Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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John’s University in Queens and was serving overseas on a peacetime military deployment. After a flurry of romantic letters, he and Phyllis wed in January of 1957, the year that she turned twenty-seven. After living together on a U.S. military base in West Germany for seven months, the newlyweds returned to Brooklyn when Peter’s tour ended that August. Their first son was born in December. They rented a modest one-bedroom apartment from a fellow Catholic couple, and with Peter’s salary as an entry-level legal claims adjuster at an insurance firm in Manhattan, Phyllis was thrilled to be able to stay at home full time—an opportunity she knew her own mother would have appreciated. By late 1959, the Grahams had two sons under age two and a third baby on the way. Although Phyllis relished homemaking—as was expected of women at that time—doing so was exceedingly difficult in her apartment with its kitchenette, hand-cranked washing machine, and tight living quarters.12
Shortly before their third child arrived in March of 1960, the Grahams bought their first house forty-five minutes away in Farmingdale, part of Long Island’s Nassau County. Phyllis’s uncle lent them a small sum for a down payment, and thanks to a low-interest loan open to white veterans like her husband, their monthly mortgage payments were the same as their rent in Brooklyn. The Grahams moved to a three-bedroom ranch, purchasing it from a family who had moved in shortly after World War II. With three children in cloth diapers, Graham was perhaps most excited about the electric washing machine in the basement. “I was so enthralled with that thing,” she reminisced. “I would stand down there in the basement and watch the clothes wash!”13 Graham sorely missed her extended family in Brooklyn, but the washing machine and additional space were welcome improvements. She also built a new support network in Farmingdale with relative ease. Most of her neighbors were Catholics and Jews in their late twenties and early thirties, and like the Grahams, they were newly middle-class suburban transplants from the city.14
The Grahams’ neighborhood in Farmingdale was typical of Nassau County in these years when the construction of new homes for white middle-class families abounded. The county’s 93 percent population increase from 1950 to 1960 was driven by a series of postwar housing initiatives. Real estate developer William Levitt famously turned fallow potato fields in Nassau County into a community of identical, affordable, mass-produced homes and communal spaces that he incorporated as Levittown. Levitt originally rented these small ranch and Cape Cod-style houses to returning veterans, but he converted them into mortgaged homes in 1949 once the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) and the so-called GI Bill finalized the terms of their lending program. Other developers soon rushed to fill in Nassau’s marshland on the south shore of Long Island to build similar communities. A whopping 84 percent of homes in the county by 1960 were detached, single-family ones built for nuclear families. Almost all these single-family homes were occupied by white families like the Grahams. Mortgage lending and real estate practices such as red-lining and racial covenants barred families of color from suburban home ownership. Since a family’s home is often its biggest expense and can determine how many salaries are needed to live on, these cheaper mortgages and home construction techniques helped make the women’s one-income, traditional nuclear family lifestyles possible. Whether they realized it or not—and many did not—families with humble roots like the Grahams were part of the new, almost entirely white, suburban middle class that unions, workplaces, federal policies like the GI Bill, and racialized housing practices created after World War II.15
With mom at home, a financial cushion, and space to grow, the Grahams and others contributed to the era’s baby boom. Roughly 70 percent of adults in Nassau County were married by 1960, and nearly every other woman of childbearing age had at least one child under age five. The women contributed to these numbers, with Terry Anselmi and Jane Gilroy having five or more children. Almost all of them, especially Catholics who heeded their church’s ban on artificial contraception, had more children than their parents. This fact is unsurprising: their Depression-era parents were hampered by more modest incomes and space constraints in the city. Less restricted childbearing was another metric of suburban success. A decade later, once their children were in school full time and their lifestyles seemed imperiled, the women used their more ample free time to organize against feminist-backed initiatives.16
The arrival of these young families spurred massive taxpayer-financed public works projects across Nassau County. Countless new schools were completed by 1960 to address the baby boom, with most districts sparing no expense to invest in modern scientific labs in which to train the next generation of cold warriors. All this came at a huge cost to homeowners in Nassau County who saw their property taxes quadruple in the first ten years after the war, making them some of the highest rates in the United States. Yet residents and families in the area undeniably benefited from these expenditures. The Long Island State Park Commission, for example, tapped into this tax base to modernize the two-lane parkways that had been built when automobiles first became popular several decades before. The commission also created superhighways with federal funding from the Eisenhower administration’s Interstate Highway Act of 1956—most notably using the money to complete the Long Island Expressway in 1958, a six-lane artery connecting New York City to Nassau and Suffolk Counties, making travel to see family and old friends easier for the Grahams and others. Private railroads that took commuters like Peter Graham to work in the city struggled to keep pace until the government took them over in 1968 and created the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Generators and gas lines constantly were installed to keep up with this activity, and these infrastructural improvements coupled with greater accessibility spurred several consumer ventures alongside residential building. By 1970, Nassau County had one of the largest malls in the region: the two-million-square foot Roosevelt Field shopping complex in Garden City, which was close to several highways and almost entirely populated by women and children during the week.17
Nassau’s consumer spaces helped reinforce traditional ideas about gender. The nuclear family, with its increased disposable income in the prosperous postwar era, was promoted as a crucial bulwark against communism in everything from government propaganda to popular culture and consumer advertisements. Keeping mom at home to raise good consumers who adhered to traditional gender roles was billed as a patriotic pursuit for women—one that set Americans apart from communists who lived in extended families, where women had to work and consumerism was nonexistent. Like opponents of feminism in the past, Graham and her allies later exploited this association between homemaking and capitalism. They claimed, for example, that feminist-backed initiatives such as the Equal Rights Amendment would dangerously open the door toward communism by sending women into the paid workforce, where their focus would shift away from children and consumerism for the home. When they eventually did so, they instinctively made use of consumer spaces like the Roosevelt Field mall to reach large numbers of other women who could be convinced of their arguments.18
Time magazine described the gendered world of Phyllis Graham and her neighbors in this era by writing that “the key figure in all suburbia, the thread that weaves between family and community—the keeper of the suburban dream—is the suburban housewife.”19 In Graham’s densely populated, middle-class (white) neighborhood, where land plots had been kept small to maximize developers’ profits, women stayed at home with their children while their husbands went to work, often commuting into the city to do so. This arrangement kept the men somewhat grounded in the more heterogeneous urban experience, while reinforcing the primacy of (white) nuclear family life and traditional gender roles for the women who saw—often at very close range outside their windows—the same gendered division of labor replicated around them. Graham and her neighbors spent their weekdays in a collective female space awash in childrearing, tending house, watching each other’s children, shopping, and running household errands. They volunteered in the county’s schools, welcomed families into their neighborhoods, and dealt with fresh construction that constantly altered everyday routes. By 1960, 95 percent of Nassau homes had telephones, which further connected Graham and her female neighbors, who were now only a quick call away when someone wanted adult companionship or a favor—or in coming years, when they needed volunteers for antifeminist causes.20
These conditions extended into neighboring Suffolk County, where the Grahams moved in 1965. After commuting into Manhattan for five years, Graham’s husband accepted a job on Long Island when one of his former law school classmates asked him to take over his