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Dorothy Day and Gender Identity: The Rhetoric and the Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

June O'Connor
June O'Connor*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Abstract

Dorothy Day's sense of herself as a woman and as a mother feature prominently in her writings. In light of recent inquiries into gender identity and gender ideology, and given Dorothy Day's prominence as editor, social activist, anarchist, pacifist, and religious author, questions about her views regarding woman's role and related feminist concerns invite investigation. The paper argues that although Dorothy Day did not become a vocal advocate nor public ally of the women's movements in twentieth-century American life because of some fundamental differences in viewpoint and loyalty, she did share a number of affinities with feminist perspectives. To investigate her thought on this topic enables us to understand Dorothy Day more fully and to bring a critical eye to selected features of feminism, discerning (from Day's standpoint) both strengths and weaknesses.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 7 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1988

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References

1 Day, Dorothy, On Pilgrimage: The Sixties (New York: Curtis Books, 1972), p. 362Google Scholar.

2 McNeal, Patricia F., The American Catholic Peace Movement 1928-1972 (New York: Arno Press, 1978), p. 37Google Scholar.

3 Dorothy Day's books, in order of original publication, are listed below with the abbreviations used for textual citations: The Eleventh Virgin [EV] (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1924)Google Scholar; From Union Square to Home [US] (New York: Arno Press, 1978Google Scholar reprint of the original 1938 edition); House of Hospitality [HH] (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939)Google Scholar; On Pilgrimage [OP] (New York: Catholic Worker Books, 1948)Google Scholar; The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day [LL] (New York: Harper and Row, 1952)Google Scholar; Therese (Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1960)Google Scholar; Loaves and Fishes [LF] (New York: Harper and Row, 1963)Google Scholar; Meditations [M], edited by Vishnewski, Stanley (New York: Newman Press, 1970)Google Scholar; On Pilgrimage: The Sixties [OPS] (see n. 1). An anthology of her writings is available in By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day [BL], edited by Ellsberg, Robert (New York: Knopf, 1983)Google Scholar.

Miller, William D., Day's biographer (Dorothy Day: A Biography [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982])Google Scholar, has made available much of Day's unpublished manuscript “All Is Grace” in All Is Grace: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day [AIG] (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987)Google Scholar. Robert Coles's conversations and tape-recorded interviews with Dorothy Day form the basis of Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987)Google Scholar. A complete listing of Dorothy Day's writings is available in Klejment, Anne and Klejment, Alice, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: A Bibliography and Index (New York: Garland, 1986)Google Scholar.

4 In Anarchist Women 1870-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 47Google Scholar, scholar Margaret Marsh offers a supporting judgment: “Feminism was not a set of specific beliefs and demands, despite the tendency of a later generation of scholars to subsume the whole movement into the drive for suffrage; it was a vast, complicated, and often contradictory movement.”

5 Maruin's three-point program (round table discussions, houses of hospitality, and agronomic universities) appeared in the second issue of The Catholic Worker 1/2 (June-July 1933)Google Scholar. A more extensive presentation, where he speaks of the role of priests and bishops, appears in 1/5 (October 1933). A collection of Maurin's, PeterEasy Essays (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1984)Google Scholar has been published with an Introduction by Dorothy Day and a Foreword by Eileen Egan.

6 The reader wonders in what way Day intends the phrase, “men's justice.” Is this a generic use of the term, as in human justice? Or is it a gender use of the term as in male-expressed justice? The context of her comment, in which Day contrasts the two jail experiences as the collective vs. the solitary, and the supportive presence of the women vs. the humiliating treatment by men, renders the gender interpretation more likely.

7 See Harrison, Beverly, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Robb, Carol S. (Boston: Beacon, 1985)Google Scholar; Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983)Google Scholar; and McFague, Sallie, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1987)Google Scholar.

8 “We are certainly not Marxist socialists, nor do we believe in violent revolution. Yet we do believe it is better to revolt, to fight, as Castro did with his handful of men, than to do nothing” (OPS, 301-02).

9 Recognition of these differences in women's experiences is becoming a point of examination and self-critical reflection among feminists today. See, e.g., Moraga, Cherrie and Anzaldua, Gloria, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981)Google Scholar, Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert, “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racism and American Feminism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and a forthcoming collection of selected papers from a February 1987 conference on gender, class, and race sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, in Women's Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal.

10 Sally Cunneen and Debra Campbell highlight this direct action feature of Dorothy Day's approach to change, namely that the primary creative responsibility for change lay in our own hands. Day felt that one should not look for permission or approval but should marshal one's energies personally to resist the giant injustices of the day. See Cunneen, Sally, “Dorothy Day: The Storyteller as Human Model” (p. 292)Google Scholar and Campbell, Debra, ”The Catholic Earth Mother: Dorothy Day and Women's Power in the Church” (p. 276), Cross Currents 34/3 (Fall 1984)Google Scholar.

David O'Brien's more generalized portrait of Personalism in America corroborates this interpretation of Day: “Perfectionist and unsystematic, focusing on the giver rather than the recipient, on the action itself rather than the social change that such action might bring about, personalism sought to realize love of neighbor through personal commitment and voluntary action. While others directed attention to legislation, organization, and institutional reconstruction, personalists concentrated on reforming themselves and changing society by the example of Christian love…. American personalism received its strongest support from sociologist Paul Henley Furfey, liturgist Virgil Michel, and the founders of the Catholic Worker movement.” See American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 185)Google Scholar.

11 In Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), p. 136Google Scholar, Susan Ware wonders why women on the left in the 1930s were not “fueled by feminist consciousness” in the way their counterparts were in the 1960s. The fruits of her thoughts are threefold: (1) that their participation in the radical movements of the 1930s might have allowed them more scope than the New Left allowed in the 1960s; (2) “that they were unwilling or unable to generalize from their own experiences to a full-scale critique of women's roles in society”; and (3) that their commitment to revolutionary socialism with an emphasis on economic solutions to address social problems subsumed their hopes for a feminist vision (which they read, rightly or wrongly, as selfish, personal, and divorced from economic issues).

12 A summary of her work, in her own words, captures this focus on the common good: ”There has been what Cardinal Newman would term a development of doctrine in the pages of the Catholic Worker, and we are still learning. But there has been a consistent theme throughout the thirty-six years, and it is that we must work for the common good, that men are responsible for each other, that God has a special love for the poor and the destitute, the insulted and the injured, and that where they are, we must be, too. We have been consistent in our pacifism and our endeavor to portray nonviolent means of bringing about a new social order. We have opposed the Japanese-Chinese War, the Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, World War n, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and can point with pride to the many editors of the Catholic Worker who have spent time in prison for their refusal to serve in the Vietnam War. We advocate the nonpayment of income tax and a life of voluntary poverty in order to have more to share with others.” See “Dorothy Day Writes of the Catholic Worker” in Conlin, Joseph R., ed., The American Radical Press 1880-1960 (London: Greenwood, 1974), 2:468Google Scholar.

13 See, e.g., Spretnak, Charlene, ed., The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982)Google Scholar and Maguire, Daniel, “The Feminization of God and Ethics” (pp. 105–21)Google Scholar and “The Feminist Turn in Ethics” (pp. 122-29) in his The Moral Revolution: A Christian Humanist Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986)Google Scholar.

14 Pellauer, Mary, “Moral Callousness and Moral Sensitivity” in Andolsen, Barbara H.et al., eds., Women's Consciousness, Women's Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics (Minneapolis: Seabury/Winston, 1985), p. 34Google Scholar.

15 Ibid.