Author Interview: Bailey Dick
Volume 38, No. 1
Bailey Dick is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. In an interview with Editorial Assistant Ollie Gratzinger, Bailey spoke about her research into the traumatic past of journalism legend Dorothy Day, the importance of historical perspective, and the role of objectivity in journalistic practice.
Where did this start? What drove you to dig into this side of Dorothy Day?
“I wrote my Master’s thesis about Dorothy, and finished that in 2018, which seems like nine lifetimes ago. I first ran into her when I was an undergrad many, many moons ago. I went to Loyola Chicago, which is Catholic, but a very social-justice oriented and a very activist-focused school. I was first introduced to her there, and I had never really encountered anyone like her. I grew up Catholic, I went to Catholic school, but I never really saw anyone or heard about anyone or learned about anyone that I identified with in any way. So, to hear about someone who had gone to jail multiple times, had a child and never married, had an abortion and attempted suicide, or was leftist was just very new to me even after sixteen years of Catholic school. I really just latched onto her because she was someone that I deeply identified with and wanted to learn more about, and I wanted to know why I didn’t know as much about her as I did somebody who was more mainstream or less problematic. She always kind of stayed with me and I never really thought I’d ever go to grad school ever, but I did, and I learned that a lot of research involves math, and I was like, ‘What kind of qualitative research can you do?’ So, I stumbled my way into history just by virtue of not being able to do math. And so I thought, ‘Who’s a historical figure that I’d love to learn more about? Or spend every waking moment thinking of?’ And the natural answer was Dorothy.
“As a historian, if you learn that nobody has written about your topic and there’s an archive [at Marquette in Milwaukee] full of stuff that no one has done anything with, that’s like hitting the jackpot. When I went to her archive, I had like 3,000-4,000 pages of documents, and just you can’t do a thesis with that. That’s just insane. So, I had some leftover material, if you will, that I still wanted to work with and I still wanted to do something with. A lot of it was stuff that I was personally interested in and maybe didn’t quite fit in with the dissertation itself but I thought was really timely. So that’s kind of where this all came about. It was the bonus leftover stuff, but the stuff that I was most excited to dig into.”
Was there anything that surprised you about what you found while conducting your research?
“Just the sheer amount of it. It was my first time really doing any kind of archival work. How much stuff there was, was really overwhelming but also great. There was a lock of her hair and a smock that she wore in prison that she had all the other prisoners sign. That stuff was cool because it was hers. She wrote a dozen letters a day back and forth to people—she was a compulsive letter-writer. People would write to her for advice because she had really been through it, right? There were all these letters from anybody—from just an everyday person who was like, ‘I don’t know what to do about this situation. Dorothy, tell me what to do,’ to Mother Theresa and presidents and the Pope, and just like people’s real handwriting…just to see somebody’s real handwriting, signed ‘Mother Theresa’ or “John F. Kennedy,’ is just really wild to physically touch it. I think the experience of it being my first archive but also how big some of the names were was really cool.”
For quite some time, journalism was a bit of a boy’s club. Can you talk a little about the importance of documenting the lives and works of female journalists?
“Part of why I wanted to pick this specific topic and this specific time period was, I think for a lot of women journalists and especially bigger-name journalists like Dorothy, they’ve been biographies to death, or there’s this girl-power thing — and you see this now with white feminism girl-boss stuff — where like, ‘You’re a girl and you did a thing that a boy can do so that inherently makes you cool!’ It’s the kind of dialogue that I grew up with in the 90s, and at first glance it’s fine and it’s great, like, ‘Yes, it’s great that girls can do what boys can do,’ but it inherently reinforces this standard of masculinity or traditionally patriarchal stuff as a bar to reach, or the thing that we want to reach to be equitable. It’s like that’s the standard that should be met instead of either a gender neutral standard or a female-focused standard. I think a lot of what I wanted to do with this was not just say, ‘It’s cool that she’s a woman and did something,’ but really examine the broader structures underneath it of why it made it difficult to do as a woman.
“As a woman, she faced a whole bunch of trauma related to her gender. Whether it’s having a child out of wedlock, which was considered at the time to be just this horrible thing, or having these multiple relationships with men who treated her horribly on account of her gender and she faced a lot of violence, or the kind of attitude she faced in the workplace because of her gender identity. Those are the things that made it difficult to do what she did — the people treating her that way or the structures that operated that way were the things that made it difficult. It’s not like, ‘She was a girl and she was tough enough to make it!’ I think that’s something that I’d like to personally see shift a lot in how women’s history is done. How can we broaden it to gender history? How can we broaden how we do history of women? Not just to be like, ‘She was a woman and she was spunky and she did a cool thing,’ [but] ‘Why was it difficult for women to do these things?’ Or, ‘Why is it difficult for someone today who has a different gender identity to fit into a box or a norm?’ That’s what my angle was, here.”
Your work speaks a lot about the impact of personal trauma on Day’s work, and analyzes it through a “trauma-informed lens.” In what ways did Day’s experience of trauma make her writing unique from that of her contemporaries?
“A lot of biographers or people who have done studies of Day have said that she’s ahead of her time. And that’s something you get with lots of women journalists. But to really dig into what that means and why, I think you saw more of this toward the end of that period of drift I talked about. As someone who is swiftly approaching 30 in just a matter of weeks, you realize throughout your twenties that you go from a place of doing what you have to do to survive, whether that’s taking whatever job you get or white-knuckling it through and doing what you have to do, to a period where you can really reflect on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. That’s something you saw play out in Day’s writing, and I think that’s something that you see happen to writers too, as writers mature as writers. It’s something that she did at the end of this period of drift, but also something that became her calling card. This was like her trademark. By the time she ran her paper starting in 1933 and then for 50 years, she wrote these really personal columns every month in the paper. That was her thing. That’s what made people subscribe to the paper or get invested in her work — how she could talk about not just, ‘Here’s a problem that’s happening,’ but ‘Here’s how I’ve experienced that problem, here’s what it’s like to live that problem. If I haven’t experienced it, here’s another person who has.” As a white woman, she had all these friends and colleagues who were working in the South and she would say, ‘I don’t know about this but here’s what someone else knows about this.’ I think that’s something that maybe we see a bit more of now, but something that I know I haven’t seen a whole lot of in early women’s histories.”
If someone wanted to learn more about the topic, are there any resources you’d point them toward?
“One of the great things is all of the Catholic Worker’s archives are online and digitized, which is amazing. You can keyword search it, which is also really great, and they broke it down by topic or decade. The good thing is, if you want to read more of her writing, it’s readily available in terms of her newspaper writing. But also, there’s collections of her letters that are in the archive and her diaries in book format. Obviously it’s not the whole thing, but kind of an edited version of it. There’s book collections, [Day] wrote six memoir-ish autobiographies. There’s plenty of stuff if you’re into learning about Dorothy. There’s lot of people who have written biographies about her, lots of people who have written studies of her movement work, her position in leftist circles, her position in Catholic circles.
“Judith Butler, gender theory. And, I think, Frank Underwood. Reading Frank Underwood’s book and understanding the role that trauma really plays in shaping journalists as professionals and how many journalists are traumatized whether they recognize it or not. That’s what’s driving my dissertation. A lot of research, not just that I’m doing but that lots of people are doing, that it’s really interesting to see that there’s this very long history of journalists being people who really seek out adventure and grittiness and tough stories and the underdog. My personal opinion, and I think Underwood’s, too, is that a lot of journalists know how to tell those stories because they’ve experienced them. You see that with Dorothy, right? She knows how to talk about poverty because she’s lived in poverty. She knows how to talk about working as a dancer per minute because she’s done it. I know a lot of the stories that I would cover when I was a reporter were stories that I cared about because I’d experienced them, and I think that’s true of a lot of journalists. If you’re going to cut it in this industry for 30-40 years, it’s got to be because you know how to deal with trauma and you know how to deal with hard stuff. I wish there was more about that, but Underwood is a great place to start.”
I think we’ve seen a push toward objective journalism in a way that negates that trauma-informed lens. Could you talk a little bit about that?
“Objectivity inherently is a Western, white male norm that stems from the Enlightenment and the notion that there’s a way to be completely rational and devoid of opinion, and that somehow makes something inherently more true. It’s still this golden calf in journalism. Mainly mainstream, legacy outlet publications. It’s again something that women or people with color, their experiences are seen as less believable or less true, or that their experiences are somehow clouding their judgement. Of course that’s not true, and if anything, people’s experiences enrich and enhance and make things epistemologically more true.
“I think there’s a resurgence of this this summer with a greater emphasis on Black Lives Matter protests. There were a bunch of Black reporters in big newsrooms — in Pittsburgh — who were not allowed to cover protests because they felt a certain way about people who identified like they do being treated a certain way. You would think, if anything, you would want a reporter who has experience and expertise with something and intimate knowledge of lived experience. They’d be better able to tell that story, because they know the right questions to ask and they know the right people to talk to. They’re able to develop better relationships and rapport with people they’re interviewing. I think, when you come at this again from a trauma-informed lens, and understand how trauma is not just something that hurts you or makes your life difficult — which it definitely does — but it’s an opportunity to better understand the truth, to better understand yourself, to better be able to connect with other people. I think if we were — the royal ‘we’ here — use a trauma-informed lens and shift away from that objectivity and really value subjectivity, value people’s stories in a really real way, you’re going to get better reporting. I think it’s kind of a win/win for everybody. A lot of people see it as a kind of liability, but I have a hard time seeing what the issue is with it.
“Dorothy is a great example of that. It made her reporting and her storytelling better. It made her personal life better. She was better able to understand herself in this decade of really shitty experiences she went through, through doing that reflective, subjective writing about the stuff that she covered. I think it’s a great model for what we should be doing now.”
Is there anything else that you wanted to mention about Day, or about your work? Or anything else that you think is important for others to know?
“[Day] is just so cool. Like I said before, it’s not just like a girl doing a cool thing because she’s gritty and has moxie. She’s someone who had this horrible, horrible go of it over her whole life. A dancer by the minute, had a child out of wedlock, had a common-law marriage that fell apart. And this is someone who is up for sainthood in a very traditional, Catholic, male, patriarchal church. I don’t know that I can underscore that enough, how important it is for us as researchers to use the power that we have. I’m not saying that my one article is single handedly going to disrupt the patriarchal system or the Catholic Church, which it’s not. It’s absolutely not. But there are ways that we can look at people differently or look at how people operated within systems or time periods differently. It really has the potential to shift how other people think of it, too. If I bring my own lens to a historical narrative, maybe that also will shift how somebody else understands that historical narrative, and who knows what the ripple effects of that are going to be? Both in terms of that person being recognized but also other people seeing that person, and seeing, ‘There’s a place for me. There’s someone who looks like me or identifies as I do.’ That gives people hope. For me to see, as a radical, leftist, feminist Catholic, that there’s someone who looks like me and acted a hell of a lot like I did, who can still be seen as someone who has value. Right now, in these times, is something that can get people out of bed in the morning. There’s somebody who looks like them, and they’re valuable and their story is valuable. It’s kind of a call to arms. I hope other people do stuff like this.”