right to life to the convenience of any other person.”28 Feminists argued that it was a woman’s basic right to decide to use her body to carry a pregnancy to term and possibly become a mother—not the state’s prerogative, especially since abortion’s illegality did not deter women from seeking the procedure, often under medically unsafe conditions. Mothers like Anselmi had proudly dedicated their lives to full-time childrearing, an attendant privilege of their upward mobility. As they and the bishop made clear, legal abortion was not only murder, but a selfish means for women to evade their maternal obligations, which felt like a rejection of what Anselmi and others were proud to have achieved. Catholic women dominated the fight against legal abortion in New York, and their politics differed from that of their (often male-led, Evangelical) allies elsewhere, who were more apt to cite biblical passages to oppose abortion. Guided by their church and daily lives, women in New York talked in more personal terms. They saw themselves as living proof of the rewards of not terminating a pregnancy and pointed out other perceived feminist threats that hit home.29
Rallying as homemakers and mothers joined the women’s politics to a long tradition of maternalist female reform. The fact that they were political outsiders lent them credibility as they entered the fray to defend what they knew best: families, children, and the home. The women in New York may have been new to electoral politics in the seventies, but their claims were not. Female activists in the first decades of the twentieth century had passed (mostly state and local) laws to aid poor mothers and children. Although many were not actual mothers, the women used their gender as the basis for maternalist claims. They hoped that doing so would provide cover as they waded into the male world of politics—doing so ostensibly only to assist children and families (acceptable female pursuits). Some antisuffragists used similar language. Although there often were deeper class dynamics at play (not wishing to be put on an equal political plane with “inferior” immigrant and poorer women who would also get the vote), they purported to oppose suffrage, which contemporary feminists said was a basic woman’s right, by claiming that female domestic responsibilities would suffer as a consequence. Family values activists later positioned legal abortion, the ERA, and related feminist proposals, also framed as core women’s rights, as dangerous measures that would enable women to shirk their maternal, home-based duties.30
The women in New York presented themselves in a populist manner in the seventies: they were mere housewives and mothers in the foreign arena of politics, forced to confront powerful feminists. Maternalists and antisuffragists made gendered political claims as those in New York later did. These foremothers were generally highly educated women from the middle class and above who were the socioeconomic peers of the elite (male) ruling class; only their sex made them political outsiders. In New York in the seventies, there were more populist dimensions to the gendered political claims of family values women. Feminists were thought to be savvy insiders who enjoyed backing from both major political parties and the government—resources that far exceeded what they, as first-generation middle-class suburban homemakers, could access. As the comment by the RTLP’s Jane Gilroy made clear, she and her associates envisioned themselves being pitted against well-supported, college-educated, elite feminists intent upon eradicating their way of life.31
This mix of maternalism and gendered populism had historical antecedents dating back to the thirties, of which the women in New York professed to be unaware. Historians have shown cash-strapped housewives organizing during the Great Depression to procure basic needs such as food and housing. These activists were not middle-class reformers aiding poor mothers and children, nor were they fearful of empowering women of lower socioeconomic status. Depression-era housewives were the ones struggling. They were women forced to wrest what they could from those of greater means. They did this for their families, their top priority. This formulation wove together maternalism, homemaking, and outsider political status—placing housewives at the fulcrum of family and community as they confronted sources of power in a populist manner.32
After World War II, women deployed similar housewife-generated populism to address a variety of causes across the political spectrum. The nation’s postwar affluence allowed (white, middle-class) homemakers to move beyond meeting basic economic needs. Progressive housewives in Queens, New York, sought measures of racial justice to benefit their families. In southern California in the fifties and sixties, homemakers on the Right protested what they saw as a bloated and possibly communist state—merging nearly three decades of conservative anticommunist female activism with this newer “housewife populism,” as one historian has called it.33 As noted, many of these women from the Depression onward sought to minimize their gender, even as they presented themselves as homemakers and benefited from not reporting to time-consuming paid jobs with set hours. They were more apt to describe themselves as determined tenants, concerned citizens, or taxpayers. This was understandable in an era before modern feminism, when politics was considered a male (or, at best, gender-neutral) arena where housewives would not be taken seriously.34
Although the context was different in the seventies, the women in New York also rallied in a populist manner as homemakers and mothers. Always a little economically insecure as recent entrants into the suburban middle class, and often remembering their Depression-era youth, the women who formed groups such as the RTLP took on many of the characteristics above. But they did so in an environment where their target of concern was modern feminism (not an unjust state or anticommunism, although these were not wholly unrelated in their view). Unlike past activists, the women always relied on gendered populist claims. They mobilized in an era when topics such as reproduction, marriage, and childcare had been politicized by feminists. The women in New York believed that they had to get involved because these (female) domestic concerns had merged with the (male) political realm. Like the Catholic Church, they, for instance, opposed abortion as murder. Yet, they did not do so as gender-neutral concerned citizens; they did so as women who had spent years of their lives pregnant and feeling kicks from within. They were mothers who had raised expanding families on shoestring budgets as their husbands finished up schooling and settled into their careers before attaining more economic comfort in the suburbs. Only selfish women could not make it work as they had. They were simple homemakers and mothers facing elite, politically connected feminists who disavowed what they and other women were pleased to have found. They were armed with the resources at their disposal, reminiscent of the many times they still had managed to make a great dinner using only what they could find in the kitchen. Their politics put traditional womanhood and family life on display, forcing the public to reckon with what these homemakers claimed would be lost if feminists had their way.
The activism of suburban women in New York changed the face of the GOP by 1980. Rockefeller’s Republican Party that had promoted the state’s leading abortion reform law in 1970 was unrecognizable from the party that, in 1980, rejected feminist-backed Republican senator Jacob Javits in favor of Al D’Amato, a little-known GOP candidate cross-endorsed by the Conservative and Right to Life Parties. The following chapters document how the women contributed to that shift by forging a conservative consensus around issues of gender and family. As one of the women’s flyers announced, “The grassroots, pro-family, ‘anti-lib’ movement [came] alive in New York State” in the seventies “and [would] not be silenced!”35
PART I
OUT OF THE SIXTIES
CHAPTER 1
Becoming a Suburban Family
By the early 1960s, Terry Anselmi was desperate to leave her cramped rental apartment in Queens and head to the suburbs with her husband and young children. She longed for more space and a yard for the kids. Anselmi had lived her entire life in New York City. She was born in 1937 and raised along with her eight siblings in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, a neighborhood filled with Catholic families like hers. They lived modestly on her father’s salary as he climbed the ranks of a local bank he had worked at since he was fourteen. After graduating from a Catholic high school nearby, Terry worked as a secretary for a
