Dorothy Day Essay Research Paper Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day Essay, Research Paper

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was born in

Brooklyn, New York, November 8, 1897. After surviving the San Francisco

earthquake in 1906, the Day family moved into a flat in Chicago’s South

Side. It was a big step down in the world made necessary because John

Day was out of work. Day understands of the shame people feel when they

fail in their efforts dated from this time. (Miller, p.4)

When John Day was appointed sports editor of a Chicago newspaper, the

Day family moved into a comfortable house on the North Side. Here

Dorothy began to read books that stirred her conscience. Upon Sinclair’s

novel, The Jungle, inspired Day to take long walks in poor

neighbourhoods in Chicago’s South Side. It was the start of a life-long

attraction to areas many people avoid.

Day won a scholarship that brought her to the University of Illinois

campus at Urbana in the fall of 1914. But she was a reluctant scholar.

Her reading was in a radical social direction. (Miller, p.5) She avoided

campus social life and insisted on supporting herself rather than live

on money from her father.

Dropping out of college two years later, she moved to New York where she

found a job as a reporter for The Call, the city’s only socialist daily.

She covered rallies and demonstrations and interviewed people ranging

from butlers and butlers to labour organisers and revolutionaries.

She next worked for The Masses, a magazine that opposed American

involvement in the European war. In September, the Post Office rescinded

the magazine’s mailing permit. Federal officers seized back issues,

manuscripts, subscriber lists and correspondence. Five editors were

charged with sedition.

In November 1917 Day went to prison for being one of forty women in

front of the White House protesting women’s exclusion from the

electorate. Arriving at a rural workhouse, the women were roughly

handled. The women responded with a hunger strike. Finally they were

freed by presidential order.

Returning to New York, Day felt that journalism was a meagre response to

a world at war. In the spring of 1918, she signed up for a nurse’s

training program in Brooklyn.

Her conviction that the social order was unjust changed in no

substantial way from her adolescence until her death, though she never

identified herself with any political party. (Forest, p.23) Her

religious development was a slower process. (Miller, p.6) As a child she

had attended services at an Episcopal Church. As a young journalist in

New York, she would sometimes make late-at-night visits to St. Joseph’s

Catholic Church.

In 1922, in Chicago working as a reporter, she roomed with three young

women who went to Mass every Sunday and holy day and set aside time each

day for prayer. It was clear to her that "worship, adoration,

thanksgiving, supplication … were the noblest acts of which we are

capable in this life."(Day, p.8)

Her next job was with a newspaper in New Orleans. Back in New York in

1924, Day bought a beach cottage on Staten Island using money from the

sale of movie rights for a novel. She also began a four-year common-law

marriage with Forster Batterham, an English botanist she had met through

friends in Manhattan. Batterham was an anarchist opposed to marriage and

religion. In a world of such cruelty, he found it impossible to believe

in a God. (Miller, p.6) It grieved her that Batterham didn’t sense God’s

presence within the natural world. "How can there be no God," she asked,

"when there are all these beautiful things."(Day, p.11) His irritation

with her "absorption in the supernatural" would lead them to quarrel.

(Miller, p.7)

What moved everything to a different plane for her was pregnancy. She

had been pregnant once before, years earlier, as the result of a love

affair with a journalist. This resulted in the great tragedy of her

life, an abortion. The affair and its awful aftermath had been the

subject of her novel, The Eleventh Virgin. Her pregnancy with Batterham

seemed to Day nothing less than a miracle. But Batterham didn’t believe

in bringing children into such a violent world.

On March 3, 1927, Tamar Theresa Day was born. Day could think of nothing

better to do with the gratitude that overwhelmed her than arrange

Tamar’s baptism in the Catholic Church. "I did not want my child to

flounder as I had often floundered. I wanted to believe, and I wanted my

child to believe, and if belonging to a Church would give her so

inestimable a grace as faith in God, and the companionable love of the

Saints, then the thing to do was to have her baptised a Catholic."(Day,

p.16) After Tamar’s baptism, there was a permanent break with Batterham.

In the winter of 1932 Day travelled to Wash

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