Woman Making History: Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897. The Day family moved to Chicago in the mid 1900's. Day's mother was a devout Catholic, and her father, after some time unemployed, was a Chicago newspaperman.

Day entered the University of Illinois at Urbana on a scholarship in 1914. She went for two years, attending more radical functions than she did classes, before she dropped out. She then moved to New York City, where she began writing for the socialist newspaper The Call. She then wrote for The Masses, a magazine opposing U.S. involvement in European war.

In November 1917, Day went to jail with other women for standing in front of the White House to protest women's exclusion from voting. She went with the other women to work camps and participated in hunger strikes until they were freed by presidential order.

Throughout the late teens and early twenties, Day continued to write for newspapers and magazines (as well as write novels), attend protests, and make her way towards the Catholic faith.

In 1927, Day gave birth to her only child, Tamar Theresa Day. She had an abortion several years earlier, for which she felt tremendous guilt and because of which she thought she was unable to conceive, so she considered Tamar's birth a miracle, sealing her faith in God and her commitment to Catholicism. Day both baptized Tamar a Catholic and was received into the Church herself.

In 1932, Day met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant and former Christian brother. It was Maurin's idea to start a newspaper to publicize Catholic teachings as a means of peacefully transforming society. Day ran with this idea, and on May 1, the first copies of The Catholic Worker were distributed.