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
