Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
DOROTHY'S PLANS WERE VAGUE AS she unpacked and settled into her parents' apartment in Manhattan, but it became clear soon enough that very little about the new arrangement was going to work. Her mother was happy to have her home. Della, sixteen and now in charge of caring for four-year-old John, was likewise happy to have her back with them. Her father, on the other hand, was not pleased with what two years of college had wrought-a daughter who smoked, didn't defer to him any more than she had before she went to Urbana, thought she was smarter than anyone in the family, and talked entirely too much about socialism, women's rights, her Jewish friends, and her future as a writer.
With an eye toward getting an apartment of her own as soon as she had an income, Dorothy made the rounds of the city's newspapers looking for work. She was met with no encouragement whatsoever, most of the time not even getting past the office boy or the city editor's secretary. As far as Dorothy was concerned, the repeated rejections she received were neither a coincidence nor an objective statement about the job market nor the predictable result of her own inexperience. In her bitterness, she was convinced that her father was spreading the word among the editors he knew that if his daughter showed up at their office, she should be talked out of her career plans or, better yet, ignored and sent on her way. That may well have been the case, but a young woman of her years with a slim college portfolio wasn't a likely candidate for work on a mainstream newspaper. The whole situation was made worse by the fact that her father had helped both her brothers get a start in journalism with far less education than she had. One editor she got in to see told her he would never let his daughter do what she was doing; another suggested a little country paper as a more feasible option.