Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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and covered copiously by the local media. Riots plagued almost every major city, including the outer boroughs of New York, where many had once had lived. Yet the women’s days were spent caring for young children and acclimating to the suburbs. Protests, political mobilization, urban upheaval, and even the beginnings of modern feminism were but distant echoes that these busy mothers sometimes missed altogether.
With domestic concerns taking center stage, Vatican II hit home for the women. A different language and strange practices soon unbraided cherished religious traditions. Navigating these changes was difficult to do in suburban parishes that were struggling under the weight of massive migration in recent years. As full-time homemakers, it was the women’s job to help their families adjust. They, for example, researched schools for their children. The reforms affected the parochial education system, in what were already overburdened and less established suburban Catholic schools. Despite how positive many women felt about their own Catholic educations in bustling urban parishes before Vatican II, it was not always clear what they should do for their children in what sometimes felt like another church after the reforms. As so much shifted, the women tackled these difficult domestic dilemmas alongside female friends and neighbors. Their “radical sixties” entailed making their way in new suburbs without a settled and familiar Catholic Church to guide them.2
Yet, even as Vatican II disrupted daily life, it unintentionally gave lay Catholic women the tools to do something about it—in ways that contradicted both their own ideas about where women belonged (in the home) and what male Catholic leaders had in mind when crafting the reforms. Vatican II doubled down on patriarchy, with the men who met in Rome refusing to give lay Catholic women and nuns any real power. At the same time, the reforms encouraged the growth of social and religious groups at the parish level. Ironically, lay Catholic women in New York used these organizations as springboards to attain political power. They justified spending so much time away from home in the seventies by arguing that their roles were temporary ones that they would relinquish once family-centered issues were resolved. Their Right to Life Party, for example, which evolved from a parish dialogue group created after Vatican II, became an indispensable asset to male Catholic leaders who, for fear of losing the church’s tax-exempt status, could not enter the electoral arena. These developments undercut the patriarchal goals affirmed at Vatican II, even though the women used their public platform to promote the same traditional ideas about gender and sexuality that the men running the church held.3
For Catholics like these homemakers who had been raised as Democrats, the mid- to late sixties also marked the beginning of their religious and political affiliations becoming unraveled. The Catholic Church and the Democratic Party historically were aligned over a shared commitment to social justice and alleviating poverty. But as feminists turned to legal abortion and related measures, and many Democrats did the same (along with more liberal Republicans like Governor Nelson Rockefeller), the women’s church and party started diverging over these issues. Vatican II was supposed to be a moment of liberalization for the church, where it modernized in ways that male Catholic leaders envisioned benefiting their antipoverty and social justice missions. The church, however, left women behind in its concept of liberalization, while the Democratic Party, increasingly home to feminists and better female representation, did not. There is added irony here. The patriarchal reforms unknowingly empowered lay Catholic housewives, and the women then used Vatican II-inspired groups to partner with the GOP’s conservative faction that was hostile to the antipoverty and social justice work that the church and Democratic Party (and to some extent, Rockefeller’s Republican wing) favored. Once the women’s families had ascended into the ranks of the homogeneous white suburban middle class, poverty and injustice were less visible to them. Meanwhile, the alleged victims of feminism—aborted “babies” and traditional homemakers—surrounded them and took precedence at the polls. Training a spotlight on future antifeminist leaders in New York State during the era of Vatican II reveals the foundation for this political realignment that the women helped bring about in the seventies.4
Catholic Life in the Era of Reform
Vatican II’s great impact on the women is understandable since their lives always had been intertwined with the Catholic Church. When Margie Fitton talked about growing up in upper Manhattan, before settling in Rockland County in 1959, her frame of reference was marked by the borders of the urban Catholic parish system.5 Margie was born into an Irish Catholic, working-class family in 1930 and raised on the east side of Manhattan at 99th Street. In 1954, she married John Fitton, who had just returned from an overseas peacetime tour in the U.S. Army. “My husband was from the same area in upper Manhattan,” Fitton noted, “but it went by parishes in the city. He came from East 106th Street, St. Cecilia’s, and I was in St. Francis de Sales Parish on 96th Street.” The various stages of Fitton’s early life were delineated by those boundaries—from her baptism as an infant at St. Francis through her marriage there in her early twenties. Fitton and her only sibling, a brother, were educated in the parish system as well because, she explained, “everyone went to Catholic schools.”6
The rich ethnic urban parish system of Fitton’s youth was a byproduct of the First Vatican Council (Vatican I) in 1870. As American cities expanded at unprecedented rates in the decades after Vatican I, much of it related to immigration from (Catholic) countries in Southeast Europe that supplied unskilled workers for the nation’s growing urban industrial economy, the church tried to prevent secularization by attracting these new arrivals. It did so with a neighborhood parish system that intermingled faith with traditions from immigrants’ home countries. These attempts were evident for decades to come. The working-class urban parishes of the women’s youth were close-knit ethnic communities that functioned as much as cultural and social institutions as religious ones—where an emphasis on the San Gennaro Festival in Phyllis Graham’s Italian Catholic corner of Brooklyn might give way to heightened celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day in parishes serving Irish Catholics like Jane Gilroy and Margie Fitton.7
In bustling northern cities like New York, neighborhood parishes further incurred loyalty by offering a range of services (often run by nuns) that people could rely on from cradle to grave. Many Catholics attended weekly or sometimes daily mass, turned to priests for personal advice, raised money for the church, and looked to parishes to care for the elderly, educate children, and provide recreation for the entire family. In New York City by 1940, there were roughly 1.8 million Catholics, and in Brooklyn alone—where Jane Gilroy and Phyllis Graham grew up in Irish and Italian Catholic parishes, respectively—there were 129 parishes, nearly all with their own elementary schools. Nuns played a pivotal role in managing these services. In New York City, they oversaw twenty-five Catholic hospitals, more than one hundred high schools, and elementary schools that educated roughly 214,000 children.8
With the parish system so central to Catholic life in New York City, the church tried to retain its importance in the surrounding suburbs after World War II as these women and countless others relocated to places like Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland Counties. From 1940 to 1970, 72 percent (thirty-two of forty-five) of the new parishes in the Archdiocese of New York—which covers parts of the city and several outlying counties including Rockland and Westchester—were in the suburbs. Westchester County, just north of the Bronx, for example, gained 323,129 new Catholics from 1940 through 1970. Enrollment in Catholic primary schools in Westchester and nearby Rockland County more than tripled to over 60,000 students by 1970. An astonishing eighty-four parish schools were opened in these counties as young families like Margie Fitton’s moved there.9
On Long Island, the Catholic population exploded so rapidly that a separate diocese needed to be created in 1957 (previously Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island had been part of the Brooklyn Diocese). Between 1957 and 1963, twelve million Catholics arrived on Long Island, with anywhere from 42 to 46 percent of Nassau County identifying as Catholic at various points in the sixties. Nearly all the Catholics moving to Nassau and the surrounding suburban counties were white transplants from New York City, while the urban parishes they left behind remained stagnant or saw an influx of Hispanics from places like Puerto Rico. The bishop of the new Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island, the Reverend Walter Kellenberg, joked that he should be called “Kick-off Kellenberg.” In the diocese’s first three years, the bishop’s schedule was filled with a never-ending