-57.

104 June O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day: A Feminist Perspective

(New York: Crossroad, 1991), 12.

105 William Farrell, “About New York: Drifters, Priests and Nuns Pay Respects to

Dorothy Day,” New York Times, December 3, 1980.

43

106 Yocum Mize, “Studies on Dorothy Day and the Soul of American

Catholicism,” 36–57.

107 Dorothy Day and Robert Ellsberg, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of

Dorothy Day (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2008).

108 Dorothy Day, and Robert Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven: The Selected

Letters of Dorothy Day (New York: Image Books, 2012).

109 Rosalie Riegle Troester, ed., Voices from the Catholic Worker (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1993).

44

Chapter 2

This chapter will provide a biographical study of Dorothy Day, in hopes of understanding insomuch as is possible the enigmatic figure she was. Day was born in

Brooklyn, New York, on November 8, 1897, to Grace Satterlee and John Day, six years after the publication of Rerum Novarum and three years before the founding of the

Socialist Party.1 Dorothy was the third of five children, including older brothers Donald and Sam, and younger siblings Della and John.2

Day’s father, the son of a Confederate surgeon, worked in the newspaper industry, as did two of Dorothy’s brothers. Her father, John, worked as a sportswriter for Joseph

Pulitzer’s New York World, was a “make-up editor,” assembling stories into pages for

William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal-American, and covered boxing and racing for The San Francisco Chronicle.3 John moved the family to the San Francisco area after accepting a job as the sports editor. Shortly thereafter, the 1906 earthquake wrecked the

Day family home, as well as the paper where John worked.4 One of Dorothy’s earliest memories was of the earthquake, and her mother’s attempts to help those in the family’s devastated neighborhood.5 Day’s first memory of a religious experience also came in

Oakland. As she recalled in one of her diaries near the end of her life, “The first time I remember going to a place of worship was a little Baptist church with a next door neighbor’s child in Oakland, Calif. There was a children’s library there and I was allowed to borrow a book about a pious little girl called Birdie. I remember I wanted to be like her.”6 After the disaster, the Days were forced to relocate to Chicago. Before the move, the Day family was relatively well off, and even employed a domestic servant. But their twelve years in Chicago were marked by poverty, and they lived in a tenement above a

45 saloon, despite John’s work in newspapers.7

Dorothy recalled reading the Bible on occasion as a child, and the Days considered themselves Protestant Christians, but the family did not regularly attend church until a rector from an Episcopal church encouraged Dorothy’s mother to have her sons join the church choir. Dorothy had a particular fondness for the psalms, and took it upon herself to study in order to be baptized and confirmed as a teenager.8

The Days emphasized reading and education to their children, and Dorothy was a particularly avid reader and eager learner. She read novels by Hugo, Dickens, Stevenson,

Cooper, and Poe, as well as writings by satirist and iconoclast Sinclair Lewis. Her father was adamant about keeping the children from reading popular “dime novels.”9 Dorothy’s favorite author as a child—and for the remainder of her life—was Fyodor Dostoevsky.10

Dorothy grew to love writing, graduated high school at sixteen, and won a Hearst scholarship to study at the University of Illinois-Urbana.11 At seventeen, while sitting atop a tombstone, she rebuffed her first of four marriage proposals, this one from an aspiring chicken farmer who “thought Dorothy would make a good farmer’s wife.”12

Upon arriving at the university, Day landed her first reporting job covering social conditions and wealth disparity for a local paper13 and joined a writing group called the

Scribblers’ Club.14 From her first-ever assignments, Day’s writing was inspired by her own life, as she herself worked odd jobs, caring for children and doing laundry for families in exchange for a place to live. She wrote of the time, “Writers are notoriously underpaid. I earned more working my way through a year of college at 20 cents an hour for housework, plus four hours work a day for board and room.”15

Day left school after just two years, and moved into a flat between the Manhattan

46 and Brooklyn bridges in New York City in 1916 “with not much more than her phonograph,”16 and the articles she’d written during her time in Illinois to show editors.

She soon found work as a features writer at the socialist daily The Call. Day’s first big story for the radical paper was about women workers, and her success on the assignment led to higher-profile assignments covering worker strikes, the new birth control movement, and pacifists. She landed her biggest interview with the Russian revolutionist

Leon Trotsky, who lived briefly in New York in 1917, just weeks before the czar was overthrown.17 Day later wrote of this time, “I don’t look back on those days as full of glamour,” saying that she was “dragged into Village life.” Yet her life and work at the time were not a departure from who she was: “My work in the labor field, and with the radical group was very much in accordance with my conscience—that is why I still love them all. It is all a question of means and ends.”18 Day worked for The Call for just seven months.19 Then she was fired, according to a biographer, “[p]ossibly because she never seem[ed] the least bit interested in the intricacies of Socialist logic.”20

Day’s next job was at Greenwich Village’s “chic radical monthly” 21 The Masses, where she became more politically engaged and interviewed movement figures such as union leader Eugene V. Debs, anarchist Emma Goldman, and socialist journalist and activist John Reed.22 Day befriended Peggy Baird Johns, who “was rumored to be the first woman in the Village to bob her hair.”23 Day routinely worked alongside socialists and communists, befriended American Federation of Labor and Industrial Workers of the

World organizers, and covered labor meetings, “bread riots,” and strikes and protests against living costs, conscription, and unemployment. During this time, Day protested conscription for the Great War with a group of students from Columbia University, and

47 was already professing pacifism.24 Day’s personal writings from this time show that she felt her reporting gave her a sense of “adventure” from her proximity to those creating social change, and that she was impressed by the protests and direct actions she was able to witness firsthand. While Day did advocate a point of view through her reporting, it’s not clear from her personal writings whether she in fact endorsed each of the causes she covered.25

During her early years in New York, Day befriended “radicals and rebels of all stripes,” within the Greenwich Village artist and activist community. She became engaged to radical writer and Orthodox Jew Itzok Granich, who began signing his work as “Irwin Granich,” and later, “Mike Gold.” While with Granich, Day invited homeless people she met in the park to visit her apartment, and Granich often pointed out to

Dorothy her natural inclination toward the spiritual.26 The pair would remain close friends throughout Day’s life, but never married. Day also met playwright Eugene

O’Neill during this time,27 and the pair became regulars at a saloon called The Golden

Swan, where “a special back room was reserved for the young writers and artists,”28 and

The Hell Hole, where Dorothy would bring “rough-looking men she had encountered at the steps of St. Joseph’s Church in need of a warm room and a stiff drink.”29 In the winter of 1918, she and O’Neill became close friends, and frequently attended balls at socialist hotspot Webster Hall and haunted neighborhood taverns until closing time, after which

Day would duck into Mass at St. Joseph’s Church. As Day biographer William Miller describes it:30

In the early hours she would walk with him to whatever room happened to be his lot, see that he was warmly covered, and then, likely as not, stop at St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue and kneel for a while. She did this from no explicit religious impulse, but only because the church was warm, and she felt soothed by

48 its quietness.31

During this period, she became overwhelmed by “the tragic aspect of life in general,” and “could no longer endure the life [she] was leading.” This period culminated with the death of O’Neill’s friend, Louis Holliday, who swallowed a vial of heroin in front of friends gathered at a bar, killing himself in the wake of being left by his fiancée.

Holliday died in Day’s arms. She decided to leave the “Village life” the next morning, and joined her sister Della in a training program for nurses at Kings County Hospital in

Brooklyn as a national flu pandemic took hold.32

While training, she experienced what one biographer called a “fatal attraction” to abusive playboy writer Lionel Moise, who was at the time working for The New York

American.33 Moise was already legendary among journalists for his ability to write about work and jobs, particularly work he had personally experienced. Moise had a knack for sniffing out a fantastic story and “was one of the last of his kind—opinionated, hard drinking, hard fighting, and loyal to no one but himself.”34 The “womanizing newspaperman” was the object of Day’s obsessive first love affair, which spanned years, states, countries, and one marriage to another man. When Day became pregnant with his child at the age of twenty-two,35 Moise demanded she get an abortion, and then left her.36

Unsure of how to handle the situation, Dorothy recalled the advice of her mother, Grace, who had once told her of the procedure, “Don’t get caught.” Day followed Moise to

Chicago, where she had her abortion.37 Of her relationship with Moise, she called it the

“dimmest adolescent crush.”38 Yet, according to writer Stephen Krupa, Moise was “likely a stand-in for Day’s emotionally distant father,” and Day’s decision to get an abortion was a desperate attempt to keep him by her side.39 It was Moise who taught Day how to

49 write as a journalist, “but he fought bitterly against being tied by love for any woman and was cruel to those who did love him,” according to granddaughter Kate Hennessy.40

She soon met and married a much older literary promoter, Berkley Tobey.41

While on a train to Groton, Connecticut, Tobey simply told Day, “Let’s get married.” The wealthy Tobey whisked Day off to Europe, only to have the marriage fall apart in less than a year.42 Tobey was an occasional writer for The Masses and The New Republic. He tried his hand at acting and inherited a sizeable fortune—some of which he gave to The

Masses. Tobey was something of a serial wedder, and as one rumor had it, he “would give each of his new wives the family silver, which would then be ‘stolen’ to find its way back to him at the end of the marriage.”43 Day told her biographer, William Miller, that the marriage was “an unhappy love affair,” and said she “felt [she] had used him and was ashamed.”44 Day later recalled the marriage to Catholic Worker editor Robert Ellsberg.

He wrote:

She said when she was twenty-two, she was exhausted, so she married this sugar daddy, just to go to Europe to take a rest. “What I remember about Europe is falling asleep on a yacht off Capri and having a drink in the Eiffel Tower. When I got back, we were staying in the Hotel New Yorker. One morning I got up before he did and took all the jewelry he had given me and put it on the counter and went home to my mother.” The thing that amazed me about all that was the courage. . . . Most women don’t have the moxie to marry somebody just for a vacation. She needed a rest, and so she took one. She didn’t think it was a good thing to do ultimately, but it was a tough thing, a gutsy thing. . . . She tried a lot of different things. Got herself in trouble. And then had the humility to say, “Look I can’t. . . . I’m not doing good with my life. . . . I can’t handle my own life, and I’m going to look for wisdom someplace else.”45

After her marriage fell apart, Day tried to make her way back to Moise, despite his dalliances with other women and her own dates with other men. Day briefly worked for the communist journal The Liberator in Chicago. While caring for radical friend

Marie Cramer, “who had tried to either commit suicide over love for Lionel [Moise] or

50 give herself an abortion by taking twenty-five tablets of bichloride of mercury,”46 Day was arrested during a “Red Squad” raid on the house by city police looking for labor activists or communists. Police charged Day as being “an occupant of a ‘disorderly house,’” or in short, a prostitute.47

As biographer Miller wrote, “If anyone, in the first 25 years of life, seemed headed for despair, it was she.”48 Indeed, Day seldom wrote about this time, saying “there are a couple years in my life after I left the hospital [during nursing training] that I don’t go into.”49 The only record of her mentioning this period—as well as her own experience with suicide—in writing came in a letter written to a woman who visited Dorothy in the last years of her life whom she appeared to identify with strongly:

I myself have been through much of what you have been through. Twice I tried to take my own life, and the dear Lord pulled me thru that darkness—I was rescued from that darkness. My sickness was physical too, since I had had an abortion with bad after-effects, and in a way my sickness of mind was a penance I had to endure. . . . I have known such joy in nature, and work—in writing . . . in fulfilling myself, using my God-given love of beauty and desire to express myself.50

Day moved to New Orleans in 1923 to work as a reporter for The New Orleans

Item,51 a paper that was known for muckraking, sensational articles.52 Day brought with her to New Orleans a friend from Chicago, who gave Day her first rosary.53 She began visiting Catholic churches out of curiosity and in search of respite.54 Day wrote a letter to literary editor Llewellyn Jones from New Orleans about her writing a double page feature in the Sunday edition of the New Orleans Item, as well as daily features. She told Jones that the paper’s editors “don’t mind working you like hell for very little money,” and that the busy schedule “keeps me occupied so that I don’t miss liquor and bright lights.”

While in New Orleans, one of her blockbuster assignments was to go undercover as a taxi

51 dancer, or paid dance partner, in three “dens of vice [that] cater only to men, and many girls are hired to dance with them. The men pay ten cents a dance, and the girl gets four of it.” Long before Gloria Steinem posed as a Playboy bunny to expose working conditions of girls at Playboy Clubs, Day was “to investigate, under assumed name, and disguised as a flapper, to see if this wild night life doesn’t lead to vice and crime amongst our young womanhood of the south.” How Day felt about the assignment: “I shall enjoy myself immensely.”55 In what would become a hallmark of her writing, Day, in these articles, led with vivid and intimate portraits of women at work. In one February 1924 piece, she wrote of “the girls who sit there night after night and make their living not only from the men they meet, but from the number of drinks they can induce the customers to buy.” She described one particular restaurant as a place that “at times can be sorbid [sic] and maudlin and ugly in every way, but there are some excitement seekers who found a thrill in the sordid and ugly, they were beautiful women who bloom like orchids in an unhealthy and vicious setting.”56 While her series on the taxi dancers made a splash, and she told Jones that she was “having a lovely time,— lots of pretty boys around . . . am very tan, am drinking a little but not too much,”57 Day soon felt ready to move back to

New York.

In 1924, Day’s period of drift ended with the publication of her novel, The

Eleventh Virgin, which centered on themes of disillusionment and was loosely based on her own life.58 Day sold the screen rights to her book for five thousand dollars, and purchased a beachfront cottage on Staten Island where she could write. The sale of her rights to the movie, which was never produced, made Day “fabulously rich,” and led her back to New York where “for several weeks she wined and dined old friends.”59

52 Day’s move to New York in 1925 marked a pivotal period of immense change and happiness, as she entered into a common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, who shared Day’s commitment to social change. While Day wrote that Batterham was “an anarchist, an Englishman by descent, and a biologist,” he was, in fact, from North

Carolina. Catholic Worker editor Ellsberg wrote of Batterham, “His ‘anarchism’ was chiefly expressed in his opposition to the institution of marriage. And though he was fascinated by natural history and anything to do with fishing, it was a stretch to call him a biologist; he worked in a factory making gauges.”60

While Day wrote gardening columns with some regularity for the Staten Island

Advance and less frequently for The New Masses, she was primarily focused on her relationship with Batterham and her burgeoning spirituality.61 Day prayed the rosary on her way to get the mail each morning, recited prayers while doing housework, contemplated God’s presence in nature while gardening, and even prayed in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary that had been given to her. Day wrote in September 1925 of how “it would be wonderful to live entirely off the land and not depend on wages for a livelihood,” perhaps foreshadowing the kind of life she would go on to lead.62

Batterham was adamantly against the notion of having children, as well as any form of organized religion. While Day believed that she was unable to have children after her abortion, she became pregnant a second time. During the pregnancy, Day became resolved that her child would be baptized in the Catholic faith, as she thought it would bring about a more firm belief for herself and provide “order” to the child’s life.63 She knew, even before she gave birth, that she would be faced with “the simple question of whether I chose God or man.”64

53 Her daughter, Tamar Teresa, was born on March 4, 1927. Tamar’s birth led to

Day’s conversion, and Day found that a private faith, as well as her own radical ideology, compelled her to participate in the community that the Catholic Church offered.65 Day saw Sister Aloysia, a Catholic nun, while walking one day, and inquired about having her daughter baptized. Sister Aloysia brought Day a copy of the Catechism and a number of

Catholic magazines, and the pair struck up a friendship. Tamar was baptized in July of

1927, and Dorothy was confirmed into the Church on December 28, 1927.66

Batterham felt he could not reconcile his anarchist and atheist beliefs with Day’s newfound religious fervor,67 and left Dorothy and Tamar numerous times over the months that followed. This caused Dorothy to hesitate in being baptized herself, knowing it would lead to the end of the pair’s relationship. The tumult led to Day being diagnosed with a “nervous condition,”68 and a final, emotional fight was followed shortly afterward by Day’s separation from Batterham.69 The following day, Batterham tried to return. Day did not allow him into their home, and went to Sister Aloysia the next day to be conditionally baptized, as the Episcopal Church previously had baptized her as a teenager.70 Day said later in life, after Day and Batterham reconciled, that “their separation came about because she felt gratitude toward God and desired to say thank you, while Forster did not.”71

After her split from Batterham, Day worked for communist outfit, the All-

America Anti-Imperialist League and then for the nonviolence organization, the

Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which she became a lifelong member.72 She worked for a number of radical organizations for the next several years, and wrote occasionally for the communist literary magazine The New Masses.73 She and Tamar moved to

54 Hollywood, California in 1929, where Day was the only woman on the staff of twenty- four writers at Pathé,74 the studio where she had accepted a job as a dialogue writer, but she received little work and stayed only three months.75 Their time in California was punctuated with longing letters back to Batterham (“Why don’t you becom[e] reasonable or indulgent or whatever you want to call it and tell me to come back and marry you? We could be so happy together. Even if we fought it would be better than this blank dead feeling.”)76 Armed with “Tamar, her typewriter, her phonograph, and two hundred dollars,” the pair left to spend six months in Mexico in a 1926 Ford that Day purchased for eighty-five dollars, and that would drive no faster than thirty miles per hour.77 The pair met artist Diego Rivera, who had read Day’s account of Tamar’s birth in The New

Masses, and Day began penning articles for an auto magazine and for Catholic publications America and Commonweal.78 She and Tamar returned the United States in

1931 after Tamar contracted malaria.79

Day traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1932 during the depths of the Depression to report on the National Hunger March of unemployed Americans for America and

Commonweal.80 While covering the march, Day noted she felt “unfulfilled,” as her faith and her conscience made her feel compelled to do something about the suffering she witnessed, rather than simply to write about it.81 After Day finished filing her stories on the march, she visited the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, where she prayed in tears that she would find a way to merge her writing abilities with her desire to work in solidarity with and for the poor.

Upon her return to New York, Peter Maurin was waiting to meet her at the apartment in the city she shared with her brother John and his wife, Tessa.82 Thinking

55 Maurin was a lunatic, Tessa had been initially hesitant to let Maurin in the door, but provided him with a cup of coffee anyway.83 Maurin had lived a life of voluntary poverty on the streets of New York as he shared the idea of Catholic social teaching with anyone who would listen. He found an open ear in Day, who had never heard about the Church’s social teachings.84 Maurin’s spiritual and theological knowledge and insight into scripture, the sacraments, and the Church—paired with Day’s professional background as a reporter—proved complementary.85

Maurin, born to an impoverished family with twenty-two children,86 began his journey toward radical poverty- and faith-based activism when he moved to Paris at the age of fourteen to begin his education and training as an ordained religious member of the Christian Brothers. Maurin remained with the order for eleven years. He first encountered struggling, working-class families as he taught elementary students in

France. Maurin began studying Catholic social teaching, including the papal encyclical

Rerum Novarum, after a period of ascribed military service, and joined a social and political movement called Le Sillon (“The Path”) after leaving the Christian Brothers.

When Maurin later emigrated to Canada, and eventually the United States, he became more aware of the plight facing working-class people, especially as it pertained to low wages and poor working conditions. He began writing about industrialism and the faith in

1925.87 In 1932, when Maurin met Day, he was a homeless street philosopher; Maurin was something of an eccentric, frequently forgetting to eat, wearing secondhand clothes, and occasionally forgetting to bathe.88

Maurin and Day’s plan was threefold: They would create “houses of hospitality” that would provide care and community for those living in urban poverty, establish rural

56 communities that Maurin called “agronomic universities” to provide education on farming and crafts to those who were unemployed or seeking respite from urban life, and create spaces for discourse and “clarification of thought” where the duo would share their vision of a just society.

Day regarded her co-founder Maurin as the inspiration behind the Catholic

Worker Movement,89 and as her mentor and teacher. He was “content to remain in the background,” while Dorothy was the face of the movement. While Dorothy was meticulous, Maurin was “hopeless about schedules, finances, or anything of a practical nature.” Still, Day “wrote with great affection about his holiness and his loveable eccentricities.”90 As Day would write to an admirer who inquired about having Maurin come speak at their university, she replied this way just two years after the pair met:

I am answering your letter for Peter [Maurin], who is at present sitting in the front office haranguing some visitors. . . . Another thing when you send his fare be sure and send him a return ticket to New York. If you give him money he is liable to spend it and go someplace else. As you mention making him an offering, I also ask you to give him that but to send it on to the Catholic Worker—if you give it to him he might decide to visit Bishop O’Hara in Montana or some equally distant place, as he is very impulsive.91

One way Day and Maurin hoped to forge a just society was through a newspaper, one they came to call The Catholic Worker.92 The group didn’t have ties to the Church hierarchy, so social, structural, financial, and even ideological experimentation was possible.93 From the beginning, and still today, the paper sold for a penny per copy, and a quarter for a subscription to the seven issues published each year.94 Catholic Worker

Communities continue to provide meals, shelter, and support to activists and people on the margins around the world. The movement and the newspaper maintain no official organizational ties to Church hierarchy, but Day demanded that the newspaper and the

57 actions of the movement remain faithful to official Church teachings.

In 1932, when Maurin met Day, there were a number of papers aimed at workers in New York City. There were also Catholic papers. But Day was particularly excited about the idea of a paper that served Catholic working people, to give them an understanding of social justice, and also to bring the faith to working-class nonbelievers.95 In the first issue, published to coincide with May Day 1933, an international recognition of labor, Day and Maurin set about the lofty task of reconciling leftist ideology popular at the time with traditional Catholic beliefs. She asked of her readers at the start of her new publication, “Is it not possible to be a radical and a

Christian?”96

When her outreach to socialists during a rally turned into taunts by them, Day decided to send copies of the paper to clergy in Manhattan and Brooklyn instead. They were receptive of the paper in light of their own concerns about poverty and social justice in their respective communities. The paper gained a following, and drew a staff who sought to debate politics and theology and produce a news product with other young

Catholics. Reporters covered everything from labor strikes to poverty, housing crises, sexism, and racism.97 The paper published church encyclicals, materials from bishops, and analysis of such church documents for a working-class audience. Day wrote a column for each issue, first titled “Day by Day” and later known as “On Pilgrimage.” The first run of the paper had 2,500 copies. Within four months, Day and Maurin were printing 20,000.98

When The Catholic Worker was founded, many mainstream papers were focused on “rooting out socialists,” which allowed an alternative paper such as Day’s to fill a void

58 by covering the evolving social and economic downturn, and allowing for more nuanced coverage for working people in need of news.99 Day’s background working for socialist publications gave her knowledge of the kinds of socially conscious stories that resonated with audiences, as well as what did not. As associate editor Jim Forest noted, “Probably the Socialist newspapers were much closer to the Catholic Worker press than the mass media, but still they tended to print horror stories, like Dorothy’s stories about living on two dollars a week. It was a revolution through fear and anger rather than through love.”100

Circulation of the paper peaked at 190,000 during the Depression, but fell to

50,500 as a result of the paper’s pacifist editorial stance during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s and World War II. It later saw revitalization as Americans grappled with

McCarthyism, and the Korean and Vietnam wars.101 Between 1950 and 1960, the paper’s circulation hovered between 58,000 and 65,000 readers.102 In 1983, circulation hit

100,000.103 The newspaper—and the movement—did not turn a profit off of newspaper sales, and advertisements were not a part of the paper. They instead relied solely on income from Day’s published books and donations.

Toward the end of her life, profile after profile of Day appeared in newspapers, magazines, and books. She became a much sought-after subject for biographers. One

New York Times writer described Day, noting, “The battles have etched lines into her strong face, with its high cheekbones flaring beneath pale blue eyes. A tall, plain, grandmotherly type of woman.”104 Another described her as “the gentle radical,” “spry and handsome, with a blue kerchief around her white hair.”105 Her granddaughter recalled that “a handwoven Guatemalan handbag and a pin with an E.E. Cummings quote, ‘Damn

59 everything but the circus’ crept into her otherwise conventional wardrobe” as she aged.106

Throughout her life, Day continued to practice quiet, often unseen acts of generosity. In a long missive from granddaughter Kate Hennessy’s memoir of Day’s life,

Hennessy recalls:

She gave a young seminarian money to pay for a year’s tuition and expenses. She provided rent for a newly married couple who had met at the [W]orker, supplied a down payment for a house for another, and paid off the mortgage of yet another. She made it possible for Cesar Chavez’s wife, Helen, to accompany him to Italy to attend a personal audience with Pope Paul VI, and she helped put the Farm Workers Credit Union on its feet by purchasing more than a thousand dollars’ worth of shares. . . . During one month in the early 1970s, Dorothy sent out more than three thousand dollars to various groups and people, including a home for mothers, the Medgar Evers Fund, and other Catholic Worker Houses. She gave money to PBS, Danilo Dolci and the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran. . . . And who could even begin to have a sense of the sheer numbers of meals eaten, shelter given, clothing handed out, and visits to hospitals, jails, and courts.107

When Day died in 1980 at Maryhouse in the East Village,108 a Catholic Worker house “not more than 50 yards from the insistent and menacing presence of Hell’s

Angels,”109 her life and influence were already being discussed in stratospheric terms—a sharp contrast from the humble life she had led. In obituaries from leading Catholic thinkers, Day was described as “perhaps the most talented Catholic woman writer since

Kate Chopin,”110 and yet “she smoked and uttered unladylike words like ‘damn’ and

‘hell.’”111 Day was buried in “a simple pine coffin and adorned by a single long-stemmed red rose,” and a wake was held in a Maryhouse living room decorated with a “hand hewn wooden table . . . a worn wooden priedieu . . . and a figureless cross made of two pieces of driftwood. . . . It was held together by twine.” Her casket was surrounded, as she likely would have preferred it, by “drifters, priests and nuns.”112

60 NOTES

1 Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s

Life,” n.d. http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/timeline.pdf.

2 James Allaire and Rosemary Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and

Spirituality of Dorothy Day,” The Catholic Worker Movement, n.d. http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/life-and-spirituality.html.

3 “John I. Day, Writer and Sports Editor,” New York Times, May 18, 1939.

4 Anne Klejment, “Dorothy Day,” Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia,

Research Starters data base, EBSCOhost, 2016.

5 “Thirty Interesting Facts about Dorothy Day’s Life, Many Commonly Known and Others Less So,” The Catholic Worker Movement, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/dd-interesting-facts.html.

6 Dorothy Day, diary entry, January 22, 1977, series D-4, box 7, Dorothy Day-

Catholic Worker Collection, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University,

Milwaukee, WI (hereafter DDCWC).

7 Klejment, “Dorothy Day.”

8 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Klejment, “Dorothy Day.”

12 Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate

Portrait of My Grandmother (New York: Scribner, 2017), 29.

61

13 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

14 Klejment, “Dorothy Day.”

15 Dorothy Day and Robert Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day (New York: Image Books, 2012).

16 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 5.

17 Klejment, “Dorothy Day.”

18 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 252.

19 Hinson-Hasty, “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s Life.”

20 William Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace,’” America,

December 13, 1980.

21 Klejment, “Dorothy Day.”

22 Rosalie Riegle Troester, ed. Voices from the Catholic Worker (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1993), 3.

23 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 9.

24 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

25 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

26 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 11.

27 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 2.

28 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

29 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 17.

62

30 As I mentioned previously, I opted against using Miller’s Dorothy Day:

A Biography , as Day herself rescinded her permission of his publishing the work due to what she believed were factual inaccuracies. I did, however, opt to use

Miller’s obituary of Day from America, as this piece would have undergone fact- checking by the magazine’s editors.

31 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

32 Jim Forest, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 2011).

33 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 23.

34 Ibid., 24.

35 Virginia Cannon, “Day by Day: A Saint for the Occupy Era?” The New Yorker,

November 30, 2012.

36 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 2.

37 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 28.

38 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 30.

39 Stephen Krupa, “Celebrating Dorothy Day,” America, August 27, 2001.

40 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 27.

41 Krupa, “Celebrating Dorothy Day.”

42 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 2.

43 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 29.

44 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 427.

45 Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker. 95-96.

46 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 32.

63

47 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 2.

48 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

49 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven.

50 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 397.

51 Hinson-Hasty, “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s Life.”

52 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

53 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 4.

54 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

55 Dorothy Day, “To Llewellyn Jones,” June 19, 1924, box 11, folder 5, DDCWC.

56 Dorothy Day, “Thrills of 1924,” New Orleans Item, February 26, 1924, box 11, folder 5, DDCWC.

57 Day, “To Llewellyn Jones.”

58 Hinson-Hasty, “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s Life.”

59 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

60 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 9.

61 Ibid., 11.

62 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

63 Ibid.

64 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 18.

65 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

64

66 Ibid.

67 Hinson-Hasty, “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s Life.”

68 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

69 Klejment, “Dorothy Day.”

70 Ibid.

71 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 45.

72 Hinson-Hasty, “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s Life.”

73 Ibid.

74 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 56.

75 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

76 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 27.

77 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 58.

78 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 34-35.

79 Ibid., 68.

80 Allaire and Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of Dorothy

Day.”

81 Klejment, “Dorothy Day.”

82 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 68.

83 Ibid.

65

84 John Sniegocki, “Creating a New Society: The Catholic Worker and the

Community of the Ark,” Contemporary Justice Review 8, no. 3 (September 2005): 296. doi:10.1080/10282580500133052.

85 Thomas W. Jodziewicz, “Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day: Friends,” Logos: A

Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 13, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 170.

86 Ibid., 169.

87 Jim Wishloff, “The Hard Truths of the Easy Essays: The Crisis of Modernity and the Social Vision of Peter Maurin,” Journal of Religion & Business Ethics 2, no. 1

(2010): 1.

88 Jodziewicz, “Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day: Friends,”168.

89 Peter Maurin described the Catholic Worker Movement and its aims as follows:

“1. The Catholic Worker believes in the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism. 2.

The Catholic Worker believes in the personal obligation of looking after the needs of our brother. 3. The Catholic Worker believes in the daily practice of the Works of Mercy. 4.

The Catholic Worker believes in Houses of Hospitality for the immediate relief of those who are in need. 5. The Catholic Worker believes in the establishment of Farming

Communes where each one works according to his ability and gets according to his need.

6. The Catholic Worker believes in creating a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new, which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that it looks like new.” See “What the Catholic Worker Believes,” http://www.catholicworker.org.

90 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 117.

91 Ibid., 68.

66

92 Ibid., 297.

93 Paul Stock, “Consensus Social Movements and the [U.S.] Catholic Worker,”

Politics and Religion 5, no. 1 (April 2012): 90.

94 Sandra L. Borden, “Communitarian Journalism and the Common Good:

Lessons from the Catholic Worker,” Journalism 15, no. 3 (April 2014): 281.

95 Sara Mehltretter, “The Vernacular Rhetoric of The Catholic Worker” (paper presented at the annual convention of the National Communication Association

Convention, Chicago, November 15-18, 2007).

96 Ibid.

97 Ibid., 8.

98 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 76.

99 Kyle Huckins, “Alternative News: Sources of Change,” Southwestern Mass

Communication Journal 24, no. 2 (March 2009): 66.

100 Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker, 63.

101 Mehltretter, “The Vernacular Rhetoric of The Catholic Worker,” 13.

102 Ibid., 18.

103 Ibid., 1.

104 Richard J.H. Johnston, “Catholic Worker: A Lonely Soldier,” The New York

Times, November 21, 1955.

105 Eric Pace, “Dorothy Day, at 75, Is Still the Gentle Radical,” The New York

Times, November 8, 1972.

106 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 239.

107 Ibid., 342.

67

108 Cannon, “Day by Day: A Saint for the Occupy Era?”

109 Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Hers,” The New York Times, April 24, 1980.

110 George Shuster, “Only One Candle in an Immense and Impenetrable

Darkness,” America, December 13, 1980.

111 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace.’”

112 William Farrell, “About New York: Drifters, Priests and Nuns Pay Respects to

Dorothy Day,” The New York Times, December 3, 1980.

68 Chapter 3

As legend has it, two nuns came to visit the Catholic Worker and pay homage to its founder, Dorothy Day. They found her sitting at her typewriter, with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth and a beret on her head. One of the sisters, having heard a legend about Day, asked her, “Is it really true that you live on only the Blessed

Sacrament?” Day paused, looked up at the nuns, and said, “Hell no!”1As an iconoclastic, enigmatic woman who never fit neatly into the conventional norms for women, Catholics, and reporters of her time, Day had to navigate the tricky territory of being a leader in all three realms. She often found people and institutions confused, disappointed, or skeptical of how she chose to operate. This chapter will explore the ways Day navigated these social and occupational structures , and elucidate how Day embodied personalist philosophy and feminist standpoint theory in her writings.

Before her career even began, Day faced traditional and prohibitive views about women working in the newspaper industry. Day came from a family of journalists, with her father working as sportswriter and her brother an international correspondent. As Day recalled in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, her father was adamant that women did not belong in the field, and even went so far as to speak to colleagues to prevent her from being hired. Day wrote she “had tried other newspapers but without success, in some cases because my father had told his city editor friends to lecture me on the subject of newspaper work for women.”2 As granddaughter Kate Hennessy recalled, “When Pop saw that Dorothy was determined to make her living as a journalist, he sent word to his cronies in the newspaper business to discourage her. Lore has it that he booted her out of the house when she found work at the Call, but then, he had booted his sons out too.”3

69 Among Day’s first jobs in journalism was not the actual reporting work that was typically reserved for men. Instead, a biographer said, she was “a kind of office girl among whose tasks it was to deliver the morning mail to the regal Max Eastman.”4 This also reflected the Catholic Church’s position on employment of women. In Rerum Novarum, the

Church’s document on the rights of working people, Pope Leo XIII wrote, “Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family.”5 Day got her first bits of writing advice from men, including her abusive, unfaithful ex-partner, Lionel Moise, who according to Hennessy, “advised Dorothy to write with ‘simple, declarative sentences, personal articles, and to write like a woman.’” Hennessy said her grandmother added, toward the end of her life, “And that . . . is what I’ve been doing all these years.”6

Yet, it is worth noting that Day was centering women’s stories and writing personal articles in the vein of feminist standpoint theory and personalist philosophy before she met Moise in 1918. To understand Day’s lifelong commitment to sharing the stories of women’s social and economic hardships, it is worth examining some of her first published work in The New York Call, and how her writing evolved in the early years of her career.

In a November 1916 story, Day chronicles a trip to one of New York’s night courts with little of the fearlessness and gritty realism evident in most of her other reporting. Day writes in the article, “Girl Reporter; With Three Cents In Purse, Braves

Night Court Lawyers,” “It was my first court assignment, and I didn’t know a thing that was going on and I was scared stiff.” She repeatedly uses the term “sumpthin,” and gives

70 responses “real meek-like” to the judge she encounters, but there are traces of Day’s sharp wit. After being fingerprinted, Day writes, “The copy of the finger prints that were given me I’m going to frame and hang above the table where we keep the group pictures and family Bible. I guess the contrast would be piquant.”7 But in a story the next day in

The Call (“Reporter Looks into Fads, Facts, and Fancies, and Things at Rand School,”), it is clear that Day’s trip to night court did not provide her with the full experience of immersive, muckraking reporting she hoped for—on account of her gender. While talking to two men attending the radical Rand School in New York (who Day notes “felt sorry for me”), she asks them to tell her about their adventures. She noted, “We females, you know, have to be contented with the tales of adventures—not the adventures themselves. And all my life long I have wanted to be a slinky, Theda Bara, adventuress.”8

Here, we see the first glimpses of Day coming to understand her own standpoint as a woman, and sharing that standpoint with readers in a journalistic article.

In her first stunt reporting series as part of a “diet squad” examination of working- class nutrition for The Call, readers see Dorothy’s signature diary-like style begin to emerge, yet these stories are still peppered with salacious details to grab readers mixed with poignant, subtle details. One such sensational detail appeared in a December 1916 story, “Reporter of $5 a Week Eats Farina and Cheese, Reads Wordsworth,”:

Yesterday morning I had farina, a roll and butter and a cup of milk. The farina was wormy. I noticed when I poured it out of the box. The small grains were matted together, cobweb like, but I gritted my teeth and thought of sailors and their wormy fare and when the stuff was done I ate a large dish of it. There is enough left over to fry for supper.9

But after eating a bowl of worms, Day cites Wordsworth, and “meditate[s] on how spiritual I shall become by the simple, well-balanced life.”10 Day calls out the

71 inequities women face, and the hypocrisy of women—particularly wealthy ones—and certain government organizations setting out to see just how bad women can live in poverty and still survive. Day writes,

It isn’t just the eating question. Any “society” woman of not too sensuous a disposition can content herself on an eight-cent meal, if she can have a light, large room to eat it in and knows it is just temporary. . . . Lest the diet squad of The Call be misunderstood, it is best to say here that we are not trying to prove whether it can or whether it can’t be done. Of course it can be done. It has been proved again. I want to show the dull misery of “just skimping along” and the damnable mockery of any “society” women setting an example. 11

In an article a few days later, Day’s growing confidence in her own reporting becomes more evident, and her sense of humor begins to shine through more as she writes about living in a tenement, budgeting her five dollars for the week, and the tips offered by other columnists and stunt reporters. Day remarks in an article titled, “‘Man

Cannot Live By Bread Alone,’ and Neither Can a Normal Woman”,

As girls do not wear trousers, nor shirts, it is a waste of time and of space to tell them how they can save and still look neat by pressing the trousers under the mattress and sleeping on them, and of turning in the cuffs of their shirt. And, anyway, this is not a column, or part column, to tell girls how to give condescendingly helpful hints on how to save and be content in the hall bedroom. It is merely an experience.12

By early 1917, Day was writing stories with all-female interviewees, and telling tales of women strikers braving knife-wielding scabs on picket lines (“Plucky Girl of Picket Line

Braves Knives of Scabs and ‘Guerillas.’”13 In these early articles, Day is fully sharing the standpoints of women in politically marginalized positions, facing violence. Yet, Day does so with her own voice and perspective in the mix.

A 1917 series on birth control advocates who were jailed at Blackwell’s Island

Asylum is also indicative of stories focused on providing the unique standpoints of women—not just the writer—but that still exhibit some of the sensationalistic writing

72 popular at the time. Day interviewed birth control activist Margaret Sanger about the condition of her sister, Ethel Byrne, who had just been released from Blackwell’s. for her own birth control activism Day writes, “The nearest reporters could get to [Byrne] was the doorsill of her room. One glance at the motionless, collapsed figure on the bed was enough to confirm the sentiments as to her condition made by her sister. . . . The whole appearance was that of a corpse.”14 Yet this vivid, shocking portrait of Byrne’s post-jail state is augmented by a more honest perspective from Fania Mindell, an aide at Sanger’s clinic, who told Day, “You’d have to work with the women or you’d have to work at the clinic before you understand the terrible fear that hangs over these women. They are never free from it. . . . I know the conditions of working women better—because I have lived and worked with them—than the nurse does who takes them as they come in the hospital.”15 Here, Mindell exemplified the power of feminist standpoint theory in reporting; she explains the power of working with and living among the marginalized, and explains why an outsider does not have the same power to provide care for them. In an interview with Byrne a few days letter, Day presents a woman who has been profoundly changed by her time in jail—something we see from Day herself that very same year. Byrne tells Day,

I never realized that Blackwell’s Island was such a terrible place. . . . The night I was in the Tombs I was placed next to a girl who was in for twenty years for killing the child she did not want and which she was unable to support. She was only 17 years old, and I couldn’t help thinking that the knowledge we are fighting to give women would have saved her.16

When Day began The Catholic Worker in 1933, she did so during one of the most difficult decades for women. According to Day scholar Nancy L. Roberts, the 1930s were host to “perhaps the century’s most repressive anti-women legislation.”17 Specifically, the

73 decade saw a trend toward encouraging women’s place in the home and a backlash against striking women factory workers. Roberts noted, “Legislatures enacted laws restricting the employment of married women; and labor, government, and the mass media all joined in a campaign urging females as a patriotic duty to refrain from taking jobs. . . . By the end of the decade, prospects for improving women’s economic and social status appeared bleak indeed.”18

When The Catholic Worker was first printed, Day had mixed feelings about women taking on the challenges of journalism. On one hand, she hired a number of female reporters despite the anti-woman climate of the time. As she recalled in Loaves and Fishes, her account of the early days of the movement, women were a key part of the paper’s early success: “The first of them” was Dorothy Weston, “a dainty young Irish girl with black hair and bright blue eyes, just out of school. Her education was of the best:

Sacred Heart Convent, where her sister was a nun; Fordham University; Columbia

School of Journalism.”19 Another early reporter was Eileen Corridon, who would later leave the paper to open her own magazine. Day recalled her as a “fierce worker.” And yet despite Weston’s reporting and Corridon’s appearance on the masthead as an assistant editor, Day often tried to discourage women from writing for the paper and working full time in the movement.20 While according to some workers, Day’s concern was primarily for the safety of the women who would be living and working in the somewhat dangerous

Bowery neighborhood, others pointed out Day showed little concern for her own safety as a woman, and “would do what she would not think of asking others to.”21

Perhaps in response to the antagonistic view of women at the time, Day saw her role as unique from other women with whom she worked. This is perhaps an early

74 example of Day deflecting attention away from herself and attempting to shield others from the pain and suffering with which she was intimately familiar. Day intimately understood the suffering many young women faced (herself included) at the hands of men working in the journalism industry, as well as among the poor in impoverished areas of New York City, and she perhaps wanted to protect other driven young women from the suffering she herself faced. Day recalled the access provided to men within the radical movement and newspaper industry at the time, perhaps acknowledging her individualistic motives in such behavior:

I was bent on following the journalist’s side of the work. I wanted the privileges of the woman and the work of the man, without following the work of the woman. I wanted to go on picket lines, to go to jail, to write, to influence others and so make my mark on the world. How much ambition and how much self-seeking there was in all this!22

Still, Day hired women in later decades to write for The Catholic Worker, including Judith Gregory, who edited the paper for ten years. Particularly among her female writers and editors, Day demanded perfection. As Gregory recalled, “She once reproved me when I spoke of writing in some way that to her implied perfectionism; writing seemed to be for her above all to report. . . . She added indignantly that her writing was logical enough: ‘I go from one paragraph to the next.’ . . . She wrote clear, informal and compelling accounts of her life and thoughts.”23

Day was the editorial leader and stylistic heart throughout the fifty years she led the paper, and her was key to her leadership style. In the first issue, she opted against running one of Maurin’s pieces as the featured editorial because “she was ‘irked’ at his exclusion of women in his description of a prototypical House of Hospitality.”24 Maurin did remain an integral part of Catholic Worker life and philosophy until his death in

75 1949.

Even later in her career, as she traveled frequently for speaking engagements and reporting trips, Day maintained control of the paper’s editorial content through memos and other correspondence that had a frequency “according to the degree of trust she had in the person editing it.”25

With the success of the movement and Day’s rising popularity, the movement also came under greater scrutiny. When the New York City Health Department began to send inspectors every few weeks who threatened to shut down the bread lines at the

Catholic Worker houses there, Day wrote to the health commissioner, “Of course we do not intend to stop. We will start again just as often as we are stopped.” When the New

York City Health Department opened an inquisition into safety at the hospitality house in

1938, the New York City Catholic Worker houses had provided 49,275 nights lodging,

1,095,000 breakfasts, and 131,400 lunches and suppers.26 Criticism did not lessen over time. When the Catholic Worker Movement was taken to court in 1956 over charges that it was a “slum landlord” in violation of a number of health and safety codes, the New

York Times ran a story on the case, which was presided over by a sympathetic judge. It resulted in both great publicity and a windfall of donations, including a sizeable one from poet W.H Auden.27

Day herself was also the subject of criticism, which she often met with her dry humor: “I’m supposed to be an immoral woman, with illegitimate children, a drunkard, a racketeer, running an expensive apartment on the side, with money in several banks, owning property, in the pay of Moscow, etc. etc.”28 Day also wrote to Tamar in 1951 of criticism she faced from the Catholic Church, which happened with some regularity, yet

76 was not met with the same optimism:

I was called to the Chancery Office last month on account of our condemnation of capitalism. . . . It may be the FBI are putting pressure on them. . . . It’s all for the good, all for the best, whatever happens. I am always convinced of that. For our correction and also for our good, even if the work gets suppressed one way or another. It is hard to understand but I am not going to worry about it. Peter [Maurin] is still busy stirring things up in heaven too.29

In 1939, Day spoke as an expert at an event of the Catholic Press Association.

The organization’s president, Charles H. Ridder, remarked in a newspaper article on the event that “editorially the Catholic papers are freer than any other section of the

American Press,” which was indeed true for Day and The Catholic Worker. The paper, according to a New York Times article, was one of 4,631 Catholic publications totaling a circulation of nearly nine million.30

Day also did not shy away from criticizing the Church when she felt its leaders were not following its own teachings. During the winter of 1949, when the Diocese of

New York’s cemetery gravediggers went on strike, Day and The Catholic Worker were ardent supporters. That winter, seminarians were brought in to bury the 1,200 coffins that had been placed under tarps and left unburied, given the lack of diggers reporting to work. When Cardinal Francis Spellman refused a plea from strikers’ wives to have a priest mediate the strike and demanded that the gravediggers could return to work only if they left the union,31 Dorothy wrote “a brief but pointed letter to His Eminence detailing some of the consequences of his heedlessness. Her opening sentence is an epitome of so much of the spirit that has gone into her involvement with the hierarchical church over the course of the years: ‘I write as an obedient but angry daughter of Holy Church.’”32

The Catholic Worker weathered criticism from within and without due to its activist role, but Day’s ironclad commitment to her beliefs, according to several Catholic

77 Workers, is what gave the movement its staying power. Eileen Egan, Dorothy’s longtime travel companion, noted, “In order to carry a very old message, a message of peace and nonviolence, we have to be absolutely above suspicion.” Egan said she believed the movement, as well as the Catholic Worker’s success as a publication, were the result of

Day being “totally, irrevocably, faithful to the teaching of the Catholic Church. If she had deviated in one iota, the movement would have died. . . . [T]he way Dorothy criticized the church was with love, and you felt that.”33

As time went on, Day’s steadfast commitment to Church teaching began to be reflected in the crowd the Worker drew to its doors. As Jesuit Donald Campion recalled,

“Suddenly, you found yourself talking with a bishop or theologian from Africa or

Australia and discovered that the first stop he had made in the States on his way home from seminary days in Rome, just before World War II, was to the Worker house.”34

The Catholic Worker, Day, and the movement were also covered—and criticized—by the secular press. During the “Red Scare” era of the late 1940s through the late 1950s, the National Police Gazette and the New Republic both censured The Catholic

Worker.35 When the federal government staged a fifty-four-city nuclear attack drill in

June 1955, The New York Times told its readers that it was their “duty” and “self-interest requires that you make ready for the worst by taking part in this drill.” Yet, Day and other

Catholic Workers headed to City Hall Park during the drill in protest, letting the mayor, police, Associated Press, and United Press know that they would be there.36 After arrests and jail time, the group’s trial garnered positive coverage in The New York Times, New

York World-Telegram, Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Harper’s, The

Progressive, The Nation, and the New York Post. Reports by diocesan reporters weren’t

78 as kind, and the St. Louis Catholic Register spent two full pages reprimanding them.37 In a similar drill demonstration two years later, the Daily Worker, New York Post, The New

York Times, Village Voice, and London Daily Express covered the group favorably, while

The Nation wrote that Day’s imprisonment was a “terrifying and inescapable comment on our society.” The protestors also got support from Commonweal editor Edward S. Skillin;

John C. Bennett, the co-chair of Christianity and Crisis; and Rabbi Eugene J. Lipman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations via a letter published in the New York

Times.38

When, in 1951, the Internal Revenue Service began investigating the Catholic

Worker—and Day—for having never paid any federal income taxes, she faced the investigation armed with her faith and her usual quippy prose.

I certainly do not want to go to jail, but if some day the “all-encroaching State,” as our bishops have termed it, does prosecute me, which it would do if it were legalistic and insistent in its rejection of Christianity, which it isn’t, I hope I would be given the grace to endure it and be accounted worthy to suffer for Christ, who loved us and died for us, and who said we should love our enemies. He himself lived for 33 years in an occupied country and did not lift a hand against the oppressor. You probably will find this letter insufferable, if you have never studied these ideas or considered them. But please forgive me if I sound pietistic.39

While Day maintained a decades-long leadership presence at The Catholic

Worker, her own understanding of her place as a female leader was strongly influenced by the normative beliefs of the time in which she lived. As Roberts noted, the paper’s view on women’s issues, as indicated by several articles in the first years of publication, was “not particularly progressive,” and that workplace rights such as living wages could contribute to women being able to be home to fulfill their “real vocation” of being a wife and mother.40

79 Day had stable yet infrequent relationships with female family members and friends throughout her life. As Day scholar June O’Connor wrote,

While Dorothy’s associations and friendships with women received regular mention (Peggy Baird, her sister Della, Nina Polcyn, Eileen Egan, among others), no single woman friend nor community of women friends received special attention in the way Forster or Peter did. Dorothy seems to have lived in a primarily male world, both as a radical Christian and editor. Her story is notable for its dearth of discussion about living female role models, friends, or confidants.41

Day often diminished her own role as a female leader and was self-deprecating in her writing. Roberts described Day’s tone when writing about her gender as

“incongruously self-effacing” and noted Day “often undercut herself in her writing.”42

Day frequently cited one of her favorite saints, Teresa of Avila, who often quipped, “I’m only a woman.” And even while explicitly addressing women in her published set of

1948 journals, On Pilgrimage, Day wrote, “You must excuse me if I seem to be writing an Easter sermon, out of place for a woman to do.”43

As a “single parent, a career woman, and a Catholic convert, trying to start an unprecedented, radical Catholic publication,” in a Catholic Church that was “a sexually conservative Church, especially during the Thirties, a time of increasingly reactionary public opinion on women’s roles,” Day may have been consciously or subconsciously trying to police—or at the least, be self-aware of—her own gender role. As Roberts suggested, this action was “a result, most likely, of her upbringing and the time in which she lived.”44 Yet perhaps through the repeated self-efficacy Day displayed in her writing, she was attempting to draw attention away from herself and toward the people impacted by the injustices about which she wrote.

As society’s views on gender evolved during midcentury, Day developed nuanced

80 views on women, gender, and her own role as a female leader and editor. As longtime

Catholic Worker Stanley Vishnewski noted, Day maintained complex beliefs: “It is still hard for me to be able to classify Dorothy Day. To me she still remains an enigma dressed up in women’s clothing.”45

Several decades into the paper’s existence, Day became more open and aware of

“discrimination on the basis of gender” at the Worker, and Catholic Worker Thomas

Cornell recalled Day “was always ‘well aware’ of the male-female ratio among Catholic

Workers at St. Joseph’s, and ‘she was afraid of men taking over.’”46

Day frequently deflected sexist arguments with a touch of her self-effacing wit, with remarks such as “I have no time for arguing and besides I think like a woman”; responded to people who had issues with her near-constant knitting that “women actually could think best when they had something to do with their hands and that they were able to work and talk at the same time”; and noted that men “seemed incapable of carrying on an intellectual conversation and working at the same time.’’ Worker Thomas Cornell recalled that Day would frequently deflect men’s arguments by “shifting the onus onto

Peter [Maurin], or saying, ‘Well, what can you expect? I’m only a woman,’ and then going off and doing ten times more than any man could accomplish.”47 Yet it was Peter

Maurin who had the highest ambitions for Dorothy, as he “wanted her to follow in the footsteps of St. Catherine of Siena and advise the popes.”48

As the second-wave feminist movement emerged in the later decades of Day’s life, she had similarly complex views on the issue. Despite going on a strike in 1917 while jailed as a Silent Sentinel49 for suffrage, Day saw the second-wave feminist movement as “selfish, personal, and totally divorced from economic issues,”50 and “too

81 lacking in love.”51 Indeed, she had “already accomplished many of the things authors such as Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir were now advocating as women’s rights,” and “felt she faced much more challenging and important tasks than those associated with the new activist feminists’ struggle.”52 In 1970, in the last decade of her life, Day spoke alongside Feminine Mystique author Friedan at a New York college. One Commonweal reporter described Day as “perhaps the oldest person in the room, the most personally courageous, in action and practice, already the most liberated.” The reporter noted that unlike Friedan, Day received a standing ovation after her speech, in which Day

said nothing about women’s liberation, never mentioned the words, never stated her views on the subject of economic equality, careers, chores, society’s institutions. Instead, she reminisced about her life, her daughter, the families she’d known, the poor, the work she’d done, in jail, in the streets, in her Houses [of Hospitality].53

One of Day’s most endearing traits as a female leader, according to some of her colleagues, was the way in which she guided other women reporters and activists. Cornell recalled that Day frequently ensured women made connections with other women:

“Dorothy made sure that people got assignments in keeping with their talents, then praised them publicly (often in the Catholic Worker), even if the results weren’t up to the standard expected.”54

Just as Day’s views on gender evolved over the course of her career, so too did her relationship to the Catholic Church. When contemplating a conversion to the faith in her early life, Day questioned the integrity of a church whose models fell short of what she viewed as concrete change. Day wrote in her autobiography, “Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?”55

82 Years later, as the Catholic Worker Movement took hold, Roberts noted that Day

“did not wait for priests, bishops, or cardinals to officially approve her ideas; she went ahead and took immediate action.”56 Still, Day was, throughout her life, banned from several dioceses by their respective bishops, and The Catholic Worker was banned from being distributed in some churches. But despite being seen as a threat to the Catholic

Church’s male-dominated leadership structure and conservative political norms, the

Church hierarchy never actually asked her to stop her work.57 Perhaps this was because, as Day scholar O’Connor wrote, Day “made it clear that she ‘didn’t become a Catholic in order to purify the church.’ The church was her home, not her forum for effecting change.”58

Day wrote in the early years of The Catholic Worker to her daughter, Tamar, of criticism she received from the Catholic Church, which happened with some regularity.

Day was called to the Chancery Office often during the Spanish Civil War, as the

Catholic Worker advocated for pacifism, while “Franco was seen by many Catholics as the rescuer of the Church.”59 These years led to a period when, as Hennessy wrote,

[t]hat steady flow of priests, who since 1934 had stopped on their way home from Rome, had long slowed, and seminarians had their vocation questioned if they expressed interest in the Worker. Dorothy found herself relegated to the fringes of the Catholic Church, much like a poor and batty aunt who can’t be gotten rid of and is embarrassing in what she could come out with at indelicate moments.60

Some of Day’s credibility with Church authorities came through Day’s apparent obedience to contemporary gender roles, including using Catholic Worker co-founder

Maurin’s masculinity. Day sometimes played the role of deferential woman in her interactions with the Church, as Day scholar Nancy Roberts wrote, “she knew bishops and others were more likely to forgive the mistakes she made, on the grounds that she

83 was, after all, not only a convert but a woman. And she accepted that.”61 In a 1952 profile of Day in the New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald wrote that Day was “a Catholic first and a radical second.’62

Further, Day’s legitimacy with Church authorities was “made smoother” through her ability to use Maurin, and “claim a male co founder,”63 according to Roberts. And especially in the early years of the movement and paper, Day “perhaps unconsciously” encouraged more men to write and work with The Catholic Worker, which helped her

“achieve a greater credibility and subsequent acceptance in the sexually conservative

Catholic Church than if she were operating alone.”64

As Day aged, her traditionalism became more apparent, especially in contrast to the young activists with whom she lived and worked. Day was “quite conservative when it came to questions of sexual morality and other forms of personal expression.”65 New

York Catholic Worker Pat Jordan recalled that Day “kept a sense for femininity . . . almost Victorian.” Jordan recalled one incident in which a college student staying at the house for a summer received from Day a handkerchief doused in perfume and was told,

“Just remember that you’re a woman,” which Jordan believed was Day’s way of reminding her “what a gift it was of who you were.”66 Granddaughter Kate Hennessy recalled Day’s “sense of style long after she started the Catholic Worker, still longing for lovely clothes,” and her frequent admonition, “‘Every woman needs one good dress,” which she often said while looking at Tamar.67

Despite her four engagements, abortion, and two failed marriages, Day eventually came to a place of doctrinal obedience as to the Church’s position on marriage. Day biographer William Miller wrote that Day, while hoping to straighten out her life by

84 having her legal marriage annulled, met repeatedly with a young priest in the New York chancery office, Francis A. McIntyre, who later became Cardinal Archbishop of Los

Angeles. “He always gave me the most courteous and sympathetic attention,”68 she said.

As O’Connor pointed out, “In spite of the fact that she had been willing to bear her child outside of a legally sanctioned marriage and remained an anarchist as a Catholic, Day’s occasional references to marriage reflect conventional views.”69

One of the keys to Day’s success in achieving recognition and validity as a

Catholic leader was her steadfast commitment to Catholic social teaching and the

Catechism as a whole. While some bishops and believers alike had qualms about Day’s tactics and approach, what Day could not be faulted for was her adherence to Church teaching. As Nancy Roberts noted, Day “was a fervent Catholic traditionalist who never criticized the Church’s teachings, only its failure to live up to them.”70 Take one example of Day’s adherence to Church teaching over the benefits it might have for her as a newspaper editor. In 1963, Father Felix McGowan, a Maryknoll priest, was planning to travel to Cuba to report for The Catholic Worker. His order’s leadership counseled him against the trip because of its communist, pro-Soviet government, and when learning of the order’s decision, Day counseled McGowan to follow their directive, rather than hers as an editor.71

Not only did Day remain committed to Catholic beliefs, she also insisted the

Catholic Worker reflect the same. In an effort to show readers that the paper did indeed follow Church teachings, she astutely made sure the paper’s headlines indicated endorsement by Church officials, wherever possible to do so.72 In the midst of the social and political upheaval in the 1960s and given the radical beliefs of many Catholic

85 Workers and newspaper editors, Day’s unfaltering obedience to Church teaching— particularly in regard to abortion, birth control, and the liturgy—were a tough pill to swallow.73 Yet, it was that same strict commitment to the faith that protected Day and the newspaper from being censured. Some of the New York diocese’s most conservative leaders, including Patrick Cardinal Hayes, James Cardinal McIntyre, and Francis

Cardinal Spellman, made attempts to stop any of the work or writing by Day and the houses of hospitality because of the “doctrinal purity of the Catholic Worker philosophy” and her “emphasis on the works of mercy.”74

Catholic Worker houses and farms became a haven for wayward religious leaders, as the Church hierarchy grew to see Day as a person leading a movement who accepted the poorest, last, and least. Granddaughter Hennessy recalled, “In the forties both Mott

Street and the Easton farm [a Catholic communal work project in Pennsylvania] had become known as places for alcoholic priests to stay until they got back on their feet.”

She quoted daughter Tamar as saying Day “was the first person to recognize the problem with alcohol and priests. She would take them in, and some of them were in terrible straits. She realized the Church wasn’t doing it, so she did it.”75 Tamar didn’t feel the same way Dorothy did about the returning priests, saying, “The Worker was often a dumping place for unwanted [priests]. They could do no wrong in her eyes. She accepted the authority of the Church.”76

Over time, Day developed clout both occupationally and with the Church hierarchy—enough to call in favors. By 1940, Day was meeting with high-ranking

Church officials. As she recalled in a letter home from one visit to California to Catholic

Worker editor Joe Zarella,

86 Saw the Archbishop this morning . . . he was lovely to me, and kept me an hour and a half. . . . I liked him immensely and he asked me to come to see him again. He gives permission for the work to go on here, or rather I didn’t even ask him for it. I just told him we wanted to start a place here in Oakland and he asked about the group and offered no objections.77

Before Day’s close friend Eugene O’Neill died, Day was “at Chrystie Street praying the rosary when the candle fluttered, and the phrase ‘tear drippings’ suddenly came to her, and she knew Gene was ill.” On a whim, Day called Boston’s Cardinal

Cushing and requested that a priest be sent to O’Neill.78 Day also developed a relationship with Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy, who, in a letter to Day, described the efforts of the Catholic Worker as “heroic.” Day pushed the Post to run stories about the movement.79 McCarthy, who was a speechwriter for Sargent Shriver in the White House’s Office of Economic Opportunity under the Johnson administration, sent Day copies of Shriver’s speeches in which he discussed the Catholic Worker, and in an enclosed letter, McCarthy wrote that Shriver “mentions you frequently, both privately and in speeches.”80

Day’s status after decades of writing, social activism, and adherence to Church teaching gave her clout on the global stage and within the faith—something opponents grew to despise. In 1963, Day flew to Rome with Women Strike for Peace, the group associated with the most widespread peace protests of the twentieth century until that time. The group “foolishly expect[ed],” she wrote, that they could encourage Pope John

XXIII to take an active stance on pacifism during the Second Vatican Council. Yet she met with bishops and cardinals for three solid weeks, and received thunderous applause from a meeting of the National Council of Catholic Men. Day said in a letter home that it

“was not too gratifying since no one pays attention to all our work on peace,” and that the

87 men were “just welcoming a little stimulus.”81 In 1967, when she was asked to attend the

World Lay Congress in Rome, her longtime travel companion Eileen Egan worked to have Day accredited as an “expert” for the event. Yet Day noted she wanted “to go just as a journalist and pilgrim.”82 And while she was there as an expert, she was not always treated as such on account of her gender. When she and the other women striking for peace were set to travel to a papal audience on a bus, “Dorothy registered surprise that the women’s group was being handled in the same way as the visiting school children,” who had “gathered from all over Europe to visit the Vatican during a holiday.” It was in this moment that Dorothy came to understand the differences in her political clout in the

States and that in the Vatican. As Day scholar O’Connor put it: “In the United States,

Dorothy was a presence to be reckoned with and she had more than a few opportunities to make her positions known to the officers of her church. In Rome she was voiceless and she knew it. That was an audience she would not take on.”83

In one New York Times article, journalist Max Seigel notes Day had received praise from “President Nixon, Archbishop Luigi Raimondi, the Apostolic Delegate in

Washington and other leaders.”84 Day was frequently given awards, including a number of honorary degrees from universities across the country. However, Day turned them all down because of her humility and her commitment to her pacifist beliefs. She wrote in

1968:

I have been offered five honorary degrees, the latest Fordham. . . . The others, St. John’s, Holy Cross, LaSalle, Boston College. That is three Jesuits, one Benedictine, one Christian Brothers. I have refused them all of course, what with ROTC and their tie up with the State and war. I am not boasting. It is to emphasize that it? is important about writing what we write. 85

Despite her growing public status as a leader in the Church, Day never viewed

88 herself as such. Joe Zarella, one of the first Catholic Workers, noted that Day was “not a person who mingled easily with people, and when we had visitors, she didn’t particularly care to come down and converse with them.” Zarella recalled one visitor who was particularly taken with Day’s “living sainthood,” who went up to Day’s room, and asked,

“Miss Day, do you have visions?” To which Day replied, “Oh shit!”86 It was not just humility that kept Day from being on the front lines of direct action as she had been when younger. Age also played a factor in her transition from a more public, active life to a more narrow focus on speaking and writing. “A gang from our crowd gives all their time to the protests, the resistance, but my arthritis keeps me down,” she wrote in 1967 as the

Vietnam War raged. “So I stick at letters, writing, and travelling and speaking. But I envy the young ones with the strength to sit out vigiling all night. Thank God the protests are increasing.”87

And yet, she retained some connection to the young people with whom she lived and worked, due largely to her deep understanding of their struggles. As former Catholic

Worker editor Robert Ellsberg wrote, “The memory of her own youthful struggles made her particularly sensitive to the searching and sufferings of youth.”88 She wrote to one of her oldest friends, Sister Peter Claver, who donated the first-ever dollar to the Catholic

Worker, that she was “considered an ancient, an old fogey, and the more praise given me by the press—by those who do not know me—the more the young edge away from me.”89 As she told Eugene O’Neill’s biographer, who had written to Day about her own troubled youth,

The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them, to find things to love in them, even when they read the Daily News and spend all their time at television. They don’t really. And the Daily News

89 gave us one of the best write-ups we ever had, so while minimizing what we are able to accomplish, at least they attempted to put forth our point of view.90

As associate editor Jim Forest said of Day’s relationship with the new, young

Catholic Workers in her older years,” She was very good with the young people. . . . She tried to work in a very gentle, storytelling, invitational way, by and large.”91

Day also began to indulge more in a life where she could “settle down and feel guilty at [her] luxury,” while still maintaining her commitment to a life of solidarity with the poor. Day’s biographer William Miller loaned her his car, and Day wrote to him that

“it makes me happy indeed to be able to go out, jump in the car, and go to the

Laundromat, insurance man, real estate office, post office, etc.” She told Miller, “[I]t relaxes me to drive.”92 She wrote in a thank-you note to longtime friend Donald Powell that she spent a gift he sent to her on an indulgent “good shrimp chop suey dinner”—her favorite meal which she wrote of to friends with some frequency.93 Though she gave up meat, cigarettes, and alcohol one at a time after her period of wandering, her regular vice—one she was unable to function without—was coffee. Catholic Worker Tom

Cornell recalled that he “only saw her drink one thimbleful of wine in all the years I knew her,” and that she “had been addicted to cigarettes,” but remained “addicted” to coffee.94 Day wrote toward the end of her life that while in prison for civil disobedience in the 1950s, she “reached out for the luxuries of something to read, the letters sent in to me . . . and as soon as I was permitted to go to the commissary I got me a jar of instant coffee and so could indulge myself early mornings before the cells were unlocked.” She noted her own weakness, writing, “How can I condemn the expensive drinks of the activists in the peace movement when I myself hang on to my comfort, my own addiction—judge not.”95

90 By the time of Day’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1972, she was a figure worth celebrating for religious media outlets, as well as the Church. Day received a hand- delivered birthday message from Pope Paul VI. In America’s issue devoted entirely to

Day, the editors wrote, “[I]f one had to choose a single individual to symbolize the best in the aspiration and action of the American Catholic community during the last forty years, that one person would surely be Dorothy Day,” while Commonweal called her “American

Catholicism’s Reigning First Lady.”96 Sociologist Ed Marciniak wrote of Day, “In her own way, she pioneered a lay role . . . within the Church, a Christian lay style. . . . [S]he had asked us to find our true identity as Christians by identifying with the suffering, the abandoned, the alienated and the young of heart—whatever their age.”97

At the end of Day’s life, Church hierarchy came to fully recognize her position as a female leader. In 1973, Day received a handwritten note from James Francis Cardinal

McIntyre, who thanked her for books she gave and which he promised to read. Day often left notes of her own on incoming correspondence to remind herself whether or not she had responded to each letter. On McIntyre’s letter, Day wrote a note that reads, in her typical fashion, “Visited him again in August 1973 after Fresno jail.”98 Day was frequently in line with, yet decades ahead of, public stances taken by the Church on social issues. The most notable example of this is Day and the Catholic Worker’s unwavering stance on pacifism from its founding. During the 1976 International

Eucharistic Congress, on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Day led a group of eight thousand women in silent prayer for victims of war violence. The New York

Times said the protest “in effect brought the issue of an outside street protest into the congress program, came in a session stressing the rights and role of women in the church

91 and society.” Day was interviewed after the protest, and was given “a long, standing applause” by the women in prayer. After the action, Church leaders and congress planners decided to include in the Mass some prayers of penance for Hiroshima,

“apparently added after congress planners were reminded of the date.”99 As Day herself remarked, “I would say that the clergy should be very happy and probably are very happy that we are instigating a movement among the laity of going ahead on our own. Why should we go ahead and wait until we have dear Father come to our meetings? It is impossible to say how much that has limited the activity of the church.”100

As priest Stephen J. Krupa wrote of Day’s pacifism,

The absolute stand on nonviolence and pacifism at the Catholic Worker was Day’s idea, not Maurin’s, and she was unrestrained in confronting members of the Catholic hierarchy, including her own archbishop, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, with their uncritical patriotism and defense of the nation’s war aims. A layperson and a woman, she did not wait for the church hierarchy to approve of her stand on nonviolence.101

Later in life, Day was joined by other Catholic leaders on the issue of pacifism in public actions and statements. In 1979, for example, Day was part of “A Religious Call for a Nuclear Moratorium” and was joined by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit.102

Day’s example of a faithful Catholic lay woman paralleled shifts in public positions on women by Church hierarchy. At the 1975 Catholic Synod, Stephen Cardinal Kim of

Korea remarked about the injustice of men and women being “oppressed, exploited and imprisoned simply because they struggle to exercise or defend human rights.” Bishop

Joseph Bernardin suggested in front of Pope Paul VI “that the possibility of women as priests be pursued,” while Finnish Bishop Paul Verschuren said that “the situation of women there in civil society was greatly at odds with their role in the Church.” In addition, Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit Superior General, spoke to the Synod audience,

92 “emphasizing the importance and strength of religious women ‘in a position to exercise all the offices and ministries the church may entrust to them.’”103 Catholic historian

Sandra Yocum Mize described Day and the Catholic Worker as “the precursor” of

“American Catholicism’s coming of age” and that Day should be credited “with creating a ‘theology of the laity that antedated Vatican II’ and being ‘prophetic of the consciousness of the Church.’”104 Clearly, by the end of Day’s life, and arguably though her pioneering work as a female Catholic lay leader, women occupied a vastly different space in the Church and commanded a far greater level of respect than when she converted in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Day was buried in 1980, it was with full honors from the Archdiocese of

New York—the same entity she had picketed when the diocese’s gravediggers went on strike in 1949.105 In the years immediately after Day’s death, Catholic Church leaders in

Amarillo (home to the nation’s assembly plant for nuclear weapons), Seattle, and San

Francisco took official positions on nuclear disarmament and military spending that mirrored those first put forth by Day in The Catholic Worker. When Pope John Paul II traveled to Japan to visit the sites of nuclear bombings, his call for an end to preparations for nuclear war was directly reminiscent of Day’s words.106 Day and the teachings of the

Catholic Worker Movement, though ahead of the Church establishment’s teachings, did eventually come to be synchronous. The right to conscientious objection, which Day first protested decades before the Catholic Worker was founded, was first solidified by the

Church during Vatican II,107 while Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (“Peace on

Earth”) and Pope Paul VI in Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”) provided “a partial vindication” of the Catholic Worker’s position.108

93 In 1997, New York Archbishop John Cardinal O’Connor told a group of Day devotees gathered to celebrate the centennial of her birth at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that

Day should be proposed as a candidate for sainthood. In his homily, O’Connor remarked that “the more reading I’ve done, the more saintly a woman she seems to me.”109

Day’s authority as a movement leader coupled with a personalist focus derived from her socialist beginnings were perhaps best exemplified in the way in which the

Catholic Worker was—and is still—run. The paper, and the movement that followed, gave rise to 207 Catholic Worker communities in thirty-seven states, as well as thirty

Catholic Worker communities across six continents and fifteen countries, as of 2018. And writing for the paper meant being an active part of the movement. Conversely, those who came to Catholic Worker communities for shelter, for food, even just for the community, found themselves involved in the production of a newspaper. Reporters and editors for the paper often lived at the hospitality house in New York, and guests and clients served at the house became part of the newspaper operation, folding and addressing papers and even writing articles. The paper was anchored in both journalism and service, and sought to “affirm traditional Church teachings while rhetorically creating opportunities for action not offered in the traditional Catholic Church structure.”110 It asked readers—and its writers—to partake in acts of charity such as donating food or money, or volunteering to work at a Catholic Worker farm. And if circumstance made those tasks prohibitive, prayer for specific intentions was the kind of donation any reader could make.111

Writers for The Catholic Worker included radical activist types, including

“near[ly] everyone [on the] Catholic Left.” Among the noteworthy were peace activists and authors Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Gordon Zahn, Thomas Cornell of the Catholic

94 Peace Fellowship, and James Forest of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation;

1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and his wife Abigail; and trade union activist John Cort.112 Day, her writing, and her work also attracted more mainstream contributors and readers. Over the history of The Catholic Worker, Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton wrote frequently for the paper; John Corley, who later became

The New York Times religion editor, regularly contributed, and one particular examination of American poverty in the paper “commended the attention” of President

John F. Kennedy and encouraged his anti-poverty agenda.113

In the last decade of her life, Day began to write more explicitly to her friends and fellow Catholic Workers about the motives behind her work and writing, and provided them with a framework for carrying on her message and legacy. To Mike Cullen, to whom she wrote in 1970 after he was imprisoned for burning his draft card in an act of civil disobedience, Day wrote:

I felt glad as I entered my cell that now at last I could be poor for a time, for a day, for a week, or a month, that no matter how small a time, I was at last sharing a little the misery of the poor. . . . I am convinced that prayer and austerity, prayer and self-sacrifice, prayer and fasting, prayer, vigils, and prayer and marches, are the indispensable means . . . and love. All these means are useless unless animated by love. . . . It is a terrible thought—”we love God as much as the one we love the least.”114

For Day, this period was a “time for letting go, for turning over the reins to the

‘young people’ who continued to be drawn to her cause,” and grew to feel “more like the mother of a large family,” rather than an editor and movement leader.115

To a hurting young woman, she wrote that “it is a very real agony of our own, wanting human love, fulfillment, and one so easily sees all the imperfections of this love we seek, the inability of others to ever satisfy this need of ours, the constant failure of

95 those nearest and dearest to understand, to respond.” Yet, in closing her letter, Day told the woman, “I love you, because you remind me of my own youth, and of my one child and my grandchildren.”116 To Catholic Worker Mary Lathrop, Day “really was [her] mother.” Lathrop, who helped care for Day at the end of her life, said Dorothy once told her, “You’re taking care of your old mother,” and showed her a book that was inscribed to Day as “the mother of thousands.”117

Day’s writings, and especially her role as a journalist, reveal how her understanding of herself and her place became more nuanced over the course of her lifetime. It is not too much of a stretch to say that Day’s journalism was a route to her own self-exploration, spiritual development, and education about effecting change in the realms of political and religious dogma.

NOTES

1 Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate

Portrait of My Grandmother (New York: Scribner, 2017), 85.

2 Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (San

Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 50.

3 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 7.

4 William Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace,’” America,

December 13, 1980, 382.

5 Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum,” May 15, 1891, http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo- xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.

6 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 25.

96

7 Dorothy Day, “Girl Reporter; With Three Cents In Purse, Braves Night Court

Lawyers,” The New York Call, November 11, 1916.

8 Dorothy Day, “Reporter Looks into Fads, Facts, and Fancies, and Things at

Rand School,” The New York Call, November 12, 1916.

9 Dorothy Day, “Reporter of $5 a Week Eats Farina and Cheese, Reads

Wordsworth,” The New York Call, December 6, 1916.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Dorothy Day, “‘Man Cannot Live By Bread Alone,’ and Neither Can a Normal

Woman,” The New York Call, December 18, 1916.

13 Dorothy Day, “Plucky Girl of Picket Line Braves Knives of Scabs and

‘Guerillas,’” The New York Call, February 1, 1917.

14 Dorothy Day, “Mrs. Byrne Too Weak to Eat after Ordeal at Workhouse,” The

New York Call, February 3, 1917.

15 Ibid.

16 Dorothy Day, “Blackwell’s Island Gray, Dead, Desolate, Declares Mrs. Byrne,”

The New York Call, February 8, 1917.

17 Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1984).

18 Ibid., 23.

19 Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 138.

20 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 94.

21 Ibid., 70.

97

22 Day, The Long Loneliness, 60.

23 Judith Gregory, “Remembering Dorothy Day,” America, December 13, 1980.

24 Ibid., 36.

25 Ibid., 100.

26 Dorothy Day and Robert Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day (New York: Image Books, 2012), 100.

27 Ibid., 235.

28 Ibid., 90.

29 Ibid., 195.

30 “Wide Scope Noted in Catholic Papers.” New York Times, September 7, 1939.

31 Teresa Tritch, “When Prominent Catholics Opposed Dorothy Day,” New York

Times, September 30, 2015.

32 Herbert W. Rogers, “The Obedient but Angry Daughter of Holy Church,”

America, November 11, 1972.

33 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 198.

34 Donald Campion, “Of Many Things . . .” America, October 19, 1968.

35 Nancy L. Roberts, “Journalism and Activism: Dorothy Day’s Response to the

Cold War,” Peace & Change 12, no. 1/2 (April 1987), doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-

0130.1987.tb00090.x, 16.

36 Ibid., 19.

37 Ibid., 20.

38 Ibid., 21.

39 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 198.

98

40 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 90.

41 June O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day: A Feminist Perspective

(New York: Crossroad, 1991), 25. Parentheses in original.

42 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 88.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 86.

45 Ibid., 84.

46 Ibid., 91.

47 Ibid., 93.

48 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 73.

49 The term “Silent Sentinels” refers to the group of women who partook in silent protest in front of the White House under the direction of National Women’s Party leader

Alice Paul in support of women’s suffrage.

50 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 93.

51 Ibid., 91.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 92.

54 Ibid., 98. Parentheses in original.

55 Day, The Long Loneliness, 45.

56 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 109.

57 Ibid., 107.

58 David O’Brien, “American Catholics and Organized Labor in the 1930’s,” The

Catholic Historical Review 52, no. 3 (October 1966): 323-49.

99

59 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 130.

60 Ibid., 184.

61 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 109.

62 “A Pilgrimage Achieved,” America, December 13, 1980.

63 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 109.

64 Ibid., 94.

65 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 283.

66 Rosalie Riegle Troester, ed., Voices from the Catholic Worker (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1993). 93.

67 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 7.

68 Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace,’” 384.

69 O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day, 37.

70 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 172.

71 George Dugan, “Priest, Suspended for Cuba Visit, Yields to Bishop” New York

Times, September 17, 1963.

72 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 86.

73 Ibid., 104-5.

74 Ibid., 108.

75 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 194.

76 Ibid., 245.

77 Dorothy Day, “To Joe Zarella,” n.d., 1940, box 23, folder 8, Dorothy Day-

Catholic Worker Collection, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University,

Milwaukee, WI (hereafter DDCWC).

100

78 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 187.

79 Colman McCarthy, “To Dorothy Day,” n.d. box 14, folder 1, DDCWC.

80 Colman McCarthy, “To Dorothy Day,” May 19, 1967, box 14, folder 1, DDCWC.

81 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 316.

82 Ibid., 337.

83 O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day, 75.

84 Max Seigel, “Dorothy Day and Movement Resist U.S. Tax Claim,” New York

Times, May 19, 1972.

85 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 343.

86 Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker, 71.

87Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 341.

88 Ibid., xxii.

89 Ibid., 425.

90 Ibid., 253.

91 Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker, 36.

92 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 284.

93 Ibid., 355.

94 Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker, 79.

95 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 366.

96 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 166.

97 Ed Marciniak, “Constancy to the Church and to Social Teaching,” America,

December 13, 1980.

101

98 James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, “To Dorothy Day,” April 10, 1973, box 14, folder 2, DDCWC.

99 “Catholic Women Protest over a Mass for Military” New York Times, August 7,

1976.

100 O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day, 74.

101 Stephen Krupa, “Celebrating Dorothy Day,” America, August 27, 2001.

102 Kenneth A. Briggs, “Religious Coalition Calls for a Halt to Nuclear Power and

Arms Race” New York Times, May 3, 1979.

103 Abigail McCarthy, “The Roman Catholic Synod: A Second Look,” New York

Times, January 11, 1975.

104 Sandra Yocum Mize, “Studies on Dorothy Day and the Soul of American

Catholicism,” U.S. Catholic Historian 16, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 36–57.

105 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 169.

106 Ibid., 172.

107 Ashley Beck, “Making the Encyclicals Click: Catholic Social Teaching and

Radical Traditions,” New Blackfriars 93, no. 1044 (March 2012): 213–29, doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2011.01477.x.

108 Ibid., 221.

109 David Halbfinger, “O’Connor Says He’ll Work to Propose Sainthood for

Dorothy Day, Servant of the Poor” New York Times, November 10, 1997.

102

110 Sara Mehltretter, “The Vernacular Rhetoric of The Catholic Worker,” (paper presented at the annual convention of the National Communication Association

Convention, Chicago, November 15-18, 2007), 2.

111 Ibid., 21.

112 Nancy Roberts, “Dorothy Day’s Vision of Journalism” (paper presented at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass

Communication, Corvallis, Oregon, August 6-9, 1983), 2.

113 Ibid., 4.

114 Day and Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven, 367.

115 Ibid., 364.

116 Ibid., 397.

117 Troester, Voices from the Catholic Worker, 89.

103

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 will examine the ways in which Dorothy Day’s writings on suffering can be interpreted as feminist in praxis, and how they evolved from being personal to personalist in nature. These can be described as falling into a number of categories that were evident upon a reading of thousands of pages of documents in her archive, as well as her autobiographical texts. Her writings can be categorized via: (1) How Day described her own suffering in her early life and career; (2) A pivotal moment in understanding the suffering of others as a suffragist; (3) Her personal suffering, subsequent conversion to Catholicism and early understanding of the church’s teachings on suffering; (4) Her non-appropriative manner of writing about suffering as an established leader and editor; and (5) Her later focus on personally connecting her suffering to that of other individuals later in life.

While Day never self-identified as a feminist, and even wrote that she disapproved of many aspects of the second-wave feminist movement that emerged at the end of her life, Day often exhibited a response to and understanding of suffering that could be understood in a contemporary context as a feminist one. Day’s writing evolved from an attempt to make sense of her own suffering, to a fuller understanding, which she used to attain a greater sense of solidarity and empathy with the women whom she protested and worked with, and about whom she wrote.

On the first page of Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, there is a quote from a little-known seventeenth-century English nun. The text reads,

I think, dear child, the trouble and the long loneliness you hear me speak of is not far from me, which whensoever it is, happy success will follow. . . . The pain is

104 great, but very endurable, because He who lays on the burden also carries it.

Mary Ward, a religious sister who hoped to found a more forward-thinking order of sisters, was the original author of that text. According to scholar Christina Moss, Ward was known for using her writing to “disrupt patriarchal discourse,” and was responsible for changing the church’s view of women in the seventeenth century while still remaining within the bounds of Catholic teaching.1 The decision to not simply include, but to begin her autobiography with a quote on suffering from Ward, who has been described as the

“first sister of feminism,”2 is a choice many of Day’s readers are unaware of, yet provides significant insight into Day and her relationship with suffering and patriarchal structures.

Three centuries after Ward wrote those words, Day, who was at once a radical

Catholic activist and newspaper editor, found herself in occupational, social movement, and religious spaces uncommon for a woman of her time. As noted in previous chapters,

Day was no stranger to suffering, both personally and professionally. Day was indeed unique in her role as a female newspaper editor, religious figure, and movement leader.

Day’s personal, lived experience, her time spent in relationships with others who suffered, and her understanding of the Catholic Church’s understanding of suffering provided her with the ability to, as granddaughter Kate Hennessy put it, write “beautifully about what was wrapped in tragedy. Part of her genius was this ability to see beauty in what didn’t seem to possess it.”3

When Day began her news career, stunt reporting, or immersive experience reporting, remained popular in major newspapers. The trend toward female reporters doing stunt or undercover reporting began with Nellie Bly posing as an insane immigrant to write about the abuses suffered by women held at the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s

105 Island for the New York World in the 1880s. Typically this kind of reporting involved women reporters—women being seen as better able to explore the emotional aspects of stunts than men—experiencing the suffering of others by immersing themselves in situations of social injustice for the enlightenment of readers. Day signed on for one such assignment: “In my zeal for work, I offered to be a diet squad of one, demonstrating how one could live on five dollars a week,”4 she wrote in her autobiography. Yet, in her account, she “satirized” her experience, seeing the concept of living on five dollars a week to be a ludicrous one. Ironically, an inequality focused nonprofit, the Russell Sage

Foundation, “asked [Day] to send them the result of my findings for the benefit of the working girl.”5 This episode reflects an immature understanding of empathy on the part of both the Russell Sage Foundation and Day as described by feminist writer Elizabeth

Spelman, in her book Fruits of Sorrow: Framing our Attention to Suffering. Spelman writes:

Empathy does not necessarily reflect or encourage knowledge; having it does not require recognizing another as separate, nor hearing what they may have to say about the empathetic gesture or about what is claimed to be understood. Inequality along almost any dimension is not at all ruled out by empathy.6

Day wrote that during her early reporting years, she was motivated deeply by the suffering she witnessed. Yet, Day’s attention to suffering was still on an individual scale, rather than a personal one: “Certainly we loved them in the mass; we were moved by the account of their sufferings, and by what we saw of their sufferings, and our hearts burned with the desire for justice and were revolted at the idea of a doled-out charity.”

Day’s personal writings from this time show she attuned herself to the suffering of others, but her reasoning for doing so was not entirely selfless. Day wrote at the time she felt her reporting gave her a sense of “adventure” from her proximity to those

106 creating social change.7 This echoes a style of exploitative journalism Susan Sontag argues against in Regarding the Pain of Others:

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. . . . Information about what is happening elsewhere, called “news,” features conflict and violence—”If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guideline of the tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows—to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.8

In spite of Day’s immature understanding of the suffering of others, her writing shows she was at least somewhat aware that the type of journalism she published, and the manner in which she covered and discussed the plight of suffering individuals, had to be done in a manner that afforded more dignity to those individuals.

As noted in Chapter 2, Day’s tenure at The Masses was cut short when censorship during the First World War shuttered the paper after just months of her being employed there. Left without stable work, Day joined Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels in front of the

White House to picket for women’s suffrage.9 Day was jailed for the first time on

November 10, 1917 for her participation in the protest.10 While behind bars, Day, along with other members of the National Women’s Party, began a hunger strike to protest prison conditions at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia.11 Day wrote extensively about the emotional and physical lows she experienced in prison, and particularly while in solitary confinement for six days,12 and described it as a pivotal moment for her as a budding journalist, movement leader, and female activist. In a New York Times article detailing the pickets’ release from prison, Paul notes, “Twenty-two of us are out, but nine are unjustly imprisoned,” and mentions Day as being one of those still behind bars.13 It was during this time that Day began to sharpen her perception of the suffering of others

107 and her relationship to that suffering, as well as her own beliefs about her faith.

In one of her earliest autobiographical works, From Union Square to Rome, published in 1938, Day describes her conversion, with her time in Occoquan being key.

Here, Day focuses her writing on coming to an understanding of the suffering of others through suffering herself:

Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit–these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself. I was man. I was no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed, I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who for rebellion was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover. The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own heart every abomination. As I read this over, it seems, indeed, over-emotional and an exaggerated statement of the reactions of a young woman in jail.14

Here, Day writes that she sees herself as those suffering, thus losing her own ego and identity as part of a collective social movement, and more so as one with those with whom she was imprisoned. However, Day does display some level of self-awareness, recognizing the “exaggerated” nature of her writing.

A more objective account of her time in Occoquan, as described by Hennessy, still provides a visceral depiction of the suffering Day underwent:

While traveling [to Occoquan] by train, Dorothy, feeling oppressed by the bleak countryside, wondered why she had gotten involved. That night when they arrived at Occoquan, November 15, the Night of Terror, as it came to be known, was the worst and most brutal incident of the treatment of the suffragists. About forty guards, some dressed in street clothes and all armed with clubs, dragged, kicked, trampled and choked the women. Some were knocked unconscious or threatened with rape. Three guards attacked Dorothy so violently the story made the newspapers. They throttled her, held her arms above her head, and smashed her several times against an iron bench, almost beating her senseless. Witnesses were afraid the guard had broken her back.15

108

In Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness, published fourteen years later, she wrote of the event in a remarkably similar fashion about the lack of identity she experienced, and the taking-on of the identity of those she was imprisoned with:

I lost all feeling of my own identity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin. That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me. I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty. . . . When I first wrote of these experiences I wrote even more strongly of my identification with those around me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own breast every abomination. Is this exaggeration? There are not so many of us who have lain for six days and nights in darkness, cold and hunger, pondering in our heart the world and our part in it.16

Yet, it is Day’s earliest account of the event that provides readers a more detailed and nuanced picture of the importance Day placed, even at the beginning of her career, upon the necessity of shared experience to truly comprehend and empathize with the suffering of others. Just after her Union Square account of her arrest, Day writes:

If you live for long in the slums of cities, if you are in constant contact with sins and suffering, it is indeed rarely that so overwhelming a realization comes upon one. It often has seemed to me that most people instinctively protect themselves from being touched too closely by the suffering of others. They turn from it, and they make this a habit. The tabloids with their presentation of crime testify to the repulsive truth that there is a secret excitement and pleasure in reading of the sufferings of others. One might say there is a surface sensation in the realization of the tragedy in the lives of others. But one who has accepted hardship and poverty as the way of life in which to walk, lays himself open to this susceptibility to the sufferings of others.17

Day shows through this excerpt that she understands how individuals shield themselves from suffering, and that her peers in the newspaper industry exploit the suffering of others for profit.

Day’s accounts of suffering while in jail echo what Hannah Arendt terms

109 “solidarity,” in which attention is raised by but not guided by suffering, and in which nonsufferers “establish deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited.”18 Particularly, Day’s emphasis on the commonality between her own and others’ suffering, not just in terms of physical conditions, has a direct connection to Arendt. For Arendt, “Solidarity focuses on what nonsufferers and sufferers have in common—for example, their shared humanity or dignity—not on the conditions of want, deprivation, misery, or humiliation which distinguishes them.”19 And further, Arendt’s call for an active response to that experience of suffering in solidarity is remarkably similar to the action-based social and political movement Day founded a few years later: Arendt “strongly implies that there is no need to deliberate over the existence or significance of suffering; if people are hungry you feed them, if they are without shelter you house them.”20

Day’s close identification as being those whose suffering she witnessed was tempered over time, as she later acknowledged the potential problems with such a strong identification. In Fruits of Sorrow, a lack of ability to recognize the potential problems with such identification is explicated by contemporary African American feminist bell hooks,21 who remarks that “emphasis on ‘common oppression’ in the United States was less a strategy for politicization than an appropriation by conservative and liberal women of a radical political vocabulary.”22 Yet, as Elizabeth Spelman writes, had Day left the experience without any sort of understanding of the suffering she witnessed, it would have had far worse implications:

While there certainly seems to be something repugnant in seeing so much of oneself in another’s experience that one completely obscures the existence of that other subject, there is something similarly repugnant in so distancing oneself from the experiences of others that one cannot see oneself as having anything to do

110 with such an experience.23

Day’s ability to recognize her own suffering, the suffering of others, and the relationship and difference between the two appears to be rooted in Day’s own personal experiences of social, political, and economic marginalization. Spelman remarks, “The deeper privilege goes, the less self-conscious people are of the extent to which their being who they are, in their own eyes as well as the eyes of others, is dependent upon the exploitation or degradation or disadvantage of others.”24 As such, Day was able to leave prison with a thorough and compassionate understanding of the suffering of others that would profoundly shape the rest of her career. As Hennessy describes it, “It also opened something up in her that helped her to share in the suffering of the other jailed women, many of whom were going through drug withdrawals, that the first arrest [as a Silent

Sentinel] had not. But then, she too had grown and suffered.”25

It is clear that Day’s writing from her first few decades in the newspaper industry are marked by an attempt to understand the experiences of others and to write about them in a non-exploitative way. Yet, her lack of experience and exposure to the suffering of others led Day to a style of writing characterized by trepidation and at times overidentification with her subjects. The next period of her life, one marked by increasing personal suffering as detailed in Chapter 2, led to a shift in belief that would better anchor her understanding of the suffering of others.

In her memoirs, Day writes about her trepidations about conversion, as well as her opinions on the ways in which the Church addressed structural causes of social suffering.

She asked, “How can we believe in a God who permitted such suffering and injustice in the world?”26 and, “Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to

111 minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?”27 Yet despite her questions, she found a church that was in line with her radical beliefs and focus on social and political activism. She noted, “My very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate myself with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God.”28 The conversion, though rooted in her connection with and compassion toward the experiences of others, was not one without hiccups. Day noted one priest told her years after the fact that he “found little of Christ in my writing but much of self” in Day’s early work.29

The notion of suffering as something uniquely embraced and even glorified by the

Catholic Church is not simply limited to Day’s experience. Sontag also writes of the

Church’s interest in suffering, and the history and purpose for doing so:

The iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human. . . . The innumerable versions in painting and sculpture of the Passion of Christ, and the inexhaustible visual catalogue of the fiendish executions of the Christian martyrs--these are surely intended to move and excite.30

But as Day grew to understand her faith, and along with it the paradox of suffering that is so uniquely essential to the Catholic Church, she too began to unite her own suffering with that of those she wrote about and served. In the Catholic Worker newspaper’s early years, Day frequently filed reports centered on sharing the suffering of others with her movement’s followers in hopes of effecting political change. As her granddaughter Hennessy described it, “Dorothy began to hear from people telling their stories of being homeless, and as she wrote about it, the homeless began appearing at the door.”31 In the first decade alone, she wrote about a number of strikes, including the 1936

Vermont marble workers’ strike and the 1937 Republic Steel massacre in Chicago, as well as a series on sharecroppers in Arkansas.32

112 In the year or so after publication of those stories, Day wrote of suffering in a much more theological sense than in her earlier reflections on her time in prison. In From

Union Square to Rome, Day notes, “We must suffer for those we love, we must endure their trials and their sufferings, we must even take upon ourselves the penalties due their sins. Thus we learn to understand the love of God for His creatures.”33 Perhaps a more direct tie to the physical suffering and even deaths of those she wrote of in the prior years is Day’s suggestion that readers of her memoir should “think of the numbers of men who have died for the love of God, holding out their arms to share in Christ’s sufferings. Yes, love, great love—and who wishes to be mediocre in love?—brings with it a desire for suffering.”34 In a 1953 letter to supporter Gertrude Power, Day wrote, “Take heart, keep on going, suffering though you may be. Of course we want to get to heaven, but far better to work out our purgatory here, and to serve God and our brothers as long as possible.”35

What is perhaps most unique about Day’s understanding of suffering here is the coupling of a certain grounding in one’s fallibility with an identification with the divine.

Her emphasis on personal suffering and penance, on one hand, reminds readers of their humanity, while on the other, they strive to be like the God in whom they believe. She encourages readers to strive for the impossible goal of understanding the suffering of God in order to understand not only His suffering, but also that of others, and the commonality of suffering that unites all of humanity.

It is clear by the time of the publication of Union Square that Day had come to a place of personal belief in the connections between personal suffering, societal suffering, suffering as inherent in political movements, and the God in whom she believes. She writes, “When we suffer, we are told we suffer with Christ. . . . We suffer His loneliness

113 and fear in the garden when His friends slept. We are bowed down with Him under the weight of not only our own sins but the sins of each other, of the whole world. . . . We are identified with Him, one with Him.”36 And indeed a decade later, she further crystalizes this belief in her account of the Catholic Worker Movement’s history, Loaves and Fishes, that “[b]y our suffering and our failures, by our acceptance of the Cross, by our struggle to grow in faith, hope, and charity, we unleash forces that help to overcome the evil in the world.”37 And just a few years later, in 1940, Day wrote in a diary entry:

I need to overcome a sense of my own impotence, my own failure, and an impatience at others that goes with it. I must remember not to judge myself as St. Paul says. Such a sense of defeat comes from expecting too much of ones self, also from a sense of pride. More and more I realize how good God is to me to send me discouragements, failures, antagonisms. The only way to proceed is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways. To bear our own burdens, do our own work as best we can and not fret because we cannot do more, or do another’s work.38

This notion of transformative suffering, embraced by Day and hailed by the

Catholic Church, is a more ancient one, rather than a more modern one. As Sontag writes,

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation—a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes us feel powerless.39

Day also saw within the Catholic Church a possible explanation as to why women in particular suffered more than men. She noted, “God knows women have enough of the ugly and the lowly to do in the work of this world,” and that “in their sufferings they see clearly the result of the Fall.”40 Day describes women as getting “a raw deal over and over again” and having “twice the burden of men, yet greater fragility.”41

Day’s newfound understanding of the power of shared suffering was a direct result of not simply a period of profound personal pain, but a conversion to a faith whose

114 entire belief system is centered on the redemptive power of suffering. Having gone through a significant amount of suffering herself, and armed with an understanding of the

Catholic perspective on suffering, Day entered the height of her career with a healthy understanding of how to respond to and write about the suffering of others.

The very style of The Catholic Worker, along with its editorial stance, was infused with Day’s beliefs on respecting and responding to the suffering of others. As she notes in The Long Loneliness,

Certainly whenever we have written in The Catholic Worker about the conditions through the country we have tried to see and study them first hand, and to work out a solution that would be within the means and the capacities of all.42

In one interview, Day told a reporter, “You can’t write about things without doing them. . . . You just have to live that same way.”43 This sentiment echoes Sontag’s theory that “[p]erhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”44

Similarly, Day felt the principle of non-exploitative writing applied to her autobiographical work as well:

I feel hesitant to go too deeply in writing of other lives. It is hard enough to write about my own. I do feel, however, that I have a right to give an account of myself, a reason for the faith that is in me. But I have not that right to discuss others. . . . I am a journalist, not a biographer, not a book writer.45

Key to Day’s ability to avoid writing exploitative pieces about the suffering of others was the newspaper’s financial model. As The Catholic Worker sold for just a penny per copy, having articles aimed at shocking readers into buying papers through exploiting the suffering of article subjects was not part of the equation. Biographer Nancy

Roberts noted that for Day,

115 The value of writing lay far beyond the income it could provide to aid the poor, or the creative gratifications it offered. Journalism, Day believed, was the social activist’s prime tool. One could use it “to move the heart, stir the will to action; to arouse pity, compassion, to awaken the conscience.” Day frequently encouraged young writers to “resist the temptation of writing trash just to make money.”46

Day also advised journalists and activists who were concerned with the suffering they saw (and wrote about) to take their vocations one step further: “Going around and seeing such sights is not enough. . . . One must live with them, share with them their suffering too. Give up one’s privacy, and mental and spiritual comforts as well as physical.”47 To another supporter, addressed only as “David,” Day writes of the paper and movement’s financial woes, saying,

Somehow we’ll make out, we always have. It is a fearful struggle but we will manage somehow. Thank God there will be enough money to pay the installment on the farm. And that Royalty check is only up to Dec. 31. Which means there will be enough for next year too. What I get from Miss Gage we’ll put to the printing bill. . . . I feel so much happier when I am at home--it is so much harder to see poverty when one is not living with it. It is a constant ache in the heart.48

Day’s writing during her later life demonstrates a strong level of self-awareness of herself and her paper as a mouthpiece for the suffering of others, and the role in which the paper played in demonstrating how to communicate suffering in a productive way.

Another aspect of Day’s life and work demonstrates her aim was not simply to write about or emulate suffering for the sake of experiencing it for personal gain: the

Catholic Worker Movement’s emphasis on direct political action and social service.

Sontag notes that although compassion is a natural reaction to witnessing suffering,

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do—but who is that “we?”—and nothing “they” can do either—and who are “they?”—then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.49

Day similarly recognized this series of events, and noted in her autobiography, “It

116 is easy enough to write and publish a paper and mail it out with the help of volunteers to the four corners of the earth. But it becomes an actual, living thing when you get out on the street corners with the word.”50 And a 1950 diary entry points to similar feelings, as

Day wrote, “We talk of compassion, of suffering with others. Here we have a little taste of homelessness and hostility. The reality of scheming, planning, wondering, uncertainty as to what to do. The lot of most people. It occupies so much of one’s thoughts, one can

51 well see how people can think these days so little of God.”

Spelman noted, “Whether a community has shared or individual experiences of grief and joy depends on the extent to which that community allows individual ownership of property.”52 Life within the movement was structured around such a principle, as Day encouraged voluntary poverty, as well as a combined focus on writing and experience, for her paper’s staff. She remarked, “Since the Catholic Worker is also a movement, our editors and writers cook, clean, and wash dishes. They tend the sick, chauffeur the ailing to hospitals, and clean out vermin-ridden apartments.”53 The fact that the movement encouraged communities—and the paper’s writers and editors—to live and work among the poor in conditions similar to theirs, allowed for a more authentic understanding of suffering to come across in the writing and editing of the paper. As Day questioned in her account of the movement and paper’s beginnings,

What right has anyone of us to have security when God’s poor are suffering? What right have I to sleep in a comfortable bed when so many are sleeping in the shadows of buildings here in this neighborhood of The Catholic Worker office? What right do we have to food when many are hungry, or to liberty when the Scottsboro boys54 and so many labor organizers are in jail?55

Writing about and living through such profound suffering caused Day and her fellow activists to consider the insurmountability of the task of alleviating such pain. In

117 one of her diary entries, Day wrote, “As I sit I am weeping. I have been torn recently by people, by things that happen. Surely we are here in our community, made up of poor lost ones, the abandoned ones, the sick, the crazed and the solitary human beings whom

Christ so loved and in whom I am, with a terrible anguish, the body of this death.”56

Similarly, Sontag cautioned readers against the dangers of making social and political ills too big of a problem to tackle:

Making suffering loo large, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more. It also invited them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention.57

Yet Day recognized such a challenge, and offered a possible solution, urging a continuation of political and social action despite the seemingly impossible odds:

Young people say, What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, just as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.58

Day, her writing and her movement emphasized the importance of not simply recognizing and calling attention to suffering, but also the importance of taking even the smallest steps to act and change others’ potential to experience suffering.

While Day’s activism and devotion to radicalism never waned, her approach, as evidenced by her writing, did change. In her later years, Day began to focus on a more personalism-driven approach, and became more attuned to the daily needs and acts of love of those around her, including herself.59 Integral to this approach was Day’s processing suffering—of others and herself—through more intimate, personal, reflective writing. As she noted in Union Square:

118 It entails suffering, as I told you, to write it. I have to dig into myself to get it out. I have to inflict wounds on myself. I have, perhaps, to say things that were better left unsaid. After all, the experiences that I have had are more or less universal. Suffering, sadness, repentance, love, we all have known these. They are easiest to bear when one remembers their universality, when we remember that we are all members or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ. However, one does not like to write about others, thus violating their privacy, especially others near and dear. So, in what follows I have tried to leave out as much as possible of other personalities, those of our own family and those with whom later I associated most intimately.60

Biographer Roberts notes that Day’s autobiographical works, House of

Hospitality, On Pilgrimage, The Long Loneliness, and Loaves and Fishes, were seen as

“a most effective way of working things out for oneself as well as trying to make others understand,” and were written in part to “ease an aching heart and a discouraged mind.”61

Roberts also noted that while Day’s tone and message could come across as “preaching and didactic in parts,” Day wrote in such a manner because she was “preaching and teaching and encouraging [herself] on this narrow road we are treading.”62 Day felt this manner of writing was at once sacrificial and an attempt at solidarity. She wrote in The

Long Loneliness,

Writing a book is hard, because you are ‘giving yourself away.’ But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man’s problems are the same, his human needs of sustenance and love.63

Day’s descriptions of writing is similar to Sara Ahmed’s notion that women “all have different biographies of violence, entangled as they are with so many aspects of ourselves: things that happen because of how we are seen; and how we are not seen. You find a way of giving an account of what happens, of living with what happens.”64

Day’s writing later in life can best be distinguished by her increased focus on correspondence with individuals across the country, and indeed, the world. The Catholic

119 Worker encouraged participation from readers in the form of letter writing, with one early issue noting the paper received “at least 18,250 letters during the last year,” and a letters section comprising roughly an eighth of the paper.65 Day’s influence here is visible. As

Spelman remarks, the public sharing of feelings “offers proof of the depth of one’s connection with those who are in such great pain and thus the right to speak about and for them.”66 Day frequently infused stories from letters sent by readers into her own stories, as she saw each individual reader as “as a significant individual,”67 and employed a

“rhetorical strategy . . . to introduce them by their first names—Bill, Anna, Millie—as if to say, ‘They are one of us.’”68 Indeed, her readers and those on whose behalf she advocated saw her the same way. Letter writers routinely referred to Day as simply

“Dorothy,” and the tone was frequently one of familiarity. Some letter writers explained they felt as if they knew her personally, while others wrote, “Before we ever met her, we knew her holiness and love of the poor which she expressed so well in words.”69

Day also spent time in her later life thinking about suffering while alone. In 1961,

Day wrote in her diary, “My heart is wrung by the suffering in the world, and I do so little. There was a picture in Newsweek of a dozen starving babies in the Congo, one tiny little one with his face in his hands. Terribly, terribly moving. The only consolation is that God will wipe away all tears from their eyes. But woe to us who caused those tears.

We white ones.”70 In another entry ten years later, Day wrote,

My heart literally aches, pains, hurts. What to do? Pray yes. Watch and pray. But what steps can be taken before lives are ruined...Talking does not mend matters. Neither does precipitate action. Hasty action. . . . So little we can do to help another, but just listen, sympathize, reassure. People have to live their own crises alone. We can pray. That is the important thing: To leave it in God’s hands. He loves them more than we do.71

For Day, the discussion of suffering and providing agency to those who do suffer

120 is key to political and journalistic life, something Spelman also proposes: “The solution is not to prohibit discussions of the meaning of the suffering of particular people, but, if possible, to make sure that those who are suffering participate in the discussion—which means acknowledging their status as moral and political agents even as one recognizes and responds to their condition of suffering.”72

Day did not only correspond with readers, but also with confidantes, fellow

Catholic Workers, leaders in various social and political movements, and religious figures. A number of letters in Day’s personal papers at Marquette University reveal that

Day became more open to corresponding with others about her ideas on the meaning of suffering in the later part of her life.

The first example of outgoing correspondence from Day that explicitly mentions suffering came in a late 1952 letter to Jack English, a longtime supporter of The Catholic

Worker and Trappist monk living in Georgia. English, an alcoholic, wrote to Day to ask for guidance. In the letter, she shifts the agency back to English, writing, “You are holding us up in ways you do not know of. You with your flounderings are preventing others from falling.”73 She additionally calls to mind the Catholic interpretation of suffering, telling English, “What a strength there is in going on just from hour to hour, day to day. You don’t know anything about it, what is generated by that suffering. Of course you have to suffer—to attain love.”74 Day also describes to English the unique, feminine nature of suffering through the example of her daughter, Tamar, who was experiencing marriage trouble, as she notes, “Tamar became more womanly, more gentle and brave under it all.”75 Finally, she affirms the uniqueness of English’s pain, and does not conflate his own pain with her own, her daughter’s, or anyone else’s: “You have

121 suffered so much, and each one’s suffering is different. You have been brave in the past, to endure, and I am praying that you will be brave now and endure. . . . You know you have our love always. You are part of us around here.”76 Such a structure, one that highlights English’s agency, the Catholic perspective, the perspective of women, and a simultaneous feeling of both individual attention and inclusion in a larger community, offers a vivid illustration of Day’s unique, feminist response to suffering.

Another illustrative example of Day’s approach to the suffering of others in her letter writing comes in a long missive to priests and brothers Dan and Phil Berrigan, both jailed for direct action against the Vietnam War. In a 1973 letter, Day describes the suffering of two saints whose feast days are on the same day she penned the letter, including a hermit who lived among the poor and an Italian woman who started a trade school for girls.77 Day then describes the suffering at the Catholic Worker house, a place she describes as “a vision of hell,” with “parents afflicted with drink, or fatherless children, and mothers unable to cope and abandoning the children to the care of the community.”78 Day’s proposed solutions to such ills are community and increased personalism in the candid letter, which she notes she “could not possibly print,” lest fellow activists “rightly accuse me of lack of charity, of hope, even of faith in them all.”79

Here, in two brothers decades younger than herself, who learned of political activism from her, now jailed in a similar fashion to her life-altering experience behind bars, Day asks them for forgiveness for “sharing my suffering with you,” but notes she does so as the brothers “are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. As you are to many.”80 Here,

Day displays a remarkable vulnerability and recognition of co-suffering with not just equals, but followers of hers in the movement.

122 Despite Day’s repeated insistence that she was not, in fact, a feminist, the evolution of her understanding of suffering can certainly be read through a feminist lens vis a vis the writings of Sontag, Spelman, and Ahmed. Day can be seen as what Ahmed calls a “spiritual bellhop,” one who is a “carrier of experience from which others can benefit.”81 Indeed, the way in which Day came to understand her own experiences of suffering throughout her life through her Catholic faith reflects what Ahmed describes as

“the use of one’s suffering by others” which “appears to offer at least partial redemption for that suffering.”82 Thus, Day was able to unite her experiences of suffering with the divine, as well as with other women and those with whom she worked. This was explicated and communicated through her newspaper, The Catholic Worker, and reinforced the paper’s mission, which reflects Ahmed’s assertion that one’s “experiences are not anomalous or at the margins of human existence, but representative of or paradigmatic for the rest of humankind.”83 Yet it is worth noting that Day was far from able to prevent or even intervene with some instances of suffering. In recalling instances of suffering at the communal Easton Farm run by the movement in Pennsylvania,

Hennessy writes, “It was the call to return to the land and the men who listened but couldn’t free themselves from their own inner demons, and all Dorothy could do was watch and pray through the devastation wrought through alcohol, breakdowns, abuse, and mental illness.”84

Similarly, Day’s autobiographical works can be seen as a sort of “killjoy manifesto,” a concept Ahmed writes about in Living a Feminist Life. It is clear that Day comes to a more mature understanding of suffering throughout her life as her understanding of Church teachings on the subject developed and as she spent decades

123 living with the most marginalized members of society. Although Day avoided use of the term “feminist,” it was clear that she was what Ahmed would describe as a “killjoy.”

Indeed, Day’s life was “not so linear,” and Day did not, as Ahmed writes, “become [a] feminist killjoy early on.”85 Yet Day did indeed live and write that particular manifesto, living a life that was unafraid of causing unhappiness and that did not easily fit into ascribed boxes. Day was often angry, and she often caused unhappiness within the male- dominated spaces of Church and newspaper industry that she occupied. Day was not just unhappy with the state of the world, but called attention to the suffering of others in order to effect change. Day very much embodied the trope described by Ahmed, in that Day, once radicalized, saw that her “only option is to become more of a feminist killjoy.”86

Day did, as Ahmed describes, live a feminist life, as her “life [was her] work. We work in our life. To live a feminist life is also to be a feminist at work.”87

NOTES

1 Christina Moss, “‘Women May Be Perfect as Well as Men’: Self-Identity and

Patriarchal Oppression in the Writings of Mary Ward and Her Followers,” Critical

Survey 11, no. 1 (1999): 98, DOI: 10.3167/001115799782483988.

2 Simon Caldwell, “The First Sister of Feminism,” The Independent, June 10,

2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-first-sister-of-feminism-

1702163.html.

124

3 Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate

Portrait of My Grandmother (New York: Scribner, 2017), 150.

4 Dorothy Day, Dorothy The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy

Day (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 52.

5 Ibid., 57.

6 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering

(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 130.

7 James Allaire and Rosemary Broughton, “An Introduction to the Life and

Spirituality of Dorothy Day,” The Catholic Worker Movement (blog), n.d., http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/life-and-spirituality.html.

8 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 18.

9 Anne Klejment, “Dorothy Day,” Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia,

Research Starters data base, EBSCOhost, 2016.

10 Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s

Life,” n.d. http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/timeline.pdf.

11 Ibid.

12 William Miller, “Dorothy Day, 1897-1980: ‘All Was Grace,’” America,

December 13, 1980.

13 “Suffrage Pickets Freed From Prison” New York Times, November 28, 1917.

14 Dorothy Day, From Union Square to Rome (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,

2006), 7.

15 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty.

16 Day, The Long Loneliness, 78.

125

17 Day, From Union Square to Rome, 8.

18 Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow, 84.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 bell hooks is the author’s penname, which is stylized as lowercase.

22 Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow, 116.

23 Ibid., 118.

24 Ibid., 111.

25 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 33.

26 Day, From Union Square to Rome, 147.

27 Day, The Long Loneliness, 45.

28 Ibid., 139.

29 Ibid., 152.

30 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 40.

31 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 81.

32 Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1984), 72.

33 Day, From Union Square to Rome, 155.

34 Ibid., 176.

35 Dorothy Day, “To Gertrude Power,” February 11, 1953, box 18, folder 2,

Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette

University, Milwaukee, WI (hereafter DDCWC).

36 Day, From Union Square to Rome, 13.

126

37 Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 209.

38 Dorothy Day, August 27, 1940, series D-4, box 3, DDCWC.

39 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 99.

40 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 90.

41 Ibid., 91.

42 Day, The Long Loneliness, 230.

43 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 76.

44 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 42.

45 Day, The Long Loneliness, 11.

46 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 68.

47 Day, The Long Loneliness, 214.

48 Dorothy Day, “To ‘David,’” April 4 (year omitted), box 33, folder 9, DDCWC.

49 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 101.

50 Day, The Long Loneliness, 204.

51 Dorothy Day, “Diary Entry,” June 3, 1950, series D-4, box 3, DDCWC.

52 Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow, 25.

53 Day, Loaves and Fishes, 135.

54 Day here refers to nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama.

55 Dorothy Day, House of Hospitality (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor

Publishing Division, 2015), 144.

56 Dorothy Day, “Diary Entry,” February 19 (year omitted), series D-4, box 4, DDCWC.

127

57 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 79.

58 Day, Loaves and Fishes, 176.

59 Rosalie Riegle Troester, ed. Voices from the Catholic Worker (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1993). 36.

60 Day, From Union Square to Rome, 18.

61 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 69.

62 Ibid.

63 Day, The Long Loneliness, 10.

64 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2017), 23.

65 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 51.

66 Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow, 64.

67 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 46.

68 Ibid., 77.

69 Ibid., 80.

70 Dorothy Day, “Diary Entry,” February 26, 1961, series D-4, box 6, DDCWC.

71 Dorothy Day, “Diary Entry,” June 20, 1971, series D-4, box 7, DDCWC.

72 Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, 88.

73 Dorothy Day, letter to Jack English, August 21, 1952, box 6, folder 6,

DDCWC.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

128

77 Dorothy Day, letter to Dan and Phil Berrigan, May 14, 1973, box 2, folder 5,

DDCWC.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 8.

82 Ibid., 9.

83 Ibid.

84 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty.

85 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 173.

86 Ibid.,

87 Ibid., 89.

129 Chapter 5

A close reading of Dorothy Day’s personal documents, writings, and a number of written works about Day’s life indicate a strong connection to be made between Catholic personalism and feminist standpoint theory, and by extension, the compatibility of feminism with Catholic social teaching vis a vis the life of Catholic activist women as exemplified by Day.

This thesis has argued that Dorothy Day was an enigmatic, female leader within both the Catholic Church and newspaper industry, and that her personal life and faith had a profound impact on her professional work. I have also described the historical context into which Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement and newspaper emerged, and the theoretical frameworks of personalism and feminist standpoint theory as an epistemological basis of understanding the activism of women in the Catholic Church. I established the evolving adherence of Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker to Catholic

Church teachings, and Day’s increasing legitimacy with the Church’s male-dominated leadership. I also established Day’s growing clout as a female leader who commanded the attention of the male-led legacy newspaper industry and a number of important media leaders. I next examined Day’s personal suffering and writing about both her own suffering and that of others, and made the case that as Day’s own understanding of suffering evolved in concert with her understanding of the Catholic faith, her writing reflected a growing feminist consciousness and feminist theory of suffering as described in Elizabeth Spelman’s Fruits of Sorrow, Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, and

Susan Sontag’s In Regarding the Pain of Others.

130 The personalist thought that was at the center of Catholic Worker philosophy is key to understanding Day’s faith—and her understanding of the value of all people— including women.

Day sums up the Catholic Worker definition of personalism in a 1943 column, in which she writes,

And the catechism sums it all up. What are we here for? We are here to know God, to love Him and to serve Him . . . and how can we love and serve Him unless we love our brother and serve him. So it follows, that each of us, instead of being self-centered, must try more and more to be God centered.1

Another column, from 1955, describes Peter Maurin’s philosophy in a column entitled, “Peter’s Program”:

That everything began with one’s self. He termed his message a personalist one, and was much averse to the word socialist, since it had always been associated with the idea of political action, the action of the city or the state. He wanted us all to be what we wanted the other fellow to be. If every man became poor there would not be any destitute, he said. If everyone became better, everyone would be better off. He wanted us all “to quit passing the buck.”2

The Catholic Worker personalist philosophy is not just something lived in the social work done by volunteers, but also in the journalism printed in the newspaper, and in the shifting of perspectives that comes from living in solidarity with and among the poor. The smallest and least are made the greatest, as exemplified by a 1941 front-page story about William, a newborn at the Mott Street house. Day writes in a Page 1 article,

William . . . is hereby headlined on our front page, as the biggest news of the month, the gayest news, the most beautiful news, the most tragic news, and indeed more worthy of a place in a headline than the seventeen billion, four hundred and eighty-five million, five hundred and twenty-eight thousand and forty-nine dollars headlined in The New York Times this morning.3

For Day, a days-old baby is far more important breaking news than the latest military budget. This personalist philosophy has shifted Day’s understanding of the “rules of the

131 game” in journalism—what Day once knew to be “newsworthy,” things such as eating worms on a diet squad or sky-high dollar amounts for the cost of war—is no longer what matters. As scholar Patrick Coy wrote in his study of personalist politics at the Catholic

Worker,

The experience of living in a Catholic Worker hospitality house in solidarity with the poor softens the aversions many people have to presuming to know a ‘truth’ and to speaking that truth to the world through nonviolent action. This first-hand experience Workers obtain regarding the effects of public policies on the poor shapes—and in at least some cases sharpens—their political analysis of those policies (discerning the truth). It also emboldens them to act on that analysis (speaking the truth) through public, dramatic, nonviolent action, which is a form of political action that is decidedly not postmodern as it is often designed to paint stark contrasts and create crises of moral choice. In short, the Catholic Worker house of hospitality is a source of political knowledge leading to nonviolent action.4

This openness and vulnerability to the other is all the more remarkable considering the suffering Day experienced in her personal life. As her confidante and close friend Thomas Merton reminded her in a 1961 letter,

We have to remember the terrible danger of projecting to others all the evil we find in ourselves, so that we justify our desire to hate that evil and to destroy it in them. The basic thing in Christian ethics is to look at the person and not at the nature. . . . [W]e forget the concrete, the individual, the personal reality of the one confronting us. Hence we see him not as our other self, not as Christ, but as our demon, our evil beast, our nightmare.5

Day was able to find that balance between theory, experience, and emotion, as

Judith Gregory, one of the editors of The Catholic Worker, recalled: “This is not to say that Dorothy considered either theory or emotion unimportant. Far from it. She often spoke of the need for theory. . . . It’s as if she said: ‘Let sayings from the theorists guide you, yes, but don’t get lost in the theory itself.’”6 Participation and action were key to life at the Catholic Worker. As granddaughter Kate Hennessy recalled, “At the Worker you didn’t merely write about the news; you took part in it.”7 Hennessy also wrote that for

132 Day, “being a bystander did not sit comfortably with her. Her radical friends were out on the front lines, and she too wanted to be involved in some way and not simply observing as a journalist while others acted.”8

This participation rooted in personalist philosophy, and the remarkable consistency with which Day and those at the Catholic Worker practiced it, are what gave

Day such legitimacy with Catholic Church officials. As sociologist Monsignor Paul

Hanley Furfey wrote, “This answer, the New Testament answer, was the real solution to social problems. . . . Of course the CW people hadn’t discovered anything new. Their contribution, an overwhelmingly important one, was that they tried to take the Gospels literally.”9 Another sociologist, Ed Marciniak, wrote shortly after Day’s death that this constancy was so integral to her prominence and status as a leader within the Church:

Ardent activists flit from cause to cause: the right of labor to organize, conscientious objection, farming communes, Vietnam, ecology, women’s liberation, church renewal, civil rights, the war against poverty and so on. And where was Dorothy Day all this time? From the beginning she was there, standing against injustice, and while others moved on to more fashionable causes, she stood her ground.10

It is clear that Dorothy Day was an enigmatic and groundbreaking leader in the Catholic

Church and for women reporters. As “a pious Roman Catholic who stripped her religion down to its essentials and clung to them,”11 Day remained faithful to her Church for the entirety of her career.

But in order to gain this legitimacy within the male-led structure of the Catholic faith as a female journalist, activist, and writer, Day was forced to consider her gender and the role it played in her career. Although Day did eventually become one of the foremost female Catholic lay leaders of her time, she faced barriers both in the Church and the newspaper industry. As evidenced by a life and writings, particularly in regard to

133 the suffering she witnessed both herself and of others, her understanding of the subject could be regarded as both feminist and decades ahead of her time. Throughout her lifetime in writing about and caring for the suffering of others, Day was able to grow in her understanding of the meaning of suffering to a theory of life that was both profoundly

Catholic and feminist.

It is evident that Day had traditional views of gender and womanhood that are reflective of the time in which she lived. As Day scholar June O’Connor wrote in her book about Day’s feminist beliefs, Day “regularly critiqued the movement in both its early and later twentieth-century forms as being too self-centered.”12 Former Catholic

Worker editor Judith Gregory said after Day’s death, “I found her feelings about the women’s movement largely negative. She seemed to feel sexual promiscuity to be the essence of women’s liberation, and to know nothing of the extraordinary accomplishments in cooperation, community and work that have grown out of the women’s movement. I don’t know whether she changed her sense of feminism before she died.”13 Yet another former Catholic Worker editor, Tom Cornell, wrote that the essence of who Day was intimately tied to her being a woman:

Dorothy has mentioned many times to me that the reason she has gotten away with so much is that she is a woman, and people don’t pay much attention to women, or excuse their excesses more freely. . . . On the other hand, one of Dorothy’s most frequent complaints is that people forget that she is a woman, a woman who had a love, a family woman who has raised a daughter, cared for nine grandchildren and now two great-grandchildren. . . . She could ramble comfortably with professional women and housewives.14

This practical interpretation of womanhood is also reflective of the Catholic

Church’s view of women as “doers” who accomplish much practical work without recognition. As scholar Ashley Beck writes, Day exhibited “quite a strong sense of what

134 John Paul II would later call the ‘genius of women’—she saw in the often rather chaotic life of Catholic Worker houses that women were needed to do a lot of the practical jobs that needed doing.”15 Indeed, Day herself once remarked in one of her columns, “What did the women do after the crucifixion?” She answered her own question: “While the men mourned and prayed, the women had to get on with the business of living.”16

Despite these traditional views, O’Connor notes that there is perhaps “a hidden feminist dimension to Day’s thought, for her work is also punctuated with observations and recommendations that clearly reflect a critical eye with respect to injustice in sex roles and a desire to expand and improve opportunities for women and men alike.”17 Day also wrote pointed critiques of the social and emotional missteps of men with whom she had close relationships. Hennessy recalls Day writing, “[M]en want maidservants,” though Hennessy said it is unclear whether she was speaking of one or both of her ex- husbands.18

Day also exhibited some signs of understanding body politics from a feminist perspective. In a diary entry on Valentine’s Day 1944, Day writes of “Brother Ass, St.

Francis called our bodies,” saying,

What burdens it must bear of joy and sorrow, what torrents of pleasure pass over it into what an abyss of pain it can talk. A woman contemplates her body, “that earthen vessel,” that temple of the Holy Ghost, and young or old, as always holy. Young, it is as fresh and fragrant as flowers. Old, it is worn and stale, there is the smell of age and corruption. But this aging flesh, I love it, I treat it tenderly, but I also rejoice that it has been well used. That was my vocation,—a wife and mother, I gave myself to husband and children, my flesh, well used, droops, my breasts sag, my face withers but my eyes and lips rejoice and love and laugh with happiness. Am I a virgin, a single woman, have I willingly cast myself into the arms of God tor have I longed for earthly love, and it has passed me by?19

Day also displayed a profoundly intersectional understanding of women, race, and class. As O’Connor points out, “ Insofar as the women’s movement emphasized rights

135 over responsibilities and focused on freedom rather than justice, it failed to engage

Dorothy Day. She was never drawn to petition or demand equality for women; rather, she was driven to expose and to criticize the system that prevented it in specific forums such as the labor movement, the prison system, and the war resistance movements.”20 And

Day was not alone in this critique, as it was Catholic sisters and nuns who were on the front lines of social, economic, and racial injustice in the Church. As Day’s daughter

Tamar believed, deeply religious Catholic women “were the first to understand and respond to what Dorothy was trying to do, and the invitations for Dorothy to speak at their schools and convents poured in.”21

At the end of Day’s life, both the understanding of feminist theory and Day’s own understanding of the movement began to evolve. As O’Connor writes,

It was at this time that the feminist critique deepened and broadened. Self-critical debates within feminism expanded it beyond its white middle-class origins to include the specific concerns of women of color. And the political focus of feminism expanded to include historical, philosophical, and theological analysis of sexism, androcentrism, patriarchy, and misogyny.22

A shift in Day’s own understanding is evident in her personal writings from this time. In

1973, Day attended a talk on what she called “women’s lib,” writing that the speaker

“was superb. A clear, beautiful mind and heart. . . . We are blessed with brilliant and noble women these days.”23 And in a 1978 diary entry, Day writes again that although “I am not what is called a feminist,” she can “can see clearly how women are forced into being what in . . . journalism used to be called ‘sob sisters’”—a job she herself held at the outset of her career. She remarks that women reporters such as Dorothy Thompson and

Abigail Quigley McCarthy “can be called intellectuals that is, they took what I will call ‘a whole view of life’ and wrote and still write about the political scene.”24

136 While Day did not see herself as a feminist, even as her understanding of the movement—and the movement itself—evolved and radicalized toward the end of Day’s life, feminist concerns were often the subject of Day’s writing, and her commitment to centering the stories, experiences, and voices of women in her work throughout her career reflect what could today be called a feminist ethic of life and work. Writer Stephen

Krupa noted that Day’s writings reflect six feminist concerns:

The active participation of women in the work force and in the professions; support for working mothers; the importance of community; the intimate connection between diverse social problems like work gender, class, race, poverty, capitalism, and war, as well as the deep connection between the physical and the spiritual; attention to human experience as an essential component in the search for truth; disregard, in practice, for assigned gender roles in work.25

And insofar as Day was able to cut a path for other women—particularly Catholic women—in the newspaper and Church structures, Day played a revolutionary role in making these spaces accessible and open to women. Catholic scholar Jeffrey Burns noted that in terms of the Church,

[t]he radical quality of the life Day lived and demanded all to follow clearly exceeded what would have been thought of as a proper woman’s role. If Day shattered the traditional bounds of a woman’s sphere, she did so because of the crises of modern life, not because she was asserting some abstract right or pursuing some illusory self-fulfillment and editing. . . . Moreover they did this despite an excessively male-centered, clerical, ecclesiastical structure, and a restrictive ideology of the family and the sexes. . . . The present feminist ferment in the Church has its roots in the 1950s with the arrival of what I have called the “emerging Catholic laywoman.”26

As Day’s daughter Tamar pointed out, Catholic women, including both religious and lay, have been at the forefront of activism, social, and political work within the

Church. This insight and foresight into a given society’s need for direct action and systemic change is not only witnessed first but also described by the female Church. In a sense, women’s voices and standpoints are frequently decades ahead of official Church

137 positions on social issues—something Day was aware of and lived herself. As O’Connor notes, Day’s writing “reflects the self-consciousness of the writer acutely aware of the way a shift in standpoint alters perspective.”27 As Day wrote in a 1967 diary entry, “We certainly live in no ivory tower. If there are any problems that our readers write to us about, we have them too. What is hard is that they envision us as a beloved community, a group of Christians. Like the early Christians, so devoted, so peaceful that people can point to us and say, ‘See how they love one another.’”28

This commitment to action and solidarity is rooted in a culture of storytelling in order to shift standpoints and effect change. And that storytelling begins with listening and empathy. Catholic Worker Deane Mowrer, who lived at the Worker for three decades, said her most persistent memories of Day were “of her sitting with her knitting and listening to somebody pouring out some terrible story.” Fellow Worker Jack English said this portrait was an accurate one, recalling, “I can remember her sitting doing the same thing on Mott Street . . . except then she always had a cigarette in her mouth.”29

And Day was relentlessly defensive of the power of storytelling in order to change minds and hearts. At a conference where Day had been invited to speak, Hennessey recalled,

Day

[g]ave one of her usual rambling discourses, telling stories of Agnes sitting up all night in the dining room and how they learned of the plight of migrant workers in upstate New York only when someone dropped off an African American migrant worker at the doorstep of the Newburgh farm. A man in the audience asked, “What are the statistics on how many men there are who come in on the breadline and become involved in the political aspect of the work?” Dorothy responded by telling the story of when a man had attacked Arthur Sheehan with a knife. “What does that have to do with anything?” the questioner asked. “I don’t know,” she answered. “Let me be discursive. I’ve learned to speak in stories.”30

138 The “long, seemingly rambling stories [Day] spun out like a thread in her quiet, luminous voice, a voice you couldn’t help but listen to” were so integral to not only

Day’s life, but also to her legacy. Hennessy said what makes Day so powerful is her ability to “lull you into a sense of listening to a story as comforting as a lazy river running through a hot summer’s day—until she wallops you with the realization that you need to change your life and you need to do it now.”31

Perhaps it was Day’s ability to spin a good story that moved individuals to act on behalf of and with the poor that has led to the present-day effort to canonize her. In 2000, the Vatican approved Day to have the title “Servant of God,” and Cardinal O’Connor of

New York City told The New York Times he believed Day to have been a saint, “by which he said he meant ‘a modern-day, devoted daughter of the church . . . much of what she spoke of in terms of social justice anticipated the teachings of Pope John Paul II and lends support to her cause.’”32 In 2012, American bishops unanimously approved the cause for her sainthood at a semiannual meeting. And at the same gathering, a group of bishops rejected a document on the economy that they said “did not sufficiently emphasize Catholic teaching on social justice, the structural causes of economic inequality and the rights of workers to unionize,” reflecting the kind of Church Day hoped to actualize.33

Dorothy Day, her writings, and her legacy do not fit neatly into theological, philosophical, or ideological boxes. Day was years ahead of the Church in terms of taking firm stances on Church teaching, as well as years ahead of the feminist movement in terms of race and class understandings. As I would argue, Day’s approach to reporting is feminist, and is exemplary of the power of employing a feminist standpoint theoretical

139 approach. Day and the activism of the Catholic Worker Movement is rooted in personalism, and Day’s ability to create an epistemology of suffering, to stand alongside the suffering, and convey this experience in writing exemplifies the best of both

Catholicism and feminism. As a woman in predominantly male spaces, Dorothy Day leveraged her understanding of her own personal pain and experiences of living with and for the marginalized in order to amplify the voices, perspectives, and experiences of others. Day’s ability to do so gained her access and legitimacy within those male spaces, and eventually led to her being a leader and example for how other women could similarly become leaders within the Church and journalism industry.

Yet, as many other Day scholars have, it is worth questioning if Day is even knowable. As an enigmatic, at times paradoxical figure, Day somewhat defies categorization. Although her writing is remarkable for its clarity, Day as an individual is somewhat abstruse. And as I would argue, perhaps this is how she preferred it. Day used her life and platform as a prism through which the plight and stories of others could be heard. By her frequent deflections and self-effacing attitude, Day turned the focus away from herself and toward others. Her ability to write and critique with incredible incisiveness drew attention to herself and her movement, which set Day up to refract that attention to illuminate the stories of those around her.

Today, and throughout the history of the American Catholic Church, there have been countless other examples of women employing these same tactics to advocate with and for marginalized groups both within the Church and within society as a whole. There remains a tremendous amount of scholarship yet to be done on these women, their writing, and the profound changes they have made.

140

NOTES

1 Dorothy Day, “Day after Day,” The Catholic Worker, February 1943.

2 Dorothy Day, “Peter’s Program,” The Catholic Worker, May 1955.

3 Dorothy Day, “A Baby Is Born,” The Catholic Worker, January 1941.

4 Patrick Coy, “An Experiment in Personalist Politics: The Catholic Worker

Movement and Nonviolent Action” Peace & Change 26, no. 1 (January 2001): 78–93.

5 Thomas Merton, “To Dorothy Day,” December 20, 1961, box 15, folder 8,

Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette

University, Milwaukee, WI (hereafter DDCWC).

6 Judith Gregory, “Remembering Dorothy Day,” America, December 13, 1980.

7 Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate

Portrait of My Grandmother (New York: Scribner, 2017), 79.

8 Ibid., 65.

9 Paul Hanley Furfey, “From a Catholic Liberal into a Catholic Radical,”

America, December 13, 1980.

10 Ed Marciniak, “Constancy to the Church and to Social Teaching,” America,

December 13, 1980.

11 William Farrell, “About New York: Drifters, Priests and Nuns Pay Respects to

Dorothy Day,” New York Times, December 3, 1980.

12 June O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day: A Feminist Perspective

(New York: Crossroad, 1991).

141

13 Gregory, “Remembering Dorothy Day.”

14 Tom Cornell, “Faith to Sustain a Vision and to Communicate It,” America,

December 13, 1980.

15 Ashley Beck, “Making the Encyclicals Click: Catholic Social Teaching and

Radical Traditions,” New Blackfriars 93, no. 1044 (March 2012): 213-29 doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2011.01477.x.

16 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 262.

17 O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day, 36.

18 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 207.

19 Dorothy Day, “Diary Entry,” February 14, 1944, series D-4, box 4, DDCWC.

20 O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day.

21 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 94.

22 O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day, 75.

23 Dorothy Day, “Diary Entry,” March 30, 1973, series D-4, box 8, DDCWC.

24 Ibid.

25 Stephen Krupa, “Celebrating Dorothy Day,” America, August 27, 2001.

26 Jeffrey Burns, “Catholic Laywomen in the Culture of American Catholicism in the 1950s,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5, no. 3/4 (Summer-Fall 1986): 385-400.

27 O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day, 20.

28 Dorothy Day, “Diary Entry,” July 9, 1967,s series D-4, box 6, DDCWC.

29 Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, 97.

30 Ibid., 240.

31 Ibid., 276.

142

32 Gustav Niebuhr, “Sainthood Process Starts for Dorothy Day,” New York Times,

March 17, 2000.

33 Laurie Goodstein, “Bishops Support Dorothy Day for Sainthood,” New York

Times, November 13, 2012.

143

Notes on Sources

The heart and soul of this thesis, and of the entire body of sources on Day, lies in her personal papers, which are housed at Marquette University. The archive contains thousands of pages’ worth of documents, many of which are in Day’s own handwriting.

The collection contains private correspondence, most of which is in the form on incoming mail, but does include some copies and originals of Day’s outgoing letters dating from

1923 to her death in 1980. The correspondence includes letters from both acquaintances and family, the latter of which, along with her diaries, were unsealed in 2005, twenty-five years after her death. Day’s outgoing correspondence is not arranged separately from incoming correspondence, which can make finding letters from Day herself difficult yet exciting. Select collections of Day’s letters and diaries were published in book form, edited by former Catholic Worker editor Robert Ellsberg, in 2012 and 2008, respectively.

Day’s diaries, journals, date books, and notes from retreats from 1934 to 1980 represent a sizable portion of the collection. The Marquette archives also include drafts of articles, an unpublished novel, and three other incomplete books Day wrote, as well as copies of

Day’s financial and legal records, and correspondence regarding Day’s public activities, awards, and speaking engagements.

In delving into Day’s archive materials, there are some logistical notes worth mentioning, should it help others studying her life: For other historians hoping to create searchable PDF documents or documents in which text can be extracted, I found the process to be near impossible, given how much of Day’s outgoing correspondence was handwritten, and how difficult her handwriting is to decipher by human eye, let alone via

144 software. I found it a helpful, albeit arduous, experience to transcribe every document I needed into my own searchable database in Zotero.

Given that some of the most fascinating and personal items in the archive were unsealed a mere thirteen years ago, many of the “first generation” of books on Day’s life are missing key sources that enrich stories of Day and her life. Nancy Roberts’s Dorothy

Day and the Catholic Worker, as well as June O’Connor’s The Moral Vision of Dorothy

Day: a Feminist Perspective proved invaluable assets to understanding this first wave of scholarship on Day and the Catholic Worker. Prior to these works, scholarship on Day could be categorized as (1) biographies, of which there are more than a dozen of Day in print, two of which were published before 1984; (2) memoirs, including five written by

Day and which provide Day’s own perspective which can be found at great length; (3) press articles, as the mainstream press covered Day’s life and work extensively, and with some regularity; and (4) academic articles, which include a limited amount of scholarship, which is where Roberts enters the Day canon. At the end of 1984 only three peer-reviewed articles on Day had been published. Even today, Roberts’s Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker remains the only book published on Day’s life, save for collections of Day’s own letters and diaries, published by a university press.

During her lifetime, Dorothy Day was recognized as a “living saint,” and just three years after her death, the cause for her canonization was opened. Pope John Paul II officially approved her cause for sainthood in 2000, giving her the title “Servant of God,” and in 2012, American Catholic bishops unanimously recommended she be canonized. It is not unreasonable to believe Day could be made a saint in the not-so-distant future, which would lead to increased scholarship on Day’s life and the Catholic Worker. It is

145 my hope these notes prove to be a helpful guide to others who hope to contribute to the small body of scholarship on Day and her life.

146

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147

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Popular Magazines

America

Christianity Today

Commonweal

The Independent

The New Yorker

Tikkun

Newspapers

The Catholic Worker

The New York Call

The New Orleans Item

The New York Times

The Wall Street Journal

The Washington Post

Personal Archives

The Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection, Marquette University, Milwaukee,

Wisconsin

153

Webpages

Allaire, James, and Rosemary Broughton. “An Introduction to the Life and Spirituality of

Dorothy Day.” The Catholic Worker Movement (blog), n.d.

http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/life-and-spirituality.html.

Hinson-Hasty, Elizabeth. “Timeline of Significant Events in Dorothy Day’s Life.” n.d.

http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/timeline.pdf.

Klejment, Anne. “Dorothy Day.” Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia. Research

Starters. EBSCOhost, n.d.

Williams, Thomas D., and Jan Olof Bengtsson. “Personalism.” The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University,

2016. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personalism/.

Papal Encyclicals

Leo XIII. “Rerum Novarum,” May 15, 1891, http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-

xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.

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