For those of you who think, “that Andrea: She’s so conservative,” I’ll have you know that you are…right. However, once in a while, I do stretch myself by reading the autobiographies of communists. Right now I’m enjoying The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. I’m about halfway through and I finally hit the point where she explains the title:
I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness…”
And that rang true to me, so I thought I would share it.
by 
Nice- thanks for sharing. And thinking of you finding bonds/connections with pro-woman people on the left… I saw this article in the Globe on the weekend and thought of you. Its called “Reactionaries are Feminists, too” http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/reactionaries-are-feminists-too/article2121253/
My favourite quote from the article is: Many of these women are socially conservative, strongly supportive of the armed forces, and religious – and yet they crave equality as strongly as any leftist vegetarian in Birkenstocks. It’s blindness to this perfectly legitimate approach to feminism that keeps tripping up commentators who wish to dismiss women such as Margaret Thatcher or Muslim women or now right-wing U.S. women leaders as somehow not being the “real thing.”
Perfect quote! I’m going to bring this to my meeting for the Single Mothers/Senior Women’s community involvement project tomorrow. I’ve always wanted to find out more about Day. Thanks Andrea 🙂
Actually, I’ve always thought you sounded like a communist, so this all makes perfect sense. As it happens, I’m reading a biography of a good homegrown Canadian communist right now — One Woman Army: The Life of Claire Culhane. I actually find her rather inspiring, to the ambivalent extent that a social conservative can feel inspired by an atheist, marxist, radical activist. Culhane was known mostly for her activism against the Vietnam War, and then in favour of prisoners’ rights, but the book also happens to contain a couple poignant episodes relating to abortion — it’s perplexing why, given her experiences with it, she ended up being an advocate of abortion rights. She was an amazingly hard-working ally of underdogs who, in at least certain cases, chose the wrong side of a hot issue.
Anyway, that’s all OT, but it seems that August must be read-a-communist-biography month …
Dorothy Day was an amazing woman, but I think it’s a bit of a slander to call her a communist. Not everyone who is critical of capitalism is a communist. Distributism, the economic philosophy she and Peter Maurin advocated, really means that you distribute the means of production as widely as possible among the population. According to the distributists, both communism and unrestricted capitalism lead to the same result, with all the wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. Distributism tries to remedy that by promoting a small business model and encouraging communities to solve their own problems rather than look to the state for everything. The economist E.F Schumacher wrote a beautiful book based on these principles called Small is Beautiful, which may be out of print but is worth getting anyways.
Here’s an amusing story about Dorothy Day and the ProChoice movement:
http://www.cjd.org/paper/right.html
@ Pat: Day didn’t call herself a communist, it’s true. She used other terms, like anarchist. (The term “distributism” has not come up in her autobiography yet.) But if there is any truth to the idea that a person shall be known by the company he or she keeps, then “communist” to describe her is not slander, it is fitting. She met Trotsky, hung out with all the international socialist workers of the world, and was involved with people who travelled to Russia to help with the revolution. She quotes Lenin, and not with disdain. She certainly was on the wrong side of history on that. It doesn’t mean I discount her later life, or her conversion. But thus far in the book, she’s never repudiated communist thought or ideas. She appears to appreciate it, and she wishes she could find more of it in Roman Catholicism. I’m only half way through the book, so I’ll reserve judgment. And I’m still enjoying it, as it tells the tale of her thoughts around social justice, faith and American life.
I can’t say that I agree with Ms. Day’s generalization about women needing community. I am a woman and I seek only one person, preferably a husband but I’ll settle for a friend, who can alleviate my loneliness through sharing all of who I am with all of him- or herself . That is, I believe a single, perfect (i.e. complete) relationship is the true cure for loneliness. Sadly, that is not achievable in this life. Instead, like Dorothy Day, it seems we gather as many people as possible around us to distract us from how alone we really are.