Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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times of peace after World War II. The women had children upon marrying and moved to New York City’s outer boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, squeezing into apartments while their husbands finished degrees and began careers. Most women stayed at home with their children, an opportunity that they relished, and one that had eluded many of their working-class mothers in the lean Depression-era and wartime years. As their husbands secured middle-class, white-collar employment, the women began pining for a better life in the suburbs.2
Terry Anselmi and her peers moved in the late fifties and early sixties to one of the four suburban counties surrounding New York City. They purchased their homes in rapidly growing towns across Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, and in Westchester and Rockland Counties to the north and west of the city. Their families were not the first migrants to arrive in these expanding suburbs after World War II. Since the women typically did not come of age and marry until a decade after the war, they formed a second wave of suburban dwellers. Many even bought small Levitt-style homes from the original owners who had moved in after the war. But the type of house they purchased was not important for these new entrants into the middle class. The women’s American dream was simply to own any single-family home in the suburbs, and to stay home full time tending to it and their children.3
Examining the lives of Terry Anselmi and four others living outside New York City in the sixties illustrates how social forces linked to suburban growth and upward mobility laid the groundwork for an impassioned antifeminist politics a decade later. The women include Jane Gilroy and Phyllis Graham from Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, Annette Stern from Westchester County, and Margie Fitton, who, along with Terry Anselmi, settled in Rockland County. The experiences of these five women are highlighted because they represent those of other activists in the book. The four counties they moved to are emphasized because of their increasing importance in state politics as it migrated rightward throughout the seventies. As Anselmi and others adjusted to their new suburban lives, modern women’s liberation movement(s) sprang up around them. A major catalyst for modern feminism erupted in their backyard when self-styled housewife from Rockland County and soon-to-be feminist icon Betty Friedan published her landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1963. In provocative language designed to question the foundation upon which Terry Anselmi and others had constructed their identities and built their aspirations, Friedan claimed that the suburban home was a “comfortable concentration camp” for women.4 As opposed to the often more educated and financially secure homemakers that Friedan appealed to, Anselmi and her upwardly mobile allies saw full-time homemaking and motherhood as coveted prizes to protect, not burdens to shed. But these impassioned debates were years away. Women like Anselmi were preoccupied with raising children and building new lives in the suburbs in the sixties—so much so that they hardly noticed Friedan’s book or thought about feminism. They remained uninterested in politics until New York State legalized abortion in 1970, which seemingly eroded the underpinnings of their Catholic faith and maternal and child-centered lives.5
We begin by taking an in-depth look at the role that place and race played in shaping the political consciousness of these five women and others like them. When they came together in a populist fashion as mothers and homemakers, their impetus to organize (to save their traditional way of life from supposedly dangerous feminist reforms), as well as the political tactics that they deployed (such as canvassing busy shopping centers in town), reflected how suburban and domestic their lives (and politics more generally) had become in the past decade or more. Meanwhile, racially coded policies and practices in the mortgage industry ensured that the version of the family that Terry Anselmi and others defended, the type of family they most often encountered in their new suburbs, looked a lot like their own (white, middle-class) nuclear families.6 More fully exploring these factors sheds light on what the women were fighting to protect in the seventies, as they opposed feminist initiatives and helped shift the politics of the GOP and the state to the right in ways that mirrored national developments.
A New World in the Suburbs
When the women discuss their first years in the suburbs, they paint a picture of dizzying growth they had to navigate on a daily basis. New schools, homes, highways, streets, and community and commercial spaces were ascendant across Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester Counties. Even a drive through these areas today, where architecture from the fifties and sixties abounds, offers a glimpse into how excitingly modern and fresh these counties must once have seemed for families seeking greener pastures. The area was filled with young families constantly arriving and learning to become suburbanites—urban dwellers suddenly faced with caring for lawns, managing entire houses, finding schools and activities for their children, making friends, and driving cars after a lifetime of relying on public transportation. “Everyone was in the same boat, so it was almost like transferring you from the city,” Margie Fitton of Rockland County remembered.7 A sense of community abounded as neighbors made their way together, anchored by women who stayed at home full time and helped their families adjust to suburbia—female bonds that Fitton and others would rely on to oppose feminism.
The rapid growth of these four counties is reflected by census data, which reveal a stagnant urban core and expanding suburbs on the periphery. New York City’s population held remarkably steady in the immediate postwar era (1945–1970), experiencing its largest decline of only about 1 percent from 1950 to 1960. That statistic obscures the fact that tens of thousands of New Yorkers left the city in that time period—only to be replaced by massive waves of people from places such as San Juan, Puerto Rico, who came looking for work at a time of national prosperity. But while the city remained stable, the population in the four surrounding suburban counties swelled. In the respective time periods of 1950–1960 and 1960–1970, Nassau County grew by 93 and 9 percent, and adjacent Suffolk County, also on Long Island, by 142 and 67 percent. Westchester County increased by 29 percent and 10 percent, while Rockland swelled by 53 and 67 percent in those decades. These numbers, though impressive, offer little insight into how conditions in these flourishing suburban counties later informed antifeminist beliefs.8
Personal narratives and local histories help us answer that question, and for thousands of women across New York State—including Phyllis Graham—the journey began in New York City’s outer boroughs.9 Graham was born in Depression-era Brooklyn in 1930 to Sicilian immigrants who had recently moved to the United States. At the time, her father was working a string of odd carpentry jobs while her mother toiled in a coat factory as a dues-paying (although otherwise inactive) member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Both her parents had to work outside the home to make ends meet, and nearby relatives watched Graham and her younger brother when classes were not in session at their Catholic schools. The family lived in a railroad-style apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which was then a working-class Italian neighborhood. Money was never abundant, but Graham relished the simple vestiges of her youth: a quiet but joyful mother who sang “America the Beautiful” while making dinner every night after her shift, despite scarcely speaking English; a kind and, as she saw it, morally decent father; a strong Catholic faith; and a close-knit extended Italian family who ate dinner together every Sunday.10
Before marrying, Graham dabbled in two very different vocations before settling down to start a family. After graduating from Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School for Girls, a tuition-free Catholic magnet school where she had volunteered in the administrative office and learned to type, Graham commuted into lower Manhattan to work as a secretary. She enjoyed the work, but was not very passionate about it. Inspired by her deep Catholic faith, she decided to enter the Maryknoll Missionaries as a nun. Headquartered in nearby Westchester County, the Maryknolls were a Dominican sect of Roman Catholic nuns who served the poor as they worked, mostly unsupervised, in various countries abroad. Graham stayed in New York and soon realized that what she liked most about joining this worldly, independent-minded sect of nuns was performing domestic chores at their convent in Westchester—to, in effect, run her own household after a lifetime with her parents. Her spiritual advisor suggested that marriage and motherhood might instead be her true missions in life, and she soon returned home.11
Perhaps nobody was happier to hear this news than Phyllis’s future husband, Peter Graham, who soon gave her the opportunity to fulfill that domestic calling. Peter was an old friend