The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism^33assumptions pervaded life at the Catholic Worker.” She would
often chastise people whose conduct she disapproved of, as in
the case of Jim Forest, whose “divorce and remarriage in 1967
moved Dorothy to request that Forest remove himself as head
of the Catholic Peace Fellowship or she would remove her name
from the list of sponsors.”^53 On another occasion, she banned
alcohol at Peter Maurin Farm. Her most forceful actions, how-
ever, consisted of the outright expulsion of individuals from the
movement. The most notorious of these episodes took place in
1962, when “there were young people living in Worker house
apartments whose standards were so at variance with traditional
morality that Dorothy, in one of her moments of a towering righ-
teous anger, threw them all out.”^54
Within her own Worker community in New York, Day’s ex-
ercise of authority—as has often been remarked—was to a large
extent modelled on the monastic role of the abbess, who exer-
cised final sovereignty within an institution whose components
functioned more or less autonomously on an everyday level.
While many of the criticisms of Day’s heavy-handedness by oth-
er Workers are undoubtedly justified, any explanation of Day’s
willingness to vest such authority in herself must take into con-
sideration the fact that she felt a strong personal responsibility
for the institutional survival of the New York Catholic Worker.
Arguably, it was because Day voluntarily shouldered this burden
and the complex and often painful problems of decision-making
that came along with it that other figures within the movement—
Maurin in particular—were able to lead lives of greater consisten-
cy, to adopt more literally “the values of smallness and openness
to failure that Day espoused.” As Dan McKanan points out,
Maurin’s “practice, during all the years he was associated with
the movement, was simply to outline his ‘program’ and provide a
personal example of a life of scholarship and manual labour, then
leave it to others to follow suit or not.”^55 Determined to build a
movement, Day clearly felt that she could not afford the luxury of
perfect exemplarity, and it was in New York more than elsewhere
that the instrumentalities of movement-making stood out in her
actions and gave them a more controlling aspect. It is crucial to
acknowledge with McKanan, however, that whatever truth there