Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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it was possible for white families with young children like theirs to avoid all the racial tension in Mount Vernon. Eventually, doing so would no longer be possible. Annette Stern and the other women wanted their children to have more opportunities and resources than they had in their own Depression-era urban childhoods. This included access to quality education, which, in Mount Vernon, was delineated along racial lines. As the Sterns’ children got older, other solutions, such as moving away or paying for expensive private schools, needed to be divined. They chose to move to Harrison, which is also in Westchester County.37
As white families like the Sterns left Mount Vernon, nearby suburbs like Harrison flourished. Harrison experienced a 12 percent population increase in the sixties, more than the overall growth in Westchester County. The Sterns’ new town was much smaller and more affluent than Mount Vernon. Harrison had 50,000 fewer residents, a less densely populated layout dominated by single-family homes with an average of two acres of land, an excellent public school system, and an almost entirely white population devoid of fractious racial disputes. In other words, Harrison had the conditions that many women had hoped to find in the suburbs.38
Westchester County had the largest percentage (about 10 percent in 1970) of nonwhite (mostly African American) residents, but the other three suburban counties were not immune to racial tensions, albeit on a lesser scale. With fewer nonwhite residents, relatively minor occurrences in Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties became magnified. In 1967 in the Rockland County suburb of Nyack, for example, where Margie Fitton and her family lived, the community’s entire twenty-two-man police force and a larger detachment from the county sheriff’s office—all dressed in full riot gear—greeted representatives from the African American civil rights group CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) when they convened a forty-person rally. Although the gathering merely featured speeches urging attendees to elect a black mayor in Nyack, minor violence soon broke out as the police aggressively patrolled the crowd. On Long Island, roughly 99 percent of Nassau County’s public school students were white compared to 94 percent in Suffolk County, with most of Suffolk’s nonwhite population concentrated in the hamlet of Wyandanch, where a startling 92 percent of the district was African American in 1968. After one white male reform candidate for the school board in Farmingdale, Phyllis Graham’s first suburban town in Nassau, proposed busing African American students from Wyandanch across county lines into his mostly white community, he lost the election by a wide margin.39
The desire to be insulated from racial strife also prompted Terry Anselmi’s family to move to New York’s Rockland County in 1969. When Anselmi finally convinced her husband to leave Queens in 1964, they first moved to Teaneck, New Jersey. Their decision to abandon Teaneck five years later was motivated primarily by their quest for more space for their eight children, but Anselmi admitted that school integration battles there were, as she phrased it, “definitely a push” as well.40 Led by reformers in town, Teaneck became the first place in the nation to vote by popular referendum to integrate their schools in 1965—a move prompted by the fact that this suburb about twenty miles outside New York City was divided along stark racial lines like Mount Vernon. As more African Americans arrived in Teaneck looking for high-quality schools for their children after integration began in earnest, racial tensions mounted.41 The Anselmis’ oldest son was bullied frequently in their increasingly mixed-race neighborhood. Terry, a native of the Bronx, remembered thinking, “this is not what you get a house in the ’burbs for.”42 Even though the Anselmis had African American friends on their block, the tensions led them fifteen miles away across state lines to a brand-new, more spacious home in the nearly all-white town of Pearl River, part of New York’s Rockland County.43
Anselmi’s remarks reveal her desire to live a more tranquil life in the suburbs, compared to some of the battles taking place at the time in the women’s former urban neighborhoods and other large cities across the country. Racial disputes in suburbs like Teaneck and Mount Vernon paled in comparison to those in, for example, the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, where Jewish and Italian families violently opposed busing their children to majority African American schools. As the outer boroughs of New York City became more racially heterogeneous in these years as white families like the Anselmis moved to the suburbs, such disputes were perhaps inevitable as they overlapped with various movements for civil rights and expanded power and liberation for racial minorities. Once the women left the city, they were exposed to these urban struggles from a distance, mostly through news coverage. The women might have avoided these battles if they had stayed in the city, particularly Catholics whose children attended racially insulated parochial schools.
Still, the women remained emotionally connected to New York City’s outer boroughs where some of the most fraught racial struggle was occurring, which caused them to interpret more minor incidents in their new suburbs through the lens of what was happening there. With mounting concerns about public safety and law and order being broadcast around them by the late sixties (primarily related to a series of urban riots in New York City and across the nation in these years), women like Annette Stern and Terry Anselmi could move away when their version of suburban paradise seemed endangered by racial turmoil (however modest that “paradise” was, in reality, and however mild these disputes were compared to battles taking place in central cities). By the time the women were active in antifeminist politics, most lived in these four suburban counties that insulated white residents from the inequities in nearby New York City, while naturalizing (and thus hiding from view) the racial privilege they enjoyed.44
These circumstances underscore that silence does not indicate the absence of race and racial concerns. Inspired to protect their lifestyles, women like these five suburban housewives worked throughout the seventies to organize from the grassroots around a specific definition of the family—one that was molded by the institutions and social landscape of their surroundings. It was a decidedly white, middle-class, single-income, suburban vision of the family, and to protect it from allegedly powerful and dangerous feminist forces, the women solicited support with populist rhetoric aimed at appealing to others who felt the same way.
Social mobility and the racialized growth of suburban neighborhoods and organizations were the ideological and material building blocks for the women’s future politics, but so too were changes within the Catholic Church. When this group of mostly Catholic housewives became involved in electoral politics, they relied on suburban institutions to fuel their movements, including groups created after the church’s Vatican II reforms in the sixties. Exploring how the women experienced Vatican II is therefore crucial to understanding their oppositional family-based politics in the seventies.
CHAPTER 2
Vatican II and the Seeds of Political Discontent
Religion was central to the lives of the lay Catholic women who moved to the suburbs of New York City in the sixties, and the major changes made by the church in that era anticipated their unease with feminism. The Catholic leaders who met in Rome from 1962 through 1965 at the Second Vatican Council (or Vatican II) upended centuries of religious tradition as they tried to modernize and reinvigorate the church. Vatican II urged lay Catholics to become more active in parish governance and the church’s social and economic justice work, at a time when countless secular political movements were vying for people’s attention. In theory, parishioners like the women in New York City’s growing suburbs supported these goals. In reality, the reforms significantly altered or eliminated weekly and even daily religious practices, wreaking havoc on established routines. Vatican II, in effect, foreshadowed subsequent discomfort with feminism, which the women also believed would change everyday family life. Focusing again on a handful of Catholic women in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, and in Westchester and Rockland to the north and west of New York City, helps contextualize the women’s antifeminist activism in these important suburbs and beyond a decade later—an opposition eventually so effective that conservative Republicans partnered with them to marginalize their party’s more moderate, pro-feminist Rockefeller wing. But this was still to come; in the sixties, the women were otherwise occupied.1
The sixties were a time of great social upheaval in America, but these first-generation suburban homemakers experienced very little of this firsthand. Large-scale antiwar protests and various civil rights and liberation