after its McGovern-Fraser Commission (1969–1972) invited minority groups including women to have more sway over party platforms and delegate representation at the presidential level (which meant that feminists infiltrated the party since they were the most politicized group of organized women in the late sixties and early seventies). These self-proclaimed “new Democrats,” such as feminist representative Bella Abzug of Manhattan, moved the party beyond support for a living wage and protective labor legislation, and toward equal pay, more job opportunities, legal abortion, the ERA, and other civil rights for women. With poverty and inequality now less visible to Catholic women in their suburban neighborhoods, issues such as abortion loomed large in their lives. They felt that their party was abandoning them, so they used pathways created by the church to enter the political arena to save their families. Their activism across the state, notably in the four suburban counties outside New York City, soon caught the eye of conservative Republicans who had been on the far margins of party leadership in New York State and the nation.40
The politics of the four suburban counties that future antifeminist leaders settled in—Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island, and Westchester and Rockland to the north and west of the city—historically were dominated by wealthy, pro-business, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans. Before World War II, these counties, in particular Westchester and Nassau that border New York City, were filled with affluent bedroom communities that had blossomed in the twenties alongside automobile sales and the construction of new homes, parkways, and commuter trains. In the presidential election of 1932, all four counties went to the unpopular pro-business Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover, despite the fact that the market had crashed on his watch and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee, was then governor of New York. Yet, because the population of these counties was so small then, just a fraction of what it would become after World War II, Roosevelt easily won the state. Voters in these suburbs responded by sending a string of anti-New Deal candidates to Congress in the thirties. After the war, support for business in these areas became joined with more tolerance for a bigger government that would guarantee civil rights for African Americans and other oppressed groups—eventually including abortion rights for women by the late sixties. As this occurred, these counties became a stronghold for so-called Rockefeller Republicanism. Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor of the state from 1959 through 1973, epitomized these qualities and was one of Westchester County’s most famous residents with an expansive estate in the scenic Hudson River Valley.41
The nation’s postwar prosperity and new mortgage provisions allowed white Catholic Democrats from the city—including the women and their families—to move to these counties and potentially threaten the dominance of (Rockefeller) Republicans. Mass-produced housing techniques, thirty-year home financing terms, and low-interest, government-backed loans for (white) male veterans helped flood the area with families who had been the backbone of FDR’s New Deal coalition. State Republican leaders worried when Nassau County experienced a 65 percent population increase from 1948 to 1952 after the completion of the Levittown development. Nassau’s ratio of Republicans to Democrats soon went from five-to-one to less than two-to-one. Even though Republicans still outnumbered Democrats in the county by roughly 200,000 voters in the fifties and sixties, both major parties became competitive in Nassau and surrounding suburban counties for the first time. In the statewide elections of 1962, voters in Nassau County elected Republican Nelson Rockefeller for governor and Democrat Arthur Levitt (no relation to the housing developer) for comptroller. Results like this were common in these four counties throughout the fifties and sixties. Third parties like the Liberal and Conservative parties often cross-endorsed candidates, which alternately helped or hurt the two major parties and contributed to split decisions.42
There was another reason that this large influx of urban Democrats did not completely obliterate the GOP’s longstanding dominance in these counties: many new arrivals registered as Republicans upon becoming suburban homeowners. Jane Gilroy’s widowed father—a retired police detective who had struggled to pay for her late mother’s medical care—was one Democrat who switched his party after moving to Long Island with his new wife in the sixties. Gilroy remembers him declaring, “We’re on Long Island now, you can be a Republican!”43 In the city, Democratic ward rule served the needs of workers like Gilroy’s father by fighting for rent controls, creating jobs during the Great Depression, and working alongside Catholic and union leaders to alleviate poverty. But postwar prosperity coupled with homeownership in these counties, which had some of the highest property taxes in the nation, caused many people to reconsider their political affiliation. The divide between Democrats and Rockefeller’s Republican wing that ruled in that era was not that great: both parties were dominated by centrist Cold Warriors who embraced the Keynesian economic principles that marginalized conservative Republicans rejected. In many ways, the parties only differed over taxation, with Rockefeller Republicans striving for—although not always attaining—lower rates than Democrats. Renters not paying property taxes in the city might not care if the powerful Tammany Hall Democratic machine subcontracted municipal services out to their cronies at uncompetitive rates. But if yet another school were being built in the suburbs to address the postwar baby boom, new homeowners might justifiably worry about their already high property taxes increasing to pay for it. As the economy slowed down in the seventies, voters were even more insistent that all business conducted with their precious tax dollars be done above-board at competitive rates.44 Republicans understood these sentiments and tried to capitalize on them. “Keep Tammany out of Nassau, Vote Republican” was an effective slogan used in the county to link local Democrats with the corruption and fiscal mismanagement that was endemic to urban machines.45
While most women remained committed Democrats until their party seemingly abandoned them for feminist issues in the seventies, some switched parties upon moving to the suburbs in the sixties—a move that hardly affected them. Both Phyllis Graham on Long Island and Annette Stern in Westchester County registered as Republicans upon leaving the city, but they only did so at the behest of their husbands who were upwardly mobile, first-time homeowners in these high-tax counties. The switch was hardly consequential to either woman since they only engaged with politics on a very superficial level then. Issues of little real importance—such as a candidate’s good looks, charming personality, ethnicity, or religion—were more apt to grab their attention in the sixties.46 Phyllis Graham, for instance, first moved to Long Island at the start of the presidential campaign in 1960. Although she followed her husband in registering as a Republican, she still gave money to Democratic contender John F. Kennedy’s campaign when volunteers knocked on her door. “At night in our old ranch house in Farmingdale,” she later remarked, “I would iron in the kitchen and listen to [campaign coverage] on the radio. His Catholicism was a bonus, but I just loved him.” When asked about specific issues that made him an appealing candidate, she could not cite any: “Loving JFK was the extent of my interest in politics. I didn’t have time [for issues] with all the little kids!”47
As families like these moved to the four suburban counties outside New York City and became more open to voting Republican, the GOP’s previously marginal conservative wing (which before was only competitive in rural upstate New York) wrested statewide control of the party away from the Rockefeller faction by winning over these new transplants. At first, conservatives had little success in doing so. Growing frustrated, some even broke away and formed the Conservative Party in 1962. The situation changed by the mid- to late seventies. Conservative Republican party bosses like Joseph Margiotta of Nassau County grew more powerful by tapping into the antifeminist political networks created by suburban women like Phyllis Graham, especially since the four counties where many of these women lived (and had their deepest support) made up a quarter of all votes in the state by 1980.48
Motivated to protect their new lifestyles—ones that already had been tested by Vatican II—activist housewives worked throughout the seventies in New York to mobilize people around a decidedly white, suburban, middle-class version of the traditional nuclear family. To protect families like their own, the women deployed populist rhetoric to organize people feeling the same way from their growing neighborhoods. They relied on suburban institutions to do so, including new Catholic community groups that were created after Vatican
