Dorothy Day

She authored a semi-autobiography; ‘The Eleventh Virgin’ which she regretted writing, later in her life.

She lived with the biologist, Forster Batterham, for some time and became pregnant with his child. Forster Batterham was against the idea of having children, which led to conflict between the two. However, she gave birth to a daughter, Tamar Teresa.

Dorothy Day was born to John Day and Grace Satterlee in Brooklyn, New York. She was raised in San Francisco and Chicago and spent most of her childhood living in isolation.

She was an avid reader as a child and became particularly interested in anarchist communistic beliefs. She joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on scholarship, but dropped out a couple of years later and moved to New York City.

Her parents were nominal Christians and she showed remarkable faith in the Bible from a very young age.

While in college, she abstained from social gatherings and insisted on supporting herself rather than relying on her family. As an adult she participated in a number of protests and even worked with socialist publications like ‘The Liberator’.

In the late 1920s, Dorothy Day went through a phase of spiritual awakening, which eventually led her to embrace Catholicism. In December 1927, she was baptized at ‘Our Lady Help of Christians Parish’ on Staten Island.

In 1929, she left New York and worked as a screen-writer in Hollywood for a brief period of time. As the ‘Great Depression’ began to set in, she started writing for Catholic publications like ‘America’ and ‘Commonweal’.

She founded ‘The Catholic Worker Movement’ with the first publication of the ‘Catholic Worker’, issued on May 1, 1933. It was published to promote Catholic social teachings and the pacifist ideology and became an instant-hit with the masses.

In the 1940s, she became a Benedictine oblate and was introduced to spiritual practices, which she retained for the rest of her life.

She recorded her experiences with her lovers, children, marriage and religion in her 1952 autobiography, ‘The Long Loneliness’.

Dorothy Day was the founder of ‘The Catholic Worker’, a newspaper published seven times a year by the ‘Catholic Worker Movement’, a guild of Catholics. It appeared on May 1, 1933 for the first time and by 1936 over 1, 50,000 issues were published.

The ‘Catholic Worker Movement’, initiated by her spread to a number of countries like Canada and the United Kingdom and by 1941, 30 independent Catholic Worker movements were already in existence.