Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York

By Stacie Taranto

Most histories of modern American politics tell a similar story: that the Sunbelt, with its business friendly environment, right-to-work laws, and fierce spirit of frontier individualism, provided the seedbed for popular conservatism. Stacie Taranto challenges this narrative by positioning New York State as a central battleground. In 1970, under the governorship of Republican Nelson Rockefeller, New York became one of the first states to legalize abortion. By 1980, however, conservative, antifeminist Republicans with broad suburban appeal—symbolized by figures such as Ronald Reagan—had usurped power from these so-called Rockefeller Republicans. What happened during the intervening decade?

In Kitchen Table Politics, Taranto investigates the role that middle-class, mostly Catholic women played both in the development of conservatism in New York State and in the national shift toward a conservative politics of "family values." Far from Albany, a short train ride away from the feminist activity in New York City, white, Catholic homemakers on Long Island and in surrounding suburban counties saw the legalization of abortion in the state in 1970 as a threat to their hard-won version of the American dream. Borrowing tactics from church groups and parent-teacher associations, these women created the New York State Right to Life Party and organized against several feminist initiatives, including defeating an effort to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution in 1975.

These self-described "average housewives," Taranto argues, were more than just conservative shock troops; instead, they were inventing a new, politically viable conservatism centered on the heterosexual traditional nuclear family that the GOP's right wing used to broaden its electoral base. Figures such as activist Phyllis Schlafly, New York senator Al D'Amato, and presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan viewed the Right to Life Party's activism as offering a viable model to defeat feminist initiatives and win family values votes nationwide. Taranto gathers archival evidence and oral histories to piece together the story of these homemakers, whose grassroots organizing would shape the course of modern American conservatism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812293852

Book preview

Kitchen Table Politics

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore,

Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

KITCHEN TABLE POLITICS

Conservative Women and Family Values in New York

Stacie Taranto

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-4897-5

For my family, and the ability for all people and families to live as they choose …

CONTENTS

Note on Terms

Introduction. Inventing a New Politics of Family Values

PART I. OUT OF THE SIXTIES

Chapter 1. Becoming a Suburban Family

Chapter 2. Vatican II and the Seeds of Political Discontent

PART II. AWAKENINGS

Chapter 3. Abortion and Female Political Mobilization

Chapter 4. Equal Rights and Profamily Politics

PART III. COALESCENCE

Chapter 5. Ellen McCormack for President

Chapter 6. Toward the GOP

PART IV. REALIGNMENT

Chapter 7. Making a More Conservative Republican Party

Epilogue. The Politics of Women, Gender, and Family After 1980

Archive and Interview List

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON TERMS

Certain key terms and organizing principles appear throughout the book. The movements, groups, and participants they refer to were not as homogeneous as the blanket terminology used to describe them suggests. The term New York refers to New York State, not New York City, which is labeled as such. Derivations of pro-family or family values were used for convenience. Unless otherwise noted, references to feminists relate to (white) liberal, as opposed to radical, feminism because liberal feminists from organizations such as the National Organization for Women were more immersed in the electoral political arena covered here. Liberal feminists offended the first-generation suburban homemakers at the center of this narrative, as women of a similar racial and class demographic who were supposed to be their friends and neighbors, not political adversaries.

Perhaps no issue is more volatile than debates over whether abortion should be legal, which necessitated a careful parsing of words. Opponents of legal abortion are labeled as anti-abortion. This term does not imply that advocates of legal abortion were necessarily pro-abortion. Proponents advocated abortion’s legality; few took the actual procedure lightly. The more politicized pro-life and pro-choice descriptors appear only in quotations from activists. Opponents of legal abortion chose the term pro-life to reflect their belief that unborn fetuses were akin to, and thus should be afforded the same legal rights as, those living outside the womb. Proponents of legal abortion, particularly feminists, saw legal abortion as a fundamental right—a decision that only a woman, whose body and life were directly affected by pregnancy, should make, as the pro-choice marker denotes. These terms reflect two very different outlooks on abortion, the origins of which unfold here.

INTRODUCTION

Inventing a New Politics of Family Values

The inspiration for this book grew from going door-to-door in 2004 collecting donations for the Democratic National Committee on behalf of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. I was disappointed to be stationed in Rhode Island instead of an exciting swing state like Ohio, but being there made the most sense. I was about to begin graduate school in the area, where I intended to research American women during World War II. That plan shifted after canvassing Rhode Island for Democratic cash. Wealthier suburban neighborhoods were our best bet. Anecdotally, it seemed that a Volvo or Subaru in the driveway guaranteed hundred-dollar checks from people eager to expound on President George W. Bush’s worst policy blunders.

We also visited many lower-middle- and working-class neighborhoods—voters who had been the backbone of the New Deal coalition, yet whose support for the party was less assured in recent years. As naïve young staffers, we thought we could convince this demographic to open their wallets. These were neighborhoods likely to benefit, for example, from Kerry’s promise of national healthcare. We suspected that issues such as abortion might repel some of these voters. Still, this was the blue state of Rhode Island. These were mostly Catholic families, not the Evangelicals our friends were confronting elsewhere. We were wrong.

Older women, especially ones with rosary beads and other visible Catholic insignia, were the most hostile. They said they would never vote for Kerry, a fellow Catholic, because he backed legal abortion. They liked his economic message and used to be Democrats, but what they called family values issues now took precedence. The women had heard much of the same from their Catholic leaders and had been a target of the Republican Party for decades. When, I wondered, did this concept of family values emerge, and why did it become wedded to opposing legal abortion and championing the traditional nuclear family, instead of reforms such as national healthcare? And why vote for these issues when your economic position was not wholly secure?

That experience revealed what I wanted to study in graduate school, a project that became this book. I would investigate the origins of family values politics, shining a spotlight on everyday lay Catholic women like those I had met. Their language seemed aligned with the much-discussed (Protestant Evangelical) Religious Right working in large national religious and antifeminist organizations, yet they were understudied by the media and scholars alike.

Women, Kitchen Tables, and Political Change in the Seventies

My initial questions led to kitchen tables across suburban New York in the seventies. Archival research, interviews, and never-before-seen documents from basements and attics across the state revealed a small but incredibly effective group of ordinary, mostly Catholic women who redirected American conservatism from the grassroots. Throughout the seventies, topics that never had been widely debated in public before—such as how to divide childcare between the sexes or whether to become a parent at all—moved to the forefront of politics as modern feminist movements and related abortion reforms accelerated. As this occurred, some women felt that their families and homes were under siege. With no formal political experience, they gathered around kitchen tables and used the resources around them to fight back. This is the story of Catholic women such as Ellen McCormack and Jane Gilroy from Merrick, Long Island, who met when their parish priest started a dialogue group in the late sixties that mostly attracted housewives like them. They soon learned of efforts in the state legislature to legalize abortion. Echoing their Catholic leaders, many equated legal abortion with state-sanctioned murder and agonized over making it easier for women to evade their maternal responsibilities. After legislators passed an abortion reform law in 1970, the women formed the New York State Right to Life Party and began running anti-abortion candidates for elective office. It is also the story of women like Phyllis Graham from a nearby suburb of New York City. Graham remembers sitting at her kitchen table depressed after abortion was legalized. Anti-abortion activism through her Catholic parish evolved into opposing the state’s Equal Rights Amendment; by the late seventies, she was hosting a popular antifeminist local talk radio show.¹

New York, which seems as unlikely a place to encounter political conservatism as Rhode Island, provides very useful terrain for studying the Catholic family values Right. New York City was a key intellectual and political center of liberal and radical feminism in the sixties and seventies. At that time, the Democratic Party had growing feminist representation within it. In the New York City area, U.S. representatives Bella Abzug (D-Manhattan) and Shirley Chisholm (D-Brooklyn) garnered a great deal of press as they guided feminist proposals through Congress. On the other side of the aisle, the state Republican Party was a Manhattan-based organization that Governor Nelson Rockefeller dominated with his personal fortune, top-down leadership, and generally moderate politics. Rockefeller Republicans, as they were called, embraced feminist initiatives such as the state’s abortion reform law, which they linked to the GOP’s affinity for individual rights and personal freedom. The strength of feminism in the state engendered a backlash among mostly first-generation suburban Catholic homemakers—women whose opposition to legal abortion expanded to include other feminist-backed policies.²

Prior to 1970, the women’s political views were largely unformed but Democratic-leaning. Most were born during the Great Depression and raised in working-class neighborhoods across New York City where President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which enabled their modest families to make ends meet, were revered. Many of their mothers were forced to work outside the home during the Depression and war. Some women were Jewish, such as Annette Stern from the Bronx who settled in suburban Westchester County; others were Protestant, with a small faction of Mormons upstate. Most, however, belonged to New York’s large and politically significant Catholic population, which constituted 36 percent of the state by the seventies.³ The majority of Catholic women had attended parochial schools and still went to mass as adults. They watched their church—through a series of papal encyclicals that filtered down to their parishes—promote civil rights and social justice for racial minorities and the poor. These same causes were promoted by the national Democratic Party, especially in the sixties with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Following the church and party, most women praised the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Johnson’s attempts to end poverty and its racialized elements.⁴

But much of this was very distant from their lives as busy suburban homemakers. By the early sixties, the women were living with their upwardly mobile husbands and young children in the suburbs of New York City. They settled in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island and Rockland and Westchester Counties to the northwest of the city. Many took advantage of cheaper, mass-produced housing and federally backed GI mortgages to do so. These opportunities lifted their families into the growing postwar (white) middle class and made it easier to subsist on a single male-earned income as the women stayed at home full time—something their mothers’ generation was less able to do. There was little racial or economic strife to test the women’s political beliefs in their new, nearly all-white, red-lined suburbs.⁵ As various civil rights, liberation, and antiwar movements unfolded in the sixties, they were exposed only through television and newspaper reports, consuming what little they could in between domestic tasks. They were, as future antifeminist organizer Annette Stern noted, interested primarily in husband, children, and home.⁶ These duties were especially all-encompassing for Catholics who respected the church’s ban on artificial forms of birth control and had large families. The women voted indiscriminately for both major parties based on superficial reasons or simply mimicked what their husbands did. Politics appeared to revolve around issues like foreign policy that had little relevance in their lives as homemakers.⁷

Nor was the increased visibility of feminism in the early sixties, with its emphasis on equal pay, that worrisome. Most of the women were full-time homemakers when the first Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, but their modest upbringings made them sensitive to the fact that, as Stern pointed out, many women have to go to work, and that is why … equal pay is so essential.⁸ They believed that mothers should work only out of economic necessity, as some of their own had done; when this occurred, women ought to be paid as well as possible. Either way, a woman’s top priority was helping her family—if needed, with outside income.

Those like Stern were, however, dismayed to see self-proclaimed dissatisfied housewife and writer, Betty Friedan, from a nearby suburb in Rockland County, argue for possibilities for women other than homemaking in her groundbreaking book from 1963, The Feminine Mystique.⁹ Just as their families had attained suburban home ownership and a single male breadwinner’s salary—to them, the American dream—Friedan and others established groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) to advocate for greater educational and work opportunities for all women, including economically secure ones. This differed from the safety net of equal pay. Opponents thought that letting women choose between homemaking or working outside the home implied that the former was not as valuable as they believed. First-generation homemakers felt particularly slighted as their prize was undercut.

Beginning with abortion, the women labeled nearly all feminist policy prescriptions antithetical to proper gender roles and familial arrangements. They went on to defeat a state-level Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) mandating full legal equality for men and women in 1975. They worried that if feminists passed the ERA, the United States would resemble the Soviet Union, where women were compelled to work outside the home and daycare was provided by the state. Clearly delineated sex roles were not just good for the family: they were the basis for a moral and successful capitalist America. A range of proposals were denounced along these lines, from less stringent divorce laws to government-subsidized childcare. When thriving feminist movements made the personal political, the women took action.¹⁰

Rather than simply being against feminist goals, they also tried to forge a more positive politics that allowed their followers to be for something during that unsettling time. Echoing allies elsewhere, the women opposed legal abortion by being pro-life for fetuses, not against reproductive rights. They embraced heteronormative gender roles and rejected new legal rights for women by being pro-family. These were useful formulations on the heels of the rights revolution of the sixties that had begun to empower previously marginalized groups in America. By the seventies, denying someone his or her legal rights conjured up images of people being attacked by police dogs as they marched peacefully in the Jim Crow South. The women’s rhetoric avoided the pretense of impeding civil (legal) rights for their sex and instead elevated a very popular institution: the family (albeit strictly in its traditional form).¹¹

Timing also impacted the women’s politics in another way, as the weak economy of the seventies reinforced anxiety over changing gender roles. The era’s recessionary climate was compounded in New York by the statewide fiscal crisis that resulted from New York City’s near bankruptcy in 1975. The economic downturn disproportionately affected men, making it harder than ever for families to live on one income. By the mid-seventies, fewer than half of American households were headed by a husband and wife, and only a fourth had a sole male breadwinner.¹² As first-generation suburbanites, some only had a faint grasp on middle-class life. Others were married to men with very lucrative white-collar jobs. Either way, the women could not shake their upbringings. They did not want to be compelled to work outside the home like some of their mothers, whether by economic need or by feminist-backed laws.The fact that feminism began to flourish as the economy floundered encouraged them to conflate the two and assign blame. Feminists argued that job opportunities for women were a solution to the waning breadwinner-homemaker family structure, not the cause of this decline. Many women in New York disagreed and became determined to protect their entry into the middle class from feminist threats allegedly aimed at traditional families like theirs.¹³

Although many feminists had similar journeys of upward mobility, a trajectory shared by countless (white) Americans as the nation’s economy and suburbs proliferated after World War II, family values activists (as they were called after 1980) configured their opponents as dismissive and condescending elitists. Jane Gilroy, a founder of the New York State Right to Life Party, recalled, I saw [feminists] as professional women, college graduates, who thought they were better than us [homemakers].¹⁴ At first, this impression was driven by straightforward reports in area newspapers and on television that noted which feminist proposals had passed at the state and federal levels. What one side cherished (full-time homemaking and motherhood) was imagined to be an inconvenient burden for others. These feelings arose despite feminists advocating for greater economic security and legal protections for both homemakers and women in the paid workforce.

As opposition spread in New York, and the women reached out to similar groups across the country, their sources of information changed in ways that led them to view feminism in an even more inflammatory light. National antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly was especially adept at including provocative, often out-of-context remarks from feminists in her monthly anti-ERA newsletter, to which nearly all family values activists in New York eventually subscribed. This included the declaration credited to feminist leader Gloria Steinem that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Many women seized upon that line, which fueled the deep alienation felt by Jane Gilroy and other homemakers who proudly relied on men.¹⁵

To uncover these raw emotions and their political import, the book focuses on New York State from 1970, when abortion was legalized there, through the elections of 1980—a time when feminists and an emerging conservative family values movement competed side-by-side to define the family (including an important subset of Catholics whose politics have not received adequate coverage). Catholic, middle-class, white women living in the four suburban counties outside of New York City presented themselves as a silent majority that would not surrender to dangerous feminist reforms. In reality, they were a vocal minority of no more than a thousand activists in a state of more than eighteen million people. But the women reached thousands more at the polls as they created a viable conservative politics centered on nuclear families, heterosexual marriage, and traditional gender roles. Women and gender were at the core of their populist politics as they purported to leave the sidelines to save fellow homemakers and families from elite bipartisan support for feminism. The women relied on the neighborhood, religious, and community ties woven through their supposedly imperiled lifestyles to do so. They formed political organizations and aligned with conservatives in the Republican Party.¹⁶

The women became active as conservative Republicans were consolidating their power within the state GOP after decades of moderate rule. Once Nelson Rockefeller retired from public life in 1977, previously marginalized conservative Republicans wrested control away from his more liberal wing of the party. Two factors contributed to this outcome. First, suburban areas downstate—notably the four counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester, where a sizable number of women lived—grew to make up a quarter of all votes in New York, as winning them became all but essential to statewide victory. Second, as New York (and the nation) experienced an economic downturn, conservative Republicans in the state blamed liberals in both major parties and called for lower taxes to remedy the situation. These promises were popular in the voter-rich downstate suburbs, which had some of the highest property taxes in the nation; they also played well upstate, which historically had been a conservative (though sparsely populated) area of New York.¹⁷

Conservative Republicans reached out to the women to augment their power, shrewdly using state rules governing third parties. In addition to running on either the Democratic or Republican lines in New York, candidates can be cross-endorsed by one or more independent political parties. The Conservative Party, for instance, was formed in 1962 by disaffected New Yorkers hoping to push Rockefeller’s Republican Party to the right, although it had limited success doing so during the governor’s heavy reign. The New York State Right to Life Party (RTLP) was started in 1970, and a few years later, conservative Republicans were vying for its cross-endorsement to tap into the strong grassroots networks the women had built upstate and especially in the downstate suburbs where many lived: the exact areas where conservative Republicans hoped to create organizations from the ground up after Rockefeller’s top-down rule. The RTLP women and their allies were by then ready to leave the Democratic Party that had embraced feminist reforms. They soon saw conservative Republican calls for individual rights, smaller government, and lower taxes through the lens of heterosexual traditional family rights. Taxation, for example, became synonymous with financing objectionable feminist initiatives, such as Medicaid-funded abortions. Higher taxes, some also feared, might push mothers into the paid workforce. In partnership with the broader family values movement, the state’s GOP went from a more liberal, pro-feminist, and New York City-based organization in 1970 to a decidedly more conservative, antifeminist, and suburban one by 1980.¹⁸

But this is not simply a case study of New York: it is a history of national politics in the seventies. In New York, the Republican Party transitioned from Rockefeller to Reagan by 1980, which it did nationally as well. A marked division between the more conservative and liberal factions of the state’s GOP, along with the strength of feminism and antifeminism there, makes New York ideal ground to assess how the family values movement (led by women who felt they had the most to lose) contributed to this shift. Contemporary politicians recognized that this large, electorally rich state was a crucial formation site of modern family values conservatism, but historians have been slower to do so. President Nixon’s reelection campaign understood as much when it sided with anti-abortion advocates in New York in 1972, which secured the all-important Catholic swing vote, and with it, the state. In 1980, Ronald Reagan made winning New York a top priority. He announced his entry into the presidential race in Manhattan and named several prominent New Yorkers to his leadership team. His campaign believed that a victory on what had been Nelson Rockefeller’s turf would signal the end of moderate Republican rule, and they understood that partnering with opponents of feminism would facilitate that goal. While this was the end result, the women did not initially set out to alter party politics. They simply wanted to protect their way of life. In fact, most retreated home once they were confident that conservative Republicans would protect their interests.¹⁹

It was literally dining-room-table work, real kitchen-table politics, Jane Gilroy of the RTLP later said in a very telling turn of phrase.²⁰ Gilroy and others not only engaged in kitchen table politics by organizing at the grassroots level from their homes. Conservative Republicans in New York came to depend upon them. In the process, family values women worked alongside the feminists they fundamentally disagreed with to redefine politics. This was not a case of women stepping outside the domestic sphere to navigate a political domain defined by men. Instead, they reimagined the parameters of acceptable politics. In effect, women from groups like the RTLP invited New Yorkers—in ways that reflected broader national trends—to their tables, where they discussed issues previously deemed too private or irrelevant for public debate, including ones related to motherhood and sexuality. Working from literal kitchen tables, marching on the state capital, and running political campaigns, these self-declared average housewives were more than conservative shock troops. They nurtured and expanded, from the ground up, a powerful politics dedicated to traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.

A Politics That Hit Home

The women’s story builds upon a distinguished body of work that details how race and the Cold War shaped liberalism’s decline and conservatism’s rise in the decades after World War II. Much of this growth occurred as kitchen-table activists worked outside the existing power structure to rid the GOP of its moderate politics.²¹ Thinking about these concerns alongside gender and women refines our analysis. Sociologists, political scientists, and journalists have done a better job of doing so, although few have focused on ordinary women working at the grassroots level.²²

A handful of historians have placed women and gender at the crux of the anticommunist New Right in the fifties and sixties. These works concentrate on America’s Sunbelt region, where such appeals were popular because rising affluence and a Cold War-related economy prevailed there. They describe how middle- and upper-middle-class white women assumed maternal, home-centered identities in the traditionally male public sphere of politics and reform to stymie alleged communist threats. Other women minimized the importance of gender in their anticommunist work, although the fact that they were homemakers with more disposable time to organize shaped their political activism.²³ A comparable analysis of the seventies is warranted—a time when feminist-backed changes for women created new targets of conservative ire—particularly a history like this that considers race and ethnicity, religious affiliation, and class alongside women and gender.

Race had an ever-present (if sometimes hidden) influence on the women in New York. They rarely, if ever, engaged in the overtly racialized (often anti-welfare) rhetoric that other silent majority voters leaned on. Their humble childhoods coupled with the antipoverty and social justice messages these devout parishioners absorbed from Catholic leaders made such politics unappealing. Nor were the women consumed by the highly racialized school busing battles in the seventies since this issue did not affect their suburbs. Yet the racial exclusivity of the women’s communities—due to historical discrimination in the education, employment, and housing sectors—ensured that the idealized version of the family that they rallied to save was one only open to other white, middle-class, traditional, suburban families like theirs. For these white ethnics, often one or two generations removed from immigrant roots, this lifestyle was an achievement to be protected at all costs. The women’s insularity was compounded as they turned to similarly placed neighbors, friends, and local groups for assistance. Their Catholicism also molded their family values politics in ways that merit more scholarly attention.²⁴

Much has been written about Evangelicals (and to a lesser extent, Mormons and Catholics) in the rise of the New Right, mostly from a top-down perspective. Histories of this Religious Right disproportionately cover organizations such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, which reportedly mobilized millions of family values voters in the 1980 presidential election. Catholics operating on the grassroots level have received some coverage, especially when discussing Phyllis Schlafly. A Catholic herself, Schlafly tied legal abortion to the ERA to prompt fellow Catholics to join Evangelicals and Mormons in opposing the amendment (although the emphasis is usually on Schlafly’s coalition-building skills, not on the Catholic women she attracted). Other scholarship has examined this alliance between Mormons, Evangelicals, and Catholics—three groups historically at odds with one another. New work shows that the leaders of these sects first came together around theological issues (ironically including a shared disdain for interreligious unity, or ecumenism) well before they unified as a Religious Right opposed to legal abortion and related matters in the seventies. Even more literature describes how the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the church’s highest governing authority in the United States, has continued to pressure Congress to pass a human life amendment that would invalidate the Roe and Doe U.S. Supreme Court decisions that legalized abortion on the federal level in 1973.²⁵

Little has been written, however, about how everyday Catholic priests and parishioners responded to legal abortion and modern feminism. The history of women from groups such as New York’s RTLP highlights that as church leaders lobbied in Washington, D.C., parish priests and the laity, led by Catholic homemakers who felt endangered and had more flexible schedules, opposed legal abortion on the state level and beyond. The RTLP women arguably enjoyed more success than their church leaders, including running for president of the United States and fueling national debate over abortion despite their low voter tallies. After all, Catholic leaders could not as thoroughly immerse themselves in politics as the women could, for fear of losing the church’s coveted tax-exempt status.

This is partially a history of the Catholic Church in America at mid-century as dioceses and parishes grappled with recent social and political movements alongside their own sweeping reforms. Catholic leaders from across the globe met in Rome from 1962 through 1965, and these meetings, known as Vatican II, recommended several ways to modernize the church and better engage parishioners—from abandoning the Latin mass to encouraging the growth of parishioner groups. Church leaders soon turned to fighting legal abortion. Their first goal (energizing parishioners) fed into the second (outlawing abortion) when a Vatican II-inspired dialogue group in Merrick, Long Island, grew into the RTLP, which was officially separate from the church but clearly had evolved from it.²⁶

The abortion debates that jolted many women in New York into action set the tone for a more personal approach to politics, something that their Catholic faith helped shape. The women saw legal abortion as the state-sanctioned murder of innocent babies, not fetuses or blobs of cells, terms that Terry Anselmi, a homemaker and mother of eight from Rockland County, disparaged feminists for supposedly using.²⁷ One bishop who sent an anti-abortion statement to the New York State Legislature underscored that the church was concerned with life at its very beginning and "unalterably opposed to a philosophy of law which would relegate the unborn child’s right to life to the convenience of any other person."²⁸ Feminists argued that it was a woman’s basic right to decide to use her body to carry a pregnancy to term and possibly become a mother—not the state’s prerogative, especially since abortion’s illegality did not deter women from seeking the procedure, often under medically unsafe conditions. Mothers like Anselmi had proudly dedicated their lives to full-time childrearing, an attendant privilege of their upward mobility. As they and the bishop made clear, legal abortion was not only murder, but a selfish means for women to evade their maternal obligations, which felt like a rejection of what Anselmi and others were proud to have achieved. Catholic women dominated the fight against legal abortion in New York, and their politics differed from that of their (often male-led, Evangelical) allies elsewhere, who were more apt to cite biblical passages to oppose abortion. Guided by their church and daily lives, women in New York talked in more personal terms. They saw themselves as living proof of the rewards of not terminating a pregnancy and pointed out other perceived feminist threats that hit home.²⁹

Rallying as homemakers and mothers joined the women’s politics to a long tradition of maternalist female reform. The fact that they were political outsiders lent them credibility as they entered the fray to defend what they knew best: families, children, and the home. The women in New York may have been new to electoral politics in the seventies, but their claims were not. Female activists in the first decades of the twentieth century had passed (mostly state and local) laws to aid poor mothers and children. Although many were not actual mothers, the women used their gender as the basis for maternalist claims. They hoped that doing so would provide cover as they waded into the male world of politics—doing so ostensibly only to assist children and families (acceptable female pursuits). Some antisuffragists used similar language. Although there often were deeper class dynamics at play (not wishing to be put on an equal political plane with inferior immigrant and poorer women who would also get the vote), they purported to oppose suffrage, which contemporary feminists said was a basic woman’s right, by claiming that female domestic responsibilities would suffer as a consequence. Family values activists later positioned legal abortion, the ERA, and related feminist proposals, also framed as core women’s rights, as dangerous measures that would enable women to shirk their maternal, home-based duties.³⁰

The women in New York presented themselves in a populist manner in the seventies: they were mere housewives and mothers in the foreign arena of politics, forced to confront powerful feminists. Maternalists and antisuffragists made gendered political claims as those in New York later did. These foremothers were generally highly educated women from the middle class and above who were the socioeconomic peers of the elite (male) ruling class; only their sex made them political outsiders. In New York in the seventies, there were more populist dimensions to the gendered political claims of family values women. Feminists were thought to be savvy insiders who enjoyed backing from both major political parties and the government—resources that far exceeded what they, as first-generation middle-class suburban homemakers, could access. As the comment by the RTLP’s Jane Gilroy made clear, she and her associates envisioned themselves being pitted against well-supported, college-educated, elite feminists intent upon eradicating their way of life.³¹

This mix of maternalism and gendered populism had historical antecedents dating back to the thirties, of which the women in New York professed to be unaware. Historians have shown cash-strapped housewives organizing during the Great Depression to procure basic needs such as food and housing. These activists were not middle-class reformers aiding poor mothers and children, nor were they fearful of empowering women of lower socioeconomic status. Depression-era housewives were the ones struggling. They were women forced to wrest what they could from those of greater means. They did this for their families, their top priority. This formulation wove together maternalism, homemaking, and outsider political status—placing housewives at the fulcrum of family and community as they confronted sources of power in a populist manner.³²

After World War II, women deployed similar housewife-generated populism to address a variety of causes across the political spectrum. The nation’s postwar