88 Facts About Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism.

Dorothy Day was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics.

Dorothy Day was an active journalist, and described her social activism in her writings.

Dorothy Day practiced civil disobedience, which led to additional arrests in 1955,1957, and in 1973 at the age of seventy-five.

Dorothy May Day was born on November 8,1897, in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

Dorothy Day was born into a family described by one biographer as "solid, patriotic, and middle class".

Dorothy Day's 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.

Dorothy Day's parents were married in an Episcopal church in Greenwich Village.

Dorothy Day had three brothers and a sister and was the third oldest child.

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 Dorothy Day's brothers join the church choir.

Dorothy Day was taken with the liturgy and its music.

Dorothy Day studied the catechism and was baptized and confirmed in that church in 1911.

Dorothy Day was an avid reader in her teens, particularly fond of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Dorothy Day 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.

Dorothy Day learned about anarchy and extreme poverty from Peter Kropotkin, who promoted a belief in cooperation in contrast to Darwin's competition for survival.

Dorothy Day enjoyed Russian literature while in university studies, especially Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky.

Dorothy 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.

Dorothy Day's reading was chiefly in a Christian radical social direction.

Dorothy Day avoided campus social life, and supported herself rather than rely on money from her father, buying all her clothing and shoes from discount stores.

Dorothy Day left the university after two years, and moved to New York City.

Dorothy 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.

Dorothy Day celebrated the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a reformist government.

Dorothy 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.

Dorothy Day 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, based on her affair with Moise.

Dorothy Day lived there from 1925 to 1929, entertaining friends and enjoying a romantic relationship that foundered when she took passionately to motherhood and religion.

Dorothy Day, who had thought herself sterile following her abortion, was delighted to find she was pregnant in mid-1925, while Batterham dreaded fatherhood.

Dorothy Day returned to New York via a sojourn in Mexico and a family visit in Florida.

Dorothy Day supported herself as a journalist, writing a gardening column for the local paper, the Staten Island Advance, and feature articles and book reviews for several Catholic publications, including Commonweal.

In 1932, Dorothy Day met Peter Maurin, the man she always credited as the founder of the movement with which she is identified.

Dorothy Day had a vision of social justice and its connection with the poor, which was partly inspired by St Francis of Assisi.

Dorothy Day had a vision of action based on sharing ideas and subsequent action by the poor themselves.

Still, Dorothy Day censored some of Maurin's attacks on the Church hierarchy and tried to have a collection of the paper's issues presented to Pope Pius XI in 1935.

Dorothy Day opposed its atheism, its advocacy of "class hatred" and violent revolution, and its opposition to private property.

Dorothy Day defended government relief programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps that the Communists ridiculed.

Dorothy Day refused to follow the Catholic hierarchy in support of Franco against the Republican forces, which were atheist and anticlerical in spirit, led by anarchists and communists.

Dorothy Day acknowledged the martyrdom of priests and nuns in Spain and said she expected the age of revolution she was living in to require more martyrs:.

Dorothy Day was briefly a postulant in the Fraternity of Jesus Caritas, which was inspired by the example of Charles de Foucauld.

Dorothy Day felt unwelcome there and disagreed with how meetings were run.

The closing of many of the movement's houses around the country, as staff left to join the war effort, showed that Dorothy Day's pacifism had limited appeal even within the Catholic Worker community.

Dorothy Day replied with a respectful letter that asserted as much right to publish the Catholic Worker as the Catholic War Veterans had to their name and their own opinions independent of those of the Archdiocese.

On June 15,1955, Dorothy Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in civil defense drills scheduled that day.

Dorothy Day said she was doing "public penance" for the United States' first use of an atom bomb.

Dorothy Day enjoyed it when Abbie Hoffman told her she was the original hippie, accepting it as a form of tribute to her detachment from materialism.

Dorothy Day imagined how soldiers returning from Vietnam would want to kill them.

In 1971, Dorothy Day was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award of the Interracial Council of the Catholic Diocese of Davenport, Iowa.

Dorothy Day is harassed continually, and recently his small cottage in the country has been vandalized and papers destroyed, and a friend of his who went to bring some of his papers to him was seized and beaten.

Dorothy Day had supported the work of Cesar Chavez in organizing California farm laborers from the beginning of his campaign in the mid-1960s.

Dorothy Day admired him for being motivated by religious inspiration and committed to nonviolence.

Dorothy Day was arrested with other protesters for defying an injunction against picketing and spent ten days in jail.

Dorothy Day made her last public appearance at the Eucharistic Congress held on August 6,1976, in Philadelphia at a service honoring the US Armed Forces on the Bicentennial of the United States.

Dorothy Day suffered a heart attack and died on November 29,1980, at Maryhouse, 55 East 3rd Street in Manhattan.

Dorothy Day was buried in the Cemetery of the Resurrection on Staten Island just a few blocks from the beachside cottage where she first became interested in Catholicism.

Dorothy Day's gravestone is inscribed with the words Deo Gratias.

Dorothy Day struggled to write about poverty most of her life.

Dorothy Day admired America's efforts to take responsibility through the government, but ultimately felt that charitable works were personal decisions that needed the warmth of an individual.

Dorothy Day said that "depriving the laborer" was a deadly sin, using similar language to the Epistle of James in the Bible.

Dorothy Day explained that she understood the jarring impact of such an assertion:.

Dorothy Day used to embarrass us sometimes by dragging in Marshall Petain and Fr.

Dorothy Day read The Bomb by Frank Harris, a fictionalized biography of one of the Haymarket anarchists.

Dorothy Day discussed anarchy and extreme poverty with Peter Kropotkin.

Dorothy Day was saddened by the executions of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927.

Dorothy Day insisted that he put on the proper vestments before he began.

Dorothy Day comes to us as to a refuge whereby working for others in our community of fifty or more, she can forget once in a while her human misery.

Dorothy Day comes to us when she is drunk and beaten and hungry and cold and when she is taken in, she is liable to crawl into the bed of any man on the place.

The beginning of Dorothy Day's career was inherently radical and rooted personalism and socialism; ideologies fundamental to intersectional feminism.

Much like her gravitation towards Catholicism, Dorothy Day grew into her feminism; she is a "born again feminist", like Dolores Huerta.

Dorothy Day's ethos did not change when she was drawn to Catholicism, rather, her devotion to egalitarian Catholic values only propelled her radical feminism, blending her past with her newfound beliefs and values.

Dorothy Day forged a place for feminist theology in a religious world where women's experiences were largely not accounted for, or at worst, disregarded as anti-Church by male elites.

Dorothy Day took gendered, raced, classed experiences into account in her writing and work, providing a framework for a construction of religious theory and ethics which was finally both passable and accurate in reflecting the congregation.

Dorothy Day lived through several significant events in the history of feminism: women's suffrage, labor rights, and movements in the 50s, 60s, and 70s which crusaded for equality, justice, and egalitarianism; all pillars of feminism.

Dorothy Day wrote constantly throughout her life, journalling and writing bits for herself.

Dorothy Day published several autobiographical works: The Eleventh Virgin, From Union Square to Rome, The Long Loneliness, and Loaves and Fishes.

Dorothy Day was known for her knack for leveraging and undermining gender norms to fight patriarchal and kyriarchal systems in the workplace, politics, social structures, and the Catholic Church.

From a young age, growing up in a family of journalists, Dorothy Day was made very aware of her perceived limitations as a woman in the world of journalism.

Dorothy Day eventually got her foot in the door as an "office girl".

Dorothy Day was instructed to "write like a woman", in a simple, declarative manner, but eventually grew her writing, centring on women's and social issues, from both a feminist and personalist perspective.

Dorothy Day outright rejected what was currently being published about perceived women's issues.

Dorothy Day grew as a writer and a journalist, stopping at nothing to advance her career and focus on the type of journalism she found important, regardless of her gender.

Dorothy Day's fight against the system was noticed by the American government.

Dorothy Day's push against the Catholic Church and the military state served to promote egalitarianism and alleviate the oppressed.

Dorothy Day called for a shift to anarchism, communism, and pacifism in the name of Christianity and Christian teachings.

Dorothy Day wrote about vital happenings, matters of life and death, Japanese Chinese war, Ethiopian war, Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam war, labor strikes, on streetcars, in garment factories, sugar refineries, and smelting plants, and policies of conscription.

Dorothy Day's papers are housed at Marquette University, along with many records of the Catholic Worker movement.

Dorothy Day was one of four Americans mentioned by the Pope in his speech to the joint session that included Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.

An independent film about Dorothy Day called Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story was released in 1996.

Dorothy Day was portrayed by Moira Kelly, and Peter Maurin was portrayed by Martin Sheen.

At a Young Adult Mass held at New York's Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Cardinal Timothy M Dolan formalized the send-off of the evidence of Dorothy Day's holiness, amassed by the Dorothy Day Guild, to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome.

The next step in the process is for Dorothy Day to be declared "Venerable" in recognition of her life of Heroic virtue, following a review of the evidence by the Roman Postulator.