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CHAPTER 2

Vatican II and the Seeds of Political Discontent

Religion was central to the lives of the lay Catholic women who moved to the suburbs of New York City in the sixties, and the major changes made by the church in that era anticipated their unease with feminism. The Catholic leaders who met in Rome from 1962 through 1965 at the Second Vatican Council (or Vatican II) upended centuries of religious tradition as they tried to modernize and reinvigorate the church. Vatican II urged lay Catholics to become more active in parish governance and the church’s social and economic justice work, at a time when countless secular political movements were vying for people’s attention. In theory, parishioners like the women in New York City’s growing suburbs supported these goals. In reality, the reforms significantly altered or eliminated weekly and even daily religious practices, wreaking havoc on established routines. Vatican II, in effect, foreshadowed subsequent discomfort with feminism, which the women also believed would change everyday family life. Focusing again on a handful of Catholic women in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, and in Westchester and Rockland to the north and west of New York City, helps contextualize the women’s antifeminist activism in these important suburbs and beyond a decade later—an opposition eventually so effective that conservative Republicans partnered with them to marginalize their party’s more moderate, pro-feminist Rockefeller wing. But this was still to come; in the sixties, the women were otherwise occupied.¹

The sixties were a time of great social upheaval in America, but these first-generation suburban homemakers experienced very little of this firsthand. Large-scale antiwar protests and various civil rights and liberation movements erupted throughout the nation. Many were anchored in New York City and covered copiously by the local media. Riots plagued almost every major city, including the outer boroughs of New York, where many had once had lived. Yet the women’s days were spent caring for young children and acclimating to the suburbs. Protests, political mobilization, urban upheaval, and even the beginnings of modern feminism were but distant echoes that these busy mothers sometimes missed altogether.

With domestic concerns taking center stage, Vatican II hit home for the women. A different language and strange practices soon unbraided cherished religious traditions. Navigating these changes was difficult to do in suburban parishes that were struggling under the weight of massive migration in recent years. As full-time homemakers, it was the women’s job to help their families adjust. They, for example, researched schools for their children. The reforms affected the parochial education system, in what were already overburdened and less established suburban Catholic schools. Despite how positive many women felt about their own Catholic educations in bustling urban parishes before Vatican II, it was not always clear what they should do for their children in what sometimes felt like another church after the reforms. As so much shifted, the women tackled these difficult domestic dilemmas alongside female friends and neighbors. Their “radical sixties” entailed making their way in new suburbs without a settled and familiar Catholic Church to guide them.²

Yet, even as Vatican II disrupted daily life, it unintentionally gave lay Catholic women the tools to do something about it—in ways that contradicted both their own ideas about where women belonged (in the home) and what male Catholic leaders had in mind when crafting the reforms. Vatican II doubled down on patriarchy, with the men who met in Rome refusing to give lay Catholic women and nuns any real power. At the same time, the reforms encouraged the growth of social and religious groups at the parish level. Ironically, lay Catholic women in New York used these organizations as springboards to attain political power. They justified spending so much time away from home in the seventies by arguing that their roles were temporary ones that they would relinquish once family-centered issues were resolved. Their Right to Life Party, for example, which evolved from a parish dialogue group created after Vatican II, became an indispensable asset to male Catholic leaders who, for fear of losing the church’s tax-exempt status, could not enter the electoral arena. These developments undercut the patriarchal goals affirmed at Vatican II, even though the women used their public platform to promote the same traditional ideas about gender and sexuality that the men running the church held.³

For Catholics like these homemakers who had been raised as Democrats, the mid- to late sixties also marked the beginning of their religious and political affiliations becoming unraveled. The Catholic Church and the Democratic Party historically were aligned over a shared commitment to social justice and alleviating poverty. But as feminists turned to legal abortion and related measures, and many Democrats did the same (along with more liberal Republicans like Governor Nelson Rockefeller), the women’s church and party started diverging over these issues. Vatican II was supposed to be a moment of liberalization for the church, where it modernized in ways that male Catholic leaders envisioned benefiting their antipoverty and social justice missions. The church, however, left women behind in its concept of liberalization, while the Democratic Party, increasingly home to feminists and better female representation, did not. There is added irony here. The patriarchal reforms unknowingly empowered lay Catholic housewives, and the women then used Vatican II-inspired groups to partner with the GOP’s conservative faction that was hostile to the antipoverty and social justice work that the church and Democratic Party (and to some extent, Rockefeller’s Republican wing) favored. Once the women’s families had ascended into the ranks of the homogeneous white suburban middle class, poverty and injustice were less visible to them. Meanwhile, the alleged victims of feminism—aborted “babies” and traditional homemakers—surrounded them and took precedence at the polls. Training a spotlight on future antifeminist leaders in New York State during the era of Vatican II reveals the foundation for this political realignment that the women helped bring about in the seventies.⁴

Catholic Life in the Era of Reform

Vatican II’s great impact on the women is understandable since their lives always had been intertwined with the Catholic Church. When Margie Fitton talked about growing up in upper Manhattan, before settling in Rockland County in 1959, her frame of reference was marked by the borders of the urban Catholic parish system.⁵ Margie was born into an Irish Catholic, working-class family in 1930 and raised on the east side of Manhattan at 99th Street. In 1954, she married John Fitton, who had just returned from an overseas peacetime tour in the U.S. Army. “My husband was from the same area in upper Manhattan,” Fitton noted, “but it went by parishes in the city. He came from East 106th Street, St. Cecilia’s, and I was in St. Francis de Sales Parish on 96th Street.” The various stages of Fitton’s early life were delineated by those boundaries—from her baptism as an infant at St. Francis through her marriage there in her early twenties. Fitton and her only sibling, a brother, were educated in the parish system as well because, she explained, “everyone went to Catholic schools.”⁶

The rich ethnic urban parish system of Fitton’s youth was a byproduct of the First Vatican Council (Vatican I) in 1870. As American cities expanded at unprecedented rates in the decades after Vatican I, much of it related to immigration from (Catholic) countries in Southeast Europe that supplied unskilled workers for the nation’s growing urban industrial economy, the church tried to prevent secularization by attracting these new arrivals. It did so with a neighborhood parish system that intermingled faith with traditions from immigrants’ home countries. These attempts were evident for decades to come. The working-class urban parishes of the women’s youth were close-knit ethnic communities that functioned as much as cultural and social institutions as religious ones—where an emphasis on the San Gennaro Festival in Phyllis Graham’s Italian Catholic corner of Brooklyn might give way to heightened celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day in parishes serving Irish Catholics like Jane Gilroy and Margie Fitton.⁷

In bustling northern cities like New York, neighborhood parishes further incurred loyalty by offering a range of services (often run by nuns) that people could rely on from cradle to grave. Many Catholics attended weekly or sometimes daily mass, turned to priests for personal advice, raised money for the church, and looked to parishes to care for the elderly, educate children, and provide recreation for the entire family. In New York City by 1940, there were roughly 1.8 million Catholics, and in Brooklyn alone—where Jane Gilroy and Phyllis Graham grew up in Irish and Italian Catholic parishes, respectively—there were 129 parishes, nearly all with their own elementary schools. Nuns played a pivotal role in managing these services. In New York City, they oversaw twenty-five Catholic hospitals, more than one hundred high schools, and elementary schools that educated roughly 214,000 children.⁸

With the parish system so central to Catholic life in New York City, the church tried to retain its importance in the surrounding suburbs after World War II as these women and countless others relocated to places like Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland Counties. From 1940 to 1970, 72 percent (thirty-two of forty-five) of the new parishes in the Archdiocese of New York—which covers parts of the city and several outlying counties including Rockland and Westchester—were in the suburbs. Westchester County, just north of the Bronx, for example, gained 323,129 new Catholics from 1940 through 1970. Enrollment in Catholic primary schools in Westchester and nearby Rockland County more than tripled to over 60,000 students by 1970. An astonishing eighty-four parish schools were opened in these counties as young families like Margie Fitton’s moved there.⁹

On Long Island, the Catholic population exploded so rapidly that a separate diocese needed to be created in 1957 (previously Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island had been part of the Brooklyn Diocese). Between 1957 and 1963, twelve million Catholics arrived on Long Island, with anywhere from 42 to 46 percent of Nassau County identifying as Catholic at various points in the sixties. Nearly all the Catholics moving to Nassau and the surrounding suburban counties were white transplants from New York City, while the urban parishes they left behind remained stagnant or saw an influx of Hispanics from places like Puerto Rico. The bishop of the new Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island, the Reverend Walter Kellenberg, joked that he should be called “Kick-off Kellenberg.” In the diocese’s first three years, the bishop’s schedule was filled with a never-ending stream of fundraisers as he worked to defray the $65 million cost of building twenty-eight elementary schools, twenty-seven additions to existing schools, three more high schools, eleven churches, a hospital, eighteen convents for nuns, and a day camp for children. Despite these strides, it was hard to keep pace with suburban transplants who, often with greater financial comfort and an adherence to the church’s ban on artificial forms of birth control, had large families.¹⁰

Lay Catholic women, more so than men, confronted the church’s suburban growing pains—something that was perhaps most obvious to them in parochial schools. Upon moving to the suburbs, parents typically looked into parochial education for their children, as generations before them had done in the city. Many children, however, ended up in the public system because of limited space in suburban Catholic schools. In an era when mothers were held almost solely responsible for their children’s welfare, it was clear to many women, even before Vatican II, that family life might not be as idyllic in the suburbs as they had envisioned. When Phyllis Graham and her family moved to Port Jefferson in Suffolk County in 1965, for example, she immediately tried enrolling her children at the local Infant Jesus elementary school. But the parish had more than quadrupled in size, from 400 families in 1951 to 1,700 by 1964, and there was a long waiting list to be admitted into the school. Graham was determined to give her children a Catholic education like she had in Brooklyn, so she devised a workaround. As a newcomer, she began volunteering at the church to make herself better known. Graham did what she knew best as a homemaker: she gave up what little discretionary time she had to benefit her children. Her tactic worked, and Infant Jesus eventually secured spots for her four children. Overcrowding, though, was only part of the problem in the sixties. Catholic leaders and everyday parishioners like these women also had to contend with the vast changes adopted at Vatican II.¹¹

At a time when people were joining social justice movements worldwide, Vatican II tried to redirect some of that participatory energy toward the Catholic Church. The church leaders from across the globe who met in Rome from 1962 to 1965 at the Second Vatican Council were concerned that Catholic life and traditions, such as devotional ceremonies to various saints, had become too scripted and passive. They worried that even devout parishioners who attended mass regularly were repeating rote phrases in Latin that were not well understood. Church leaders instead hoped to engage parishioners more actively and foster thoughtful reflection about Catholic ideas. To do so, the Vatican II reforms recommended, for instance: fewer days of fasting and eliminating other dietary restrictions; creating parish councils to give the laity a greater stake in governance; and, perhaps most dramatically, having clergy face participants (instead of having their backs to them) while reciting the mass in English (or the official language of the country in which the service was being held) instead of Latin, which few people understood. Better comprehension and greater participation, they hoped, would make Catholicism more relevant in the sixties.¹²

Implementing these vast changes was a major challenge for the church and lay Catholics, in particular women. Phyllis Graham’s pastor at Infant Jesus on Long Island, the Rev. Matthew LePage, wrote a long letter to parishioners that included a very thorough description of what people were supposed to do and say in the radically new mass. Priests like LePage convened countless meetings to explain the reforms and devoted many hours to setting up parish councils and other social and religious groups Vatican II encouraged. Confusion and dissatisfaction predictably followed. Many Catholics like Phyllis Graham loved the rituals that leaders sought to eradicate; to her, there was great beauty in symmetry. Even if she did not fully understand the Latin mass, she knew all its parts, and it comforted her to know that it was always the same—whether recited in Brooklyn, suburban Long Island, or even on a U.S. military base in West Germany, where she and her husband had lived briefly after getting married. But despite how they felt, the church needed homemakers like Graham. Women prepared meals for their families as restrictions like the ban on meat on Fridays were lifted. They had more flexibility to attend meetings convened by LePage and other priests. In turn, the women educated their husbands and children on how to behave at mass, suggested groups that they could now join, and otherwise ensured that their families complied with the reforms.¹³

Catholic leaders pressed on through this difficult transition because they hoped that a more active laity would promote causes that they cared about, including the church’s historical commitment to social and economic justice. An encyclical letter by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 (Rerum Novarum, or On the Condition of Labor) set the church on this course by commenting on the large income gap and rampant poverty created by the second industrial revolution. The pope sided with poor unskilled workers in Europe and the United States, who he felt were forced to work in exploitative conditions in order to generate surplus profits for industrial oligarchs. In 1931, amid a global economic depression, Pope Pius XI reiterated much of the same in a fortieth-anniversary encyclical (Quadragesimo Anno) that criticized the excesses of capitalism, which he blamed for the market’s crash, as well as communism and socialism, which, despite promising more equitable work conditions, were shunned because of their effective atheism. In 1961, Pope John XXIII issued a related encyclical, Christianity and Social Progress (Mater et Magistra). In a nod to contemporary decolonization and civil rights movements around the world, as well as to the deeply entrenched Cold War context, the pope committed the church to liberating people from unjust social, racial, political, and economic conditions, including communism and socialism—especially in former colonies that were not yet fully industrial, and therefore thought to be more vulnerable to capitalist alternatives.¹⁴

In 1962, a year after writing Christianity and Social Progress, Pope John XXIII opened Vatican II in much the same spirit. As Phyllis Graham’s new pastor, the Reverend Matthew LePage, wrote to his parishioners at Infant Jesus on Long Island, the church hoped to compete better with the distractions of modern life by transforming the mass into a “community prayer in which everyone, priest and people, must take part actively.” Reflecting the social justice and participatory democratic zeitgeists of that time, LePage argued that Vatican II had “but one purpose: to get people to lead better and more Christian lives.”¹⁵ In the United States in the sixties, these ideals led Catholic leaders and parishioners to oppose legal and economic discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities. Catholic leaders also criticized what they saw as an unjust war in Vietnam. They did not advocate for communism in that country, but they were against spending vast sums of money to wreak death and destruction upon a poor nation that had been exploited economically. Church leaders likewise rejected sending mostly working-class and poorer American men to do so since they lacked the resources to avoid being drafted into war.¹⁶

But while (male) Catholic leaders promoted justice along race and class lines, they held very traditional positions on women and gender, as their embrace of a “living wage” underscores. During the economic crisis of the thirties, Catholic leaders—from the pope, in encyclicals such as Quadragesimo Anno (1931), to parish priests in New York and elsewhere—began arguing for a living wage, which would enable a man to earn enough money for his whole family while his wife stayed home with the children. Church leaders recognized, however, that many women such as Phyllis Graham’s mother were in the paid workforce during the Depression (they avoided whether these women worked out of choice or necessity, framing it as the latter). As a result, the church promoted measures to help working women, beginning with protective labor legislation in the thirties and including equal economic opportunity by 1971 in a papal letter. Yet, ample language about women’s maternal obligations accompanied such pronouncements on work into the late twentieth century. The church hierarchy, much like the lay Catholic housewives who would lead New York’s antifeminist response, had a limited view of women’s economic rights. They felt that women, specifically mothers, belonged at home. When that was not possible for financial reasons, policies were needed to help them serve their families with crucial outside income. Clearly, the church’s concept of a worker was gendered male. Women were back-up earners who should only step in when a living wage was not tenable.¹⁷

The church’s concept of a leader was similarly gendered: men unequivocally ran the Catholic Church, although nuns wielded a considerable amount of de facto power before Vatican II. Prior to the reforms, becoming a nun was considered an acceptable (even praiseworthy) substitute for Catholic women who did not become wives and mothers, or for those who wanted greater agency in the workplace. While college-educated women struggled to be anything more than secretaries, nurses, and teachers in the lay workforce at the time, male leaders in the Catholic Church leaned on nuns to run the day-today operations of their extensive hospital, retirement, and parochial school networks. With many of these facilities open to the general public and tending to the church’s social justice mission on the front lines, Catholic nuns wielded more power than nearly any other subset of women before an active feminism emerged in the sixties and seventies—power that, even if relegated to historically female pursuits such as caring for children and the infirm, nuns would not appreciate losing after Vatican II. Nuns also were in charge of devotional ceremonies that parishioners took part in. In the case of sects like the Maryknolls, which Phyllis Graham joined for a short time before marrying, some even worked abroad with little or no male oversight.¹⁸

Vatican II only granted women token benefits while taking away much of this de facto female power, which caused many nuns to leave the church. Two thousand Catholic men from across the globe—priests, bishops, and others in leadership roles—initially met in Rome at Vatican II. At first, not a single woman was included. The men even refused to allow the wives of the press corps covering Vatican II to attend daily morning mass with them. In response to protest, twenty-three women were invited into the councils as listeners without voting rights; the twenty-three were a mix of lay Catholic women and nuns who made up a mere fraction of the two thousand men in attendance. The men voted to give women some minor concessions in the spirit of modernizing the church. Lay women and nuns could now do readings at mass, other than the important Gospel, which was considered to be (the male) God’s word. In addition, women were allowed to administer bread and wine at mass that, though considered symbolic embodiments of Jesus Christ, comfortably placed them on familiar terrain serving food and drink. But they still could not become priests or hold real positions of power. The reforms also curbed the de facto authority nuns held by, for instance, eliminating many of the devotional ceremonies they ran. These changes overlapped with the transfer of many American nuns to predominantly white, homogeneous, middle-class suburbs, where some were unhappy to no longer be able to administer the church’s social justice mission as they had in poorer and more racially heterogeneous urban parishes. Fortunately for some dissatisfied nuns, Vatican II unfolded amid burgeoning women’s liberation movements across the globe that opened up social and economic possibilities for them outside the church. Modern feminism further prompted some to view the reforms as an attempt to strip them of what little power they possessed. These factors contributed to the largest exodus of Catholic nuns across the globe after Vatican II. In America, the sisterhood decreased by an unprecedented 28 percent from 1966 to 1976.¹⁹

Parochial schools were hit hard by the loss of nuns, as many women in New York discovered firsthand in their new suburban communities. Both Phyllis Graham and Jane Gilroy, for example, spoke very highly of the education they received from the nuns at Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School in Brooklyn. The women enrolled their children in parochial schools once they moved to Long Island, but after Vatican II, they felt that Catholic education had become less rigorous. As the mass moved away from rote memorization and became more participatory, the women detected a similar trend in the classroom, where attention to the classics and learning religious doctrine appeared to go by the wayside. The women were very upset that their attempt to give their children a better lifestyle did not include a Catholic education that was as good as or better than theirs had been in the city before Vatican II—this, on top of the overcrowding in suburban parochial schools. The situation worsened as more nuns left the church. Jane Gilroy’s Curé of Ars Parish in Merrick, Long Island, for instance, had built its primary school in 1950 to address the area’s population surge. Two nuns who planned to teach there symbolically broke ground for the project on Easter Sunday that year. But in 1971, the mother general of the Amityville Dominican nuns, whose order ran the school, announced that because of a perceived lack of support from the (male) parish leadership, they would be leaving before the next academic year. Their departure devastated Gilroy and others who felt that nuns, dating back to their own school days, were responsible for instilling an appreciation for hard work, educational rigor, and religious devotion in Catholic youth. Women in charge of their children’s schooling took these developments to heart, as if they had failed as mothers.²⁰

Along with bolstering patriarchy in these ways, church leaders reaffirmed traditional ideas about women’s sexuality and reproduction. As they attempted to modernize the church, the men at Vatican II elected not to alter the Catholic belief that life begins at conception or lessen restrictions on birth control. Some had argued for reform, but the more conservative viewpoint of those like Pope Paul VI (who was in power by the end of Vatican II after Pope John XXIII died of stomach cancer in the summer of 1963) prevailed. In the midst of worldwide, youth-led sexual revolutions—buoyed by movements for women’s rights and liberation, as well as by the advent of the birth control pill earlier in the decade—Pope Paul VI dug his heels in deeper by issuing a related encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), in 1968. Humanae Vitae reaffirmed the church’s ban on all forms of artificial contraception, underscoring that the only appropriate outlet for sex was the heterosexual marital relation, with procreation a welcome and natural outcome. The women considered here agreed, as their large families attest. This makes their (and the church’s) subsequent opposition to legal abortion understandable. For devout parishioners who viewed marriage and motherhood as their highest calling, a message that the church reinforced in discussions about everything from women’s paid work to contraception, legal abortion was a dangerous enabler that allowed women to avoid these sacrosanct duties by murdering babies no different from their own.²¹

Reflecting on the reforms decades later, Phyllis Graham declared, “Vatican II was earth-shattering for me and my family…. I felt that Vatican II disrupted tradition and was just wrong for Catholics.”²² The Catholic Church had been a bedrock institution for the women, one that offered social networks, educational opportunities, and rituals that they later tried to replicate when raising their own families. But after they moved to the suburbs, uncertainty abounded, from living apart from close family to needing to learn to drive a car. Many Catholics looked to the church for stability, only to find overburdened suburban parishes that barely resembled the tight-knit urban ones they had left. Even worse, the women faced foreign customs and weaker schools that thwarted their desire to give their children a better life in every regard. Luckily, they were surrounded by many other (often first-generation) suburban homemakers who felt the same way, which would fuel their antifeminist activism.

Phyllis Graham even tried to bypass the Vatican II reforms for a while. After the new mass went into effect, she traveled almost an hour every Sunday to Nassau County to attend a traditional Latin mass held in a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hall in Hicksville, near where she had first lived on Long Island. This mass was sanctioned by a rogue archbishop in France, Marcel Lefebvre, who, because of a history of such actions, was later excommunicated from the church by Pope John Paul II in 1991. Partially for convenience, Graham returned less than a year later to her parish in Port Jefferson. After all, despite updating the mass, her pastor, the Reverend Matthew LePage, was unenthusiastic about Vatican II and implemented its recommendations as slowly as possible. LePage’s foot-dragging later cost him his job at Infant Jesus in 1972.²³

According to Graham, attending these unsanctioned Latin masses occurred at a time before she was political, but behavior like this actually formed the basis of the women’s future activism. Like others, Graham did not start paying attention to electoral politics until the early seventies after New York State legalized abortion. She learned about the Equal Rights Amendment on an anti-abortion lobbying trip that her parish arranged, and her opposition expanded as she became the host of an antifeminist talk radio show on Long Island. Once in politics, Graham and her allies assumed a populist mantle as mere housewives and mothers battling elite, feminist-backed forces that sought to disrupt family life. The women had to leave their homes to fight these perceived evils, something that seemed more necessary as the political and domestic spheres began to intersect after feminists had pushed to make “the personal political.” Attending Latin masses in the sixties was an early act of defiance aimed at preserving family life and traditions. Graham may have been new to electoral politics in the seventies, but for almost a decade, she and others had been primed to defend their families from harm—from watered-down parochial schools and other changes inspired by Vatican II to feminist-backed reforms like legal abortion later on.²⁴

Still, perhaps out of a deep-seated belief in religious obligation, and in some cases simply to escape the stresses of full-time childrearing in insular suburbs, many women joined the new parish groups. St. Anthony’s in Nanuet was a thriving parish that, like everything in Rockland County, experienced a huge population surge of mostly Irish and Italian Catholics in the mid- to late fifties. The parish expanded 57 percent from 1955 to 1960, and another 44 percent from 1960 to 1965. St. Anthony’s was in Nanuet, but it served parts of several surrounding towns including West Nyack, where parishioner Margie Fitton lived. Father Edmund W. Netter, an enthusiastic priest in his early forties, arrived at the parish in 1967 and attempted to cultivate the parishioner involvement Vatican II had envisioned. Netter oversaw a range of groups, including a thirty-person parish council that helped priests make important decisions at St. Anthony’s, a group called Young Catholic Students, and a new anti-abortion organization based at the church but open to the community. Margie Fitton and Terry Anselmi, neither of whom had been politically active before, joined the anti-abortion group as mothers concerned about what Netter positioned as killing babies; doing so was a launching point for joining the Rockland County Right to Life Committee in the seventies.²⁵

The same was true in Merrick, Long Island, where Jane Gilroy’s participation in electoral politics grew from involvement in her new suburban parish after Vatican II. The Curé of Ars Parish that she joined after moving to Merrick experienced Nassau County’s postwar boom, with a 46 percent increase in its parishioner rolls in the early sixties when the Gilroys arrived. By 1963, 2,100 families were in the parish, making it the largest religious community in Merrick. Father Paul Driscoll came in 1964, right after being ordained, and began organizing parishioners as Vatican II had recommended. But as he did so, he encountered resistance, so, in the spirit of the reforms, Driscoll created a group to discuss the changes. The Intra-Church Relations Committee that he formed met regularly to debate the philosophical ideas and goals affirmed at Vatican II. The group, which included Jane Gilroy’s husband, Francis, considered all viewpoints in a variety of forums, such as parish study groups and church publications.²⁶ Father Driscoll’s penchant for debate led him to form a separate weekly dialogue group in 1966 to discuss the vast change occurring outside the church. This new group mainly consisted of housewives with young children, including Jane Gilroy, who welcomed the chance to get out of the house and talk to other adults. At Father Driscoll’s behest, their conversations increasingly centered on attempts in the New York State Legislature to legalize abortion in the late sixties. When Driscoll left the parish in 1969, the women continued meeting on their own and formed the New York State Right to Life Party after abortion was legalized in the state in 1970.²⁷

This progression indicates that the church leaders who bolstered male authority at Vatican II unknowingly set lay Catholic women on a path toward attaining more power. A decade later, many Catholic nuns felt undercut, with unprecedented numbers leaving the church. Lay Catholic women, on the other hand, went on to become indispensable public advocates for the church’s views on women, the family and, above all, abortion—ideas shaped and reinforced by their active parish lives as much as by personal circumstances as upwardly mobile suburban homemakers. The women relied on political organizations that they created on the grassroots level to do so, ones that evolved from parish groups attracting likeminded women after Vatican II. Jane Gilroy and others presented themselves in the seventies as outsiders in electoral politics. They were, technically, but this arena was not entirely foreign to them as domestic, familial, and political concerns began to converge. The women’s overarching goal was also familiar. Led by Catholics who were sensitive to perceived threats after Vatican II, they presented themselves as homemakers and mothers opposed to anything that might disrupt the rhythms of traditional nuclear family life. By the seventies, many had learned how to help their families navigate vast change—at first by joining parish groups where they connected with others feeling the same way and, later, by using those same networks to create political coalitions.

Forging a Suburban Politics

The women’s activism ultimately became entwined with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was a far leap from the Democratic Party and Catholic Church that had shaped their younger years. Although none of the women came from very politically active households, they grew up at a time when the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party were prominent institutions that worked in close cooperation with each other. During the Great Depression, Pope Pius XI’s aforementioned papal encyclical from 1931, Quadragesimo Anno, argued for proposals such as a living wage and the right to organize for improved work conditions. As he campaigned for president along the same lines, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the encyclical “one of the greatest documents of modern times.”²⁸ Comments like this paved the way for a new partnership that broke down the historical animosity between white Anglo-Saxon Protestants like FDR and the Catholic Church.

This synergy was perhaps most evident in the white ethnic Catholic enclaves of New York City where the women were raised, areas that had been ruled by Democratic machines for decades. Jane Gilroy joked that “if you were Irish and Catholic, you had to be a Democrat in Flatbush, Brooklyn.”²⁹ Francis Cardinal Spellman—archbishop of New York from 1939 to 1967, and a close friend of the powerful Catholic Kennedy family while JFK was president—worked alongside the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the more inclusive Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that was formed from FDR’s Wagner Act. As the church built countless Catholic schools and parishes after World War II, Cardinal Spellman did so only with unionized labor. He attended AFL and CIO conventions and pressed politicians for fair wages and humane treatment for workers, which aligned with the Democratic Party’s strong embrace of antipoverty initiatives and labor unions since the New Deal.³⁰ In the sixties, President Johnson’s pronouncements on poverty, race, and inequality mirrored sentiments expressed by Catholic leaders such as Pope John XXIII in Christianity and Social Progress (1961). These ideas from Rome were reinforced in Sunday sermons and the growing parish groups that Jane Gilroy and others joined after Vatican II.³¹

Gilroy was no stranger to the racial segregation and poverty that her church and political party focused on. Gilroy was born in 1936 and raised in the racially divided Flatbush section of Brooklyn: white working-class families, many of them Irish Catholic like hers, lived on one side of Bedford Avenue; African Americans lived on the other. There was little social interaction between the two groups, and although white families like hers were not wealthy, they were better off than most of their black neighbors. Gilroy was the second of three children, and her family struggled financially. Her mother was unable to work because of an earlier bout of rheumatic fever, and much of her father’s salary as a detective with the New York City Police Department went toward her care. Gilroy was a good student at nearby Catholic schools and began a degree in elementary education at Brooklyn College. In the fall of her senior year in 1957, she married Francis Gilroy, a graduate of nearby St. John’s University who was from Brooklyn and had spent some time in the Navy. Gilroy was soon pregnant, and since expectant women were not allowed to take courses at Brooklyn College, she had to end her education a few credits short of graduation. As a young married couple, the Gilroys barely eked out a living with Jane caring for young children at home while Francis finished his accounting apprenticeship. By 1961, they were expecting their third child. They had outgrown their small apartment in Brooklyn and could only afford more space in a housing project in Woodside, Queens.³²

Every morning in the housing project, Gilroy observed the vestiges of racial privilege as she and other white homemakers chatted in the courtyard while their young children played. They watched as African American mothers in the complex headed out to work, as some of their own mothers had done a generation before. Gilroy and many of her white neighbors were biding their time in this middle-income housing project that had been built for veterans after World War II. While most of the veterans and their families had been white, their migration to the suburbs was followed by families of color moving in. The Gilroys only met the project’s low-income requirement because her husband was a poorly paid accounting apprentice. Once Francis became a certified public accountant a couple of years later, he used his GI mortgage benefits to move to a Levitt-style home in Merrick, Long Island—a town that was almost entirely white. From that point on, the Gilroys were solidly middle class.

Witnessing racial inequality, first as a child in Flatbush, then in a housing project in Queens, prompted Gilroy to volunteer in the mid-sixties in a Head Start program. She was assigned to a majority African American school in nearby Freeport, Long Island, a short distance from where she lived in Merrick, but worlds apart in economic opportunity and racial demographics. The Head Start program provided early childhood education for economically disadvantaged young people as part of the antipoverty initiatives that LBJ implemented in his so-called War on Poverty. The fact that Gilroy volunteered in a poor black school shortly after moving to the suburbs is unsurprising. She sometimes felt guilty about owning her first Levitt-style home in nearly all-white Merrick. Although it was a modest home, she knew it was a vast leap from where she came from and where the students in that Head Start program lived. Trained as a teacher, she sought this opportunity at a local branch of the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity. Doing so reflected her belief in the transformative power of education, along with her church’s and party’s concern with poverty and its intersection with race—not to mention Catholic leaders’ desire to cultivate a more active laity interested in social justice.³³

As a newly middle-class suburban mother who wanted to give her children more than she had in Depression-era Brooklyn, Gilroy felt a maternal responsibility to help young people who lacked similar parental support, a sentiment that would move her and others to save vulnerable “babies” from abortion. Much like maternalist activists in the past, including those who were part of FDR’s New Deal coalition and enacted welfare provisions for impoverished single mothers, Gilroy and her allies went on to embrace a politics of public mothering. They too were concerned with society’s most vulnerable children, who, for them, primarily included fetuses in utero. A major difference was that their politics in the seventies—unlike the New Deal politics they grew up with—would be aimed at shrinking, not augmenting, the size of the government once they came to see an expanded state as evocative of dangerous feminist aims.³⁴

But in the sixties, political concerns like this took a backseat to family matters. Gilroy’s family soon grew to five children, so she stopped volunteering for Head Start. In fact, although they often hailed from similar backgrounds, Gilroy and other suburban women avoided discussing politics and current events.³⁵ When one typically thinks of the sixties, a series of hackneyed images spring to mind: protests in the streets, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Women like Gilroy spent those years acclimating to their new suburban lives and raising young children full time, important symbols to them of their growing financial comfort. As they did so, they watched—often only from afar on the nightly news coverage—as rapid expansion, Vatican II, an unpopular war, and various movements on the left and right of the political spectrum created great change. Yet Phyllis Graham’s neighbor in Farmingdale, Long Island, where she and her husband first purchased a home in 1960, could only remember her interminably hanging cloth diapers as the country and institutions like the Catholic Church shifted. “It’s true,” Graham later admitted. “We didn’t have disposable diapers then, and we didn’t have a [clothing] dryer right away, so after I put them in my new washing machine, I hung the diapers on the line.”³⁶

Not even burgeoning feminism could wake the women from their political slumber in the sixties. They voted indiscriminately for both major parties based on superficial issues; some just mimicked what their husbands did at the polls. To them, politics encompassed matters such as foreign policy and taxation that had little relevance in their lives. Neither major party embraced feminism in a significant way at first, which encouraged their apathy. None remember hearing about Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book from 1963 until much later, although she positioned herself as a fellow housewife in Rockland County. Few women knew of the feminist organizations that were formed in that decade, many of which were based in nearby New York City—nor would they learn of them until the abortion debates introduced them to radical groups like Redstockings and more liberal ones such as the National Organization for Women that Friedan helped to found and lead.

Many Catholic women did, however, notice and back the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Before it was later expanded, the initial law only impacted federal employment in cases where women and men performed the same roles for unequal pay, which was rare in an economy with sex-segregated jobs.³⁷ Jane Gilroy remembered that she and her neighbors in suburban Long Island “said ‘yes’ for equal work and equal pay.”³⁸ Gilroy and others were by then full-time homemakers. Much like their church, the women thought since some mothers had to work out of economic necessity, they ought to be in a position to provide well for their families with equal pay and related measures—a belief that aligned with the women’s Democratic upbringings and messages from the pope that filtered down into Sunday sermons in their new parishes. As these homemakers and their church and party believed, a woman’s top priority was her family, ideally serving them exclusively from within the home.³⁹

By the seventies, the priorities of the Catholic Church and Democrats began to diverge as the party embraced tenets of modern feminism such as legal abortion, leaving women like Jane Gilroy at a crossroads. The Democratic Party was transformed after its McGovern-Fraser Commission (1969–1972) invited minority groups including women to have more sway over party platforms and delegate representation at the presidential level (which meant that feminists infiltrated the party since they were the most politicized group of organized women in the late sixties and early seventies). These self-proclaimed “new Democrats,” such as feminist representative Bella Abzug of Manhattan, moved the party beyond support for a living wage and protective labor legislation, and toward equal pay, more job opportunities, legal abortion, the ERA, and other civil rights for women. With poverty and inequality now less visible to Catholic women in their suburban neighborhoods, issues such as abortion loomed large in their lives. They felt that their party was abandoning them, so they used pathways created by the church to enter the political arena to save their families. Their activism across the state, notably in the four suburban counties outside New York City, soon caught the eye of conservative Republicans who had been on the far margins of party leadership in New York State and the nation.⁴⁰

The politics of the four suburban counties that future antifeminist leaders settled in—Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island, and Westchester and Rockland to the north and west of the city—historically were dominated by wealthy, pro-business, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans. Before World War II, these counties, in particular Westchester and Nassau that border New York City, were filled with affluent bedroom communities that had blossomed in the twenties alongside automobile sales and the construction of new homes, parkways, and commuter trains. In the presidential election of 1932, all four counties went to the unpopular pro-business Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover, despite the fact that the market had crashed on his watch and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee, was then governor of New York. Yet, because the population of these counties was so small then, just a fraction of what it would become after World War II, Roosevelt easily won the state. Voters in these suburbs responded by sending a string of anti-New Deal candidates to Congress in the thirties. After the war, support for business in these areas became joined with more tolerance for a bigger government that would guarantee civil rights for African Americans and other oppressed groups—eventually including abortion rights for women by the late sixties. As this occurred, these counties became a stronghold for so-called Rockefeller Republicanism. Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor of the state from 1959 through 1973, epitomized these qualities and was one of Westchester County’s most famous residents with an expansive estate in the scenic Hudson River Valley.⁴¹

The nation’s postwar prosperity and new mortgage provisions allowed white Catholic Democrats from the city—including the women and their families—to move to these counties and potentially threaten the dominance of (Rockefeller) Republicans. Mass-produced housing techniques, thirty-year home financing terms, and low-interest, government-backed loans for (white) male veterans helped flood the area with families who had been the backbone of FDR’s New Deal coalition. State Republican leaders worried when Nassau County experienced a 65 percent population increase from 1948 to 1952 after the completion of the Levittown development. Nassau’s ratio of Republicans to Democrats soon went from five-to-one to less than two-to-one. Even though Republicans still outnumbered Democrats in the county by roughly 200,000 voters in the fifties and sixties, both major parties became competitive in Nassau and surrounding suburban counties for the first time. In the statewide elections of 1962, voters in Nassau County elected Republican Nelson Rockefeller for governor and Democrat Arthur Levitt (no relation to the housing developer) for comptroller. Results like this were common in these four counties throughout the fifties and sixties. Third parties like the Liberal and Conservative parties often cross-endorsed candidates, which alternately helped or hurt the two major parties and contributed to split decisions.⁴²

There was another reason that this large influx of urban Democrats did not completely obliterate the GOP’s longstanding dominance in these counties: many new arrivals registered as Republicans upon becoming suburban homeowners. Jane Gilroy’s widowed father—a retired police detective who had struggled to pay for her late mother’s medical care—was one Democrat who switched his party after moving to Long Island with his new wife in the sixties. Gilroy remembers him declaring, “We’re on Long Island now, you can be a Republican!”⁴³ In the city, Democratic ward rule served the needs of workers like Gilroy’s father by fighting for rent controls, creating jobs during the Great Depression, and working alongside Catholic and union leaders to alleviate poverty. But postwar prosperity coupled with homeownership in these counties, which had some of the highest property taxes in the nation, caused many people to reconsider their political affiliation. The divide between Democrats and Rockefeller’s Republican wing that ruled in that era was not that great: both parties were dominated by centrist Cold Warriors who embraced the Keynesian economic principles that marginalized conservative Republicans rejected. In many ways, the parties only differed over taxation, with Rockefeller Republicans striving for—although not always attaining—lower rates than Democrats. Renters not paying property taxes in the city might not care if the powerful Tammany Hall Democratic machine subcontracted municipal services out to their cronies at uncompetitive rates. But if yet another school were being built in the suburbs to address the postwar baby boom, new homeowners might justifiably worry about their already high property taxes increasing to pay for it. As the economy slowed down in the seventies, voters were even more insistent that all business conducted with their precious tax dollars be done above-board at competitive rates.⁴⁴ Republicans understood these sentiments and tried to capitalize on them. “Keep Tammany out of Nassau, Vote Republican” was an effective slogan used in the county to link local Democrats with the corruption and fiscal mismanagement that was endemic to urban machines.⁴⁵

While most women remained committed Democrats until their party seemingly abandoned them for feminist issues in the seventies, some switched parties upon moving to the suburbs in the sixties—a move that hardly affected them. Both Phyllis Graham on Long Island and Annette Stern in Westchester County registered as Republicans upon leaving the city, but they only did so at the behest of their husbands who were upwardly mobile, first-time homeowners in these high-tax counties. The switch was hardly consequential to either woman since they only engaged with politics on a very superficial level then. Issues of little real importance—such as a candidate’s good looks, charming personality, ethnicity, or religion—were more apt to grab their attention in the sixties.⁴⁶ Phyllis Graham, for instance, first moved to Long Island at the start of the presidential campaign in 1960. Although she followed her husband in registering as a Republican, she still gave money to Democratic contender John F. Kennedy’s campaign when volunteers knocked on her door. “At night in our old ranch house in Farmingdale,” she later remarked, “I would iron in the kitchen and listen to [campaign coverage] on the radio. His Catholicism was a bonus, but I just loved him.” When asked about specific issues that made him an appealing candidate, she could not cite any: “Loving JFK was the extent of my interest in politics. I didn’t have time [for issues] with all the little kids!”⁴⁷

As families like these moved to the four suburban counties outside New York City and became more open to voting Republican, the GOP’s previously marginal conservative wing (which before was only competitive in rural upstate New York) wrested statewide control of the party away from the Rockefeller faction by winning over these new transplants. At first, conservatives had little success in doing so. Growing frustrated, some even broke away and formed the Conservative Party in 1962. The situation changed by the mid- to late seventies. Conservative Republican party bosses like Joseph Margiotta of Nassau County grew more powerful by tapping into the antifeminist political networks created by suburban women like Phyllis Graham, especially since the four counties where many of these women lived (and had their deepest support) made up a quarter of all votes in the state by 1980.⁴⁸

Motivated to protect their new lifestyles—ones that already had been tested by Vatican II—activist housewives worked throughout the seventies in New York to mobilize people around a decidedly white, suburban, middle-class version of the traditional nuclear family. To protect families like their own, the women deployed populist rhetoric to organize people feeling the same way from their growing neighborhoods. They relied on suburban institutions to do so, including new Catholic community groups that were created after Vatican II. But it took a specific battle to stir the political consciousness of women who had never given electoral politics much thought. Debates over New York State’s abortion reform law of 1970 were just the wake-up call many Catholic homemakers needed.