a dues-paying (although otherwise inactive) member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Both her parents had to work outside the home to make ends meet, and nearby relatives watched Graham and her younger brother when classes were not in session at their Catholic schools. The family lived in a railroad-style apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which was then a working-class Italian neighborhood. Money was never abundant, but Graham relished the simple vestiges of her youth: a quiet but joyful mother who sang “America the Beautiful” while making dinner every night after her shift, despite scarcely speaking English; a kind and, as she saw it, morally decent father; a strong Catholic faith; and a close-knit extended Italian family who ate dinner together every Sunday.10
Before marrying, Graham dabbled in two very different vocations before settling down to start a family. After graduating from Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School for Girls, a tuition-free Catholic magnet school where she had volunteered in the administrative office and learned to type, Graham commuted into lower Manhattan to work as a secretary. She enjoyed the work, but was not very passionate about it. Inspired by her deep Catholic faith, she decided to enter the Maryknoll Missionaries as a nun. Headquartered in nearby Westchester County, the Maryknolls were a Dominican sect of Roman Catholic nuns who served the poor as they worked, mostly unsupervised, in various countries abroad. Graham stayed in New York and soon realized that what she liked most about joining this worldly, independent-minded sect of nuns was performing domestic chores at their convent in Westchester—to, in effect, run her own household after a lifetime with her parents. Her spiritual advisor suggested that marriage and motherhood might instead be her true missions in life, and she soon returned home.11
Perhaps nobody was happier to hear this news than Phyllis’s future husband, Peter Graham, who soon gave her the opportunity to fulfill that domestic calling. Peter was an old friend from her neighborhood who recently had completed his law degree at St. John’s University in Queens and was serving overseas on a peacetime military deployment. After a flurry of romantic letters, he and Phyllis wed in January of 1957, the year that she turned twenty-seven. After living together on a U.S. military base in West Germany for seven months, the newlyweds returned to Brooklyn when Peter’s tour ended that August. Their first son was born in December. They rented a modest one-bedroom apartment from a fellow Catholic couple, and with Peter’s salary as an entry-level legal claims adjuster at an insurance firm in Manhattan, Phyllis was thrilled to be able to stay at home full time—an opportunity she knew her own mother would have appreciated. By late 1959, the Grahams had two sons under age two and a third baby on the way. Although Phyllis relished homemaking—as was expected of women at that time—doing so was exceedingly difficult in her apartment with its kitchenette, hand-cranked washing machine, and tight living quarters.12
Shortly before their third child arrived in March of 1960, the Grahams bought their first house forty-five minutes away in Farmingdale, part of Long Island’s Nassau County. Phyllis’s uncle lent them a small sum for a down payment, and thanks to a low-interest loan open to white veterans like her husband, their monthly mortgage payments were the same as their rent in Brooklyn. The Grahams moved to a three-bedroom ranch, purchasing it from a family who had moved in shortly after World War II. With three children in cloth diapers, Graham was perhaps most excited about the electric washing machine in the basement. “I was so enthralled with that thing,” she reminisced. “I would stand down there in the basement and watch the clothes wash!”13 Graham sorely missed her extended family in Brooklyn, but the washing machine and additional space were welcome improvements. She also built a new support network in Farmingdale with relative ease. Most of her neighbors were Catholics and Jews in their late twenties and early thirties, and like the Grahams, they were newly middle-class suburban transplants from the city.14
The Grahams’ neighborhood in Farmingdale was typical of Nassau County in these years when the construction of new homes for white middle-class families abounded. The county’s 93 percent population increase from 1950 to 1960 was driven by a series of postwar housing initiatives. Real estate developer William Levitt famously turned fallow potato fields in Nassau County into a community of identical, affordable, mass-produced homes and communal spaces that he incorporated as Levittown. Levitt originally rented these small ranch and Cape Cod-style houses to returning veterans, but he converted them into mortgaged homes in 1949 once the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) and the so-called GI Bill finalized the terms of their lending program. Other developers soon rushed to fill in Nassau’s marshland on the south shore of Long Island to build similar communities. A whopping 84 percent of homes in the county by 1960 were detached, single-family ones built for nuclear families. Almost all these single-family homes were occupied by white families like the Grahams. Mortgage lending and real estate practices such as red-lining and racial covenants barred families of color from suburban home ownership. Since a family’s home is often its biggest expense and can determine how many salaries are needed to live on, these cheaper mortgages and home construction techniques helped make the women’s one-income, traditional nuclear family lifestyles possible. Whether they realized it or not—and many did not—families with humble roots like the Grahams were part of the new, almost entirely white, suburban middle class that unions, workplaces, federal policies like the GI Bill, and racialized housing practices created after World War II.15
With mom at home, a financial cushion, and space to grow, the Grahams and others contributed to the era’s baby boom. Roughly 70 percent of adults in Nassau County were married by 1960, and nearly every other woman of childbearing age had at least one child under age five. The women contributed to these numbers, with Terry Anselmi and Jane Gilroy having five or more children. Almost all of them, especially Catholics who heeded their church’s ban on artificial contraception, had more children than their parents. This fact is unsurprising: their Depression-era parents were hampered by more modest incomes and space constraints in the city. Less restricted childbearing was another metric of suburban success. A decade later, once their children were in school full time and their lifestyles seemed imperiled, the women used their more ample free time to organize against feminist-backed initiatives.16
The arrival of these young families spurred massive taxpayer-financed public works projects across Nassau County. Countless new schools were completed by 1960 to address the baby boom, with most districts sparing no expense to invest in modern scientific labs in which to train the next generation of cold warriors. All this came at a huge cost to homeowners in Nassau County who saw their property taxes quadruple in the first ten years after the war, making them some of the highest rates in the United States. Yet residents and families in the area undeniably benefited from these expenditures. The Long Island State Park Commission, for example, tapped into this tax base to modernize the two-lane parkways that had been built when automobiles first became popular several decades before. The commission also created superhighways with federal funding from the Eisenhower administration’s Interstate Highway Act of 1956—most notably using the money to complete the Long Island Expressway in 1958, a six-lane artery connecting New York City to Nassau and Suffolk Counties, making travel to see family and old friends easier for the Grahams and others. Private railroads that took commuters like Peter Graham to work in the city struggled to keep pace until the government took them over in 1968 and created the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Generators and gas lines constantly were installed to keep up with this activity, and these infrastructural improvements coupled with greater accessibility spurred several consumer ventures alongside residential building. By 1970, Nassau County had one of the largest malls in the region: the two-million-square foot Roosevelt Field shopping complex in Garden City, which was close to several highways and almost entirely populated by women and children during the week.17
Nassau’s consumer spaces helped reinforce traditional ideas about gender. The nuclear family, with its increased disposable income in the prosperous postwar era, was promoted as a crucial bulwark against communism in everything from government propaganda to popular culture and consumer advertisements. Keeping mom at home to raise good consumers who adhered to traditional gender roles was billed as a patriotic pursuit for women—one that set Americans apart from communists who lived in extended families, where women had to work and consumerism was nonexistent. Like opponents
