Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897 in Brooklyn, New York. She was a journalist and recognized as a monumental peace and justice activist in Cuba, Italy, Africa, the U.S.S.R., and the United States. Between 1917 and 1921, Dorothy Day took up work as a journalist with the papers The Call, The Masses, and The Liberator, covering issues including rent strikes, birth-control and peace movements. She joined the International Workers of the World and participated in Greenwich Village intellectual circles. In 1932 she founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a truly radical fusion of activism and faith, with priest and fellow social activist Peter Maurin.

The Movement embodied Day's concept of "personalism", an ideology pointed toward the transformation of individuals rather than political and economic relationships. After publishing the first few issues of the Movement's newspaper The Catholic Worker, she insisted that the Worker could not advocate economic justice without working to bring it about. So in 1934 she and Maurin founded St. Joseph's House of Hospitality, a refuge for people suffering in the Depression. By 1940 the newspaper had reached its peak circulation of 185,000 and Hospitality House had expanded to a network of thirty hospices and work farms.

Throughout her life, Day unabashedly and consistently spoke out, condemning fascism, nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and supporting WWII draft resistance, an undertakers' strike against the New York Catholic archdiocese, and the United Farm Workers' unionization of migrant workers. Day's balance of radical social beliefs and conservative doctrinal views enabled her to avoid being censured by the Church, and thus to raise awareness among Catholics and all people of struggles for social justice.

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