Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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then in a housing project in Queens, prompted Gilroy to volunteer in the mid-sixties in a Head Start program. She was assigned to a majority African American school in nearby Freeport, Long Island, a short distance from where she lived in Merrick, but worlds apart in economic opportunity and racial demographics. The Head Start program provided early childhood education for economically disadvantaged young people as part of the antipoverty initiatives that LBJ implemented in his so-called War on Poverty. The fact that Gilroy volunteered in a poor black school shortly after moving to the suburbs is unsurprising. She sometimes felt guilty about owning her first Levitt-style home in nearly all-white Merrick. Although it was a modest home, she knew it was a vast leap from where she came from and where the students in that Head Start program lived. Trained as a teacher, she sought this opportunity at a local branch of the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity. Doing so reflected her belief in the transformative power of education, along with her church’s and party’s concern with poverty and its intersection with race—not to mention Catholic leaders’ desire to cultivate a more active laity interested in social justice.33
As a newly middle-class suburban mother who wanted to give her children more than she had in Depression-era Brooklyn, Gilroy felt a maternal responsibility to help young people who lacked similar parental support, a sentiment that would move her and others to save vulnerable “babies” from abortion. Much like maternalist activists in the past, including those who were part of FDR’s New Deal coalition and enacted welfare provisions for impoverished single mothers, Gilroy and her allies went on to embrace a politics of public mothering. They too were concerned with society’s most vulnerable children, who, for them, primarily included fetuses in utero. A major difference was that their politics in the seventies—unlike the New Deal politics they grew up with—would be aimed at shrinking, not augmenting, the size of the government once they came to see an expanded state as evocative of dangerous feminist aims.34
But in the sixties, political concerns like this took a backseat to family matters. Gilroy’s family soon grew to five children, so she stopped volunteering for Head Start. In fact, although they often hailed from similar backgrounds, Gilroy and other suburban women avoided discussing politics and current events.35 When one typically thinks of the sixties, a series of hackneyed images spring to mind: protests in the streets, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Women like Gilroy spent those years acclimating to their new suburban lives and raising young children full time, important symbols to them of their growing financial comfort. As they did so, they watched—often only from afar on the nightly news coverage—as rapid expansion, Vatican II, an unpopular war, and various movements on the left and right of the political spectrum created great change. Yet Phyllis Graham’s neighbor in Farmingdale, Long Island, where she and her husband first purchased a home in 1960, could only remember her interminably hanging cloth diapers as the country and institutions like the Catholic Church shifted. “It’s true,” Graham later admitted. “We didn’t have disposable diapers then, and we didn’t have a [clothing] dryer right away, so after I put them in my new washing machine, I hung the diapers on the line.”36
Not even burgeoning feminism could wake the women from their political slumber in the sixties. They voted indiscriminately for both major parties based on superficial issues; some just mimicked what their husbands did at the polls. To them, politics encompassed matters such as foreign policy and taxation that had little relevance in their lives. Neither major party embraced feminism in a significant way at first, which encouraged their apathy. None remember hearing about Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book from 1963 until much later, although she positioned herself as a fellow housewife in Rockland County. Few women knew of the feminist organizations that were formed in that decade, many of which were based in nearby New York City—nor would they learn of them until the abortion debates introduced them to radical groups like Redstockings and more liberal ones such as the National Organization for Women that Friedan helped to found and lead.
Many Catholic women did, however, notice and back the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Before it was later expanded, the initial law only impacted federal employment in cases where women and men performed the same roles for unequal pay, which was rare in an economy with sex-segregated jobs.37 Jane Gilroy remembered that she and her neighbors in suburban Long Island “said ‘yes’ for equal work and equal pay.”38 Gilroy and others were by then full-time homemakers. Much like their church, the women thought since some mothers had to work out of economic necessity, they ought to be in a position to provide well for their families with equal pay and related measures—a belief that aligned with the women’s Democratic upbringings and messages from the pope that filtered down into Sunday sermons in their new parishes. As these homemakers and their church and party believed, a woman’s top priority was her family, ideally serving them exclusively from within the home.39
By the seventies, the priorities of the Catholic Church and Democrats began to diverge as the party embraced tenets of modern feminism such as legal abortion, leaving women like Jane Gilroy at a crossroads. The Democratic Party was transformed after its McGovern-Fraser Commission (1969–1972) invited minority groups including women to have more sway over party platforms and delegate representation at the presidential level (which meant that feminists infiltrated the party since they were the most politicized group of organized women in the late sixties and early seventies). These self-proclaimed “new Democrats,” such as feminist representative Bella Abzug of Manhattan, moved the party beyond support for a living wage and protective labor legislation, and toward equal pay, more job opportunities, legal abortion, the ERA, and other civil rights for women. With poverty and inequality now less visible to Catholic women in their suburban neighborhoods, issues such as abortion loomed large in their lives. They felt that their party was abandoning them, so they used pathways created by the church to enter the political arena to save their families. Their activism across the state, notably in the four suburban counties outside New York City, soon caught the eye of conservative Republicans who had been on the far margins of party leadership in New York State and the nation.40
The politics of the four suburban counties that future antifeminist leaders settled in—Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island, and Westchester and Rockland to the north and west of the city—historically were dominated by wealthy, pro-business, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans. Before World War II, these counties, in particular Westchester and Nassau that border New York City, were filled with affluent bedroom communities that had blossomed in the twenties alongside automobile sales and the construction of new homes, parkways, and commuter trains. In the presidential election of 1932, all four counties went to the unpopular pro-business Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover, despite the fact that the market had crashed on his watch and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee, was then governor of New York. Yet, because the population of these counties was so small then, just a fraction of what it would become after World War II, Roosevelt easily won the state. Voters in these suburbs responded by sending a string of anti-New Deal candidates to Congress in the thirties. After the war, support for business in these areas became joined with more tolerance for a bigger government that would guarantee civil rights for African Americans and other oppressed groups—eventually including abortion rights for women by the late sixties. As this occurred, these counties became a stronghold for so-called Rockefeller Republicanism. Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor of the state from 1959 through 1973, epitomized these qualities and was one of Westchester County’s most famous residents with an expansive estate in the scenic Hudson River Valley.41
The nation’s postwar prosperity and new mortgage provisions allowed white Catholic Democrats from the city—including the women and their families—to move to these counties and potentially threaten the dominance of (Rockefeller) Republicans. Mass-produced housing techniques, thirty-year home financing terms, and low-interest, government-backed loans for (white) male veterans helped flood the area with families who had been the backbone of FDR’s New Deal coalition. State Republican leaders worried when Nassau County experienced a 65 percent population increase from 1948 to 1952 after the completion of the Levittown development. Nassau’s ratio of Republicans to Democrats soon went from five-to-one to less than two-to-one. Even though Republicans still outnumbered Democrats in the county by roughly 200,000 voters in the fifties and sixties, both major parties became competitive in Nassau and surrounding suburban counties for the first time.