and attracted national attention. At that time in the mid- to late sixties, reformers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., had eradicated de jure segregation laws in the Jim Crow South and were turning their attention to de facto battles in the North—in places like Mount Vernon that were segregated not by overt laws, but by custom and the legacy of discriminatory practices and policies in the employment and housing sectors. Although Mount Vernon was not a large or well-known city, with fewer than 75,000 people living there in the sixties, it was less than ten miles away from the Bronx and the Harlem section of Manhattan, both of which contained the national headquarters for several prominent black civil rights organizations. Mount Vernon also shares New York City’s major media market, and that, along with its clear and almost clichéd racial division by railroad tracks, drew national press coverage and amplified exchanges on the local level.35
In 1975, an integration plan for the lower schools finally was reached in the state court system—one that, because of the racial turnover that had occurred in the past decade, did not involve the massive busing scheme initially proposed. From 1960 to 1970, Mount Vernon experienced a 4 percent population loss, at a time when most places in Westchester County were gaining. But while Mount Vernon’s total population shrank, its African American community increased by 44 percent: from 20 percent of the total population in 1960 to 36 percent in 1970. Most racial turnover occurred from 1960 to 1965, when the new integrated high school opened and talk of granting African Americans greater access to Mount Vernon’s high-performing lower schools on the (white) north side heated up. African Americans living nearby in places like New York City soon moved to Mount Vernon to embrace educational opportunities for their children. As they did so, white residents left.36
The Sterns sold their colonial home on the north side of Mount Vernon in 1967. Annette and her husband were not on the school board or following the busing debates too closely throughout the sixties. Their boys were not yet old enough to attend the integrated high school; they attended mostly all-white public lower schools on their side of town while the family was in Mount Vernon from 1958 to 1967. Decades later, Stern did not mention any of these disputes, but she remembered that their move was prompted by the desire not to send their children to private schools in the future. At any moment the lower schools could implement busing and, eventually, the Sterns’ sons would be old enough to attend the integrated high school. Throughout the sixties, it was possible for white families with young children like theirs to avoid all the racial tension in Mount Vernon. Eventually, doing so would no longer be possible. Annette Stern and the other women wanted their children to have more opportunities and resources than they had in their own Depression-era urban childhoods. This included access to quality education, which, in Mount Vernon, was delineated along racial lines. As the Sterns’ children got older, other solutions, such as moving away or paying for expensive private schools, needed to be divined. They chose to move to Harrison, which is also in Westchester County.37
As white families like the Sterns left Mount Vernon, nearby suburbs like Harrison flourished. Harrison experienced a 12 percent population increase in the sixties, more than the overall growth in Westchester County. The Sterns’ new town was much smaller and more affluent than Mount Vernon. Harrison had 50,000 fewer residents, a less densely populated layout dominated by single-family homes with an average of two acres of land, an excellent public school system, and an almost entirely white population devoid of fractious racial disputes. In other words, Harrison had the conditions that many women had hoped to find in the suburbs.38
Westchester County had the largest percentage (about 10 percent in 1970) of nonwhite (mostly African American) residents, but the other three suburban counties were not immune to racial tensions, albeit on a lesser scale. With fewer nonwhite residents, relatively minor occurrences in Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties became magnified. In 1967 in the Rockland County suburb of Nyack, for example, where Margie Fitton and her family lived, the community’s entire twenty-two-man police force and a larger detachment from the county sheriff’s office—all dressed in full riot gear—greeted representatives from the African American civil rights group CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) when they convened a forty-person rally. Although the gathering merely featured speeches urging attendees to elect a black mayor in Nyack, minor violence soon broke out as the police aggressively patrolled the crowd. On Long Island, roughly 99 percent of Nassau County’s public school students were white compared to 94 percent in Suffolk County, with most of Suffolk’s nonwhite population concentrated in the hamlet of Wyandanch, where a startling 92 percent of the district was African American in 1968. After one white male reform candidate for the school board in Farmingdale, Phyllis Graham’s first suburban town in Nassau, proposed busing African American students from Wyandanch across county lines into his mostly white community, he lost the election by a wide margin.39
The desire to be insulated from racial strife also prompted Terry Anselmi’s family to move to New York’s Rockland County in 1969. When Anselmi finally convinced her husband to leave Queens in 1964, they first moved to Teaneck, New Jersey. Their decision to abandon Teaneck five years later was motivated primarily by their quest for more space for their eight children, but Anselmi admitted that school integration battles there were, as she phrased it, “definitely a push” as well.40 Led by reformers in town, Teaneck became the first place in the nation to vote by popular referendum to integrate their schools in 1965—a move prompted by the fact that this suburb about twenty miles outside New York City was divided along stark racial lines like Mount Vernon. As more African Americans arrived in Teaneck looking for high-quality schools for their children after integration began in earnest, racial tensions mounted.41 The Anselmis’ oldest son was bullied frequently in their increasingly mixed-race neighborhood. Terry, a native of the Bronx, remembered thinking, “this is not what you get a house in the ’burbs for.”42 Even though the Anselmis had African American friends on their block, the tensions led them fifteen miles away across state lines to a brand-new, more spacious home in the nearly all-white town of Pearl River, part of New York’s Rockland County.43
Anselmi’s remarks reveal her desire to live a more tranquil life in the suburbs, compared to some of the battles taking place at the time in the women’s former urban neighborhoods and other large cities across the country. Racial disputes in suburbs like Teaneck and Mount Vernon paled in comparison to those in, for example, the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, where Jewish and Italian families violently opposed busing their children to majority African American schools. As the outer boroughs of New York City became more racially heterogeneous in these years as white families like the Anselmis moved to the suburbs, such disputes were perhaps inevitable as they overlapped with various movements for civil rights and expanded power and liberation for racial minorities. Once the women left the city, they were exposed to these urban struggles from a distance, mostly through news coverage. The women might have avoided these battles if they had stayed in the city, particularly Catholics whose children attended racially insulated parochial schools.
Still, the women remained emotionally connected to New York City’s outer boroughs where some of the most fraught racial struggle was occurring, which caused them to interpret more minor incidents in their new suburbs through the lens of what was happening there. With mounting concerns about public safety and law and order being broadcast around them by the late sixties (primarily related to a series of urban riots in New York City and across the nation in these years), women like Annette Stern and Terry Anselmi could move away when their version of suburban paradise seemed endangered by racial turmoil (however modest that “paradise” was, in reality, and however mild these disputes were compared to battles taking place in central cities). By the time the women were active in antifeminist politics, most lived in these four suburban counties that insulated white residents from the inequities in nearby New York City, while naturalizing (and thus hiding from view) the racial privilege they enjoyed.44
These circumstances underscore that silence does not indicate the absence of race and racial concerns. Inspired to protect their lifestyles, women like these five suburban housewives worked throughout the seventies to organize from the grassroots around a specific definition of the family—one that was molded by the institutions and social
