Dorothy Day

Born: 1897

Died: 1980

Country of Birth: USA

Nationality: USA

Ethnicity: White

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (no degree)

""I was only eighteen, so I wavered between my allegiance to Socialism, Syndicalism (of the Industrial Workers of the World – I.W.W.) and Anarchism. When I read Tolstoy I was an Anarchist. My allegiance to The Call kept me a Socialist, although a left-wing one, and my Americanism inclined me to the I.W.W. movement." (Wikipedia); "I thought I was a free and emancipated young woman and found out I wasn't at all. …Freedom is just a modernity gown, a new trapping that we women affect to capture the man we want." (Wikipedia); "We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to these efforts. But neither will we be carping in our criticism. We love our country, and we love our President. We have been the only country in the world where men of all nations have taken refuge from oppression. We recognize that while in the order of intention we have tried to stand for peace, for love of our brother, in the order of execution, we have failed as Americans in living up to our principles." (Wikipedia); "To labor is to pray – that is the central point of the Christian doctrine of work. Hence it is that while both Communism and Christianity are moved by 'compassion for the multitude,' the object of communism is to make the poor richer, but the object of Christianity is to make the rich poor and the poor holy." (Wikipedia); "I was bent on following the journalist's side of the work. I wanted the privileges of the woman and the work of the man without following the work of the woman. I wanted to go on picket lines, to go to jail, to write, to influence others, and so make my mark on the world. How much ambition and how much self-seeking there was in all this!" (Wikipedia); “it is my vocation to agitate, to be a journalist, a pamphleteer, and now my time must be spent in these cities, these slums.” But, she added wistfully, “how wonderful it is to be out here in…the midst of fields, atop a hill and to have samples of Heaven all about, not hell. I truly love sweet clover and thank God for it.”(americamagazine.com); "

— Dorothy Day

Field of Study: Social Justice

Institution/Corporation: Catholic Workers Movement; Catholic Church

Degrees & Memberships: Silent Sentinels; socialist Party; Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

Awards: 1971 Pacem in Terris Award, Interracial Council of the Catholic Diocese of Davenport Iowa; 1972 Laetare Medal, University of Notre Dame; 1976 Poverello Medal, Franciscan University of Steubenville; 1974 Isaac Hecker Award, boston's Paulist Center Community; 1992 Courage of Conscience Award, Peace Abbey; 2001 National women's Hall of Fame

Achievements: 1930s with fellow activist Peter Maurin established the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf; practiced civil disobedience, which led to arrests in 1955,[5] 1957,[6] and in 1973 at the age of seventy-five; As part of the Catholic Worker Movement, Day co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933, and served as its editor from 1933 until her death in 1980. In the newspaper, Day advocated the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which she considered a third alternative between capitalism and socialism. From the publishing enterprise came a "house of hospitality", a shelter that provided food and clothing to the poor of the Lower East Side of NYC and then a series of farms for communal living. in 1956 with David Dellinger & A. J. Muste helped found the Liberation magazine; her book "Loaves & Fishes" was published 1963 & is her personal account of the Catholic Workers Movement