Prisoner/Activist Profile: Dorothy Day

Article by Rebecca Neel 

“The class structure is our making and by our consent, not God’s, and we must do what we can to change it. We are urging revolutionary change.”

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 8, 1897. In her lifetime, she grew to be a pioneering activist, lifelong and adamant pacifist, devout Catholic, and a powerful advocate for the poor and those in prison. Many regard her as a saint, and her influence is still felt today.

Day’s family moved to Chicago while she was still a child. There, she read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which describes an immigrant family’s struggles in America. Day began to walk through poor areas of Chicago’s South Side to see the terrible conditions described in The Jungle firsthand. What she saw on these walks inspired her lifelong commitment to ending poverty.

In 1914 Day received a scholarship to the University of Illinois where she became interested in radical social ideas. Day dropped out after 2 years to work as a reporter for The Call, a socialist daily, covering rallies and demonstrations. Day also worked as a reporter for The Masses, a newspaper that opposed American involvement in the European war.

In 1917, Day first came into contact with the criminal justice system when she went to the White House to protest the brutal treatment of political prisoner Alice Paul, an activist for women’s voting rights. Day and more than thirty others were sent to jail where guards handled them roughly and insisted on silence. Physically hurt but determined, the women responded with a hunger strike.

Day later wrote of this time,

“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 30 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.”

After ten days the women’s demands were granted.

Day gave birth to a daughter in 1927. She managed to integrate motherhood with her social activism, and continued reporting for progressive magazines. In the winter of 1932 she reported on the Hunger March, in which 1,600 marchers, organized by communists, demanded relief from the lack of jobs, poor working conditions and poverty that accompanied the Great Depression. The day after the march, Day met French immigrant Peter Maurin, and the pair soon became very close. Maurin encouraged Day to start her own paper where she could publish the ideas that they discussed. Day agreed, and created The Catholic Worker.

The paper was started the following May in New York and sold for a penny at Day’s request, “so cheap that anyone could afford to buy it,” and soon had a printing of 100,000 copies. Readers found radicalism and religion united in the paper that sided with the labor unions and was critical of the existing social order.

As winter came, homeless people began to come to Day’s apartment. She decided to put the ideas of hospitality to strangers and those in need into practice, and soon two apartments, one for ten men and one for ten women, were opened. A house in Greenwich Village soon followed. Eventually, two buildings opened in Chinatown. By 1936, 33 houses and several farm communities had opened across the country. The Catholic Worker houses provided hospitality to whoever was in need and let them stay without limit. Day found that homelessness and poverty were not facts of life, but demands for change. “The class structure is our making and by our consent, not God’s,” Day said, “and we must do what we can to change it. We are urging revolutionary change.”

Inspired by the Gospel, Day was a staunch pacifist. The Catholic Worker’s radical pacifist stance made few ripples until the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when nearly all of the Catholic community rallied behind the fascist leader Franco. The Catholic Worker lost two-thirds of its readers. Nevertheless, the publication maintained its pacifist stance through the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fifteen Catholic Worker houses closed in response, but Day did not waver in her stance for absolute pacifism. During the Cold War, Day refused to participate in New York state’s annual civil defense drill. “We will not be drilled into fear”, she said. Indeed, one of Day’s most admirable qualities was her long-term, unwavering commitment to her beliefs. One of her biographers notes, “her conviction that the social order was unjust changed in no substantial way from her adolescence until her death”.

Dorothy Day died in 1980, regarded by many as a saint. Her activism has left behind a powerful religious movement dedicated to a more just society.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Justice Matters.