Dorothy May Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics.
Day's conversion is described in her 1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness. Day was also an active journalist, and described her social activism in her writings. In 1917, she was imprisoned as a member of suffragist Alice Paul's nonviolent Silent Sentinels. In the 1930s, Day worked closely with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. She practiced civil disobedience, which led to additional arrests in 1955, 1957, and in 1973 at age 75.
As part of the Catholic Worker Movement, Day co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933, and served as its editor from 1933 until her death in 1980. In this newspaper, Day advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which she considered a third way between capitalism and socialism. Pope Benedict XVI used her conversion story as an example of how to "journey towards faith... in a secularized environment." In an address before the United States Congress, Pope Francis included her in a list of four exemplary Americans who "buil[t] a better future".
The Catholic Church has opened a beatification process for Dorothy Day. For that reason, the Church refers to her with the title Servant of God.
Dorothy May Day was born on November 8, 1897, in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She was born into a family described by one biographer as "solid, patriotic, and middle class". Her father, John Day, was a Tennessee native of Irish heritage, while her mother, Grace Satterlee, a native of upstate New York, was of English ancestry. Her parents were married in an Episcopal church in Greenwich Village. She had three brothers (including Donald S. Day) and a sister and was the third oldest child. In 1904, her father, a sportswriter devoted to horse racing, took a position with a newspaper in San Francisco. The family lived in Oakland, California, until the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 destroyed the newspaper's facilities, and her father lost his job. From the spontaneous response to the earthquake's devastation, the self-sacrifice of neighbors in a time of crisis, Day drew a lesson about individual action and the Christian community. The family relocated to Chicago.
Day's parents were nominal Christians who rarely attended church. As a young child, she showed a marked religious streak, reading the Bible frequently. When she was ten, she started to attend the Church of Our Saviour, an Episcopal church in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, after its rector convinced her mother to let Day's brothers join the church choir. She was taken with the liturgy and its music. She studied the catechism and was baptized and confirmed in that church in 1911.
Day was an avid reader in her teens, particularly fond of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. She worked from one book to another, noting Jack London's mention of Herbert Spencer in Martin Eden, and then from Spencer to Darwin and Huxley. She learned about anarchy and extreme poverty from Peter Kropotkin, who promoted the belief that only cooperation and mutual aid could create a truly free society. She also enjoyed Russian literature while in university studies, especially Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky. Day read a lot of socially conscious work, which gave her a background for her future; it helped bolster her support for and involvement in social activism. Day graduated from Robert Waller High School in 1914.
In 1914, Day attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign on a scholarship. She was a reluctant scholar. Her reading was chiefly in a Christian radical social direction. She avoided campus social life, and supported herself rather than rely on money from her father, buying all her clothing and shoes from discount stores. She left the university after two years, and moved to New York City.
Day settled on the Lower East Side of New York and worked on the staff of several Socialist publications, including The Liberator, The Masses, and The Call. She "smilingly explained to impatient socialists that she was 'a pacifist even in the class war.'" Years later, Day described how she was pulled in different directions: "I was only eighteen, so I wavered between my allegiance to Socialism, Syndicalism (of the Industrial Workers of the World – I.W.W.) and Anarchism. When I read Tolstoy I was an Anarchist. My allegiance to The Call kept me a Socialist, although a left-wing one, and my Americanism inclined me to the I.W.W. movement."
She celebrated the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a reformist government. In November 1917, she was arrested for picketing at the White House on behalf of women's suffrage as part of a campaign called the Silent Sentinels organized by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party. Sentenced to 30 days in jail, she served 15 days before being released, ten of them on a hunger strike.
Day spent several months in Greenwich Village, where she became close to Eugene O'Neill, whom she later credited with having produced "an intensification of the religious sense that was in me." She had a love affair of several years with Mike Gold, a radical writer who later became a prominent Communist. Later she credited Gold with being "indirectly involved" in the beginning of the Catholic Worker Movement. Day maintained friendships with such prominent American Communists as Anna Louise Strong and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who became the head of the Communist Party USA.
Initially, Day lived a bohemian life. In 1920, after ending an unhappy love affair with Lionel Moise, and after having an abortion that was "the great tragedy of her life", she married Berkeley Tobey in a civil ceremony. She spent the better part of a year with him in Europe, removed from politics, focusing on art and literature, and writing a semi-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924), based on her affair with Moise. In its "Epilogue", she tried to draw lessons about the status of women from her experience: "I thought I was a free and emancipated young woman and found out I wasn't at all. ... Freedom is just a modernity gown, a new trapping that we women affect to capture the man we want." She ended her marriage to Tobey upon their return to the United States.
Day later called The Eleventh Virgin a "very bad book". The sale of the movie rights to the novel gave her $2,500, and she bought a beach cottage as a writing retreat on Staten Island, New York. Soon she found a new lover, Forster Batterham, an activist and biologist, who joined her there on weekends. She lived there from 1925 to 1929, entertaining friends and enjoying a romantic relationship that foundered when she took passionately to motherhood and religion.
Day, who had thought herself sterile following her abortion, was delighted to find she was pregnant in mid-1925, while Batterham dreaded fatherhood. While she visited her mother in Florida, separating from Batterham for several months, she intensified her exploration of Catholicism. When she returned to Staten Island, Batterham found her increasing devotion, attendance at Mass, and religious reading incomprehensible. Soon after the birth of their daughter Tamar Teresa, on March 4, 1926, Day encountered a local Sister of Charity, Aloysia Mary Mulhern, and with her help educated herself in the Catholic faith and had her baby baptized in July 1927. Batterham refused to attend the ceremony. His relationship with Day became increasingly unbearable, as her desire for marriage in the Church confronted his antipathy to organized religion, Catholicism most of all. After one last fight in late December, Day refused to allow him to return. On December 28, she underwent conditional baptism in the Catholic Church with Sister Aloysia as her godparent, at the Church of Our Lady Help of Christians.