of New York from 1939 to 1967, and a close friend of the powerful Catholic Kennedy family while JFK was president—worked alongside the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the more inclusive Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that was formed from FDR’s Wagner Act. As the church built countless Catholic schools and parishes after World War II, Cardinal Spellman did so only with unionized labor. He attended AFL and CIO conventions and pressed politicians for fair wages and humane treatment for workers, which aligned with the Democratic Party’s strong embrace of antipoverty initiatives and labor unions since the New Deal.30 In the sixties, President Johnson’s pronouncements on poverty, race, and inequality mirrored sentiments expressed by Catholic leaders such as Pope John XXIII in Christianity and Social Progress (1961). These ideas from Rome were reinforced in Sunday sermons and the growing parish groups that Jane Gilroy and others joined after Vatican II.31
Gilroy was no stranger to the racial segregation and poverty that her church and political party focused on. Gilroy was born in 1936 and raised in the racially divided Flatbush section of Brooklyn: white working-class families, many of them Irish Catholic like hers, lived on one side of Bedford Avenue; African Americans lived on the other. There was little social interaction between the two groups, and although white families like hers were not wealthy, they were better off than most of their black neighbors. Gilroy was the second of three children, and her family struggled financially. Her mother was unable to work because of an earlier bout of rheumatic fever, and much of her father’s salary as a detective with the New York City Police Department went toward her care. Gilroy was a good student at nearby Catholic schools and began a degree in elementary education at Brooklyn College. In the fall of her senior year in 1957, she married Francis Gilroy, a graduate of nearby St. John’s University who was from Brooklyn and had spent some time in the Navy. Gilroy was soon pregnant, and since expectant women were not allowed to take courses at Brooklyn College, she had to end her education a few credits short of graduation. As a young married couple, the Gilroys barely eked out a living with Jane caring for young children at home while Francis finished his accounting apprenticeship. By 1961, they were expecting their third child. They had outgrown their small apartment in Brooklyn and could only afford more space in a housing project in Woodside, Queens.32
Every morning in the housing project, Gilroy observed the vestiges of racial privilege as she and other white homemakers chatted in the courtyard while their young children played. They watched as African American mothers in the complex headed out to work, as some of their own mothers had done a generation before. Gilroy and many of her white neighbors were biding their time in this middle-income housing project that had been built for veterans after World War II. While most of the veterans and their families had been white, their migration to the suburbs was followed by families of color moving in. The Gilroys only met the project’s low-income requirement because her husband was a poorly paid accounting apprentice. Once Francis became a certified public accountant a couple of years later, he used his GI mortgage benefits to move to a Levitt-style home in Merrick, Long Island—a town that was almost entirely white. From that point on, the Gilroys were solidly middle class.
Witnessing racial inequality, first as a child in Flatbush, then in a housing project in Queens, prompted Gilroy to volunteer in the mid-sixties in a Head Start program. She was assigned to a majority African American school in nearby Freeport, Long Island, a short distance from where she lived in Merrick, but worlds apart in economic opportunity and racial demographics. The Head Start program provided early childhood education for economically disadvantaged young people as part of the antipoverty initiatives that LBJ implemented in his so-called War on Poverty. The fact that Gilroy volunteered in a poor black school shortly after moving to the suburbs is unsurprising. She sometimes felt guilty about owning her first Levitt-style home in nearly all-white Merrick. Although it was a modest home, she knew it was a vast leap from where she came from and where the students in that Head Start program lived. Trained as a teacher, she sought this opportunity at a local branch of the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity. Doing so reflected her belief in the transformative power of education, along with her church’s and party’s concern with poverty and its intersection with race—not to mention Catholic leaders’ desire to cultivate a more active laity interested in social justice.33
As a newly middle-class suburban mother who wanted to give her children more than she had in Depression-era Brooklyn, Gilroy felt a maternal responsibility to help young people who lacked similar parental support, a sentiment that would move her and others to save vulnerable “babies” from abortion. Much like maternalist activists in the past, including those who were part of FDR’s New Deal coalition and enacted welfare provisions for impoverished single mothers, Gilroy and her allies went on to embrace a politics of public mothering. They too were concerned with society’s most vulnerable children, who, for them, primarily included fetuses in utero. A major difference was that their politics in the seventies—unlike the New Deal politics they grew up with—would be aimed at shrinking, not augmenting, the size of the government once they came to see an expanded state as evocative of dangerous feminist aims.34
But in the sixties, political concerns like this took a backseat to family matters. Gilroy’s family soon grew to five children, so she stopped volunteering for Head Start. In fact, although they often hailed from similar backgrounds, Gilroy and other suburban women avoided discussing politics and current events.35 When one typically thinks of the sixties, a series of hackneyed images spring to mind: protests in the streets, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Women like Gilroy spent those years acclimating to their new suburban lives and raising young children full time, important symbols to them of their growing financial comfort. As they did so, they watched—often only from afar on the nightly news coverage—as rapid expansion, Vatican II, an unpopular war, and various movements on the left and right of the political spectrum created great change. Yet Phyllis Graham’s neighbor in Farmingdale, Long Island, where she and her husband first purchased a home in 1960, could only remember her interminably hanging cloth diapers as the country and institutions like the Catholic Church shifted. “It’s true,” Graham later admitted. “We didn’t have disposable diapers then, and we didn’t have a [clothing] dryer right away, so after I put them in my new washing machine, I hung the diapers on the line.”36
Not even burgeoning feminism could wake the women from their political slumber in the sixties. They voted indiscriminately for both major parties based on superficial issues; some just mimicked what their husbands did at the polls. To them, politics encompassed matters such as foreign policy and taxation that had little relevance in their lives. Neither major party embraced feminism in a significant way at first, which encouraged their apathy. None remember hearing about Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book from 1963 until much later, although she positioned herself as a fellow housewife in Rockland County. Few women knew of the feminist organizations that were formed in that decade, many of which were based in nearby New York City—nor would they learn of them until the abortion debates introduced them to radical groups like Redstockings and more liberal ones such as the National Organization for Women that Friedan helped to found and lead.
Many Catholic women did, however, notice and back the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Before it was later expanded, the initial law only impacted federal employment in cases where women and men performed the same roles for unequal pay, which was rare in an economy with sex-segregated jobs.37 Jane Gilroy remembered that she and her neighbors in suburban Long Island “said ‘yes’ for equal work and equal pay.”38 Gilroy and others were by then full-time homemakers. Much like their church, the women thought since some mothers had to work out of economic necessity, they ought to be in a position to provide well for their families with equal pay and related measures—a belief that aligned with the women’s Democratic upbringings and messages from the pope that filtered down into Sunday sermons in their new parishes. As these homemakers and their church and party believed, a woman’s top priority was her family, ideally serving them exclusively from within the home.39
By the seventies, the priorities of the Catholic Church and Democrats began to diverge as the party embraced tenets of modern feminism such as legal abortion, leaving
