had been middle class, but in Chicago they moved into a flat over a tavern and underwent a long period of comparative poverty, eating overripe bananas and toast for dinner and getting to know the poor people around them. She writes of her high-school self, “I did not want just the few, the missionary-minded people like the Salvation Army, to be kind to the poor, as the poor. I wanted everyone to be kind. I wanted every home to be open to the lame, the halt, and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.”
Day grew up with a yearning for God and an empathic love for those at the bottom, neither of them a legacy from her parents, who were uninvolved in either religion or politics. Reconciling the two would be her great challenge. She wanted to mitigate the suffering of the poor, but she saw something holy about poverty too. In her autobiography she writes, “One afternoon as I sat on the beach, I read a book of essays by William James and came on these lines: . . . one wonders whether the revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage, and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. . . . We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient realization of poverty could have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by who we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment.” Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle made the invisible lives of the poor living nearby in Chicago real to her, and this “made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life.”
She used the language of religion intentionally. All her life before her conversion to Catholicism just before she turned thirty, she longed for prayer, for the shelter of the church and the larger meanings religion provided, for something grander and more mystical than everyday life or revolutionary politics could offer. But religion didn’t seem compatible with the other part of her life in the radical America of the early twentieth century, and only the radicals seemed to address the needs of the poor. And Day was radical. She was a tall, striking woman with a strong jaw, pale skin, black hair, usually cut in a bob, a decisive stride, strong opinions, and like many young people, a lot of pieces she could not quite put together. She fell in with anarchists, Communists, feminists, and other revolutionaries, worked with them on newspapers, marched with them on Washington, drank and danced with them at balls and bars, went to prison with them, talked with them about what the world could be and should be.
She fell in love with many things, and she uses the term intentionally to describe objects of enthusiasm and devotion entirely unlike romantic, erotic love. In The Long Loneliness , her autobiography published when she was in her fifties, she recalls, “There was a new baby that year, born in May. I fell in love that year too—I was fourteen years old—and first love is sweet.” The love was for a band conductor down the street to whom she never spoke. And she goes on to say, “The love for my baby brother was as profound and never-to-be-forgotten as that first love. The two seemed to go together.” The Russian Revolution came in 1917, when she was nearly twenty, and she joined the thousands singing and celebrating in Madison Square Garden. “I was in love now with the masses. I do not remember that I was articulate or reasoned about this love, but it warmed and filled my heart.” One love led to
Day grew up with a yearning for God and an empathic love for those at the bottom, neither of them a legacy from her parents, who were uninvolved in either religion or politics. Reconciling the two would be her great challenge. She wanted to mitigate the suffering of the poor, but she saw something holy about poverty too. In her autobiography she writes, “One afternoon as I sat on the beach, I read a book of essays by William James and came on these lines: . . . one wonders whether the revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage, and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. . . . We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient realization of poverty could have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by who we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment.” Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle made the invisible lives of the poor living nearby in Chicago real to her, and this “made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life.”
She used the language of religion intentionally. All her life before her conversion to Catholicism just before she turned thirty, she longed for prayer, for the shelter of the church and the larger meanings religion provided, for something grander and more mystical than everyday life or revolutionary politics could offer. But religion didn’t seem compatible with the other part of her life in the radical America of the early twentieth century, and only the radicals seemed to address the needs of the poor. And Day was radical. She was a tall, striking woman with a strong jaw, pale skin, black hair, usually cut in a bob, a decisive stride, strong opinions, and like many young people, a lot of pieces she could not quite put together. She fell in with anarchists, Communists, feminists, and other revolutionaries, worked with them on newspapers, marched with them on Washington, drank and danced with them at balls and bars, went to prison with them, talked with them about what the world could be and should be.
She fell in love with many things, and she uses the term intentionally to describe objects of enthusiasm and devotion entirely unlike romantic, erotic love. In The Long Loneliness , her autobiography published when she was in her fifties, she recalls, “There was a new baby that year, born in May. I fell in love that year too—I was fourteen years old—and first love is sweet.” The love was for a band conductor down the street to whom she never spoke. And she goes on to say, “The love for my baby brother was as profound and never-to-be-forgotten as that first love. The two seemed to go together.” The Russian Revolution came in 1917, when she was nearly twenty, and she joined the thousands singing and celebrating in Madison Square Garden. “I was in love now with the masses. I do not remember that I was articulate or reasoned about this love, but it warmed and filled my heart.” One love led to
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