Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village was a formative setting in Dorothy Day’s life: a place of radical newspapers, all-night political discussion, and bohemian literary company, but also the landscape of a private religious pull that her friends regarded with suspicion. Its significance lies in this coexistence. The same social world that energized Day’s radical commitments could not fully accommodate the faith that was beginning to emerge in her.

Journalism and Radical Discussion

Day’s connection to Greenwich Village grew through her work for radical newspapers. She wrote first for The Call, a socialist paper, and then for The Masses. Her circle included Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, and John Reed, who were enthusiastic about the Communist revolution, alongside other leftist intellectuals. Day reorganized her life around their discussions, which often lasted all night in Village taverns and centered on social issues.

The closing of The Masses under the 1917 Espionage Act interrupted that life by leaving Day unemployed. Her next action took her to Washington, where she picketed for women’s suffrage and was arrested. After serving thirty days in prison, she returned to New York and joined The Liberator, the successor to The Masses. Greenwich Village again became her social and professional milieu, now as an established member of its literary and social avant-garde.

Literary Company and Religious Tension

In this later Village period, Day’s friends included John Dos Passos, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, and Malcom and Peggy Cowley. She also developed a relationship with the young playwright Eugene O’Neill. Their world was liberal, radical, and bohemian, but it did not make faith an easy fit. Some of Day’s leftist friends thought her too religious to be a good radical; they feared that religious belief would divert her from the political issues they considered most important.

That conflict made the Village more than a backdrop to Day’s political formation. It was a setting in which competing accounts of commitment met: social change as the urgent work of radical politics, and religious faith as a possible source of purpose. Day’s visits to church did not mean that she had resolved this tension; the account presents them instead as stirrings beginning to surface within her existing life.

Bars, Church, and an Emerging Need for Purpose

After nights with friends in a Village bar, Day sometimes stopped at St. Joseph's Church, Sixth Avenue, on her way home. She occasionally attended early Mass and knelt at the back, not understanding the service but finding comfort in the candles, silence, praying people, and atmosphere of worship. The movement from tavern to church joined two recurring features of her Village experience: intense discussion of public life and a quieter attraction to religious practice.

Day was also searching for a way to answer the human suffering she had seen and to give her life a more substantial purpose. She began nurses’ training at a Brooklyn hospital, considering whether care for the suffering might be her calling, but after several months concluded that it was not. Her Village years therefore register neither a settled religious vocation nor a completed political identity. They show a life shaped by radical companionship and debate while a distinct religious longing was becoming harder to ignore.