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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 few years before marrying Dan Anselmi, an Italian American also from the Bronx. They soon started a family and moved to Queens. Terry stayed at home with the children while Dan earned just enough to let her do so as he worked in sales and finished his college degree at New York University. When Dan won a $5,000 insurance settlement for an injury sustained at a nearby pool, Terry begged him to put the money toward a house in the suburbs. Instead, he bought a car, a rather unnecessary purchase in a city with extensive public transportation. By the time the Anselmis purchased their first home in Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1964, before settling in a nearby suburb in New York, that old car, Terry recalled, “was stuffed with human life,” with five children, and soon three more. They bought a smaller home, but, she noted, “I thought it was paradise … I felt so free with all that extra space for the kids.”¹

Anselmi’s story is typical of the figures in this book. Hundreds of women across New York—led by Anselmi and others from the state’s four suburban counties outside New York City—began mobilizing in the political arena against feminist-backed issues such as legal abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment in the early seventies. But just a decade earlier, they were preoccupied with concerns such as finding space to accommodate their expanding families. The women’s backgrounds were as varied as the tapestry of New York City’s neighborhoods from which they came. Still, they shared certain experiences. Most women were born during the Great Depression. They grew up in the city’s Democratic working-class, white-ethnic enclaves where President Roosevelt and the New Deal were considered sacrosanct. Their lives were organized around family activities and, often, those of the local parish, since the vast majority of women were Catholic. Some had taken college classes or worked as secretaries before getting married in their early twenties. Their husbands had similar family backgrounds, and many served in the military during times of peace after World War II. The women had children upon marrying and moved to New York City’s outer boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, squeezing into apartments while their husbands finished degrees and began careers. Most women stayed at home with their children, an opportunity that they relished, and one that had eluded many of their working-class mothers in the lean Depression-era and wartime years. As their husbands secured middle-class, white-collar employment, the women began pining for a better life in the suburbs.²

Terry Anselmi and her peers moved in the late fifties and early sixties to one of the four suburban counties surrounding New York City. They purchased their homes in rapidly growing towns across Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, and in Westchester and Rockland Counties to the north and west of the city. Their families were not the first migrants to arrive in these expanding suburbs after World War II. Since the women typically did not come of age and marry until a decade after the war, they formed a second wave of suburban dwellers. Many even bought small Levitt-style homes from the original owners who had moved in after the war. But the type of house they purchased was not important for these new entrants into the middle class. The women’s American dream was simply to own any single-family home in the suburbs, and to stay home full time tending to it and their children.³

Examining the lives of Terry Anselmi and four others living outside New York City in the sixties illustrates how social forces linked to suburban growth and upward mobility laid the groundwork for an impassioned antifeminist politics a decade later. The women include Jane Gilroy and Phyllis Graham from Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, Annette Stern from Westchester County, and Margie Fitton, who, along with Terry Anselmi, settled in Rockland County. The experiences of these five women are highlighted because they represent those of other activists in the book. The four counties they moved to are emphasized because of their increasing importance in state politics as it migrated rightward throughout the seventies. As Anselmi and others adjusted to their new suburban lives, modern women’s liberation movement(s) sprang up around them. A major catalyst for modern feminism erupted in their backyard when self-styled housewife from Rockland County and soon-to-be feminist icon Betty Friedan published her landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1963. In provocative language designed to question the foundation upon which Terry Anselmi and others had constructed their identities and built their aspirations, Friedan claimed that the suburban home was a “comfortable concentration camp” for women.⁴ As opposed to the often more educated and financially secure homemakers that Friedan appealed to, Anselmi and her upwardly mobile allies saw full-time homemaking and motherhood as coveted prizes to protect, not burdens to shed. But these impassioned debates were years away. Women like Anselmi were preoccupied with raising children and building new lives in the suburbs in the sixties—so much so that they hardly noticed Friedan’s book or thought about feminism. They remained uninterested in politics until New York State legalized abortion in 1970, which seemingly eroded the underpinnings of their Catholic faith and maternal and child-centered lives.⁵

We begin by taking an in-depth look at the role that place and race played in shaping the political consciousness of these five women and others like them. When they came together in a populist fashion as mothers and homemakers, their impetus to organize (to save their traditional way of life from supposedly dangerous feminist reforms), as well as the political tactics that they deployed (such as canvassing busy shopping centers in town), reflected how suburban and domestic their lives (and politics more generally) had become in the past decade or more. Meanwhile, racially coded policies and practices in the mortgage industry ensured that the version of the family that Terry Anselmi and others defended, the type of family they most often encountered in their new suburbs, looked a lot like their own (white, middle-class) nuclear families.⁶ More fully exploring these factors sheds light on what the women were fighting to protect in the seventies, as they opposed feminist initiatives and helped shift the politics of the GOP and the state to the right in ways that mirrored national developments.

A New World in the Suburbs

When the women discuss their first years in the suburbs, they paint a picture of dizzying growth they had to navigate on a daily basis. New schools, homes, highways, streets, and community and commercial spaces were ascendant across Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester Counties. Even a drive through these areas today, where architecture from the fifties and sixties abounds, offers a glimpse into how excitingly modern and fresh these counties must once have seemed for families seeking greener pastures. The area was filled with young families constantly arriving and learning to become suburbanites—urban dwellers suddenly faced with caring for lawns, managing entire houses, finding schools and activities for their children, making friends, and driving cars after a lifetime of relying on public transportation. “Everyone was in the same boat, so it was almost like transferring you from the city,” Margie Fitton of Rockland County remembered.⁷ A sense of community abounded as neighbors made their way together, anchored by women who stayed at home full time and helped their families adjust to suburbia—female bonds that Fitton and others would rely on to oppose feminism.

The rapid growth of these four counties is reflected by census data, which reveal a stagnant urban core and expanding suburbs on the periphery. New York City’s population held remarkably steady in the immediate postwar era (1945–1970), experiencing its largest decline of only about 1 percent from 1950 to 1960. That statistic obscures the fact that tens of thousands of New Yorkers left the city in that time period—only to be replaced by massive waves of people from places such as San Juan, Puerto Rico, who came looking for work at a time of national prosperity. But while the city remained stable, the population in the four surrounding suburban counties swelled. In the respective time periods of 1950–1960 and 1960–1970, Nassau County grew by 93 and 9 percent, and adjacent Suffolk County, also on Long Island, by 142 and 67 percent. Westchester County increased by 29 percent and 10 percent, while Rockland swelled by 53 and 67 percent in those decades. These numbers, though impressive, offer little insight into how conditions in these flourishing suburban counties later informed antifeminist beliefs.⁸

Personal narratives and local histories help us answer that question, and for thousands of women across New York State—including Phyllis Graham—the journey began in New York City’s outer boroughs.⁹ Graham was born in Depression-era Brooklyn in 1930 to Sicilian immigrants who had recently moved to the United States. At the time, her father was working a string of odd carpentry jobs while her mother toiled in a coat factory as 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 of feminism in the past, Graham and her allies later exploited this association between homemaking and capitalism. They claimed, for example, that feminist-backed initiatives such as the Equal Rights Amendment would dangerously open the door toward communism by sending women into the paid workforce, where their focus would shift away from children and consumerism for the home. When they eventually did so, they instinctively made use of consumer spaces like the Roosevelt Field mall to reach large numbers of other women who could be convinced of their arguments.¹⁸

Time magazine described the gendered world of Phyllis Graham and her neighbors in this era by writing that “the key figure in all suburbia, the thread that weaves between family and community—the keeper of the suburban dream—is the suburban housewife.”¹⁹ In Graham’s densely populated, middle-class (white) neighborhood, where land plots had been kept small to maximize developers’ profits, women stayed at home with their children while their husbands went to work, often commuting into the city to do so. This arrangement kept the men somewhat grounded in the more heterogeneous urban experience, while reinforcing the primacy of (white) nuclear family life and traditional gender roles for the women who saw—often at very close range outside their windows—the same gendered division of labor replicated around them. Graham and her neighbors spent their weekdays in a collective female space awash in childrearing, tending house, watching each other’s children, shopping, and running household errands. They volunteered in the county’s schools, welcomed families into their neighborhoods, and dealt with fresh construction that constantly altered everyday routes. By 1960, 95 percent of Nassau homes had telephones, which further connected Graham and her female neighbors, who were now only a quick call away when someone wanted adult companionship or a favor—or in coming years, when they needed volunteers for antifeminist causes.²⁰

These conditions extended into neighboring Suffolk County, where the Grahams moved in 1965. After commuting into Manhattan for five years, Graham’s husband accepted a job on Long Island when one of his former law school classmates asked him to take over his suburban legal practice. The opportunity necessitated a move for the Graham family that now included four small children. Not only had they outgrown their three-bedroom ranch, but the law practice was located an hour away from Farmingdale in Port Jefferson, Long Island, on the north shore of Suffolk County. Once again, Phyllis’s uncle lent them a down payment—which he was happy to do since they had repaid his first loan—which allowed them to move into a spacious nineteenth-century Victorian home. A lucky break from a realtor, who took a lower commission, and cheaper housing values in Port Jefferson made the upgrade possible. The median housing value in Suffolk County in 1960 was $4,000 less than in Nassau County since it is farther from New York City; in fact, Suffolk was the most affordable of the four suburban counties considered here. The Grahams quickly fell into a comfortable routine in Port Jefferson, which, like much of Suffolk County, was filled with other white, upwardly mobile families like theirs who eagerly took advantage of the area’s infrastructure.²¹

Peter Graham’s suburban law practice soon began to thrive as the family climbed into the upper echelon of the middle class. Phyllis was able to hire a Scandinavian woman whom her neighbors also employed to help with cleaning. Graham may have realized homemaking as her true calling during her brief stint in the convent, but despite that and her very humble roots, she never considered this occasional help to be a luxury. As she saw it, hiring a cleaning woman was a practical concern: her home was now larger, and she had four small children who kept her busy. This assessment belies increasing financial comfort from a woman who had been laboring over a hand-cranked washing machine just five years earlier. Graham’s subsequent political involvement was similarly laced with unconscious class (and racial) privilege.²²

Rockland County, which is located northwest of New York City, also underwent unprecedented postwar growth that set the stage for future antifeminist activism. In 1959, twenty-nine-year-old Margie Fitton and her husband, a grocery store manager, moved from the Bronx with their small children to a new Cape Cod-style home in West Nyack. They eventually raised ten children in that house and were still there over fifty years later. The Fittons—along with Terry Anselmi’s family—were part of a massive wave of urban migrants who moved to Rockland Country from New York City on the heels of an infrastructural and housing boom. Most families arrived after the Tappan Zee Bridge opened in 1955, which connects Rockland to neighboring Westchester County and makes it more accessible from New York City. The opening of the Palisades Parkway in 1958, a two-lane highway linking Rockland to the city and the New York State Thruway, further fueled development. Schools and commercial spaces followed, and a startling 26 percent (a little over a quarter) of all single-family homes in Rockland County in 1960 had been built, like the Fittons’ house, in the five years since the bridge and new highways had opened.²³

The Fittons’ neighborhood was filled with other young white Irish Catholic families from the city embarking on an exciting suburban adventure along circumscribed gender lines. The women stayed home to raise children while their husbands went to work, many for New York City’s fire and police departments. Of the residents of Rockland County, 95 percent were white, over 60 percent of adults were married and, as in Suffolk County, there was roughly one child under five for every other woman of childbearing age.²⁴ After growing up in northern Manhattan and spending four years in the Bronx, Fitton immediately thrilled to her suburban surroundings. “To this day, and I felt this way from the beginning,” she later noted, “I can be outside and say, ‘can you believe that I have trees?’”²⁵ For city natives like Fitton who had grown up in working-class families often living on the margins, the trees symbolized a better lifestyle for their children. It was one that women at home all day were intimately connected to—a middle-class, suburban, female, and maternal identity with which their subsequent family-based politics would be wholly intertwined.

Annette Stern, a homemaker who led a successful campaign against the state ERA in the seventies, was equally enthralled with suburbia after moving to Westchester County in 1958. Stern was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, but she grew up in the South Bronx, where she attended public schools. Unlike the other four women, Stern grew up in a more middle-class household. She was never particularly religious like the others, and her family was Reform Jewish, not Catholic. Her father had a small business that manufactured goods for infants, and although the family was never wealthy, her mother was able to stay at home full time. After graduating from Taft High School in the Bronx and taking some courses at City College, Stern worked briefly as a secretary at her father’s company before marrying and becoming a homemaker with three sons. Her husband, Harold, ran an importing business that required frequent travel overseas; his schedule could be grueling, but because of his job, the family eventually ascended into a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in the wealthy Westchester town of Harrison. But their first stop was the county’s more economically and racially diverse Mount Vernon, a suburb directly north of the Bronx. It was the first time that Stern had lived in a detached single-family house, and she appreciated the additional space and greenery in her comfortable neighborhood of mostly older colonial homes built before World War II. Although Harold had served in the National Guard in the early fifties, the family did not seek a GI mortgage, and once they became suburbanites, Annette got involved in organizations for her children such as the Boy Scouts.²⁶

Westchester County also expanded dramatically in the postwar years, although its population was not as homogeneous as in the other counties outside New York City. As nearby upper Manhattan and the Bronx lost residents, Westchester’s population increased by 29 percent in the fifties, with most of the growth occurring in the latter half of the decade after the Tappan Zee Bridge and New York State Thruway were built. By the sixties, Westchester’s population was a mix of three different groups: white-ethnic, upwardly mobile, middle-class urban transplants like the Sterns who had recently purchased their first single-family (often brand-new) homes in the suburbs; wealthier, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families in older affluent bedroom communities, many of whom had come decades before with the advent of the automobile (e.g., Nelson Rockefeller and his ilk); and working-class, more urban, often nonwhite denizens living in multifamily rental and subsidized housing closer to the city. Only 46 percent of housing units in Westchester in 1960 were single-family detached homes (compared to 90 percent or more in the other three counties), and 8 percent of the county was not white. Predictably, wealthier towns were almost 100 percent white with detached, single-family homes. Residents of color tended to live in one of Westchester’s six larger cities that border the Bronx and have ample multifamily rental units and subsidized housing. These varied demographics did not make the family-based politics Annette Stern and others from Westchester embraced any more inclusive, due to the racial insularity that defined most of their communities in the county. This, however, was yet to come.²⁷

Still, the foundation for the women’s family-based activism was laid in the sixties as their daily lives became woven with the suburban experience. They had moved to the suburbs of New York City expecting better lives replete with more room, green spaces, full-time domesticity, and relative comfort compared to their working-class urban roots. For the most part, the women found all of that. Following their husbands’ lead, some occasionally groused about the high property taxes they now faced. Yet, their families were helped by the taxpayer-funded expenditures that had created thriving suburbs with the amenities and accessibility that families more accustomed to life in the city demanded. It was only when those taxpayer dollars seemed to support feminist-backed measures that they felt would weaken, instead of bolster, family life (in the recessionary seventies when money was generally tighter) that the women sought a politics of low taxation. When that occurred, they naturally turned to the stuff of their everyday lives—personal ties, community organizations, and popular shopping plazas—to defend their version of the family that was inextricably linked to (and in many ways defined by) those very same networks and structures.²⁸

The Hidden Shape of Racial Privilege

The racial homogeneity most women encountered upon moving to the suburbs also shaped their future politics. Their families moved from mixed-race urban neighborhoods to nearly all-white suburbs, exiting New York City’s outer boroughs at a moment of significant racial turnover. In 1960, for example, around the time Terry Anselmi’s family left Queens, roughly 9 percent of the borough’s residents were not white. This percentage was far short of a majority, but the nonwhite—mostly African American—population in Queens had more than doubled since 1950, and the trend continued into the sixties. As more people of color moved into white-ethnic working-class neighborhoods across New York City, families like the Anselmis headed to the suburbs.²⁹

Despite these statistics, one cannot simply label their experience “white flight.” Many families were unaffected by racial turnover in the city. Catholic families typically had insulated social lives that revolved around activities in their mostly all-white parishes. Their children largely attended parochial schools in the city that were immune from discussions about racial balance and residential segregation. Nor did a dearth of jobs in the central city force their families into surrounding suburbs. Skilled professional work like the kind most of their husbands did proliferated in the city long after their families left, even as the manufacturing jobs that many of their parents had relied on began to dry up. “Push factors” such as racial turnover and industrial decline did not primarily drive these families out of the boroughs of New York City. Instead, the “pull” of more space, single-family home ownership, and a better overall quality of life—their version of the American dream—sent them packing as soon as possible.³⁰

But the ability to attain this version of the American dream was not open to everyone, which makes the women’s supposedly “color-blind” politics more accurately a racialized form of activism. Like others who got involved in various conservative causes, the women often assumed that their own merit and ability to ascend the socioeconomic ladder had led their families to the suburbs. They failed to understand or acknowledge the link between social mobility and racially coded policies and structural inequalities.³¹ When the women later defended traditional nuclear families, some made allowances for mothers (of an unspecified race) to work outside the home if economic need dictated that they do so, as many had observed during their youth. They argued, though, that women like them who could afford to be full-time homemakers should do so, even if their families could benefit from additional disposable income. In effect, a mother’s home-centered care was better than material comfort so long as the basics (a house in the suburbs, good schools for the children, and so on) were met. Yet, this debate was only happening in the (white) middle- to upper-middle-class circles that they lived in, where the possibility of a one-income family was more realistic. African Americans and other racial minorities faced steep job and housing discrimination that made full-time homemaking impossible for most, and thus less subject to debate. The end result in the seventies was a defensive grassroots politics that was rooted in the women’s upward mobility and personal circumstances. Theirs was a politics that hardly mentioned race and purported to be color-blind when pressed on the issue, but that nonetheless supported a version of the family most accessible to other white, middle- to upper-middle-class families like their own.

In a few cases where racial issues did intrude upon the women’s lives in the suburbs, their relative privilege allowed them to avoid such conflict, as was the case for the Stern family when they moved from the Bronx to Mount Vernon in Westchester County in 1958. Mount Vernon, one of Westchester’s six larger cities located directly north of the Bronx, was a divided community at that time. Most white, middle-class residents like the Sterns lived in single-family homes on the north side of the New Haven-bound railroad tracks that cut through town. African Americans, who made up 20 percent of Mount Vernon’s population in 1960, lived in larger apartment complexes, subsidized housing, and multifamily homes on the much more densely populated south side of the railroad tracks adjacent to the Bronx. The city’s school system was also segregated, with different elementary, junior high, and high schools serving each side of the tracks; 96 percent of students at the various elementary schools on the south side were African American, compared to just 4 percent in northern Mount Vernon where the Sterns’ children attended a public elementary school.³²

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with its strong base of support in nearby Harlem and the Bronx, sought with limited success to remedy this situation in 1962. Their inquiry resulted in the closure of the city’s separate high schools. In 1964, a brand-new integrated Mount Vernon High School opened its doors at a cost of $8,000,000—a hefty sum, but a welcome fiscal consolidation after previously operating two high schools. But perhaps because the savings would not be as great at the primary level, there was little movement throughout the sixties to integrate Mount Vernon’s lower schools. A variety of ideas were floated to correct the racial imbalance, but most were likely stalling tactics since they were so expensive and impractical.³³

The most contentious plans to integrate Mount Vernon’s elementary and junior high schools proposed busing children across town, something that people on both sides of the tracks opposed. White parents in Mount Vernon, as elsewhere in the nation, banded together to preserve the integrity of the neighborhood school system. They noted that neighborhood schools were within safe walking distance from children’s homes and cut down on Mount Vernon’s transportation costs. White homemakers also argued that it would be easier to volunteer at their children’s schools if they lived nearby—a warning that caught administrators’ attention since (free, female) parental involvement was heavily relied upon in the lower schools. These supposedly race-neutral claims were predicated on the belief that schools on the south side of Mount Vernon were lacking, whether because white parents thought that African Americans themselves were inferior, or because they correctly saw that black schools had far fewer resources. Racial barriers in the employment and housing sectors often meant, for example, that African American mothers worked for a wage during the day and could not volunteer their time. These constraints negatively influenced school performance. Still, African American parents did not necessarily embrace busing. Many also wanted their children educated near home in familiar schools. Some parents feared that their children would not have as much exposure to black culture, history, and adult role models in majority-white schools. Others worried about their children being bused into harm’s way if whites in Mount Vernon violently resisted their arrival, which occurred in larger cities such as New York and Boston.³⁴

As various proposals to integrate the lower schools were debated, school board elections and meetings in Mount Vernon grew very heated and attracted national attention. At that time in the mid- to late sixties, reformers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., had eradicated de jure segregation laws in the Jim Crow South and were turning their attention to de facto battles in the North—in places like Mount Vernon that were segregated not by overt laws, but by custom and the legacy of discriminatory practices and policies in the employment and housing sectors. Although Mount Vernon was not a large or well-known city, with fewer than 75,000 people living there in the sixties, it was less than ten miles away from the Bronx and the Harlem section of Manhattan, both of which contained the national headquarters for several prominent black civil rights organizations. Mount Vernon also shares New York City’s major media market, and that, along with its clear and almost clichéd racial division by railroad tracks, drew national press coverage and amplified exchanges on the local level.³⁵

In 1975, an integration plan for the lower schools finally was reached in the state court system—one that, because of the racial turnover that had occurred in the past decade, did not involve the massive busing scheme initially proposed. From 1960 to 1970, Mount Vernon experienced a 4 percent population loss, at a time when most places in Westchester County were gaining. But while Mount Vernon’s total population shrank, its African American community increased by 44 percent: from 20 percent of the total population in 1960 to 36 percent in 1970. Most racial turnover occurred from 1960 to 1965, when the new integrated high school opened and talk of granting African Americans greater access to Mount Vernon’s high-performing lower schools on the (white) north side heated up. African Americans living nearby in places like New York City soon moved to Mount Vernon to embrace educational opportunities for their children. As they did so, white residents left.³⁶

The Sterns sold their colonial home on the north side of Mount Vernon in 1967. Annette and her husband were not on the school board or following the busing debates too closely throughout the sixties. Their boys were not yet old enough to attend the integrated high school; they attended mostly all-white public lower schools on their side of town while the family was in Mount Vernon from 1958 to 1967. Decades later, Stern did not mention any of these disputes, but she remembered that their move was prompted by the desire not to send their children to private schools in the future. At any moment the lower schools could implement busing and, eventually, the Sterns’ sons would be old enough to attend the integrated high school. Throughout the sixties, it was possible for white families with young children like theirs to avoid all the racial tension in Mount Vernon. Eventually, doing so would no longer be possible. Annette Stern and the other women wanted their children to have more opportunities and resources than they had in their own Depression-era urban childhoods. This included access to quality education, which, in Mount Vernon, was delineated along racial lines. As the Sterns’ children got older, other solutions, such as moving away or paying for expensive private schools, needed to be divined. They chose to move to Harrison, which is also in Westchester County.³⁷

As white families like the Sterns left Mount Vernon, nearby suburbs like Harrison flourished. Harrison experienced a 12 percent population increase in the sixties, more than the overall growth in Westchester County. The Sterns’ new town was much smaller and more affluent than Mount Vernon. Harrison had 50,000 fewer residents, a less densely populated layout dominated by single-family homes with an average of two acres of land, an excellent public school system, and an almost entirely white population devoid of fractious racial disputes. In other words, Harrison had the conditions that many women had hoped to find in the suburbs.³⁸

Westchester County had the largest percentage (about 10 percent in 1970) of nonwhite (mostly African American) residents, but the other three suburban counties were not immune to racial tensions, albeit on a lesser scale. With fewer nonwhite residents, relatively minor occurrences in Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties became magnified. In 1967 in the Rockland County suburb of Nyack, for example, where Margie Fitton and her family lived, the community’s entire twenty-two-man police force and a larger detachment from the county sheriff’s office—all dressed in full riot gear—greeted representatives from the African American civil rights group CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) when they convened a forty-person rally. Although the gathering merely featured speeches urging attendees to elect a black mayor in Nyack, minor violence soon broke out as the police aggressively patrolled the crowd. On Long Island, roughly 99 percent of Nassau County’s public school students were white compared to 94 percent in Suffolk County, with most of Suffolk’s nonwhite population concentrated in the hamlet of Wyandanch, where a startling 92 percent of the district was African American in 1968. After one white male reform candidate for the school board in Farmingdale, Phyllis Graham’s first suburban town in Nassau, proposed busing African American students from Wyandanch across county lines into his mostly white community, he lost the election by a wide margin.³⁹

The desire to be insulated from racial strife also prompted Terry Anselmi’s family to move to New York’s Rockland County in 1969. When Anselmi finally convinced her husband to leave Queens in 1964, they first moved to Teaneck, New Jersey. Their decision to abandon Teaneck five years later was motivated primarily by their quest for more space for their eight children, but Anselmi admitted that school integration battles there were, as she phrased it, “definitely a push” as well.⁴⁰ Led by reformers in town, Teaneck became the first place in the nation to vote by popular referendum to integrate their schools in 1965—a move prompted by the fact that this suburb about twenty miles outside New York City was divided along stark racial lines like Mount Vernon. As more African Americans arrived in Teaneck looking for high-quality schools for their children after integration began in earnest, racial tensions mounted.⁴¹ The Anselmis’ oldest son was bullied frequently in their increasingly mixed-race neighborhood. Terry, a native of the Bronx, remembered thinking, “this is not what you get a house in the ’burbs for.”⁴² Even though the Anselmis had African American friends on their block, the tensions led them fifteen miles away across state lines to a brand-new, more spacious home in the nearly all-white town of Pearl River, part of New York’s Rockland County.⁴³

Anselmi’s remarks reveal her desire to live a more tranquil life in the suburbs, compared to some of the battles taking place at the time in the women’s former urban neighborhoods and other large cities across the country. Racial disputes in suburbs like Teaneck and Mount Vernon paled in comparison to those in, for example, the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, where Jewish and Italian families violently opposed busing their children to majority African American schools. As the outer boroughs of New York City became more racially heterogeneous in these years as white families like the Anselmis moved to the suburbs, such disputes were perhaps inevitable as they overlapped with various movements for civil rights and expanded power and liberation for racial minorities. Once the women left the city, they were exposed to these urban struggles from a distance, mostly through news coverage. The women might have avoided these battles if they had stayed in the city, particularly Catholics whose children attended racially insulated parochial schools.

Still, the women remained emotionally connected to New York City’s outer boroughs where some of the most fraught racial struggle was occurring, which caused them to interpret more minor incidents in their new suburbs through the lens of what was happening there. With mounting concerns about public safety and law and order being broadcast around them by the late sixties (primarily related to a series of urban riots in New York City and across the nation in these years), women like Annette Stern and Terry Anselmi could move away when their version of suburban paradise seemed endangered by racial turmoil (however modest that “paradise” was, in reality, and however mild these disputes were compared to battles taking place in central cities). By the time the women were active in antifeminist politics, most lived in these four suburban counties that insulated white residents from the inequities in nearby New York City, while naturalizing (and thus hiding from view) the racial privilege they enjoyed.⁴⁴

These circumstances underscore that silence does not indicate the absence of race and racial concerns. Inspired to protect their lifestyles, women like these five suburban housewives worked throughout the seventies to organize from the grassroots around a specific definition of the family—one that was molded by the institutions and social landscape of their surroundings. It was a decidedly white, middle-class, single-income, suburban vision of the family, and to protect it from allegedly powerful and dangerous feminist forces, the women solicited support with populist rhetoric aimed at appealing to others who felt the same way.

Social mobility and the racialized growth of suburban neighborhoods and organizations were the ideological and material building blocks for the women’s future politics, but so too were changes within the Catholic Church. When this group of mostly Catholic housewives became involved in electoral politics, they relied on suburban institutions to fuel their movements, including groups created after the church’s Vatican II reforms in the sixties. Exploring how the women experienced Vatican II is therefore crucial to understanding their oppositional family-based politics in the seventies.