House of Hospitality.
By The Mother Of Radical Catholicism
And The Founder Of
The Catholic Worker
Day, Dorothy. House of Hospitality. New York and London: Sheed & Ward, 1939.
8vo.; pages evenly, faintly yellowed; light blue cloth, stamped in dark blue; pictorial black, white, and red priceclipped dustjacket with image of tenement slums on front cover; jacket with one open tear to upper right hand front cover corner, and some soil and wear; still, a good copy.
First edition of Day’s political biography, tracing the origins of the House of Hospitality movement and the founding of The Catholic Worker.
From all accounts, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a brave, remarkable, and eccentric figure in American feminist politics. She accomplished much but is known mostly for her work with the poor (the “House of Hospitality”) and for her founding of The Catholic Worker, one of the most influential religious feminist periodicals of its, or any, era. In this volume, written mid-career, Day attempts to both proselytize and to explain to others how she came to hold the views, and perform the acts, that she did.
Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn and lived there until college, when she went to study at the University of Illinois. She was at college in the early days of World War I and it is possible that the anarchic views then semi-openly expressed resonated deeply with her; certainly Day was almost unique in her combination of Catholicism with a self-described anarchist bent. When Day returned to New York in 1916, her journalist father, who opposed feminism, ordered his friends not to hire his daughter. The socialist Call, indifferent to the paternal Day’s commands, hired Dorothy as a writer/editor. She went on the next year to the Masses, and, under the editorship of leftist Max Eastman, brought herself to the attention of government censors for articles opposing the war. At the time Day was a member of both New York’s literary avant-garde and of the Socialist Party (not necessarily mutually exclusive circles). As did more conventional women, Day also worked as a hospital nurse during the last year of the war, an experience that confirmed her belief in pacifism.
Day wrote for radical newspapers in New York and Chicago throughout the 1920s until, in 1927, she astonished her Socialist friends by joining the Catholic Church. (She also, coincidentally, bore an illegitimate daughter that same year.) Catholicism attracted Day largely because she saw it as the strongest institution that identified itself with the poor. In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Day began working on a utopian/Catholic program to develop communal farms aimed at allowing the urbanized poor an income. Day’s idea met with limited success, though she did manage to maintain some farms, including one on Staten Island where she occasionally spent time.
In 1933, Day founded The Catholic Worker. The monthly, which featured Day’s unique brand of radical Catholicism, soon found an audience. Despite the Depression and its impact on the launching of a new business, the paper attained 150,000 subscribers within three years.
House of Hospitality allows Day to tell, in her own voice, the story of her radicalization, her devotion to her blend of anarchism with Catholicism, and her devotion to the urban underclass.
After the publication of House of Hospitality, Day turned her attention back to The Catholic Worker and to what she saw as her good works. So far-out was Day that, at the height of World War II, The Catholic Worker became one of the very few publications to openly oppose the war. During the 1950s Day continued to make trouble, going to jail rather than participating in mandatory civil defense drills and then, in the 60s and 70s, demonstrating vehemently against the war in Vietnam. Day was an activist until the end: just before her death in 1980 she was aggressively involved with organizing striking farmworkers in California.
Books by Day are very
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