Dorothy Day Character Analysis

Dorothy Day was a Catholic convert who spent her life caring for the poor and suffering. When she was a child, she lived through the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and believed it was evidence of God’s powerful presence. As she grew up, she became fascinated with sex but rebuked herself for her longings. This became a theme of her young adult life. She quit college and headed to New York City where she led a promiscuous lifestyle, hanging out in bars and with drug addicts. At one point, she became pregnant and aborted her child, later trying to commit suicide with the gas pipe in her apartment. She was arrested twice, once for feminist activism and another time for associating with a prostitution house. She was ashamed of her dissolute lifestyle and felt lost, not having found her vocation yet. She married a man named Forster Batterham and secluded herself with him as if to purify herself through love. Yet this still didn’t satisfy her. When her daughter Tamar was born, she found that she felt incredibly grateful but didn’t know whom to thank. However, her daughter’s birth soon gave her a calling to join the Catholic Church. She began a torturous process of conversion, criticizing herself the whole way. Her religiosity distanced her from her scientific-minded husband. During the Great Depression, she began a newspaper called The Catholic Worker and opened soup kitchens and hospitality houses that served and tended to the poor and down-and-out. The work was extremely grueling, but she did it until the end of her life because she was not a person who sought happiness, but one who sought to form herself through suffering. She was part of the Peace Movement of the late 1960s, but in an unusual way, standing against capitalism and the promotion of the individual. She was an example of someone who surrendered her individuality in order to serve a higher cause. Although her life wasn’t completely happy, she felt immense gratitude for God’s presence at the end of her life.