Dorothy Day - Infinite Women

This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.

Born: 8 November 1897, United States
Died: 29 November 1980
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

Founder of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy May Day was born to John and Grace Day at their house on 71 Pineapple Street, Brooklyn, New York; she was one of five children (Miller 1). When she was ten, Day’s family moved to Chicago after her father found a job as a sports journalist for the paper The Inter Ocean. Growing up and throughout her life, she enjoyed reading Kropotkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.
In 1914, Dorothy Day began attending the University of Illinois at Urbana, working odd jobs to pay for books and housing (Miller 31, 37), and in 1916 she left college after her father got a job for the New York Morning Telegraph and moved the family to New York (54). Arriving in New York, Day’s father persuaded several major newspapers not to hire his daughter because of her gender, so Day began working for the Socialist Call by convincing her editor she could live off five dollars a week (Day 50, 52). After leaving the Call, Day worked for Floyd Dell at the Masses where she met Mike Gold; Gold introduced her to the Provincetown Playhouse, a group of modernist playwrights and actors, who began testing their experimental ideas in Greenwich Village around December 1917 (Miller 106).
Day left the Masses and other paper jobs in 1917 and began writing as a freelancer. She also began drinking at the Golden Swan Saloon on the corner of 4th and 6th in the backroom affectionately called “The Hell Hole” with the Provincetown Players (Day 84, Miller 108). Here she made friends with Malcolm Cowley and Eugene O’Neill. Day and O’Neill would walk home together at the end of some nights, and he would recite to her “The Hound of Heaven,” a poem that helped trigger her conversion to Catholicism in December 1927 (Miller 195-6). Day spent time with the Players consistently from 1917 to 1918 and then sporadically until 1924 (105). During this time, Day met Mina Loy who joined the group in 1916 as both a performer and playwright (Burke 221, 423).
In 1924, Cowley introduced Day to Kenneth Burke and other socialites (Miller 166). From this group, she met Forster Batterham, whose sister married Burke, and they entered a common-law marriage (Miller 166). A year later Day and Batterham had a daughter, Tamar Terresa, but Batterham left over Day’s desire to baptize Tamar.
In 1932, Day met “The Peasant of the Pavement,” Peter Maurin, a Catholic French idealist. The two founded the Catholic Worker Movement and began publishing The Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 (Day 169). The movement’s goal was to live radically and to help the poor. They were pacifist in the troubling times of war and lived only on what donations they received. The movement started in New York and eventually garnered national headlines. In the 1950s, Mina Loy was a subscriber to The Catholic Worker, and she lived near one of its headquarters where Burke believes she would run into Day occasionally (Burke 423). Day spent the rest of her life working for The Catholic Worker, creating farm communes, soup kitchens and writing her column until her death in 1980.