Anastasia Hayes
The 60s and New York Revisited
Spring 2017
Professor Krase
Dorothy Day: Spirit of the Sixties
Though her radicalism found its roots in the years preceding the 1960s, Dorothy Day encapsulates the tumult of the era. She engaged some of its most pressing issues head on, grappling with the women’s liberation movement and forging an uneasy path between the rights being won and the traditional mores advocated by the Catholic Church. She was a pacifist and ardently opposed the Vietnam War, breaking with many of the lay and most of the Church’s hierarchy in declaring her belief that all war is immoral. The 1965 protests staged by the Catholic Workers are credited with establishing practices popularized by later anti-war demonstrators. Rounding out this trinity is Day’s work in the name of racial equality. While not as active in this area as figures like Jane Jacobs, Day was also skeptical of urban renewal and its effects on minority communities and devoted herself to some of New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods.
Feminism
Day’s feminism avoids easy categorization. She was on the forefront of the effort for women’s suffrage during the early nineteenth century, even being jailed for her participation. As a young woman, she lived the life of a bohemian, seeking out adventure, intellectual and otherwise.
And yet, as her twenties dawned, she became increasingly conservative. At twenty-one, after being told by her boyfriend, Lionel, that she had to terminate her pregnancy or he would leave, she had an abortion. The procedure (sought out as Day was under enormous pressure to go through with it) was traumatic. The laws of the time limited her options to the back-alley, adding another shade of sordidness to the affair. Lionel left her anyway and she regretted the experience for the rest of her life.
Unmoored, she sought solace in the Catholic Church.She had her daughter, Tamar (born of another boyfriend), baptized before converting herself on December 28, 1927. She found an important anchor in the Church’s more socially conservative platform, a life free from “doubting, and hesitating, [no longer] undisciplined and amoral.” Despite this, Day was reticent to voice her opposition to abortion publicly; even in her private life, she demurred when asked her views on it. She was also hesitant to talk about birth control, saying, “we are not going into the subject…at all as a matter of fact.” Of course, it is impossible to draw any definitive conclusions from Day’s silences but they could suggest nuanced thought regarding control over a woman’s body. Even if this were not the case and, as others have suggested, her tight-lippedness was instead founded in her fear of hypocrisy and shame, it could suggest a sympathy for women not always associated with religious figures. (Indeed, one has only to look to Russia to discover a very different approach. In Остров [The Island], one of God’s “holy fools” slaps a woman for even considering an abortion.)
It would be a mistake to think that Day’s Catholicism brought her to heel. Though ardently committed to the sect, the Church hierarchy could be highly skeptical of her attempts to further involve women in its politics. In 1962, she staged a demonstration outside the Vatican flanked by tens of other women. These “Women for Peace” fasted for peace during one of the councils, bringing an important perspective to the Church’s deliberations. Within the Catholic Worker organization, she remained committed to promoting women’s voices. The organ’s paper, The Catholic Worker, featured and continues to feature radical Christian women’s voices, promoting policies to benefit women and children, especially those on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.
Despite her radicalism though, Day thought a woman’s highest calling was motherhood, making her a controversial figure amongst feminists today. Despite living a life that was no means traditional, even after her conversion, Day encouraged other women to seek out domesticity. While her youth had seen her campaign for votes for women, she was rather uninterested in insisting on new roles for women in the Church. (After the preceding paragraph, this might seem a little strange. However, Day was the first to admit that she was not always consistent.) The debates over whether or not women should be allowed into the priesthood were largely uninteresting to her
Pacificism
On November 6, 1965, Dorothy Day joined protesters in New York City’s Union Square. The activists, a group of Catholic workers, were burning draft cards, in direct defiance of the 1965 amendment to the 1948 Universal Military Service and Training act which made modifying Selective Service certificates (a.k.a. draft cards) in any way illegal. While this type of resistance is now a well-established part of pacifist protestors’ demonstrations, oft-deployed by the anti-Vietnam movement, it was considered incredibly transgressive during the early Sixties. Tom Cornell, a Catholic Worker who participated in the draft curd burnings, explains why the act was so radical:
Against this backdrop of civic blasphemy, Day assumed the podium and spoke to show her
solidarity of purpose…and to point out that we too are breaking the law, committing civil disobedience, in advocating and trying to encourage all those who are conscripted, to inform their conscience, to heed the still small voice, and to refuse to participate in the immorality of war. It is the most potent way to end war.
With this understanding of the context in which Day was working was working, the success of her speech becomes all the more astounding. Though she was almost inaudible as she delivered it over the noise of the crowd, Day has the text reprinted in The Catholic Worker. It first circulated amongst its subscribers and then a significant portion of the public. She and the Catholic Workers managed to inspire a sea change in how Catholics thought of pacifism, a stance on war and violence that the Church’s leaders did not always support.
Despite Jesus of Nazareth’s directive to turn the other cheek, the Church has a history of sponsoring violence of all types. Due to the its involvement in statecraft, it has actively prosecuted wars (think of the Crusades of 1096 and beyond) and supported states as they have engaged each other in conflict. During Vietnam, the Church’s hierarchy towed the U.S. government’s line through much of the war’s prosecution, insisting that it was justified by the Augustinian doctrine of just war. Its support for the conflict can be explained to some extent by its desire to see communism wane globally. As much as it represented a threat to capitalism, communism is also highly critical of religion, deriding it as an “opiate of the masses” and tool of imperialism.
Though one of the group’s most supportive of the Vietnam War at its initiation, Catholics would become increasingly skeptical of the United States’ efforts in Asia. By the war’s end, they were the least committed to its cause.
More than simply shaking the Catholic American world, Day’s Union Square speech created a dialogue between the Catholic Workers and other radicals committed to peace of the era. The young and politically-engaged, though undoubtedly at odds with much of Day’s social platform informed by traditional Catholic values, respected her pacifism.
Race Relations
Day and the Catholic Workers subscribed to an ideology of “Christian personalism,” or Thomistic personalism that infuses the personalism, the melding of individualism and collectivism, with the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Personalism sees the individual as (1) possessing an inalienable dignity, (2) having their telos, or ultimate aim, in love, and (3) completely unknowable – some aspects of their selves will remain incomprehensible. The infusion of Thomism provided personalism a point, namely attainment of the Christian afterlife, transforming the “lack of ideology” into something slightly more coherent.
In its insistence that all people have an inherent worth, Thomistic personalism devoted Day to a wide-reaching social platform. Besides pacificism, she advocated for economic and racial justice. As a group particularly affected by racism and economic injustice, Day was committed to bringing attention to the plights of black American lives. She worked to ensure that her paper featured both black and white voices, shedding light on lynchings and the lives of sharecroppers, bringing her readers’ attention to the “hatred, torture and murder” against blacks that went largely unreported in the press. She was deeply committed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights campaigns, The Catholic Worker‘s pages brimming with editorials in support of his work. Day herself rode on buses in support of desegregation, her work rousing the ire of the Klu Klux Klan to such a degree that there was an attempt on her life. After Dr. King was shot by James Earl Ray on April 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, Day wrote
Martin Luther King died daily, as St. Paul said. He faced death daily and said a number of times that he knew he would be killed for the faith that was in him. The faith that men could live together as brothers. The faith in the Gospel teaching of nonviolence. The faith that man is capable of change, of growth, of growing in love. (Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, April 1968)
While this highly spiritual rhetoric might suggest a greater concern with heaven than earth, Day could be very practical in her work. While not as large a force in this area as reformers like Jane Jacobs, Day was also anti-urban renewal. Though she envisioned paradise-on-earth with roots in a life culled from the land, going so far as to try and live out the life of a communal farmer in Staten Island, she devoted herself to working in New York City’s poor, urban neighborhoods. Lower Manhattan provided a home for Day’s two “houses of hospitality,” St. Joseph House (found at 36 East 1st Street) and Maryhouse (55 East 3rd Street). Beyond providing a soup kitchen for the neighborhood’s homeless, these houses provided and continue to provide an intellectual network for the Catholic Worker Community, one that aims to be accessible to people from all walks of life.
Conclusion
Dorothy Day is a character whose life remains the subject of much interpretation. Lauded by the likes of Pope Francis and President Barack Obama, she was nonetheless a very radical figure who could be highly critical of the institutions both of these men represent, the Catholic Church and the United States government. And even as she campaigned for civil rights and an end to American imperialism, her positions on women’s rights could be decidedly less progressive, a position made especially interesting given Day’s own highly nontraditional life. In this way, she encapsulates the tensions of the 1960s, a period of reform and resistance. American life found itself unmoored after the saccharine stability of the 1950s, leaving people to cast about for answers in the unknown. What is interesting about where Day grounded herself is that she sought out the past, hoping to access universal truths buried by her present moment. She wielded her Catholicism in an entirely radical way, at times undermining the Church’s authority even as she clung to its central tenets. Again, here we can find a reflection of the nation’s struggle to rebel against the status quo without rejecting the system entirely.
