in discussions about everything from women’s paid work to contraception, legal abortion was a dangerous enabler that allowed women to avoid these sacrosanct duties by murdering babies no different from their own.21
Reflecting on the reforms decades later, Phyllis Graham declared, “Vatican II was earth-shattering for me and my family…. I felt that Vatican II disrupted tradition and was just wrong for Catholics.”22 The Catholic Church had been a bedrock institution for the women, one that offered social networks, educational opportunities, and rituals that they later tried to replicate when raising their own families. But after they moved to the suburbs, uncertainty abounded, from living apart from close family to needing to learn to drive a car. Many Catholics looked to the church for stability, only to find overburdened suburban parishes that barely resembled the tight-knit urban ones they had left. Even worse, the women faced foreign customs and weaker schools that thwarted their desire to give their children a better life in every regard. Luckily, they were surrounded by many other (often first-generation) suburban homemakers who felt the same way, which would fuel their antifeminist activism.
Phyllis Graham even tried to bypass the Vatican II reforms for a while. After the new mass went into effect, she traveled almost an hour every Sunday to Nassau County to attend a traditional Latin mass held in a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hall in Hicksville, near where she had first lived on Long Island. This mass was sanctioned by a rogue archbishop in France, Marcel Lefebvre, who, because of a history of such actions, was later excommunicated from the church by Pope John Paul II in 1991. Partially for convenience, Graham returned less than a year later to her parish in Port Jefferson. After all, despite updating the mass, her pastor, the Reverend Matthew LePage, was unenthusiastic about Vatican II and implemented its recommendations as slowly as possible. LePage’s foot-dragging later cost him his job at Infant Jesus in 1972.23
According to Graham, attending these unsanctioned Latin masses occurred at a time before she was political, but behavior like this actually formed the basis of the women’s future activism. Like others, Graham did not start paying attention to electoral politics until the early seventies after New York State legalized abortion. She learned about the Equal Rights Amendment on an anti-abortion lobbying trip that her parish arranged, and her opposition expanded as she became the host of an antifeminist talk radio show on Long Island. Once in politics, Graham and her allies assumed a populist mantle as mere housewives and mothers battling elite, feminist-backed forces that sought to disrupt family life. The women had to leave their homes to fight these perceived evils, something that seemed more necessary as the political and domestic spheres began to intersect after feminists had pushed to make “the personal political.” Attending Latin masses in the sixties was an early act of defiance aimed at preserving family life and traditions. Graham may have been new to electoral politics in the seventies, but for almost a decade, she and others had been primed to defend their families from harm—from watered-down parochial schools and other changes inspired by Vatican II to feminist-backed reforms like legal abortion later on.24
Still, perhaps out of a deep-seated belief in religious obligation, and in some cases simply to escape the stresses of full-time childrearing in insular suburbs, many women joined the new parish groups. St. Anthony’s in Nanuet was a thriving parish that, like everything in Rockland County, experienced a huge population surge of mostly Irish and Italian Catholics in the mid- to late fifties. The parish expanded 57 percent from 1955 to 1960, and another 44 percent from 1960 to 1965. St. Anthony’s was in Nanuet, but it served parts of several surrounding towns including West Nyack, where parishioner Margie Fitton lived. Father Edmund W. Netter, an enthusiastic priest in his early forties, arrived at the parish in 1967 and attempted to cultivate the parishioner involvement Vatican II had envisioned. Netter oversaw a range of groups, including a thirty-person parish council that helped priests make important decisions at St. Anthony’s, a group called Young Catholic Students, and a new anti-abortion organization based at the church but open to the community. Margie Fitton and Terry Anselmi, neither of whom had been politically active before, joined the anti-abortion group as mothers concerned about what Netter positioned as killing babies; doing so was a launching point for joining the Rockland County Right to Life Committee in the seventies.25
The same was true in Merrick, Long Island, where Jane Gilroy’s participation in electoral politics grew from involvement in her new suburban parish after Vatican II. The Curé of Ars Parish that she joined after moving to Merrick experienced Nassau County’s postwar boom, with a 46 percent increase in its parishioner rolls in the early sixties when the Gilroys arrived. By 1963, 2,100 families were in the parish, making it the largest religious community in Merrick. Father Paul Driscoll came in 1964, right after being ordained, and began organizing parishioners as Vatican II had recommended. But as he did so, he encountered resistance, so, in the spirit of the reforms, Driscoll created a group to discuss the changes. The Intra-Church Relations Committee that he formed met regularly to debate the philosophical ideas and goals affirmed at Vatican II. The group, which included Jane Gilroy’s husband, Francis, considered all viewpoints in a variety of forums, such as parish study groups and church publications.26 Father Driscoll’s penchant for debate led him to form a separate weekly dialogue group in 1966 to discuss the vast change occurring outside the church. This new group mainly consisted of housewives with young children, including Jane Gilroy, who welcomed the chance to get out of the house and talk to other adults. At Father Driscoll’s behest, their conversations increasingly centered on attempts in the New York State Legislature to legalize abortion in the late sixties. When Driscoll left the parish in 1969, the women continued meeting on their own and formed the New York State Right to Life Party after abortion was legalized in the state in 1970.27
This progression indicates that the church leaders who bolstered male authority at Vatican II unknowingly set lay Catholic women on a path toward attaining more power. A decade later, many Catholic nuns felt undercut, with unprecedented numbers leaving the church. Lay Catholic women, on the other hand, went on to become indispensable public advocates for the church’s views on women, the family and, above all, abortion—ideas shaped and reinforced by their active parish lives as much as by personal circumstances as upwardly mobile suburban homemakers. The women relied on political organizations that they created on the grassroots level to do so, ones that evolved from parish groups attracting likeminded women after Vatican II. Jane Gilroy and others presented themselves in the seventies as outsiders in electoral politics. They were, technically, but this arena was not entirely foreign to them as domestic, familial, and political concerns began to converge. The women’s overarching goal was also familiar. Led by Catholics who were sensitive to perceived threats after Vatican II, they presented themselves as homemakers and mothers opposed to anything that might disrupt the rhythms of traditional nuclear family life. By the seventies, many had learned how to help their families navigate vast change—at first by joining parish groups where they connected with others feeling the same way and, later, by using those same networks to create political coalitions.
Forging a Suburban Politics
The women’s activism ultimately became entwined with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was a far leap from the Democratic Party and Catholic Church that had shaped their younger years. Although none of the women came from very politically active households, they grew up at a time when the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party were prominent institutions that worked in close cooperation with each other. During the Great Depression, Pope Pius XI’s aforementioned papal encyclical from 1931, Quadragesimo Anno, argued for proposals such as a living wage and the right to organize for improved work conditions. As he campaigned for president along the same lines, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the encyclical “one of the greatest documents of modern times.”28 Comments like this paved the way for a new partnership that broke down the historical animosity between white Anglo-Saxon Protestants like FDR and the Catholic Church.
This synergy was perhaps most evident in the white ethnic Catholic enclaves of New York City where the women were raised, areas that had been ruled by Democratic machines for decades. Jane Gilroy joked that “if you were Irish and Catholic, you had to be a Democrat
