the seventies. In New York, the Republican Party transitioned from Rockefeller to Reagan by 1980, which it did nationally as well. A marked division between the more conservative and liberal factions of the state’s GOP, along with the strength of feminism and antifeminism there, makes New York ideal ground to assess how the family values movement (led by women who felt they had the most to lose) contributed to this shift. Contemporary politicians recognized that this large, electorally rich state was a crucial formation site of modern family values conservatism, but historians have been slower to do so. President Nixon’s reelection campaign understood as much when it sided with anti-abortion advocates in New York in 1972, which secured the all-important Catholic swing vote, and with it, the state. In 1980, Ronald Reagan made winning New York a top priority. He announced his entry into the presidential race in Manhattan and named several prominent New Yorkers to his leadership team. His campaign believed that a victory on what had been Nelson Rockefeller’s turf would signal the end of moderate Republican rule, and they understood that partnering with opponents of feminism would facilitate that goal. While this was the end result, the women did not initially set out to alter party politics. They simply wanted to protect their way of life. In fact, most retreated home once they were confident that conservative Republicans would protect their interests.19
“It was literally dining-room-table work, real kitchen-table politics,” Jane Gilroy of the RTLP later said in a very telling turn of phrase.20 Gilroy and others not only engaged in kitchen table politics by organizing at the grassroots level from their homes. Conservative Republicans in New York came to depend upon them. In the process, family values women worked alongside the feminists they fundamentally disagreed with to redefine politics. This was not a case of women stepping outside the domestic sphere to navigate a political domain defined by men. Instead, they reimagined the parameters of acceptable politics. In effect, women from groups like the RTLP invited New Yorkers—in ways that reflected broader national trends—to their tables, where they discussed issues previously deemed too private or irrelevant for public debate, including ones related to motherhood and sexuality. Working from literal kitchen tables, marching on the state capital, and running political campaigns, these self-declared average housewives were more than conservative shock troops. They nurtured and expanded, from the ground up, a powerful politics dedicated to traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
A Politics That Hit Home
The women’s story builds upon a distinguished body of work that details how race and the Cold War shaped liberalism’s decline and conservatism’s rise in the decades after World War II. Much of this growth occurred as “kitchen-table activists” worked outside the existing power structure to rid the GOP of its moderate politics.21 Thinking about these concerns alongside gender and women refines our analysis. Sociologists, political scientists, and journalists have done a better job of doing so, although few have focused on ordinary women working at the grassroots level.22
A handful of historians have placed women and gender at the crux of the anticommunist New Right in the fifties and sixties. These works concentrate on America’s Sunbelt region, where such appeals were popular because rising affluence and a Cold War-related economy prevailed there. They describe how middle- and upper-middle-class white women assumed maternal, home-centered identities in the traditionally male public sphere of politics and reform to stymie alleged communist threats. Other women minimized the importance of gender in their anticommunist work, although the fact that they were homemakers with more disposable time to organize shaped their political activism.23 A comparable analysis of the seventies is warranted—a time when feminist-backed changes for women created new targets of conservative ire—particularly a history like this that considers race and ethnicity, religious affiliation, and class alongside women and gender.
Race had an ever-present (if sometimes hidden) influence on the women in New York. They rarely, if ever, engaged in the overtly racialized (often anti-welfare) rhetoric that other silent majority voters leaned on. Their humble childhoods coupled with the antipoverty and social justice messages these devout parishioners absorbed from Catholic leaders made such politics unappealing. Nor were the women consumed by the highly racialized school busing battles in the seventies since this issue did not affect their suburbs. Yet the racial exclusivity of the women’s communities—due to historical discrimination in the education, employment, and housing sectors—ensured that the idealized version of the family that they rallied to save was one only open to other white, middle-class, traditional, suburban families like theirs. For these white ethnics, often one or two generations removed from immigrant roots, this lifestyle was an achievement to be protected at all costs. The women’s insularity was compounded as they turned to similarly placed neighbors, friends, and local groups for assistance. Their Catholicism also molded their family values politics in ways that merit more scholarly attention.24
Much has been written about Evangelicals (and to a lesser extent, Mormons and Catholics) in the rise of the New Right, mostly from a top-down perspective. Histories of this Religious Right disproportionately cover organizations such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, which reportedly mobilized millions of family values voters in the 1980 presidential election. Catholics operating on the grassroots level have received some coverage, especially when discussing Phyllis Schlafly. A Catholic herself, Schlafly tied legal abortion to the ERA to prompt fellow Catholics to join Evangelicals and Mormons in opposing the amendment (although the emphasis is usually on Schlafly’s coalition-building skills, not on the Catholic women she attracted). Other scholarship has examined this alliance between Mormons, Evangelicals, and Catholics—three groups historically at odds with one another. New work shows that the leaders of these sects first came together around theological issues (ironically including a shared disdain for interreligious unity, or ecumenism) well before they unified as a Religious Right opposed to legal abortion and related matters in the seventies. Even more literature describes how the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the church’s highest governing authority in the United States, has continued to pressure Congress to pass a “human life amendment” that would invalidate the Roe and Doe U.S. Supreme Court decisions that legalized abortion on the federal level in 1973.25
Little has been written, however, about how everyday Catholic priests and parishioners responded to legal abortion and modern feminism. The history of women from groups such as New York’s RTLP highlights that as church leaders lobbied in Washington, D.C., parish priests and the laity, led by Catholic homemakers who felt endangered and had more flexible schedules, opposed legal abortion on the state level and beyond. The RTLP women arguably enjoyed more success than their church leaders, including running for president of the United States and fueling national debate over abortion despite their low voter tallies. After all, Catholic leaders could not as thoroughly immerse themselves in politics as the women could, for fear of losing the church’s coveted tax-exempt status.
This is partially a history of the Catholic Church in America at mid-century as dioceses and parishes grappled with recent social and political movements alongside their own sweeping reforms. Catholic leaders from across the globe met in Rome from 1962 through 1965, and these meetings, known as Vatican II, recommended several ways to modernize the church and better engage parishioners—from abandoning the Latin mass to encouraging the growth of parishioner groups. Church leaders soon turned to fighting legal abortion. Their first goal (energizing parishioners) fed into the second (outlawing abortion) when a Vatican II-inspired dialogue group in Merrick, Long Island, grew into the RTLP, which was officially separate from the church but clearly had evolved from it.26
The abortion debates that jolted many women in New York into action set the tone for a more personal approach to politics, something that their Catholic faith helped shape. The women saw legal abortion as the state-sanctioned murder of innocent babies, not “fetuses or blobs of cells,” terms that Terry Anselmi, a homemaker and mother of eight from Rockland County, disparaged feminists for supposedly using.27 One bishop who sent an anti-abortion statement to the New York State Legislature underscored that the church was “concerned with life at its very beginning” and “unalterably opposed to a philosophy
