Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York 9780812293852

Citation preview

Kitchen Table Politics

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POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—​­local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

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KITCHEN TABLE POLITICS Conservative Women and Family Values in New York

Stacie Taranto

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

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Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-​­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-​­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication Data ISBN 978-​­0-​­8122-​­4897-​­5

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For my family, and the ability for all people and families to live as they choose . . .

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CONTENTS

Note on Terms ix Introduction. Inventing a New Politics of Family Values 1 PART I. OUT OF THE SIXTIES Chapter 1. Becoming a Suburban Family 17 Chapter 2. Vatican II and the Seeds of Political Discontent 35 PART II. AWAKENINGS Chapter 3. Abortion and Female Political Mobilization 59 Chapter 4. Equal Rights and Profamily Politics 93 PART III. COALESCENCE Chapter 5. Ellen McCormack for President 129 Chapter 6. Toward the GOP 162 PART IV. REALIGNMENT Chapter 7. Making a More Conservative Republican Party 189 Epilogue. The Politics of Women, Gender, and Family After 1980 215 Archive and Interview List 229 Notes 233 Index 273 Acknowledgments 283

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NOTE ON TERMS

Certain key terms and organizing principles appear throughout the book. The movements, groups, and participants they refer to were not as homogeneous as the blanket terminology used to describe them suggests. The term “New York” refers to New York State, not New York City, which is labeled as such. Derivations of “pro-​­family” or “family values” were used for convenience. Unless otherwise noted, references to “feminists” relate to (white) liberal, as opposed to radical, feminism because liberal feminists from organizations such as the National Organization for Women were more immersed in the electoral political arena covered here. Liberal feminists offended the first-​­generation suburban homemakers at the center of this narrative, as women of a similar racial and class demographic who were supposed to be their friends and neighbors, not political adversaries. Perhaps no issue is more volatile than debates over whether abortion should be legal, which necessitated a careful parsing of words. Opponents of legal abortion are labeled as “anti-​­abortion.” This term does not imply that advocates of legal abortion were necessarily “pro-​­abortion.” Proponents advocated abortion’s legality; few took the actual procedure lightly. The more politicized “pro-​­life” and “pro-​­choice” descriptors appear only in quotations from activists. Opponents of legal abortion chose the term “pro-​­life” to reflect their belief that unborn fetuses were akin to, and thus should be afforded the same legal rights as, those living outside the womb. Proponents of legal abortion, particularly feminists, saw legal abortion as a fundamental right—​­a decision that only a woman, whose body and life were directly affected by pregnancy, should make, as the “pro-​­choice” marker denotes. These terms reflect two very different outlooks on abortion, the origins of which unfold here.

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INTRODUCTION

Inventing a New Politics of Family Values

The inspiration for this book grew from going door-​­to-​­door in 2004 collecting donations for the Democratic National Committee on behalf of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. I was disappointed to be stationed in Rhode Island instead of an exciting swing state like Ohio, but being there made the most sense. I was about to begin graduate school in the area, where I intended to research American women during World War II. That plan shifted after canvassing Rhode Island for Democratic cash. Wealthier suburban neighborhoods were our best bet. Anecdotally, it seemed that a Volvo or Subaru in the driveway guaranteed hundred-​­dollar checks from people eager to expound on President George W. Bush’s worst policy blunders. We also visited many lower-​­middle-​­and working-​­class neighborhoods—​ ­voters who had been the backbone of the New Deal coalition, yet whose support for the party was less assured in recent years. As naïve young staffers, we thought we could convince this demographic to open their wallets. These were neighborhoods likely to benefit, for example, from Kerry’s promise of national healthcare. We suspected that issues such as abortion might repel some of these voters. Still, this was the “blue state” of Rhode Island. These were mostly Catholic families, not the Evangelicals our friends were confronting elsewhere. We were wrong. Older women, especially ones with rosary beads and other visible Catholic insignia, were the most hostile. They said they would never vote for Kerry, a fellow Catholic, because he backed legal abortion. They liked his economic message and used to be Democrats, but what they called “family values issues” now took precedence. The women had heard much of the same from their Catholic leaders and had been a target of the Republican Party for decades. When, I wondered, did this concept of “family values” emerge, and why did it

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2 Introduction

become wedded to opposing legal abortion and championing the traditional nuclear family, instead of reforms such as national healthcare? And why vote for these issues when your economic position was not wholly secure? That experience revealed what I wanted to study in graduate school, a project that became this book. I would investigate the origins of family values politics, shining a spotlight on everyday lay Catholic women like those I had met. Their language seemed aligned with the much-​­discussed (Protestant Evangelical) Religious Right working in large national religious and antifeminist organizations, yet they were understudied by the media and scholars alike.

Women, Kitchen Tables, and Political Change in the Seventies My initial questions led to kitchen tables across suburban New York in the seventies. Archival research, interviews, and never-​­before-​­seen documents from basements and attics across the state revealed a small but incredibly effective group of ordinary, mostly Catholic women who redirected American conservatism from the grassroots. Throughout the seventies, topics that never had been widely debated in public before—​­such as how to divide childcare between the sexes or whether to become a parent at all—​­moved to the forefront of politics as modern feminist movements and related abortion reforms accelerated. As this occurred, some women felt that their families and homes were under siege. With no formal political experience, they gathered around kitchen tables and used the resources around them to fight back. This is the story of Catholic women such as Ellen McCormack and Jane Gilroy from Merrick, Long Island, who met when their parish priest started a dialogue group in the late sixties that mostly attracted housewives like them. They soon learned of efforts in the state legislature to legalize abortion. Echoing their Catholic leaders, many equated legal abortion with state-​­sanctioned murder and agonized over making it easier for women to evade their maternal responsibilities. After legislators passed an abortion reform law in 1970, the women formed the New York State Right to Life Party and began running anti-​­abortion candidates for elective office. It is also the story of women like Phyllis Graham from a nearby suburb of New York City. Graham remembers sitting at her kitchen table depressed after abortion was legalized. Anti-​ ­abortion activism through her Catholic parish evolved into opposing the

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Inventing a New Politics of Family Values  3

state’s Equal Rights Amendment; by the late seventies, she was hosting a popular antifeminist local talk radio show.1 New York, which seems as unlikely a place to encounter political conservatism as Rhode Island, provides very useful terrain for studying the Catholic family values Right. New York City was a key intellectual and political center of liberal and radical feminism in the sixties and seventies. At that time, the Democratic Party had growing feminist representation within it. In the New York City area, U.S. representatives Bella Abzug (D-​­Manhattan) and Shirley Chisholm (D-​­Brooklyn) garnered a great deal of press as they guided feminist proposals through Congress. On the other side of the aisle, the state Republican Party was a Manhattan-​­based organization that Governor Nelson Rockedown leadership, and feller dominated with his personal fortune, top-​­ generally moderate politics. Rockefeller Republicans, as they were called, embraced feminist initiatives such as the state’s abortion reform law, which they linked to the GOP’s affinity for individual rights and personal freedom. The strength of feminism in the state engendered a backlash among mostly first-​ ­generation suburban Catholic homemakers—​­women whose opposition to legal abortion expanded to include other feminist-​­backed policies.2 Prior to 1970, the women’s political views were largely unformed but Democratic-​­leaning. Most were born during the Great Depression and raised in working-​­class neighborhoods across New York City where President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which enabled their modest families to make ends meet, were revered. Many of their mothers were forced to work outside the home during the Depression and war. Some women were Jewish, such as Annette Stern from the Bronx who settled in suburban Westchester County; others were Protestant, with a small faction of Mormons upstate. Most, however, belonged to New York’s large and politically significant Catholic population, which constituted 36 percent of the state by the seventies.3 The majority of Catholic women had attended parochial schools and still went to mass as adults. They watched their church—​­through a series of papal encyclicals that filtered down to their parishes—​­promote civil rights and social justice for racial minorities and the poor. These same causes were promoted by the national Democratic Party, especially in the sixties with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Following the church and party, most women praised the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Johnson’s attempts to end poverty and its racialized elements.4 But much of this was very distant from their lives as busy suburban homemakers. By the early sixties, the women were living with their upwardly

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mobile husbands and young children in the suburbs of New York City. They settled in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island and Rockland and Westchester Counties to the northwest of the city. Many took advantage of cheaper, mass-​­produced housing and federally backed GI mortgages to do so. These opportunities lifted their families into the growing postwar (white) middle class and made it easier to subsist on a single male-​­earned income as the women stayed at home full time—​­something their mothers’ generation was less able to do. There was little racial or economic strife to test the women’s political beliefs in their new, nearly all-​­white, red-​­lined suburbs.5 As various civil rights, liberation, and antiwar movements unfolded in the sixties, they were exposed only through television and newspaper reports, consuming what little they could in between domestic tasks. They were, as future antifeminist organizer Annette Stern noted, “interested primarily in husband, children, and home.”6 These duties were especially all-​­encompassing for Catholics who respected the church’s ban on artificial forms of birth control and had large families. The women voted indiscriminately for both major parties based on superficial reasons or simply mimicked what their husbands did. Politics appeared to revolve around issues like foreign policy that had little relevance in their lives as homemakers.7 Nor was the increased visibility of feminism in the early sixties, with its emphasis on equal pay, that worrisome. Most of the women were full-​­time homemakers when the first Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, but their modest upbringings made them sensitive to the fact that, as Stern pointed out, “many women have to go to work, and that is why . . . ​equal pay is so essential.”8 They believed that mothers should work only out of economic necessity, as some of their own had done; when this occurred, women ought to be paid as well as possible. Either way, a woman’s top priority was helping her family—​­if needed, with outside income. Those like Stern were, however, dismayed to see self-​­proclaimed dissatisfied housewife and writer, Betty Friedan, from a nearby suburb in Rockland County, argue for possibilities for women other than homemaking in her groundbreaking book from 1963, The Feminine Mystique.9 Just as their families had attained suburban home ownership and a single male breadwinner’s salary—​­ to them, the American dream—​­ Friedan and others established groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) to advocate for greater educational and work opportunities for all women, including economically secure ones. This differed from the safety net of equal pay. Opponents thought that letting women choose between homemaking or working outside

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Inventing a New Politics of Family Values  5

the home implied that the former was not as valuable as they believed. First-​ ­generation homemakers felt particularly slighted as their prize was undercut. Beginning with abortion, the women labeled nearly all feminist policy prescriptions antithetical to proper gender roles and familial arrangements. They went on to defeat a state-​­level Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) mandating full legal equality for men and women in 1975. They worried that if feminists passed the ERA, the United States would resemble the Soviet Union, where women were compelled to work outside the home and daycare was provided by the state. Clearly delineated sex roles were not just good for the family: they were the basis for a moral and successful capitalist America. A range of proposals were denounced along these lines, from less stringent disubsidized childcare. When thriving feminist vorce laws to government-​­ movements made “the personal political,” the women took action.10 Rather than simply being against feminist goals, they also tried to forge a more positive politics that allowed their followers to be for something during that unsettling time. Echoing allies elsewhere, the women opposed legal abortion by being “pro-​­life” for fetuses, not against reproductive rights. They embraced heteronormative gender roles and rejected new legal rights for women by being “pro-​­family.” These were useful formulations on the heels of the rights revolution of the sixties that had begun to empower previously marginalized groups in America. By the seventies, denying someone his or her legal rights conjured up images of people being attacked by police dogs as they marched peacefully in the Jim Crow South. The women’s rhetoric avoided the pretense of impeding civil (legal) rights for their sex and instead elevated a very popular institution: the family (albeit strictly in its traditional form).11 Timing also impacted the women’s politics in another way, as the weak economy of the seventies reinforced anxiety over changing gender roles. The era’s recessionary climate was compounded in New York by the statewide fiscal crisis that resulted from New York City’s near bankruptcy in 1975. The economic downturn disproportionately affected men, making it harder than ever for families to live on one income. By the mid-​­seventies, fewer than half of American households were headed by a husband and wife, and only a fourth had a sole male breadwinner.12 As first-​­generation suburbanites, some only had a faint grasp on middle-​­class life. Others were married to men with very lucrative white-​­collar jobs. Either way, the women could not shake their upbringings. They did not want to be compelled to work outside the home like some of their mothers, whether by economic need or by feminist-​­backed laws.

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The fact that feminism began to flourish as the economy floundered encouraged them to conflate the two and assign blame. Feminists argued that job opportunities for women were a solution to the waning breadwinner-​ ­homemaker family structure, not the cause of this decline. Many women in New York disagreed and became determined to protect their entry into the middle class from feminist threats allegedly aimed at traditional families like theirs.13 Although many feminists had similar journeys of upward mobility, a trajectory shared by countless (white) Americans as the nation’s economy and suburbs proliferated after World War II, family values activists (as they were called after 1980) configured their opponents as dismissive and condescending elitists. Jane Gilroy, a founder of the New York State Right to Life Party, recalled, “I saw [feminists] as professional women, college graduates, who thought they were better than us [homemakers].”14 At first, this impression was driven by straightforward reports in area newspapers and on television that noted which feminist proposals had passed at the state and federal levels. What one side cherished (full-​­time homemaking and motherhood) was imagined to be an inconvenient burden for others. These feelings arose despite feminists advocating for greater economic security and legal protections for both homemakers and women in the paid workforce. As opposition spread in New York, and the women reached out to similar groups across the country, their sources of information changed in ways that led them to view feminism in an even more inflammatory light. National antifeminist activist Phyllis Schlafly was especially adept at including provocative, often out-​­of-​­context remarks from feminists in her monthly anti-​­ERA newsletter, to which nearly all family values activists in New York eventually subscribed. This included the declaration credited to feminist leader Gloria Steinem that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Many women seized upon that line, which fueled the deep alienation felt by Jane Gilroy and other homemakers who proudly relied on men.15 To uncover these raw emotions and their political import, the book focuses on New York State from 1970, when abortion was legalized there, through the elections of 1980—​­a time when feminists and an emerging conservative family values movement competed side-​­by-​­side to define the family (including an important subset of Catholics whose politics have not received adequate coverage). Catholic, middle-​­class, white women living in the four suburban counties outside of New York City presented themselves as a silent majority that would not surrender to dangerous feminist reforms. In reality,

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Inventing a New Politics of Family Values  7

they were a vocal minority of no more than a thousand activists in a state of more than eighteen million people. But the women reached thousands more at the polls as they created a viable conservative politics centered on nuclear families, heterosexual marriage, and traditional gender roles. Women and gender were at the core of their populist politics as they purported to leave the sidelines to save fellow homemakers and families from elite bipartisan support for feminism. The women relied on the neighborhood, religious, and community ties woven through their supposedly imperiled lifestyles to do so. They formed political organizations and aligned with conservatives in the Republican Party.16 The women became active as conservative Republicans were consolidating their power within the state GOP after decades of moderate rule. Once Nelson Rockefeller retired from public life in 1977, previously marginalized conservative Republicans wrested control away from his more liberal wing of the party. Two factors contributed to this outcome. First, suburban areas ­downstate—​­notably the four counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester, where a sizable number of women lived—​­grew to make up a quarter of all votes in New York, as winning them became all but essential to statewide victory. Second, as New York (and the nation) experienced an economic downturn, conservative Republicans in the state blamed liberals in both major parties and called for lower taxes to remedy the situation. These promises were popular in the voter-​­rich downstate suburbs, which had some of the highest property taxes in the nation; they also played well upstate, which historically had been a conservative (though sparsely populated) area of New York.17 Conservative Republicans reached out to the women to augment their power, shrewdly using state rules governing third parties. In addition to running on either the Democratic or Republican lines in New York, candidates can be cross-​­endorsed by one or more independent political parties. The Conservative Party, for instance, was formed in 1962 by disaffected New Yorkers hoping to push Rockefeller’s Republican Party to the right, although it had limited success doing so during the governor’s heavy reign. The New York State Right to Life Party (RTLP) was started in 1970, and a few years later, conservative Republicans were vying for its cross-​­endorsement to tap into the strong grassroots networks the women had built upstate and especially in the downstate suburbs where many lived: the exact areas where conservative Republicans hoped to create organizations from the ground up after Rockefeller’s top-​­down rule. The RTLP women and their allies were by then ready to

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leave the Democratic Party that had embraced feminist reforms. They soon saw conservative Republican calls for individual rights, smaller government, and lower taxes through the lens of heterosexual traditional family rights. Taxation, for example, became synonymous with financing objectionable feminist initiatives, such as Medicaid-​­funded abortions. Higher taxes, some also feared, might push mothers into the paid workforce. In partnership with the broader family values movement, the state’s GOP went from a more liberal, pro-​­feminist, and New York City-​­based organization in 1970 to a decidedly more conservative, antifeminist, and suburban one by 1980.18 But this is not simply a case study of New York: it is a history of national politics in the seventies. In New York, the Republican Party transitioned from Rockefeller to Reagan by 1980, which it did nationally as well. A marked division between the more conservative and liberal factions of the state’s GOP, along with the strength of feminism and antifeminism there, makes New York ideal ground to assess how the family values movement (led by women who felt they had the most to lose) contributed to this shift. Contemporary politicians recognized that this large, electorally rich state was a crucial formation site of modern family values conservatism, but historians have been slower to do so. President Nixon’s reelection campaign understood as much when it sided with anti-​­abortion advocates in New York in 1972, which secured the all-​­important Catholic swing vote, and with it, the state. In 1980, Ronald Reagan made winning New York a top priority. He announced his entry into the presidential race in Manhattan and named several prominent New Yorkers to his leadership team. His campaign believed that a victory on what had been Nelson Rockefeller’s turf would signal the end of moderate Republican rule, and they understood that partnering with opponents of feminism would facilitate that goal. While this was the end result, the women did not initially set out to alter party politics. They simply wanted to protect their way of life. In fact, most retreated home once they were confident that conservative Republicans would protect their interests.19 “It was literally dining-​­room-​­table work, real kitchen-​­table politics,” Jane Gilroy of the RTLP later said in a very telling turn of phrase.20 Gilroy and others not only engaged in kitchen table politics by organizing at the grassroots level from their homes. Conservative Republicans in New York came to depend upon them. In the process, family values women worked alongside the feminists they fundamentally disagreed with to redefine politics. This was not a case of women stepping outside the domestic sphere to navigate a political domain defined by men. Instead, they reimagined the parameters of

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Inventing a New Politics of Family Values  9

acceptable politics. In effect, women from groups like the RTLP invited New Yorkers—​­in ways that reflected broader national trends—​­to their tables, where they discussed issues previously deemed too private or irrelevant for public debate, including ones related to motherhood and sexuality. Working from literal kitchen tables, marching on the state capital, and running political campaigns, these self-​­declared average housewives were more than conservative shock troops. They nurtured and expanded, from the ground up, a powerful politics dedicated to traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.

A Politics That Hit Home The women’s story builds upon a distinguished body of work that details how race and the Cold War shaped liberalism’s decline and conservatism’s rise in the decades after World War II. Much of this growth occurred as “kitchen-​ ­table activists” worked outside the existing power structure to rid the GOP of its moderate politics.21 Thinking about these concerns alongside gender and women refines our analysis. Sociologists, political scientists, and journalists have done a better job of doing so, although few have focused on ordinary women working at the grassroots level.22 A handful of historians have placed women and gender at the crux of the anticommunist New Right in the fifties and sixties. These works concentrate on America’s Sunbelt region, where such appeals were popular because rising affluence and a Cold War-​­related economy prevailed there. They describe how middle-​­and upper-​­middle-​­class white women assumed maternal, home-​ ­centered identities in the traditionally male public sphere of politics and reform to stymie alleged communist threats. Other women minimized the importance of gender in their anticommunist work, although the fact that they were homemakers with more disposable time to organize shaped their political activism.23 A comparable analysis of the seventies is warranted—​­a time when feminist-​­backed changes for women created new targets of conservative ire—​­particularly a history like this that considers race and ethnicity, religious affiliation, and class alongside women and gender. Race had an ever-​­present (if sometimes hidden) influence on the women in New York. They rarely, if ever, engaged in the overtly racialized (often anti-​ ­welfare) rhetoric that other silent majority voters leaned on. Their humble childhoods coupled with the antipoverty and social justice messages these devout parishioners absorbed from Catholic leaders made such politics

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unappealing. Nor were the women consumed by the highly racialized school busing battles in the seventies since this issue did not affect their suburbs. Yet the racial exclusivity of the women’s communities—​­due to historical discrimination in the education, employment, and housing sectors—​­ensured that the idealized version of the family that they rallied to save was one only open to other white, middle-​­class, traditional, suburban families like theirs. For these white ethnics, often one or two generations removed from immigrant roots, this lifestyle was an achievement to be protected at all costs. The women’s insularity was compounded as they turned to similarly placed neighbors, friends, and local groups for assistance. Their Catholicism also molded their family values politics in ways that merit more scholarly attention.24 Much has been written about Evangelicals (and to a lesser extent, Mormons and Catholics) in the rise of the New Right, mostly from a top-​­down perspective. Histories of this Religious Right disproportionately cover organizations such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, which reportedly mobilized millions of family values voters in the 1980 presidential election. Catholics operating on the grassroots level have received some coverage, especially when discussing Phyllis Schlafly. A Catholic herself, Schlafly tied legal abortion to the ERA to prompt fellow Catholics to join Evangelicals and Mormons in opposing the amendment (although the emphasis is usually on Schlafly’s coalition-​­building skills, not on the Catholic women she attracted). Other scholarship has examined this alliance between Mormons, Evangelicals, and Catholics—​­three groups historically at odds with one another. New work shows that the leaders of these sects first came together around theological issues (ironically including a shared disdain for interreligious unity, or ecumenism) well before they unified as a Religious Right opposed to legal abortion and related matters in the seventies. Even more literature describes how the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the church’s highest governing authority in the United States, has continued to pressure Congress to pass a “human life amendment” that would invalidate the Roe and Doe U.S. Supreme Court decisions that legalized abortion on the federal level in 1973.25 Little has been written, however, about how everyday Catholic priests and parishioners responded to legal abortion and modern feminism. The history of women from groups such as New York’s RTLP highlights that as church leaders lobbied in Washington, D.C., parish priests and the laity, led by Catholic homemakers who felt endangered and had more flexible schedules, opposed legal abortion on the state level and beyond. The RTLP women arguably

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Inventing a New Politics of Family Values  11

enjoyed more success than their church leaders, including running for president of the United States and fueling national debate over abortion despite their low voter tallies. After all, Catholic leaders could not as thoroughly immerse themselves in politics as the women could, for fear of losing the church’s coveted tax-​­exempt status. This is partially a history of the Catholic Church in America at mid-​ ­century as dioceses and parishes grappled with recent social and political movements alongside their own sweeping reforms. Catholic leaders from across the globe met in Rome from 1962 through 1965, and these meetings, known as Vatican II, recommended several ways to modernize the church and better engage parishioners—​­from abandoning the Latin mass to encouraging the growth of parishioner groups. Church leaders soon turned to fighting legal abortion. Their first goal (energizing parishioners) fed into the second (outlawing abortion) when a Vatican II-​­inspired dialogue group in Merrick, Long Island, grew into the RTLP, which was officially separate from the church but clearly had evolved from it.26 The abortion debates that jolted many women in New York into action set the tone for a more personal approach to politics, something that their Catholic faith helped shape. The women saw legal abortion as the state-​­sanctioned murder of innocent babies, not “fetuses or blobs of cells,” terms that Terry Anselmi, a homemaker and mother of eight from Rockland County, disparaged feminists for supposedly using.27 One bishop who sent an anti-​­abortion statement to the New York State Legislature underscored that the church was “concerned with life at its very beginning” and “unalterably opposed to a philosophy of law which would relegate the unborn child’s right to life to the convenience of any other person.”28 Feminists argued that it was a woman’s basic right to decide to use her body to carry a pregnancy to term and possibly become a mother—​­not the state’s prerogative, especially since abortion’s illegality did not deter women from seeking the procedure, often under medically unsafe conditions. Mothers like Anselmi had proudly dedicated their lives to full-​­time childrearing, an attendant privilege of their upward mobility. As they and the bishop made clear, legal abortion was not only murder, but a selfish means for women to evade their maternal obligations, which felt like a rejection of what Anselmi and others were proud to have achieved. Catholic women dominated the fight against legal abortion in New York, and their politics differed from that of their (often male-​­led, Evangelical) allies elsewhere, who were more apt to cite biblical passages to oppose abortion. Guided by their church and daily lives, women in New York talked in more personal

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12 Introduction

terms. They saw themselves as living proof of the rewards of not terminating a pregnancy and pointed out other perceived feminist threats that hit home.29 Rallying as homemakers and mothers joined the women’s politics to a long tradition of maternalist female reform. The fact that they were political outsiders lent them credibility as they entered the fray to defend what they knew best: families, children, and the home. The women in New York may have been new to electoral politics in the seventies, but their claims were not. Female activists in the first decades of the twentieth century had passed (mostly state and local) laws to aid poor mothers and children. Although many were not actual mothers, the women used their gender as the basis for maternalist claims. They hoped that doing so would provide cover as they waded into the male world of politics—​­doing so ostensibly only to assist children and families (acceptable female pursuits). Some antisuffragists used similar language. Although there often were deeper class dynamics at play (not wishing to be put on an equal political plane with “inferior” immigrant and poorer women who would also get the vote), they purported to oppose suffrage, which contemporary feminists said was a basic woman’s right, by claiming that female domestic responsibilities would suffer as a consequence. Family values activists later positioned legal abortion, the ERA, and related feminist proposals, also framed as core women’s rights, as dangerous measures that would enable women to shirk their maternal, home-​­based duties.30 The women in New York presented themselves in a populist manner in the seventies: they were mere housewives and mothers in the foreign arena of politics, forced to confront powerful feminists. Maternalists and antisuffragists made gendered political claims as those in New York later did. These foremothers were generally highly educated women from the middle class and above who were the socioeconomic peers of the elite (male) ruling class; only their sex made them political outsiders. In New York in the seventies, there were more populist dimensions to the gendered political claims of family values women. Feminists were thought to be savvy insiders who enjoyed backing from both major political parties and the government—​­resources that far exceeded what they, as first-​­generation middle-​­class suburban homemakers, could access. As the comment by the RTLP’s Jane Gilroy made clear, she and her associates envisioned themselves being pitted against well-​­supported, ­college-​­educated, elite feminists intent upon eradicating their way of life.31 This mix of maternalism and gendered populism had historical antecedents dating back to the thirties, of which the women in New York professed to be unaware. Historians have shown cash-​­strapped housewives organizing

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Inventing a New Politics of Family Values  13

during the Great Depression to procure basic needs such as food and housing. These activists were not middle-​­class reformers aiding poor mothers and children, nor were they fearful of empowering women of lower socioeconomic status. Depression-​­ era housewives were the ones struggling. They were women forced to wrest what they could from those of greater means. They did this for their families, their top priority. This formulation wove together maternalism, homemaking, and outsider political status—​­placing housewives at the fulcrum of family and community as they confronted sources of power in a populist manner.32 After World War II, women deployed similar housewife-​­generated populism to address a variety of causes across the political spectrum. The nation’s postwar affluence allowed (white, middle-​­class) homemakers to move beyond meeting basic economic needs. Progressive housewives in Queens, New York, sought measures of racial justice to benefit their families. In southern California in the fifties and sixties, homemakers on the Right protested what they saw as a bloated and possibly communist state—​­merging nearly three decades of conservative anticommunist female activism with this newer “housewife ­populism,” as one historian has called it.33 As noted, many of these women from the Depression onward sought to minimize their gender, even as they presented themselves as homemakers and benefited from not reporting to time-​­consuming paid jobs with set hours. They were more apt to describe themselves as determined tenants, concerned citizens, or taxpayers. This was understandable in an era before modern feminism, when politics was considered a male (or, at best, gender-​­neutral) arena where housewives would not be taken seriously.34 Although the context was different in the seventies, the women in New York also rallied in a populist manner as homemakers and mothers. Always a little economically insecure as recent entrants into the suburban middle class, and often remembering their Depression-​­era youth, the women who formed groups such as the RTLP took on many of the characteristics above. But they did so in an environment where their target of concern was modern feminism (not an unjust state or anticommunism, although these were not wholly unrelated in their view). Unlike past activists, the women always relied on gendered populist claims. They mobilized in an era when topics such as reproduction, marriage, and childcare had been politicized by feminists. The women in New York believed that they had to get involved because these (female) domestic concerns had merged with the (male) political realm. Like the Catholic Church, they, for instance, opposed abortion as murder. Yet, they

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did not do so as gender-​­neutral concerned citizens; they did so as women who had spent years of their lives pregnant and feeling kicks from within. They were mothers who had raised expanding families on shoestring budgets as their husbands finished up schooling and settled into their careers before attaining more economic comfort in the suburbs. Only selfish women could not make it work as they had. They were simple homemakers and mothers facing elite, politically connected feminists who disavowed what they and other women were pleased to have found. They were armed with the resources at their disposal, reminiscent of the many times they still had managed to make a great dinner using only what they could find in the kitchen. Their politics put traditional womanhood and family life on display, forcing the public to reckon with what these homemakers claimed would be lost if feminists had their way. The activism of suburban women in New York changed the face of the GOP by 1980. Rockefeller’s Republican Party that had promoted the state’s leading abortion reform law in 1970 was unrecognizable from the party that, in 1980, rejected feminist-​­backed Republican senator Jacob Javits in favor of Al D’Amato, a little-​­known GOP candidate cross-​­endorsed by the Conservative and Right to Life Parties. The following chapters document how the women contributed to that shift by forging a conservative consensus around issues of gender and family. As one of the women’s flyers announced, “The grassroots, pro-​­family, ‘anti-​­lib’ movement [came] alive in New York State” in the seventies “and [would] not be silenced!”35

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PART I

OUT OF THE SIXTIES

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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Becoming a Suburban Family  23

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-​ i­ ncome, 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

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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

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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-​ c­ entury 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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-​ g­ eneration 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,

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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,

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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

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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—​ t­ here 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

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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

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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 meet-

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ings 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

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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-​­to-​ d ­ ay 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 histor-

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ically 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

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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 mes-

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sage 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

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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

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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

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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

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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-​ w ­ hite 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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-​ c­ lass 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 insti-

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tutions 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.

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PART II

AWAKENINGS

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CHAPTER 3

Abortion and Female Political Mobilization

Margie Fitton was one of the women politicized by the abortion debates in New York. Sometime around 1968, as the state legislature was considering legalizing abortion, Fitton decided to attend “candidates’ night” at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Rockland County. The event was hosted by Father Ed Nutter, a young priest who arrived at St. Anthony’s the year before and immediately tried to engage parishioners along the lines suggested at Vatican II. The forum was supposed to introduce candidates running for elective office. Fitton had always been interested in politics, dating back to her childhood in upper Manhattan when her mother worked for U.S. representative Vito Marcantonio, a noted labor advocate. She had never been active in politics herself, nor did she have time to be. As a busy homemaker, she mostly went to candidates’ night to get a rare evening out of the house. She did not intend to say a word. Like many women in her generation, Fitton was uncomfortable speaking out. Nobody had encouraged her to go to college or have ambitions beyond the family. The ability to raise children full time in the suburbs was accomplishment enough.1 As she explained, “for us to do anything public was an alien thing.”2 But Fitton was disturbed by what she had read about the abortion debates in Albany, so when Republican Eugene Levy, a contender for the State Senate, showed up at candidates’ night, she did the unthinkable: she asked him how he felt about abortion. Few people discussed the topic in private, let alone in public. She was upset, however, that the press was not asking enough about it. Fitton and other women who went on to oppose legal abortion in New York State did not pay much attention to politics in these family-​­centered years. Coverage of the abortion debates in Albany—​­as they saw it, the killing of innocent babies—​­was an exception. The topic hit home for these mothers.

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While Fitton did not believe that legislators would legalize murder, she could not remain silent. Standing up to pose her question, she recalled feeling “so isolated. I felt the tension in the room, and my voice was trembling. Even after I sat down . . . ​I felt like a crazy lady from West Nyack [in Rockland County].”3 Levy gave a meandering answer, which was perhaps inevitable in a church that was firmly against legal abortion and ministered to a large swath of potential voters. After entering the State Senate in 1969, he was forced to face the issue. Like many Republicans in the downstate suburbs, in what was then Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s territory, Levy initially voted for legal abortion. He changed course in the mid-​­seventies in response to mounting pressure from constituents like Fitton.4 She and other women stepped out of their comfort zones and organized against abortion after their state legalized it in 1970 because they saw it as a matter of life and death—​­an understanding shaped by their Catholic faith and the rights revolution spreading across the country. For decades, Catholic leaders had denounced abortion (and artificial forms of birth control) by maintaining that life begins at conception. After Vatican II, this message filtered down to devout Catholics like Fitton (who had ten children) through Sunday sermons and parishioner groups. Several rights-​­based movements for African Americans and oppressed groups also were ascendant in the sixties. When Fitton and others could pick up a newspaper or watch TV, they saw these movements that mostly bypassed their sleepy suburban hamlets. They folded abortion into this framework—​­just not as a woman’s right. Much like the parish priests who introduced many women to the abortion debates in Albany, they spoke about fetuses as if they were babies outside the womb. As the right-​­to-​­life moniker underscores, they wanted civil (legal) rights for these unborn “babies.” The women wanted to protect their right to live when the babies’ own mothers and other activists and politicians, including feminists, would not.5 Pushing the state to help those in need was not a foreign concept for women raised in heavily Democratic and Catholic milieus. The Democratic Party and Catholic Church had long fought for the poor and marginalized, just as the women would later push lawmakers to protect what they perceived as another vulnerable subset of the population. If financial concerns were the cause of not wanting to carry a pregnancy to term, the women’s New Deal roots made them amenable to the state intervening on behalf of struggling families—​ n ­ ot unlike what they had witnessed as children during the Depression. Yet, full-​­time motherhood was far more central to their developing polit-

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ical identities. Unlike Democratic and Catholic leaders, the women spoke very little about antipoverty programs that might lower abortion rates by making it easier to raise children. Poverty was hardly visible in their homogeneous, mostly white, middle-​­class suburbs where single-​­family home ownership prevailed. Instead, they filtered everything through the prism of middle-​­class motherhood. They counseled adoption, if necessary, and were appalled by women refusing to use their bodies to nurture these young lives in utero. They were equally incensed by the political, feminist-​­backed establishment that provided cover for these women by legalizing abortion.6 Like other women in the past, they tried to establish authority in the foreign arena of electoral politics by positioning themselves as concerned mothers, an area in which they were experts. Advocates of legal abortion supposedly had the ear of state legislators and Governor Rockefeller. Opponents saw themselves as outsiders who shrewdly used the resources at their disposal to take on powerful feminist-​­backed insiders.7 Prodded by a deep Catholic faith and a predisposition to aid those in need, they were mothers out to save unborn “babies” from being murdered. In doing so, they practiced an updated maternalist politics (or “housewife populism,” as it has been called) in the seventies.8 Fitton and her contemporaries were not necessarily aware of those who had come before them, but it is unsurprising that they embraced a similar maternalist and populist approach. Their identities were grounded in full-​ t­ ime motherhood.9 The women’s heartfelt belief that fetuses were babies was seemingly confirmed by Life magazine’s exposé on gestational development in April 1965. Despite having little time to read or absorb news coverage in the sixties, many women still spoke about that issue of Life decades later. They vividly recalled its front page, which featured a photograph of a human fetus allegedly photographed in utero at fifteen weeks gestation (a little over three months pregnant). The fetus, with its hands clutched to its chest and legs almost crossed at its ankles, looked like a peaceful baby napping in a crib—​­a familiar sight for these mothers. The issue featured two articles (with graphics supposedly taken in utero) that encouraged readers to compare what happens in the womb to everyday life. In the final months of pregnancy, the word “baby” was used in place of “fetus,” even when it was still too early for it to survive outside the womb. The women felt validated by these scientific articles (although it later came to light that some images were taken outside the womb, not inside as claimed). Having spent years of their lives pregnant and feeling fetal movements, they were sure that legal abortion sanctioned the killing of unborn

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babies. It was a cause worth (temporarily) leaving their homes and children to pursue.10 Proponents of legal abortion in New York—​­led by female state legislators and a variety of organized women’s groups—​­were equally passionate and concerned about civil rights. Some of these women (and men) were self-​ ­consciously feminist; others were not. They were united by a strong conviction that abortion should be legal because deciding whether to carry a pregnancy to term and potentially become a mother was every woman’s right. In other words, the rights in question ought not to be of fetuses whose viability was dependent upon women’s bodies to nurture them (especially in this era of very primitive neonatology). Questions about whether a fetus was alive, or a baby, or how much it approximated behavior outside the womb were not paramount. Whether a woman wanted to continue a pregnancy was at stake. Abortion was a core right, a choice every woman should be able to make for whatever reason in consultation with whomever she saw fit. Proponents fought for a woman’s right to live on her own terms, with access to a safe, legal abortion that would shield her from criminal charges and a possibly life-​ ­threatening illegal procedure.11 By the early seventies, the battle lines were drawn, featuring two sides talking past each other, each ready to defend the rights they sought in the political arena. Proponents of legal abortion had the upper hand at the beginning, prompting state legislators to pass a reform law in 1970. Opponents of legal abortion were very thinly, if at all, organized in those years as many future leaders tended to their homes and children. Following the abortion debates in the news, sometimes at the behest of church leaders, and asking a question at a candidates’ night did not yet constitute a political movement. Once abortion was legalized, however, women like Margie Fitton arose. They pressured state lawmakers to overturn legal abortion in 1972, although Governor Rockefeller preserved the reform law with a veto.12 The abortion debates in New York in the late sixties and early seventies changed the nature of politics in the state. Similar developments occurred elsewhere, but New York offers early and abundant evidence of (mostly ­middle-​­ middle-​­ class white) women advocating for and against legal and upper-​­ abortion. Despite assistance from large institutions like the Catholic Church, both sides formed grassroots coalitions across the state. (Thirty-​­six percent of New Yorkers identified as Catholic by the seventies, the largest such group in the state, which put the church on the forefront of local religious opposition.) Together, they unwittingly worked with one another to make “the personal

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political,” as radical women’s liberationists had hoped to do. Each side pursued traditional tactics such as lobbying and running for higher office, with Fitton and her allies infusing their activism with gendered political claims about home, motherhood, and family. Suburban women soon turned the elements of their everyday lives—​­above all, the expansive, statewide web of post-​­Vatican II Catholic organizations—​­into an effective anti-​­abortion network. Events in New York foreshadowed the political shifts and party realignment that took place on the national level after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, when Catholic voters like Margie Fitton began leaving the Democratic Party to vote for conservative Republicans because of issues like abortion.13

Legal Abortion: A Woman’s Right Republican assemblywoman Constance Cook, who became Albany’s most vocal advocate for legal abortion, maintained that the reform bill only passed in 1970 because of its strong support from women. Cook had spent more than two years building a legislative coalition composed of fellow “Rockefeller Republicans” across the state and Democrats outside heavily Catholic districts in the New York City area. But the real heroes, she said, were women outside the legislature. As someone whose own feminist consciousness was raised after joining the National Organization for Women, Cook was proud she taught Betty Friedan and other NOW members how to lobby state legislators. Women also joined from good government and social welfare groups. Whether they identified as feminists or not, these different subsets united around a core tenet of the modern women’s liberation movement: that access to legal abortion was a woman’s basic right.14 Women previously had been on the periphery of these debates. Abortion had been illegal across the country since men like the crusading Anthony Comstock had made it so in the late nineteenth century. By the early sixties in New York and elsewhere, reformers—​­most of them men from the legal, medical, and certain progressive religious communities—​­were lobbying for liberalization. Many did so to protect large numbers of women from resorting to sometimes deadly illegal abortions. Wealthier women were able to fly abroad for safe legal abortions or use personal connections to persuade hospital committees to perform them for therapeutic reasons (for example, if the pregnancy allegedly threatened the woman’s mental or physical health). One

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estimate in the sixties claimed that there were roughly 8,000 legal abortions in the United States each year, versus 800,000 to 1,000,000 illegal ones. Faced with these numbers, sixteen states legalized abortion in some form between 1967 and 1970. Movements in New York began along these lines, with male reformers partnering with liberal Democrats in the state, such as assemblyman Al Blumenthal of Manhattan’s left-​­leaning Upper West Side.15 Blumenthal’s unsuccessful attempts to legalize abortion in 1966 and 1967 illustrated that he and fellow Democrats could not guide a bill through the state legislature. Democrats had little representation upstate and were a minority in both the State Assembly and Senate. Their base was downstate, and even there it was split: heavily Jewish and African American districts in the New York City area backed legal abortion; Catholic ones like where Margie Fitton grew up did not. A bill would have to be sponsored by moderate Republicans who controlled the state’s GOP and were in the majority in both houses (as opposed to the minority of conservative Republicans in New York’s GOP, most of whom were based upstate). Moderate Republicans, notably including Governor Rockefeller, embraced the feminist notion that women had a right to legal abortion, linking it to their party’s historical embrace of personal liberty and small government. Efforts to legalize abortion hastened in New York after Constance Cook—​­a moderate, strategically chosen because she was the only Republican woman in the Assembly—​­was invited to Betty Friedan’s apartment in 1967 to discuss legislative strategies. Cook, who represented the Ithaca area upstate, was changed by that meeting; she joined NOW soon after and began to see abortion through a feminist lens.16 Cook was tired of sitting through male-​­dominated abortion debates in Albany. When, for example, the Assembly held hearings on one of Blumenthal’s unsuccessful reform bills that narrowly failed in 1968, Cook soured on being in a room full of men dictating “what women’s lives shall be.”17 As Cook looked into crafting her own bill, she was convinced by fellow NOW members to pursue a repeal measure (i.e., removing abortion from the legal code entirely) instead of reform. Both would legalize abortion, but repeal would decriminalize it in all circumstances, while a reform bill would, as Blumenthal had done, outline various circumstances in which abortion was legal. Feminists argued that reform would open the door for men in power to set those terms and police them as they saw fit. Ever the pragmatic legislator, Cook also felt that women were “never going to get . . . ​aroused politically” and lobby their state representatives about reform bills that could “require them to go to a committee of doctors, then to go to a committee of hospital

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administrators, and then to have consultations with psychiatrists or social workers or priests.”18 Cook was sustained by grassroots support from women outside the ­legislature—​­often from those who might have been opponents’ neighbors in the suburbs of New York City. In 1969, as Cook was trying to get a repeal bill out of committee, Blumenthal brought another reform measure to the floor of the Assembly for a vote. He failed yet again, this time after Martin Ginsberg, a Republican from Long Island, gave a last-​­minute speech about his fight with polio. Cook and other women were outraged. What should have been a debate about their reproductive rights turned into a well-​­televised sound bite of Assemblyman Ginsberg claiming that if he could thrive with a debilitating disease, so too should unhealthy fetuses be given a chance to do so rather than being aborted. At that point, nursing professor Sylvia Fields, who lived in Ginsberg’s district, organized 350 of his constituents into what she called the Nassau [County] Committee for Abortion Law Repeal. Dr. Ruth Cusack, a nutritionist who had fought for repeal since she was a doctoral student years before at the University of California at Berkeley, assembled 150 people in neighboring Suffolk County. Both groups included organized feminists and a range of other women, from sympathetic housewives and mothers to professionals like Fields who, as a nurse, had seen the sometimes deadly impact of illegal abortion. The two organizations gathered 2,500 signatures on Long Island to try to move legislators into the repeal camp.19 A new group, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), also formed in 1969 to push for repeal on a broader scale. Most of NARAL’s leadership came from New York, and they agreed to focus on Cook’s repeal bill, which, if passed, could be replicated in other states. NOW’s Betty Friedan, a New Yorker, spoke at NARAL’s inaugural meeting, remarking that it was “the first . . . ​decent conference” on abortion because “women’s voices [were] heard and heard strongly.”20 Radical feminists in New York injected new forms of activism into the debate. Members of radical women’s liberation groups tended to come from the student New Left that was active in the black freedom and anti-​­Vietnam war movements. In February 1969, radical feminists from two New York City-​ ­ ased organizations, Redstockings and New York Radical Women, interb rupted legislative hearings on one of Blumenthal’s reform bills. The women burst into the chamber shouting slogans such as “every woman resents having our bodies controlled by men” and “no more male legislators!”21 A month later, Redstockings held its own abortion hearings at the Washington Square

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Methodist Church in Manhattan. Using the consciousness-​­raising technique that they relied on to politicize personal grievances and experiences, the only experts allowed to testify were women who spoke about their own, often illegal abortions before a diverse audience of 300 people.22 These tactics were reinforced by the efforts of liberal feminists. Redstockings and others made front-​­page news, which shaped public discourse and prompted reporters to ask lawmakers about their views on abortion. The answer that many politicians gave was often related to how much attention they had received from liberal feminist groups like NOW that deployed more traditional lobbying tactics such as visiting and writing to legislators.23 By the late sixties, Assemblywoman Cook and her allies—​­such as Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields, who marshaled support for legal abortion in the same counties on Long Island that later became strongholds for the o­ pposition—​­were irate. Women, the true experts on pregnancy and motherhood, were being overlooked in the abortion debates. True equality for women had to encompass being able to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy that would affect their lives (and bodies) well into the future. Controlling reproduction was paramount as feminist groups simultaneously tried to expand opportunities for women outside the home, such as employment gains that might lead to delaying or forsaking childbearing. This thinking was encapsulated in the “right to choose” and “pro-​­choice” language that proponents popularized nationwide in the early seventies.24 Opponents had little to worry about until 1970, when Cook won an important victory in the State Senate. Cook and her co-​­sponsor, Senator Franz Leichter, a liberal Democrat from Manhattan, decided to introduce a bill in the State Senate as opposed to the Assembly where she served; its passage seemed more certain there, which could provide momentum in the lower chamber. To secure votes in the Senate, Cook agreed to insert a requirement mandating that only physicians could perform abortions. Some radical feminist groups recanted their support for the bill and campaigned against it. Liberal feminist groups, intent upon passing legislation, held firm and formed a statewide umbrella group called the Committee for Cook-​­Leichter. The committee persuaded the New York Post to do a full story on the bill, sent telegrams to all nonsponsors, held press conferences, and circulated instructions on how and whom to lobby in Albany. Downstate in the New York City area, the Committee for Cook-​­Leichter was dominated by NOW and NARAL, along with the grassroots groups run by Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields on Long Island. Upstate, Cook relied on women’s civic and feminist organiza-

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tions, the Unitarian Universalist Church, and individual members of Planned Parenthood who had run statewide campaigns before. In contrast to Planned Parenthood members, feminists, who were relatively new to politics, did not have the infrastructure or political acumen to sustain a statewide effort. Whenever possible, Cook tried to assist them by, for example, giving Betty Friedan a list of the leaders of every women’s group in the state. Bombarded by these efforts as opponents remained comparatively silent, the State Senate passed the amended Cook-​­Leichter bill on 18 March 1970. Thirteen Republicans and eighteen Democrats, led by Rockefeller moderates and downstate liberals, voted for the bill; twenty Republicans and six Democrats, most in Catholic districts, voted against it.25 During these Senate deliberations, Catholic leaders were relatively silent in Albany as they continued to lose their grasp over parishioners. That spring, the church was preoccupied with another bill that would have enabled ever-​ ­ expanding, underfunded Catholic schools to receive state funding. The church’s inactivity differed from its action in previous abortion debates. In February of 1967, for example, as a Blumenthal reform bill was before the legislature, a pastoral letter equating legal abortion with murder was read at every Catholic mass in the state. Parishioners were told to contact their legislators to urge them to vote against the bill, with some church bulletins describing how to do so. But pleas like this were increasingly ineffective by the late sixties. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision in 1965, which eliminated remaining sanctions against birth control, occurred amidst sexual revolutions, feminist movements, and the advent of the popular birth control pill. Meanwhile, the church’s Vatican II reforms encouraged parishioner engagement and debate. This amalgam of factors caused many Catholics to question (if not blatantly disregard) what their church said about sex and reproduction, including its warnings about abortion. Still, pastoral letters like the one from 1967 hinted at the opposition the church was capable of mounting, an influence that would weigh heavily upon devout parishioners like Margie Fitton in the years to come.26 Once the abortion bill passed the State Senate, Catholic leaders began lobbying the Assembly, ultimately leading to a failed vote on 30 March 1970. The church directed parochial school students to send anti-​­abortion letters to Albany. Assemblywoman Cook remembered that “nuns would stand in the halls of the Capitol and cross themselves when I’d go by.”27 The day before the vote, an anti-​­abortion letter from the church bishops was read at every Catholic mass in New York State. Newly elected Democratic assemblywoman

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Mary Ann Krupsak of Schenectady, who was Catholic and an original sponsor of the abortion bill, was called a murderer by a bishop. The pressure got to her, and Krupsak, a feminist, voted against the bill as it fell three legislators short in the Assembly.28 Cook went back to the drawing board, and with outside advocacy from the Committee for Cook-​­Leichter, was able to get an abortion bill passed in the Assembly and signed into law. Cook kept careful tabs on who was supporting the bill. After groups such as Ruth Cusack’s from Long Island visited legislators in the Assembly, they would report back to Cook’s office; her team would then follow up with those legislators. Cook maintained that this was how laws were passed, with all the hard work occurring before the vote. Along with the physicians’ requirement, two changes were added. Abortion would now only be legal through the first twenty-​­four weeks of pregnancy, and afterward only if it were necessary to save the life of the expectant woman. A woman also had to consent to having an abortion before the procedure was performed. The final bill was therefore a reform measure, albeit one far less restrictive than those proposed before Cook and other women got involved. These changes secured additional support, including from Assemblywoman Krupsak, who had buckled under pressure from the Catholic Church the last time. The Assembly’s final tally was 76 to 73 votes in favor. Governor Rockefeller signed the bill the next day on 11 April 1970.29 Cook’s involvement in NOW led her to see legal abortion as a core woman’s right; in turn, she showed fellow feminists and everyday women and supporters how to pass legislation. Cook helped unite Rockefeller Republicans across the state with liberal Democrats in districts downstate that were not heavily Catholic. Together, they made abortion a public issue as much as a women’s one. Yet, their coalition left out whole segments of the Democratic Party and eventually enabled the small conservative Republican wing based upstate to gain power in the four populous suburban counties downstate, where (mostly Catholic) opponents like Margie Fitton lived and would soon organize.30

“Church Ladies” and the Right to Life Committee The abortion reform bill that Governor Rockefeller signed in 1970 was the most expansive law of its kind. Between 1967 and 1970, sixteen states legalized abortion to some extent through either legislation or judicial review. New

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York’s law went the furthest because there was no residency requirement. It became a model for groups elsewhere, as the state became a haven for those seeking safe and legal abortions in the years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the procedure at the federal level in 1973. Roughly 60 percent of abortions performed in New York from 1970 through 1972 were for women who did not reside there.31 Under these conditions, mounting pressure to recriminalize the procedure grew, with Margie Fitton’s participation increasing after she brought up the topic at candidates’ night at her church. Seeing that she was passionate about the topic, Fitton’s pastor, Father Ed Netter—​­who led St. Anthony’s Parish to become a hotbed of anti-​­abortion activism in Rockland County—​­asked her to attend a meeting with people from upstate New York associated with Ed Golden. In 1967, Golden had started an umbrella organization to connect anti-​­abortion activists across the state; in 1972, it was officially incorporated as the New York State Right to Life Committee (RTLC). Golden’s efforts allowed local actors like Margie Fitton, who joined St. Anthony’s anti-​­abortion group in Rockland County, to adopt uniform messages and tactics. Doing so strengthened opponents’ bargaining power as they moved to overturn the abortion reform law.32 Men such as Golden and Netter played important roles in the RTLC, but women and their concerns propelled the anti-​­abortion movement. Most opponents became aware of the abortion debates through people they knew. The expanding infrastructure of the Catholic Church after Vatican II, along with civic groups and neighborhood ties—​­in which women, especially suburban homemakers, were deeply involved—​­enabled recruitment. Utter contempt for legal abortion motivated Fitton and others to speak out for the first time; they then used their platform to criticize the feminist movement that had made women’s public roles more acceptable in recent years. Fitton and her allies often conflated legal abortion with other feminist goals, viewing them as a singular threat to so-​­called traditional family life and the homemaker role that many felt privileged to hold. Anti-​­abortion groups wisely advertised along these lines. After New York legalized abortion in 1970, they recruited members by using free space in Catholic parish bulletins. Here, politically inactive women could learn about statewide anti-​­abortion rallies in Albany; the church might even charter a bus to the capital to make lobbying even easier for political novices like Fitton. Endeavors like this—​­often arranged by priests, but undertaken by housewives and mothers with flexible schedules—​­bolstered the church’s two mutually

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reinforcing goals of that era: to better engage the laity and outlaw legal abortion. Although a majority of anti-​­abortion activists in New York were Catholic, Orthodox Jews in the New York City area and Mormons and Evangelicals upstate also were involved. In an attempt to reach a wider audience, the Mount Vernon Committee for Life in Westchester County, just outside the Bronx, posed the following question in a single-​­page advertisement in the widely read New York Times: “Can you be a murderer? You could be if you believed in legalized abortion.”33 In these ways, opponents of legal abortion connected with each other across the state. The example of Claire and John Middleton of West Chazy, a suburb upstate near Plattsburgh, illustrates how the RTLC grew as friends and parishioners came together to lobby legislators. The Middletons moved to New York in the late sixties after John completed a Ph.D. at Florida State University in family life, a field combining psychology and sociology. Upon arriving, they learned of the abortion debates in Albany. Abortion, John felt, was “a direct assault to the family,” and motivated by his academic studies and Catholic faith, he decided to get involved.34 Claire, a homemaker and mother, heard about a rally in Albany through her Catholic parish; she went and became equally committed to the cause of saving “babies.” “I had never been involved in anything before,” she noted, in describing a trajectory shared by many women, but soon she was attending rallies and contacting state legislators. In the process, the Middletons met Ed Golden, and in 1971, they formed Champlain Valley Right to Life, which became a RTLC affiliate run from their home.35 Despite these important efforts upstate, women from the suburbs of New York City were at the forefront of the state’s anti-​­abortion movement. By 1980, a quarter of all votes in the state came from Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester Counties, which later made the women’s strong anti-​­abortion leadership in these voter-​­rich suburbs attractive to conservative Republicans hoping to wrest power away from the Rockefeller Republicans who supported legal abortion and had long dominated GOP politics downstate.36 Terry Anselmi of Pearl River, a mother of eight from Rockland County, was one of these women. Anselmi’s brother-​­in-​­law first alerted her to the possibility that abortion could be legalized in New York. Although she had no prior political experience, she soon became active in the anti-​­abortion movement that was growing out of St. Anthony’s parish, where Margie Fitton had attended candidates’ night and the two women met. Anselmi initially became “involved, but not entrenched,” in the fight; she simply wanted to be another body urging legislators to rethink abortion.37

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Anselmi’s involvement increased dramatically after the 1970 abortion bill passed and a nurse from Planned Parenthood spoke to her sixteen-​­year-​­old daughter’s psychology class at her public high school. Or, as Anselmi phrased it: “What I did [in the anti-​­abortion movement] wasn’t big until Planned Parenthood came into my daughter’s class and wanted to kill my grandchildren without my having any knowledge of it.” Planned Parenthood positioned itself as a place that pregnant teenagers could go for guidance, including information on how to obtain a newly legalized abortion. Anselmi was troubled that her daughter seemed confused: “She said, mom, they [Planned Parenthood] sound so right, and when you speak you sound so right.”38 Around this time, the psychology teacher handed out a questionnaire he had obtained from a graduate-​­level education course; it was designed to measure one’s sexual awareness and covered topics such as sexual orgasm. This, along with the Planned Parenthood visit, inspired Anselmi to get involved. From her perspective, the school was encouraging premarital sex, upholding legal abortion as an easy alternative to end any unwanted pregnancies that resulted. She reasoned that if her daughter, who had grown up in a home with a “reverence for life,” could be swayed, so too could others, perhaps to an even greater extent. She took it upon herself to show her daughter’s classmates that abortion killed unborn “babies,” potentially even her own grandchildren if she did not make her voice heard. Anselmi contacted her daughter’s school and, although it was difficult for her at first, she began giving presentations that counseled against abortion in all circumstances. First she spoke to her daughter’s class, and then, with another mother in town, she did so more regularly at that and other public high schools in the area. “Honestly,” Anselmi later confessed, “the only reason I stood up, because I was terrified to speak, was for my children . . . ​it’s like I was defending my children.”39 Anselmi had taught her children about “sex and where babies come from.” But speaking out publicly was entirely different. “All of a sudden,” she recalled, “you’re at school meetings, and there are representatives from organizations like Planned Parenthood, and you have to say all these words [related to sex and conception] that I could say to my kids at home, but I couldn’t say in public. . . . ​It was such an unfair advantage.” She lacked medical training and knew that she was not an expert on such matters. She was merely a concerned mother rallying with likeminded people on the grassroots level to face feminist-​­backed experts. To cope, Anselmi tried to gain as much reproductive knowledge as she could, even obtaining slides showing the aftermath of abortion and models of fetal development from the

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RTLC, with which her parish’s anti-​­abortion group was affiliated. She hoped that doing so might bolster her expertise in such uncharted territory. Opponents like Anselmi stepped out of their comfort zones in ways that shifted their politics because they saw legal abortion as a threat to the family, and by extension, to their roles as wives and mothers. Anselmi became involved for her children’s sake when outside forces (a sexual questionnaire and a Planned Parenthood representative) came in, as she put it, “under the radar with radical things for these kids.”40 She felt that these forces were conspiring to take discussions about sex and pregnancy—​­matters that she preferred to address with her children in her own way—​­and shift them to the public domain. As middle-​­class women who were able to stay at home full time and focus on motherhood, this loss of traditional female authority over their children was troubling. Anselmi described the situation as “an impossible thing. I just thought, how could this happen?” Mounting concerns about parental rights made women like Anselmi more amenable to leaving the Democratic Party and aligning with conservative Republicans who vociferously positioned themselves as defenders of individual (i.e., parental) rights against government intrusion. With legal abortion making it easier for women to terminate unwanted pregnancies safely, Anselmi and her allies concluded that feminists rejected motherhood altogether. She and a friend, for example, once tried attending a NOW meeting. But their opposition to legal abortion overshadowed everything else on the agenda. The “general gist” of the NOW meeting, Anselmi reported, “was that in order to break the glass ceiling, women should not have children. To me, a goal achieved that way was not worth achieving.”41 Just as homemakers like Anselmi attained more financial security and space in the suburbs, and with it, the ability to have larger families than their own parents, feminists lobbied for, among other concerns, greater access to legal abortion and career opportunities. Feminists wanted to provide women with more choices: the ability to stay at home or enter the paid workforce, even in cases where their outside income was not needed; the decision to carry a pregnancy to term or not; and so on. Anselmi’s trip to the NOW meeting underscores that some homemakers and mothers felt that feminists did not support their lifestyles, despite assurances to the contrary. If feminists actually valued traditional female roles, why were alternatives necessary? In essence, the two sides fought over choice versus obligation, with rights alternately assigned to women themselves (in the case of feminists) or those for whom she allegedly was bound to care. These feelings compelled women like Anselmi out of their

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own homes and into New York’s abortion debates, where they hoped to save unborn “children” (as much as their own children and potential ­grandchildren—​ ­indeed, their entire way of life). To do so, women in the RTLC actively lobbied the state legislature to overturn the 1970 abortion reform law. They wrote letters to the editor, made trips to Albany (often arranged by their Catholic parishes), and protested in the streets. One of their most successful efforts was a march on 20 November 1971 in New York City, which drew an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 women. Dubbed the “Women’s March for Life,” it took place on the same day that feminists, in the largest gatherings since the women’s suffrage campaign over fifty years before, held rallies in New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., to encourage legal abortion nationwide. New York’s Cardinal Cooke publicly praised those who turned out for the Women’s March for Life. An anti-​­abortion march of equal proportion was held in Rockland County, where Margie Fitton and Terry Anselmi lived, making it the biggest event in these suburbs since Senator Robert Kennedy of New York campaigned in this heavily Irish Catholic enclave while running for president in 1968.42 Protesting and risking potential conflict was a new and often unsettling experience for many RTLC women. As Margie Fitton remarked, “You didn’t do that . . . ​you didn’t make scenes and go picketing. That was for hippies, and it was a very difficult thing for people like us to get used to.”43 When Fitton’s RTLC chapter in Rockland County picketed a new Planned Parenthood Center in Manhattan, where abortions were to be performed, their opponents held condoms in their faces. The Rockland County women, who were joined by members of the Brooklyn RTLC, were, as usual, instructed not to r­ espond—​ c­ ontributing, Fitton speculates, to the label “church ladies,” which was assigned to them in the press.44 For many Americans like Fitton, protest was no longer associated with marches for causes that they respected such as black civil rights in the American South. By the early seventies, mothers like Fitton was more apt to equate public protest with televised images from the “human be-​­ins” in San Francisco, long-​­haired antiwar youth, and the violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention (i.e., disobedient children disrespecting elders). Like many people who identified with the so-​­ called silent majority of ­Americans—​­a group that rejected the turbulence and new social norms of that era—​­Fitton was reluctant to take to the streets. Yet, she and others decided to do so to benefit the anti-​­abortion cause.45 In addition to protests, the RTLC lobbied the state legislature. Even so,

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state senator James Donovan, a Republican from the conservative faction upstate who emerged as an anti-​­abortion leader in Albany, could not surmount Assemblywoman Cook’s coalition and dislodge an anti-​­abortion bill from committee. Conservative Republicans like Senator Donovan held little power in the state at that time. Governor Rockefeller and his moderate wing controlled the GOP and vowed to stop efforts to overturn the reform law. With little chance to recriminalize abortion in Albany, anti-​­abortion activists tried to weaken the law. This tactic foreshadowed efforts to chip away at the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions after 1973.46 Since New York’s reform bill specified that doctors had to perform abortions, one way to restrict access was by confining the procedure to hospitals. Abortions at hospitals were more expensive and not as easily scheduled as those at clinics, where up to 200 could be performed in a day with a new vacuum method. The RTLC lobbied successfully for hospital ordinances in the cities of Orangetown in Rockland County, Hempstead and Long Beach in Nassau County, and across all of Suffolk County on Long Island and Albany County upstate—​­areas where female-​­led, anti-​­abortion sentiment was growing, and the latter county a historical stronghold for conservatives. These ordinances remained legal until Bill Baird, a noted birth control and abortion rights advocate, sued the Hempstead government, prompting the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court to rule in 1972 that local governments could not regulate medicine.47 RTLC activists also began pressing individual hospitals and medical professionals to restrict or refuse to perform abortions. Their efforts were backed by the leadership of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Melding theology with U.S. constitutional principles, the bishops issued guidelines urging Catholic hospitals and personnel to refuse to perform abortions as a matter of religious consciousness; many Catholic nursing associations vowed the same. Not all Catholic hospitals and medical professionals complied, but many did. The RTLC then turned to state-​­funded hospitals. The leader of Planned Parenthood in Syracuse, one of the largest cities upstate, complained that some public hospitals in the area illegally required women to obtain parental or spousal consent for abortions. Other hospitals forced women before their twenty-​­fourth week of pregnancy to appear before a committee to decide if they should be allowed to get abortions—​­a clear violation of the reform law from 1970.48 The most publicized attempt to curb abortion in public hospitals involved Robert Byrn, a Catholic law professor at Fordham University who ran the

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Metropolitan Right to Life Committee, an RTLC chapter in the New York City area. On 3 December 1971, a Catholic justice on the State Supreme Court appointed Byrn “guardian-​­ad-​­litem” of all zygotes (fertilized eggs) and fetuses scheduled for abortions in New York City’s municipal hospitals, thereby halting all abortions in these public facilities until the order was overturned a few months later. During the standoff, Ed Golden encouraged RTLC members to write to legislators to express their support for Byrn and demand that the 1970 abortion law be repealed. Women like Margie Fitton and Terry Anselmi heeded his call, envisioning themselves as mothers gathering in a populist manner to surmount formidable feminist-​­backed government interests (sentiments that would make conservative Republican calls for smaller government enticing).49 The anti-​­abortion movement’s biggest victory came in April of 1971 when Governor Rockefeller, who was desperate to secure votes for his state budget, agreed to Senator Donovan’s proposal to ban state Medicaid funding for elective abortions. This tactic curbed poorer women’s access to legal abortion, a restriction the U.S. Congress replicated with the Hyde Amendment in 1976 regarding federal funding for abortions. Advocates of legal abortion in New York, including feminists, protested the 1971 state funding ban, even filing a lawsuit to declare the action unconstitutional. A lower court sided with them, but the New York State Court of Appeals ultimately upheld the state Medicaid ban in 1972. Representatives Al Blumenthal and Constance Cook, who had led on abortion reform, drafted a bill to reinstate Medicaid funding in the state. They too failed since, unlike in 1970, legislators now were being bombarded with letters and visits from women such as Terry Anselmi and Margie Fitton.50 On Long Island in 1972, the RTLC successfully lobbied Ralph Caso, the Republican executive of Nassau County, to ban elective abortions at the County Medical Center—​­the only public hospital on Long Island, where an estimated 1,075 of 14,546 elective abortions in the state took place in 1971. Caso agreed, claiming that since the state Medicaid ban made it difficult for lower-​­income women to obtain legal abortions, allowing privately paid ones to be performed at the County Medical Center provided an unfair advantage to wealthier women. Advocates of legal abortion had to file another costly lawsuit to overturn the ban.51 Caso’s line of thinking, as disingenuous as it likely was for this fiscal conservative, spoke to women like Anselmi and Fitton. The women’s modest upbringings, coupled with messages about economic equality that were ingrained in them by Democratic and Catholic leaders in their early years, made Caso’s argument resonate.

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Contradictory beliefs like this appealed to the women as they awakened to politics and laid the groundwork for party realignment. They believed that politicians should bridge the gap between the rich and poor. Yet, they were equally certain that the government should not enable greater access to legal abortion. But with their families now suburban and middle class, the women eventually found more reasons to feel that the government should stay out of people’s lives—​­as when Terry Anselmi learned that abortion was being discussed in her daughter’s taxpayer-​­funded public school in ways that undermined what she taught at home. The desire to curb the size of government, in part by reducing taxes, which would in turn make less money available for initiatives like Medicaid-​­funded abortions, eventually won out as the women saw doing so as a means to stymie feminists and bolster parental and familial authority. These sentiments later made for an effective partnership with conservative Republicans.

“Becom[ing] Politicians Ourselves”: The New York State Right to Life Party Lobbying to overturn or weaken the abortion reform law was not the only weapon in the RTLC’s arsenal: individual members also ran for political office. They did not expect to win. They merely wanted to highlight the issue of abortion and force opponents to take a stand since the media allegedly were not doing so. This impulse first drove Margie Fitton to ask a question at her church’s candidates’ night. Fitton later ran for the State Assembly, while her friend ran for sheriff. Most of these efforts were scattered and poorly financed. Little campaigning took place; people simply lent their names to the cause. RTLC members generally were split on political activity. Some people embraced it, while others thought it was a waste of time. The RTLC as an organization could not officially endorse these efforts or run its own candidates for fear of losing its tax-​­exempt status for wading directly into politics. The same was true for the Catholic Church. As a result, RTLC members running for office could not use the vast resources of the two organizations and had to begin by collecting signatures to get their names on the ballot. They often ran in races that were not partisan (e.g., for town sheriff) to avoid ensuring that their nominating signatures came from people registered to the same political party.52 While the RTLC’s opinion was mixed on politics, a separate group on

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Long Island, the New York State Right to Life Party—​­again led by the grassroots leadership of mostly white Catholic middle-​­class housewives—​­focused on the political arena. By running its own candidates for office, the Right to Life Party (RTLP) also did not expect to win: its leaders had little interest in governance and were realistic about the likelihood of underfunded third-​ ­party candidates being elected. The RTLP simply wanted to win enough votes to pressure politicians who supported legal abortion into changing course. Electoral politics was foreign to the Long Island housewives who started the RTL Party, and like their counterparts in the RTL Committee, they were reluctant to enter the public arena. But the RTLP women did so to try to end legal abortion, which they opposed on religious and personal grounds. In a larger sense, they wanted to protect their way of life, steeped in full-​­time homemaking and motherhood, from perceived feminist threats—​­and like the RTLC, the RTLP leveraged the gains of the women’s movement to organize against it.53 The Right to Life Party grew out of a current events “dialogue group” that Father Paul Driscoll formed at the Curé of Ars Roman Catholic Church in Merrick, Long Island. Driscoll arrived in Merrick in 1964 right out of seminary and, like many Catholic priests in the new Rockville Centre Diocese on Long Island, faced droves of young Catholic families moving to the parish, mostly from New York City. Jane Gilroy and her family came to Merrick from Queens in 1963, contributing to the 46 percent increase in Curé of Ars parishioner rolls in the early sixties. Father Driscoll tried to engage these new arrivals with initiatives such as the dialogue group he formed in 1966. As noted, the group became a weekly refuge for housewives with young children like Jane Gilroy, who appreciated the stimulating adult conversation, including discussions Father Driscoll steered around the abortion debates in Albany. Father Driscoll was an ambitious young priest who probably knew that reaching out to parishioners—​­and vocally opposing legal abortion, which he did in the dialogue group and other forums—​­would aid his rise in a church wholly committed to these goals. His efforts were rewarded in 1969, when he was appointed “human life coordinator” for the Diocese of Rockville Centre. It was now his job to lead the church’s anti-​­abortion efforts on Long Island.54 When Father Driscoll left the parish, the housewives continued meeting and formed several anti-​­abortion organizations that they ran from their homes in Merrick—​­sandwiching their activism between homemaking and childcare duties. Before joining the dialogue group, most of these busy women had no idea about the abortion debates in New York and elsewhere

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across the country.55 Writing on behalf of a group that the women decided, against the backdrop of a rights revolution sweeping the nation, to call the Inalienable Rights Committee of America, one of the housewives, Ellen McCormack, contacted every state senator in March of 1970 to urge them to oppose the abortion reform bill before them. McCormack’s letter claimed that most women in the state felt as she did, although there was a tendency to believe “that the loud voices of more militant groups of women represent and speak for the vast majority.” This, she argued, was “not true, any more than it is true that radical students’ groups represent and speak for the general population.”56 By painting feminists and other highly visible proponents of legal abortion as akin to student radicals, McCormack sought to establish her allies as the epitome of middle-​­class, respectable womanhood. Their Inalienable Rights Committee of America saw the women’s movement as the antithesis of everything they believed in: marriage, motherhood, and homemaking. Most troubling, McCormack later recalled, was that this supposedly militant “feminist movement had become the darling of the media and they were pressuring the . . . ​country to legalize abortions. And they were winning.”57 McCormack’s letter attempted to bring visibility to women like her at a time when state legislators were confronting a broad female-​­led coalition that supported legal abortion. Yet, perhaps because fellow middle-​­class women on Long Island such as Sylvia Fields and Ruth Cusack were among those in the coalition pressing for legal abortion, McCormack’s warnings went unheeded. The state legislature passed the reform bill the following month in April 1970. After abortion was legalized in New York, the original dialogue group members formed Women for the Unborn, which became an anti-​­abortion advocacy group. They began by contacting family members and friends to raise money for an ambitious educational outreach program that resulted in nine full-​­page anti-​­abortion print advertisements between 1971 and 1974. When they had exhausted their personal contacts, the women turned to others in the community and parish for money. The ads, which equated abortion with murder, appeared in major national publications such as the Washington Post—​­a newspaper read by many people, including politicians across the country and in Albany. In another attempt to reach lawmakers, Women for the Unborn sent one of their members, Terry Siller, to testify against abortion in 1971 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, which was considering a resolution to address population control (a component of which could be addressed by access to legal abortion). The women’s opposi-

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tion to abortion had catapulted them from their suburban homes to the forefront of related policy debates in the nation’s capital.58 Their primary focus, however, was more local: they wanted to demonstrate grassroots support for overturning New York’s 1970 abortion reform law. The women spoke out against legal abortion across Long Island by reaching out to people in the communities they had lived in for the past decade. Members of neighborhood mothers’ groups were a natural audience for these efforts—​­just as a keen understanding of which shopping plazas were crowded at certain times could maximize fundraising. The women’s former priest, Father Driscoll, helped by using his contacts in the Catholic Human Life Bureau to connect them with various parish groups across Long Island. Like the women in Rockland County, Women for the Unborn often incorporated slides and models of fetal development into their talks. Science, they felt, was on their side, even though embryos and fetuses depended upon women’s bodies for survival. Women for the Unborn’s biggest effort was the Women’s March for Life in 1971, which, as mentioned, attracted upward of 2,000 people to Manhattan. Women for the Unborn first conceived of the march and proposed that the attendants carry red roses to signify their opposition to legal abortion. Clearly, someone from what became the New York State Right to Life Party had connected their modern-​­day politics to a longer tradition of antifeminist protest. Anti-​­suffragists had carried red roses to oppose the vote, which feminists had positioned as a core woman’s right, just as these organizers eschewed the idea that legal abortion was a core right for women. The march expanded the women’s anti-​­abortion network beyond Long Island as they relied on the church’s recently expanded infrastructure to locate similar groups across the state. In doing so, the women facilitated two major goals of contemporary Catholic leaders: to engage the laity and oppose legal abortion. By acting on the front lines themselves, they also helped ensure that the church maintained its tax-​ ­exempt status.59 But when their efforts failed to produce change in Albany, the women—​ ­much like the founders of other third-​­party political organizations—​­felt compelled, as Ellen McCormack said, “to become politicians [them]selves.”60 They soon formed the New York State Right to Life Party with the help of Eugene McMahon, a sympathetic attorney and election law expert on Long Island who donated his time. The women hoped to weaken the formidable political coalition of Democrats outside heavily Catholic districts and more liberal (Rockefeller) Republicans who supported legal abortion. Not unlike the

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founders of other third parties, they were upset that politicians in both major parties were not heeding their concerns. The women’s singular focus on a controversial topic, unwillingness to compromise with the other side, and insistence on viewing a politicized issue through the lens of good versus evil, made them similar to abolitionists, for example, who had formed third parties in the nineteenth century to end slavery. This moral certitude infused the RTLP’s activism with a proselytizing sensibility. Their goal was never to win office. They wanted to convince the public of their views, and, in the process, cultivate a viable anti-​­abortion swing vote that would prompt expedient politicians to outlaw legal abortion.61 The RTLP’s first race was a U.S. congressional contest in 1970 in the women’s district on Long Island, in which Republican state senator Norman Lent was favored. Lent, though conservative on most issues, had voted for the abortion reform law in the state legislature that April, and the RTLP was determined to show him how many anti-​­abortion supporters he had at home before he potentially left for Washington. They entered their friend, Vincent Carey, into the race, but it could have been anyone: the candidate was subordinate to the cause. They then gathered 1,500 signatures—​­again canvassing familiar neighborhoods and personal contacts—​­in order to place Carey’s name on the ballot next to the party’s designated symbol: a fetus, which was an increasingly familiar sight for New Yorkers as neonatal technology progressed and abortion debates heated up in the state. The RTLP soon became well versed in politics by raising money, preparing its candidate for debates, and canvassing for votes. Familiar domestic and suburban landscapes became lucrative political ones. By election day, they had learned to combine politics with homemaking, watching each other’s children as needed.62 Carey received only 2.5 percent of the vote in that race, which Norman Lent won, but it was a crucial tally nonetheless. Elections typically were very close in that district, and Lent knew that even such a small percentage could one day make a difference. Once in Washington, he began voting an anti-​ ­abortion line, even later sponsoring several unsuccessful “human life amendments” after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973—​­amendments that would have recriminalized abortion by granting constitutional rights to unborn fetuses, as the women long had favored. Lent’s conversion to the anti-​­abortion camp encouraged the RTLP women to pressure legislators in Albany to overturn the reform law.63 The RTLP also ran Jane Gilroy, one of its founders, against Governor Rockefeller, who was up for reelection in 1970 just months after signing and

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lending high-​­profile support to the abortion reform law. When the gubernatorial candidates the RTLP originally proposed declined to run, Gilroy threw her hat into the ring. A thirty-​­four-​­year-​­old mother of five children with virtually no political experience, she opened her campaign with a forceful speech covered in the Long Island press. “Running for governor is the last thing I would normally do,” she began. “But somebody has to rise and say no to an abortion law which legalizes the killing of thousands of unborn children.”64 She invited Rockefeller to debate her on the issue; he ignored the offer. In the end, Gilroy’s name never made it onto the ballot after most of her nominating signatures were disqualified by the two major parties, which sought to eliminate competition.65 In her short-​­lived campaign, Gilroy did what the RTLP became skilled at doing as its movement matured: she showcased gendered populism as a political outsider and mother concerned with the rights of fetuses. “I am not a professional politician,” she underscored, but “Somebody has to mention that two thousand years of Western tradition—​­all religions and all cultures—​ ­condemns abortion.”66 Whether it was questionable neonatology in the pages of Life magazine, fetal models from the RTLC, counsel from parish priests, or their interpretation of the Western canon, the women, who were raised not to speak out, did what people often do when tackling something new: they tried to validate their beliefs with some kind of tangible proof. They were certain in their convictions that fetuses were unborn children, capable of becoming like the ones they were raising full time, and that legal abortion was state-​­sanctioned murder. But perhaps because the women missed the terms that feminists and other proponents of legal abortion were debating (rights for women, not concerns about the viability of fetuses), these attempts to establish political authority mostly fell flat. Unable to attain credibility this way and take on political insiders like Rockefeller, the women intensified their maternal rhetoric and reveled in their outsider status. Like the maternalist reformers who decades before had fought for pensions for poor mothers and children, the RTLP established authority as mothers. Claiming to be outsiders operating above the political fray infused their moral claims about abortion with further certitude. After all, what was more natural (and thus divorced of ulterior political motives) than a mother’s concern for a “child”? That politics was encroaching on the domestic and familial terrain the women knew best, encouraged them to assume daunting tasks like running for governor. Gilroy’s campaign never got off the ground, but in that moment, the RTLP began to challenge the supposedly entrenched, feminist-​­backed political establishment.67

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Fighting from the margins fit the political zeitgeist of that moment. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 by reaching out to what he later called the “silent majority” of Americans. This alleged group was composed mostly of white lower-​­and middle-​­class people who, as the weak economy threatened their own security in the seventies, thought the nation had lost touch with morality and gone too far in its liberation and civil rights movements of the past decade. Jane Gilroy and the RTLP argued that although feminists, the media, and professional politicians had supported the abortion bill in 1970, they and a silent majority of other women and New Yorkers did not. It was up to them, as concerned mothers, to take a stand; they had to break the silence and protect the unborn by taking the right to a legal abortion away from women.68

The Campaign for Donovan-​­Crawford By 1972, New York had a politically mature anti-​­abortion movement sustained by activist women. Opponents had been chipping away at the 1970 legislation for two years with restrictive ordinances and lawsuits, and during the 1972 legislative session, their intensified efforts on three different fronts finally moved the legislature to overturn the abortion reform law before Governor Rockefeller saved it with a veto. First, the RTL Committee stepped up its lobbying, relying on women such as Margie Fitton and Terry Anselmi in Rockland County to write letters and travel to Albany. Second, women including Jane Gilroy and Ellen McCormack of the RTL Party applied direct political pressure, reportedly moving at least one key state senator to cast a crucial anti-​­abortion vote in 1972. Third, the Catholic Church organized and indirectly funded anti-​­abortion education programs and protests. The church also offered its publications, organizations, and even the pulpit—​­all of which had expanded in recent years—​­to overturn the abortion reform law. The anti-​­abortion movement’s success in 1972 was aided by the political climate in Albany, which the New York Times dubbed one of the most “retrogressive” legislative sessions in years. A national Gallup tracking poll conducted in August of 1972 showed that roughly 67 percent of Americans, and an estimated 56 percent of Catholics, believed abortion should be a matter between a woman and her doctor. Despite this widespread support, it is unsurprising that Albany’s “retrogressive” session still outlawed legal abortion in 1972. Rockefeller Republicans in New York—​­who voted with Democrats on budgetary, spending, and tax reform measures—​­joined their own party’s

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marginalized conservative wing on several social issues to court the same silent majority voters President Nixon was after in his reelection bid. This led to blocking a housing project in Queens from being built, increasing state funding for Catholic parochial schools, and passing an antibusing bill. The legislature even came close to restoring the death penalty in New York, which had been outlawed in 1965.69 In this climate, the Right to Life Committee launched its largest lobbying campaign on 5 January 1972, when buses bound for Albany began leaving New York City and the surrounding suburbs three times a week. RTLC groups managed the logistics, with most buses departing from Catholic churches and bringing housewives, nuns, priests, and parochial school students to the capital. Ed Golden, chairman of the RTLC, wrote to legislators soon afterward to encourage them to vote for a pending bill sponsored by two conservative Republicans from upstate, the aforementioned Senator James Donovan of Chadwicks and Assemblyman Edward Crawford of Oswego, that would overturn the 1970 abortion reform law. This appeal was salient after a reported 200,000 people from more than fifty anti-​­abortion groups had traveled recently to Albany. The campaign continued into the spring, culminating in the RTLC’s biggest rally on 17 April, when 600 people gathered to hear Senator Donovan urge them to continue their efforts until an anti-​­abortion bill could be brought to the floor for a vote.70 The spectacle of “church ladies” lobbying in Albany was a potent image for many legislators. The RTLC’s Ed Golden claimed that 95 percent of the demonstrators were “inarticulate in the political sense,” and had never been to the capital before. “They’re home-​­bodies,” he said, but “they’re effective.”71 The RTLC’s visibility, compared to caricatured images of feminists and the comparative apathy of proponents of legal abortion (who rightly assumed that Governor Rockefeller would hold the line), seemed to suggest that a majority of everyday women now were opposed to legal abortion. This impression was not validated by polling, but many legislators, especially those who had not witnessed Assemblywoman Cook’s campaign in 1970, were persuaded to vote for the Donovan-​­Crawford anti-​­abortion bill after seemingly only hearing from opponents. The New York Times compared these “fierce emotions and arguments” in 1972 to the period before the abortion vote in 1970. This time, however, newly mobilized anti-​­abortion activists like Margie Fitton and Terry Anselmi were leading the charge, instead of focusing on the home as they had been doing two years before.72 The Right to Life Party supplemented these efforts with political pressure.

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After the women decided to run Vincent Carey for the U.S. Congress again in 1972, RTLP founder Ellen McCormack claimed that she was “personally contacted by one of the most powerful political figures in New York State,” whose name she could not reveal, even decades later. This politician begged McCormack not to run Carey, as he thought that the anti-​­abortion bloc “might hold the balance of power” in their area, which was “a key legislative district.” In exchange, this person, as “one of the few politicians strong enough to stand up to Nelson Rockefeller,” promised to use his “considerable political influence” to bring the Donovan-​­Crawford anti-​­abortion bill out of the committee where it had been buried for two years.73 The RTLP women agreed to sideline Carey, and this unnamed politician kept his word. Donovan-​­ Crawford emerged from committee on 2 May 1972. This story cannot be verified, and the RTLP had a vested interest in presenting itself as a powerful broker in the state. Undeniably, however, its political pressure, combined with the RTLC’s lobbying, secured key votes for Donovan-​­Crawford.74 The Catholic Church also campaigned vigorously for the Donovan-​ ­Crawford bill. In April 1971, Cardinal Cooke—​­the church’s leader in the state, if not the most powerful Catholic leader in the country—​­wrote an article in the New York Archdiocese’s newspaper imploring readers to lobby their legislators to pass an anti-​­abortion bill. Meanwhile, the church’s Human Life Bureau coordinated educational and political efforts on the ground. Father Driscoll, who ran the church’s human life office on Long Island and had started the parish dialogue group that grew into the RTLP, claimed that as the Donovan-​­Crawford vote approached in the spring of 1972, “engagements [were] coming in so fast that [he could] hardly keep up with them.”75 Driscoll encouraged attendees to run against legislators who supported legal abortion. At a minimum, he wanted to establish an anti-​­abortion group in every election district on Long Island by the 1974 gubernatorial race, a goal that his close ties to the RTLP founders in Merrick (with their expanding contact base) and the church’s post-​­Vatican II parish network could facilitate. Catholic leaders like Driscoll—​­though they did not run for office or campaign for specific candidates—​­encouraged lay people to do so, as they focused on building a strong grassroots anti-​­abortion movement to overturn the 1970 law. Once again, the church’s desire to foster greater ties with lay Catholics aligned well with its attempt to outlaw legal abortion.76 The Catholic Church escalated its efforts leading up to a march scheduled for 16 April 1972, which Cardinal Cooke designated as “Right to Life Sunday.” Before the march, Cooke met with leaders from groups such as the RTLC at

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St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan; he also ordered an anti-​­abortion letter from him and the bishops across New York to be read at every mass in the state on Sunday, 9 April. The letter charged that 300,000 “unborn children” had been killed since New York legalized abortion in 1970, on average one “child” per minute.77 That same week, a four-​­page insert was included in every diocese newspaper across the state. The insert listed contact information for anti-​­abortion groups in New York and included a gruesome picture, said to be an aborted fetus, which people could sign and mail to Albany. The image was flanked by the words: “I urge you to stop the death by abortion so graphically illustrated in this photograph. . . . ​I ask you to take immediate action to bring the Donovan-​­Crawford Bill . . . ​to the floor and vote for its passage.”78 Some parishioners were furious that their donations to the church were being spent on a large-​­scale anti-​­abortion campaign that they did not support. But describing unborn fetuses as independent children with a right to live was very effective with others. Many mothers with disposable time were moved to act in ways that would have been unthinkable just a short time before—​­and they were even more apt to do so with the church arranging marches and supplying them with ready-​­to-​­mail inserts.79 On Right to Life Sunday on 16 April 1972, an estimated 10,000 to upward of 35,000 people showed up in Manhattan, including Catholic clergy, nuns, everyday citizens, and countless women. The march was sponsored by the Catholic civic group, the Knights of Columbus, and ended with a rally in Central Park, where a prominent bishop, Patrick Ahern, delivered an anti-​ ­abortion message from Cardinal Cooke. Efforts were made to be inclusive and deflect attention away from the church’s political activity. Notably, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Abraham Gross, the president of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, was a keynote speaker. Still, the event—​­from its participants and speakers to its sponsorship by the Knights of Columbus—​­had unequivocal Catholic overtones. This is unsurprising in a state where the Catholic Church led the religious opposition to legal abortion.80 The speaker list on Right to Life Sunday was heavily male and focused on the rights of fetuses. Echoing the Catholic leaders who stepped up to the podium, most speakers stressed that abortion was murder and unequivocally evil. Given the paucity of female voices, the speeches were largely devoid of the maternal pleas deployed by women on the front lines of the opposition (and overwhelmingly represented in the crowd that day). One (male) attorney for a New Yorker who was suing his wife for having an abortion warned the crowd that legal abortion allowed women to avoid maternal and familial

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obligations by aborting “on mere whim.”81 The feminist framing of abortion as a legal right and choice not only offended some women enveloped in full-​ ­time motherhood and homemaking. Some men clearly worried about losing authority over their families, in which women traditionally were beholden to them as wives and mothers serving in the home. Legal abortion, they feared, gave women an easy escape route, one they might exploit on a “whim” without much thought or the would-​­be father’s permission. The wife in question was across the street with the aforementioned abortion rights activist Bill Baird at a smaller gathering. Although she did not divulge why she had an abortion, she denied that it had been a casual decision or one done to spite her husband. Anxiety over declining male authority was exacerbated in the seventies as new opportunities appeared for women inside and outside the home. This occurred as female-​­initiated no-​­fault divorce was being debated, as the weak economy made it harder for husbands to singly support their families, and as a historical symbol of male heroism—​­the decorated American soldier—​­was replaced by the specter of defeated Vietnam War veterans.82 Proponents of legal abortion struggled to compete with these efforts and find an effective message. On Right to Life Sunday, for instance, Larry Lader of NARAL recalled standing with a handful of people carrying signs with slogans such as “Catholics for Abortion” as thousands of opponents blazed down Fifth Avenue with school marching bands. Groups like NARAL organized counter-​­rallies that day, amassing 500 people in Albany and 1,500 in Manhattan, where the wife being sued by her husband had spoken. These numbers, however, paled compared to the other side. Opponents, after all, could take advantage of the Catholic Church’s sprawling post-​­Vatican II infrastructure to organize across the state. The New York Times editorial page and other prominent news outlets tried to paint Donovan-​­Crawford supporters as hysterical and misled. These claims did not resonate with legislators who had met the everyday housewives expressing a concern for so-​­called unborn children.83 The feminist-​­backed Women’s Political Caucus (WPC) countered that the debate was not about what was right or wrong; nor was it about the rights of unborn fetuses. The issue centered on where abortions would take place, and under what conditions, since women continued to terminate pregnancies regardless whether or not the procedure was legal. As the WPC wrote in a press release, “legal [abortions were] better, cheaper, safer and more humane.”84 Yet, this formulation only met with limited success. The gruesome versus-​­ evil language of the anti-​­ abortion images and unequivocal good-​­ movement were more easily absorbed and remembered.

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As opponents continued their assault, they received an unexpected boost when President Richard Nixon publicly leaked his support for the Donovan-​ ­Crawford bill in a move that outraged Governor Rockefeller. The incident began on 5 May, four days before the vote in the State Assembly, when presidential speechwriter Patrick Buchanan sent a letter that he had drafted, and Nixon had approved, to New York’s Cardinal Cooke. Buchanan said that Cooke could make the letter public, and it soon became front-​­page news. The letter noted that, although Donovan-​­Crawford was a state matter, Nixon supported the church’s anti-​­abortion position. Rockefeller, who was a state chair of Nixon’s presidential reelection campaign that year, was irate. Rockefeller believed strongly in a woman’s right to choose a legal abortion—​­part of his more general embrace of human rights and personal freedom—​­but he was mostly upset that Nixon had waded into state politics. The press also found the president’s interference unusual. Nixon had contradicted an acting Republican governor, albeit in a party with deep cleavage between its moderate and conservative factions, with the president’s policies, if not his rhetoric and electioneering, closer to those of Rockefeller.85 The situation escalated in the media, prompting Nixon to claim he had not “intentionally or accidently” set out to embarrass Rockefeller. The president blamed “sloppy staff work” and said he had intended the letter to remain private.86 Conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Bob Novak doubted these claims; Nixon’s tactics, they said, were an astute political move. Buchanan, they claimed, was a “prudent man” who understood that winning fellow conservative Catholics was vital to Nixon’s reelection in 1972. This goal led to branding Nixon’s Democratic opponent that year, U.S. senator George McGovern of South Dakota, as the candidate of abortion, amnesty (for Vietnam War draft evaders), and acid. Conservative Catholics were the lifeblood of anti-​­abortion activism in New York, and by leaking the letter to Cardinal Cooke, Evans and Novak argued that Nixon “accelerate[d] the trend of [moving] Catholics, nationwide but particularly in New York, away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans.”87 One New York Times-​­Yankelovich poll conducted two months before the election indicated that Nixon’s campaign had been wise to do so. Nixon had a 24-​­point lead over McGovern among Catholics nationwide, but he was ahead by 36 in New York—​­a state where an overwhelming number of Catholics like these women had left New York City’s Democratic enclaves and moved to the voter-​­rich surrounding suburbs that became an important bellwether for winning the state.88 In this climate, the Donovan-​­Crawford bill passed the Assembly on 9 May

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1972, by a vote of 79-​­68, and the State Senate the next day by 30-​­27. The speeches that preceded each vote mirrored the arguments from 1970. Opponents described legal abortion as murder and spoke about religion and morality, while those such as Assemblywoman Cook positioned it as a woman’s right. Cook noted that only sex education, increased access to contraceptives, and better childcare options and other financial aid for families could stop abortions, not recriminalizing the procedure and putting women’s lives in danger. While these arguments were unchanged from 1970, the anti-​­abortion movement’s growth in those two years was felt dramatically. In the Assembly in 1972, Cook lost five votes from 1970, including three legislators who had planned to vote against the Donovan-​­Crawford bill before anti-​­abortion activists threatened them with primary races. In the State Senate, the anti-​ ­abortion coalition picked up four additional votes, one from Republican Norman Levy of Merrick, Long Island, where the Right to Life Party was founded. Levy’s vote was prudent in this always closely contested district where the RTLP’s Vincent Carey had won an important 2.5 percent (swing) vote in his U.S. Congressional election in 1970.89 As expected, Governor Rockefeller preserved legal abortion by vetoing the Donovan-​­Crawford bill on 13 May 1972. He argued that “repeal of the 1970 reforms would not end abortions. It would only end abortions under safe and supervised medical conditions.” He saw “no justification” for “condemning hundreds of thousands of women to the dark age once again.”90 Rockefeller sounded confident in public, but he privately admitted feeling “very lonely in his pro-​­abortion stand in 1972 because there was no public evidence of grassroots support.”91 The strong coalition from 1970 had receded, not because support for legal abortion had diminished, since polling indicated otherwise, but because supporters were confident that Rockefeller would protect the law. Proponents were comparatively invisible in Albany until it became clear that the Donovan-​­Crawford bill could pass. Luckily, Rockefeller upheld the law for them, but he felt pressured by the growing anti-​­abortion movement—​­an energy that conservative Republicans hoping to increase their influence wisely co-​­opted in coming years.92

Outward from New York After more than two years of wrangling in Albany, the debate shifted outside New York when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion at the federal

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level on 22 January 1973 in its Doe v. Bolton and Roe v. Wade decisions. The Doe decision determined that hospital restrictions on abortion were ­unconstitutional—​­overturning, for example, the local ordinances the RTLC had sought in New York. The better-​­known Roe decision, out of Texas, ruled that restrictive state abortion laws violated a right to privacy guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision divided pregnancy into three trimesters, each roughly three months long. In the first trimester, a state could not interfere with a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion. In the second trimester, a state could only set regulations that were reasonably related to the expectant woman’s health. In the third trimester, a state could prohibit abortion, except when it was necessary to preserve the life or health of the woman. New York’s 1970 abortion reform law comfortably fit these parameters.93 On the heels of Donovan-​­Crawford, advocates of legal abortion in New York applauded the court’s decisions. Politicians such as Assemblywoman Cook and Governor Rockefeller were happy to have a national policy in place that shifted the burden away from states. As one unnamed legislator told a Long Island newspaper, “Everyone is off the hook.”94 While some politicians rejoiced at the prospect of no longer facing controversial votes, legal abortion activists in New York shunned such complacency. The Donovan-​­Crawford campaign in 1972 had shown them that they could not rest on their laurels as they had after the state legalized abortion in 1970. Six months before the Supreme Court decisions, in July of 1972, proponents in New York formed the Right to Choose coalition to unite religious leaders, educators, women’s groups, and others who supported legal abortion. The coalition was led by organized feminists and focused on lobbying, making it a corollary on the left to the RTLC.95 As their name implied, New York’s Right to Choose coalition positioned legal abortion as a choice, a framework later embraced on the national level. Right to Choose promoted the idea that women not only had a right to legal abortions, as feminists in the state had argued for years, but, above all, they had a right to a choice in the matter. The difference was subtle, but defending “choice” was more palatable in a polarizing political environment than appearing to defend the abortion procedure itself—​­a formulation that advocates hoped would shield them from being called “pro-​­abortion.” The pro-​­choice language adopted by activists in New York in 1972 became the dominant national paradigm in the years following the 1973 Supreme Court decisions. Many of the leading advocates for choice in New York, such as NOW’s Betty

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Friedan, were national figures who prolifically defended legal abortion at the federal level after 1973. Anti-​­abortion advocates also made their voices heard outside the state. At first, they tried to weaken the Supreme Court decisions at the state level. In 1974, the RTLC pressured Albany to restrict late-​­term abortions under the terms set forth by Roe v. Wade. Yet there was only so much states could do. Father Driscoll of the Catholic Human Life Bureau on Long Island recommended passing a federal “human life amendment” that would give constitutional rights to unborn fetuses from conception onward (and therefore make legal abortion state-​­sanctioned murder). Doing so would require a national anti-​­abortion group, and the state’s RTLC soon expanded to form the National Right to Life Committee in 1973, with its founder, Ed Golden from upstate New York, as president.96 New York’s anti-​­abortion movement shaped national debate in terms not only of leadership, but of tactics. Spurred by the National Right to Life Committee and other grassroots activists, sympathetic members of the U.S. Congress began attacking the Supreme Court decisions on two fronts: by trying to end (federal) Medicaid funding for abortions and by proposing human life amendments. The former was achieved in 1976, and the latter never passed, though not for lack of trying. Within the U.S. House of Representatives alone, twenty-​­eight human life amendments were proposed in 1973 and 1974, twenty-​­one of them from Catholic legislators. These efforts to weaken the Supreme Court decisions were reminiscent of the state funding restrictions and local ordinances New York’s anti-​­abortion movement had pushed for in the years after the state law passed in 1970. The successful mobilization of groups such as the RTLC and RTLP in New York from 1970 through 1972 had provided a roadmap for weakening the U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1973 onward. None of these organizations or political maneuverings could have existed at the state or federal level without grassroots support from women with more flexible schedules who were prompted by their religious and political backgrounds, as well as personal familial circumstances (often as first-​­generation homemakers and mothers), to save unborn “babies.” The politics of New York and the nation were drifting rightward by the early seventies, often turning on matters like abortion that related to women and ­families—​­issues feminists first had made political.97 When the women from New York’s Right to Life Party ventured into politics in 1970, for example, they also helped James Buckley, a conservative anti-​ a­ bortion candidate, win a coveted U.S. Senate seat. Buckley, the brother of

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conservative author and icon William F. Buckley, ran on the Conservative Party line, representing this third party that had been formed in 1962 to try to marginalize moderate Republicans such as Rockefeller. Buckley won with 39 percent of the vote in a close three-​­way race. Only 120,000 votes separated him from his Democratic competitor, Richard Ottinger, who split liberal votes with Charles Goodell, a Republican in Rockefeller’s mold. Following the successful conservative blueprint other Republicans had used—​­including Ronald Reagan in the California gubernatorial race in 1966 and President Nixon in 1968—​­Buckley attracted people from both major parties with his law-​­and-​ ­order platform that promised to quell contemporary protest movements and to lower taxes. With the state, especially New York City, an important center of protest and urban rioting in recent years, and with the economy slowing down, many people in the populous outlying suburbs found Buckley’s candidacy appealing. He captured a reported 42 percent of the state’s blue-​­collar vote that had been the backbone of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition for decades. He also came out against legal abortion while Goodell and Ottinger remained silent; as a result, the RTLP, with its leadership in populous Nassau County on Long Island, endorsed Buckley and volunteered on his campaign. These factors gave Buckley a narrow edge in the three-​­way contest, notably in the four suburban counties outside New York City where taxes were high, transplants worried about their old urban neighborhoods declining, and much female-​­led anti-​­abortion (and more broadly, antifeminist) activism was based. Buckley’s victory was a harbinger of what was to come as conservative Republicans learned to merge fiscal and social conservatism in these crucial counties to marginalize Rockefeller’s wing of the GOP.98 From Nixon’s promise to represent the silent majority to James Buckley’s third-​­party challenge, a rightward-​­leaning populism had arisen that even the most stalwart moderates could not ignore. This politics splintered both major political parties, mixing racial resentment with a pledge to restore law and order to a society torn apart by an unpopular war, declining economy, and recent social movements. Governor Rockefeller, who still harbored presidential aspirations in the early seventies, soon adapted. In 1971, he took (an ultimately deadly) law-​­and-​­order line against prisoners who demanded political rights during tense rioting at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York; in 1973, he promised to help eradicate (racialized) urban crime by signing the nation’s toughest drug laws. These positions made Rockefeller an atpresidential pick for Gerald Ford when he assumed the tractive vice-​­ presidency in 1974 after the Watergate scandal led Nixon to resign.99

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Women from the RTLP and RTLC learned to co-​­opt this rightward-​ l­eaning populism in ways that, whether they knew it or not, had been leveraged by female activists across the political spectrum in the past. After New York State legalized abortion in 1970, Catholic women, new to electoral politics, were able to project authority and moral certitude by simply being themselves, embracing an identity that they cherished, and perhaps the only one they felt comfortable evincing in such uncharted waters. They were concerned mothers battling entrenched feminist interests on a matter that their Catholic leaders said sanctioned the killing of unborn “babies.” It was a clear case of good versus evil. The women sincerely believed this to be the case, making abortion politics hit home for these homemakers who happily cared for their children full time. The women may have been new to politics—​­outsiders facing insiders, as they saw it—​­but these concerns were familiar to them as mothers, and as those with Democratic and Catholic upbringings that made them predisposed to see the state as a guarantor of rights for society’s most vulnerable, whether it be the poor or fetuses. As busy mothers seeking to mobilize others like them, leaders from the RTLP and RTLC intertwined anti-​ ­abortion activism with everyday life. Canvassing for money simply involved talking to neighbors or stopping by familiar shopping centers. Lobbying in the capital was relatively simple when a bus left from one’s parish. Even if they were pressed for time, it was easy to sign and mail a preprinted form letter in a church bulletin. This momentum unleashed over legal abortion only continued to grow in subsequent years, and the women soon had a new target to organize against in New York: the state Equal Rights Amendment.

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Equal Rights and Profamily Politics

After Governor Rockefeller’s veto in 1972 and the Supreme Court decisions in 1973, Claire Middleton of the Champlain Valley Right to Life Committee (RTLC) realized that abortion would not be recriminalized anytime soon. When someone in Middleton’s RTLC group suggested exchanging ideas with women doing similar work across the country, she agreed. Middleton continued her anti-​­abortion activism in upstate New York through the years, often drawing on her husband’s vast contacts after he became chair of the state’s Right to Life Committee in 1973. In the meantime, this effort to connect with other women’s groups led her into one of New York’s biggest political battles in 1974 and 1975: the attempt to add an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the state constitution. Middleton recalled, “I began to think, I can’t stop abortion” right now, so “let me see if I can stop this other thing [the state ERA] over here.”1 Controversy initially erupted over adding an ERA to the U.S. Constitution. This two-​­sentence amendment proposed that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged . . . ​on account of sex.”2 The amendment was introduced by a small faction of feminists in 1923, but Congress did not pass it until 1972, after it won support from Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, labor unions, and the modern women’s liberation ­movement—​­most of whom previously had worried about the ERA eliminating female protective labor legislation. After the ERA cleared Congress, it had to be approved by at least three-​­fourths of state legislatures before the U.S. Constitution could be amended. Thirty states including New York ratified the ERA within a year, at which point opponents—​­led by Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative Republican activist and self-​­proclaimed housewife—​­mobilized against it. The amendment expired in 1982, still three states short of ratification.3

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When the federal ERA ground to a halt around 1974, women’s rights groups in New York began lobbying for a state ERA. As one pamphlet argued, “We have no idea when, if ever, the necessary number of states will ratify the U.S. ERA,” but “The people of New York State should . . . ​be guaranteed the right of equal treatment under the law.”4 Supporters assumed that the state ERA would pass easily and reinvigorate the federal campaign. New York, after all, was an epicenter of modern feminism. Just four years before, Assemblywoman Constance Cook’s feminist-​­backed coalition had delivered the nation’s most expansive abortion reform law. Even Phyllis Schlafly believed the amendment would be successful in the home state of feminist luminaries such as Betty Friedan and U.S. representative Bella Abzug, so she declined to send resources to New York. The state ERA contained the same language as its federal counterpart and more than one hundred organizations endorsed it, including feminist groups and the state’s Democratic and (Rockefeller-​­led) Republican parties. But despite this perceived inevitability, it failed by 400,000 votes when it—​­like all proposed amendments to the state constitution—​­was put on the ballot as a referendum. The state ERA lost crucial votes in the four suburban counties outside New York City, which had grown rapidly in size and political importance since World War II.5 The amendment was defeated after mostly white, middle-​­class homemakers formed Operation Wakeup, a statewide opposition group that was based in the downstate suburbs and vowed to “wake up” New Yorkers to its hidden dangers. Echoing critiques on the national level, Wakeup claimed that the state ERA would compel homemakers to enter the paid workforce while their children languished in state-​­run daycares, that women would have to serve in military combat, and public restrooms would no longer be sex-​­segregated. Opponents worried that offering women the same legally protected choices as men was akin to mandating the same expectations for both sexes. None of this would bode well for women. Contented housewives (as many Wakeup members were) would be pushed out of their homes for legal reasons, as some of their mothers had been for economic ones during the Depression. Female GIs would soon perish alongside men, a palpable fear a year after the deadly conflict in Vietnam had ended, a war that many Americans thought was unnecessary. Co-​­ed bathrooms, Wakeup implied, would offend women’s supposed higher standards of cleanliness and make them more susceptible to sexual danger. Proponents of the state ERA refuted these assertions, often with very dense legal explanations, but Wakeup had put them on the defensive, which made it harder to articulate what benefits the amendment would offer women.6

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Like the abortion debates, the state ERA energized a new class of activist suburban women, including those like Claire Middleton who opposed both for overlapping reasons. Many women felt that their families had attained the American dream—​­having a male breadwinner and female homemaker in a single-​­ family suburban home—​­ and they were determined to protect it. Wakeup members feared that the state ERA would muddy clearly delineated roles and responsibilities for each sex. As Middleton surmised about feminists, “The hand that refuses to rock the cradle is all too eager to overturn the world.”7 Middleton’s remark exposed a belief that also surfaced during the abortion debates: that feminists did not value motherhood, which was a central identity for many opponents. Middleton and her allies felt that if economic circumstances allowed it, a woman should “rock the cradle” full time. Not doing so would break apart families and upend the natural, divinely inspired world order. They worried that as the economy weakened in the seventies, proposals such as the ERA would introduce unnecessary job competition for male breadwinners in a labor market that was already contracting. Again relying on populist and maternalist rhetoric, Wakeup members presented themselves as humble suburban homemakers forced into the foreign political arena to protect their families. They were mere mothers confronting well-​ f­ unded, influential political insiders and feminists, and they would not back down from those wishing to harm traditional nuclear families like theirs. Equally important, as the state ERA became evocative of big government, with both major parties and several New York officials supporting it, the women began to look toward small-​­government conservative Republicans.8 Like anti-​­abortion groups operating from the grassroots, Wakeup’s political tactics were wedded to their suburban lifestyles. ERA proponents were headquartered in New York City and waged a far more expensive, top-​­down campaign with paid media advertising. In contrast, Wakeup had a shoestring budget that was sustained by fundraising tactics its members had honed in suburban church and civic groups. The women held neighborhood coffee klatches, canvassed playgroups and grocery stores, and turned to sympathetic organizations—​­notably overlapping anti-​­abortion ones with statewide lobbying experience—​­for money and volunteers. Wakeup formed a large grassroots network of people who perceived feminism in general, and the state ERA in particular, as affronts to the traditional nuclear family (and, by extension, to their newly acquired suburban privilege and homemaker roles). The GOP’s right wing later embraced this framework to consolidate their power over moderates in the party. To understand how this anti-​­ERA, “pro-​­family,” as

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opponents called it, politics evolved from the contentious abortion battles, it is useful to examine how the amendment first surfaced in New York.9

“Now, we . . . ​are AWAKE”: The 1974 and 1975 Legislative Sessions The state ERA’s legislative journey took several years and was sustained by feminists. NOW began lobbying for a state ERA in the late sixties. NOW, which focused on changing the law, saw the state ERA as an expedient means to achieve full legal rights for women—​­rendering all discriminatory laws null and void in one fell swoop. Both liberal and radical feminist groups also saw the ERA as an important symbol of equality. Buoyed by grassroots support, often from those fighting for legal abortion, Assemblywoman Constance Cook looked into drafting and bringing a state ERA to the floor of the legislature in the late sixties. But with more pressing issues like abortion to contend with, that did not happen until the spring of 1974.10 Proponents believed that the state ERA would pass very easily, if not quickly since amending the state constitution took at least two years. In order to do so, the State Assembly and Senate would each have to approve the amendment in 1974. In 1975, both would have to do so again, with the amendment’s exact language from 1974 intact. If that occurred, the state ERA would be placed on the ballot in November 1975 as a referendum; if voters approved it, the state constitution would be amended in 1976. The process was cumbersome, but as one supporter argued, “New York is considered the most progressive of the [fifty states] in this country, and has a tradition of importing into its own constitution basic guarantees of the federal government.”11 Women accounted for roughly 59 percent of the state’s population in 1974, and nearly 41 percent worked outside the home. Proponents were sure that these statistics would translate into wide backing for the state ERA—​­both from legislators hoping to woo female voters and from women who were financially independent or facing job discrimination.12 As predicted, the Assembly endorsed the state ERA on 24 April 1974. In comments preceding the vote, Assemblywoman Cook noted that the state ERA was virtually identical to the federal version the legislature had passed in 1972. Cook also saw its necessity. New York had made important legal strides for women in recent years, but the state ERA would eliminate remaining sex discrimination in areas such as banking, credit, and insurance law. Cook and the

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other three women in the Assembly believed that women’s interests were not served well by a predominantly male legislature that sought to protect them with laws that only applied to them—​­just as African Americans were not helped by racial exceptions under Jim Crow. Feminist groups supporting the state ERA were after full legal equality for both sexes; this, they thought, would give women (like men) more choices about their family and career paths. Opponents in the Assembly disagreed. Gerald Solomon, a Republican representing several conservative counties upstate, described himself as an old-​­fashioned supporter of chivalry. Forsaking equality, he thought that women should be placed on a pedestal and granted special legal protections. John Esposito, another marginalized conservative Republican, claimed that national surveys indicated that 80 percent of people opposed the ERA. He introduced a proposal that, had it been successful, would have allowed New Yorkers to vote on the state ERA sooner. He hoped that rejecting it as quickly as possible in a supposed bastion of liberalism and feminism would send a clear message to state legislatures still debating the federal ERA.13 These ideas encapsulated the feelings of women such as Claire Middleton. Although Middleton had not been politically active before the abortion debates, she simply had to get involved in the early seventies because, she recalled, “things [were] changing so drastically.” Like the Catholic Church, Middleton and others professed to believe in equal rights for women; equal pay and employment would have helped many working mothers during the lean Depression years of their youth. But, ideally, that was not the norm. “I was raised in a family with traditional cultural values,” Middleton explained, “so I believed very strongly that the woman’s role was in the home.”14 She and her allies argued that the state ERA would not offer women anything they did not already have or could achieve through individual changes to the law. Since the amendment seemed unnecessary, they feared that it was a ruse masking feminists’ true desire to obliterate homemaking, maybe even motherhood. Women such as Middleton relished their ability to stay at home full time and give their children lives of more abundance in the suburbs. They sensed this prize being devalued—​­if not outright threatened—​­by feminists campaigning for other alternatives for women, including an amendment with unclear intent.15 In the spring of 1974, these sentiments were just percolating, mostly out of public view as women like Claire Middleton learned about the state ERA and got together with friends and neighbors to stop it. Middleton first heard about the ERA in 1974, after her RTLC chapter reached out to other women’s

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groups across the country to strategize about outlawing abortion. As people’s personal connections spiraled outward, Middleton’s anti-​­abortion group in upstate New York connected with Happiness of Womanhood (HOW) in Kingman, Arizona. HOW was started by antifeminist activist Jacqui Davidson and was reportedly the first group created to oppose the federal ERA. When the women learned that New York was contemplating passing a state ERA, Middleton and ten associates in the Plattsburgh area, some of whom were in her RTLC chapter, started their own branch of HOW.16 A nearby newspaper profiled the group and snapped a photograph of Middleton and four others sitting in a member’s living room. The accompanying caption summarized the women’s motives for organizing against the state ERA and feminism more broadly: “Happiness of Women, Inc., a national group seeking to counter what members [feel are] coercive pressures from the National Organization of [sic] Women and other feminist groups.”17 The picture spoke volumes, as the women sat in a suburban home plotting how to save the traditional family life anchored in that space from feminism and the state ERA.

Figure 1. Claire Middleton (far right) gathers with local members of Happiness of Womanhood (HOW) in a home in West Chazy, New York, in 1974 to strategize about defeating the state ERA. Courtesy of Press-​­Republican.

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Opponents soon formed a spider web of dissent across the state that was based in the suburbs of New York City. Annette Stern, who became the statewide opposition leader, first heard Betty Friedan talking about the ERA on her kitchen radio in the spring of 1974. As she prepared food for her family, Stern became agitated. Friedan, she thought, “was making it sound like the home was a prison and . . . ​that childcare was slavery,” and “that it was okay to work for a boss, but not to do things for your husband.”18 Stern, a married homemaker with three young boys who by then lived in the affluent town of Harrison in Westchester County, began talking to female friends and acquaintances about what she had learned. She decided to convene a meeting because, Stern said, “nobody was speaking for what I consider my kind of woman,” and “it made me curious about the ERA.”19 Word spread until nearly one hundred people showed up at her home for the inaugural meeting of a group they called Women UNited to Defend Existing Rights (WUNDER). Their name infused domesticity with popular rights-​­based language. The rights in question were not legal ones, but a spirited defense of the traditional gender roles and familial arrangements that WUNDER members like Stern relished. A similar group on Long Island with 400 members, Women for Honest Equality in National Women’s Groups (WHEN), cropped up in November of 1974; they felt that women’s groups were disproportionately feminist and sought to offer an alternative. The names that groups chose were different, but they all conveyed opposition to what those like Claire Middleton and Annette Stern understood feminism to be. As women gathered together on the grassroots level—​­at kitchen tables and living room sofas that seemed to call to mind what was at stake—​­they became certain that an ERA (on the state or federal level) was not warranted. WUNDER and WHEN members were content with the status quo. If additional rights were needed for their sex, which none saw a need for, they could be obtained without amending the constitution and compelling homemakers into the paid workforce. These sentiments again foreshadowed the women’s partnership with conservative Republicans who also believed in limited government and constitutional originalism.20 As groups formed across New York in the spring of 1974, they functioned mostly unaware of one another, with Phyllis Schlafly’s newsletter as one of the only links to bind them. Schlafly, a longtime conservative Republican activist who emerged as the national spokeswoman against the ERA and feminism in general, was often in the news debating high-​­profile feminist supporters such as NOW’s Betty Friedan—​­and given that many feminist leaders resided in the New York City area, these exchanges were covered by the local media to which

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Stern and other homemakers had access. Schlafly understood the power of projecting a uniform message to oppose the federal and various state ERAs. She produced a monthly newsletter, the Phyllis Schlafly Report, to keep members of StopERA and similar groups across the country on the same page. A masterful organizer, she gave out her contact information in every public appearance and encouraged people to subscribe to the newsletter.21 Seeing this in the news, Claire Middleton wrote to Schlafly after forming her anti-​­ERA HOW group in the Plattsburgh area. Schlafly responded by noting, “You are on sound ground if you stick to the arguments in my newsletters and do not stray afield.”22 The newsletters gave Middleton and other women learning about the ERA in New York a boost of confidence by supplying them with specific arguments to wield before the state legislature. In turn, Schlafly bolstered her own power by fanning the grassroots. Nearly all the anti-​­ERA leaders in New York State subscribed to her newsletter. Schlafly, who was in New York City at the time, even attended the first gathering of WUNDER at Annette Stern’s suburban home in nearby Westchester County. She was invited by some of the women planning the meeting who had written to her to inquire about the newsletter.23 The process snowballed to the point where Pat Yungbluth, president of a NOW chapter in Buffalo, complained about having “a woman here who looks, sounds, and argues like Phyllis Schlafly.”24 Middleton’s exchange with Schlafly also highlights how anti-​­abortion activism fueled opposition to the ERA. In her letter to Schlafly, Middleton recalled, “I told her that my husband was chairman of the RTLC, so she knew I was genuine.”25 Schlafly enthusiastically replied, “Since your husband is chairman of New York State Right to Life, I know you are OK!”26 Middleton’s anti-​ ­abortion credentials secured Schlafly’s trust. The anti-​­abortion and anti-​­ERA movements both attracted people who believed that feminist-​­backed goals would undermine traditional family life by attacking motherhood and full-​ t­ ime homemaking. Schlafly solidified the link by often arguing, without proof, that the ERA would make it impossible to outlaw abortion. She also likely understood that people from the anti-​­abortion movement would be a valuable source of money and volunteers for the anti-​­ERA movement, which was true in New York. Even if they were not sophisticated about the inner workings of Albany, veterans of the state’s anti-​­abortion movement—​­crucially including homemakers with more flexible schedules and those who had lobbied politicians and testified before legislative committees in the past—​­were apt to do it again for what they considered a related cause.27 Despite benefiting from experience in the anti-​­abortion movement and

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advice in Schlafly’s newsletters, when anti-​­ERA groups formed across New York, their initial efforts were tentative. When the Senate began debating the state ERA in 1974 after the Assembly’s endorsement that April, Claire Middleton’s HOW group decided to drive down to Albany from Plattsburgh. Although she had been to the capital with her church and the RTLC, Middleton had never led a lobbying trip; unsure of what to do, she reached out to the original Arizona-​­based HOW group. “They told me to go down to Albany to take a poll of where the legislators stood” on the state ERA, Middleton remembered, “and to bring apple pies. So I did!”28 The group baked about a dozen pies, which, after Schlafly embraced the habit, became standard practice for anti-​­ERA activists across the country. Doing so became testament to the expression, “as American as motherhood and apple pie.” The women aimed to embody what they said the ERA would take away from women: the right in America, as opposed to the Soviet Union, to opt out of paid work and become a housewife. For women of humbler economic origins, this (often new) ability was worth leaving their homes to protect. Without a unified front from anti-​­ERA groups across the state, lobbying trips like Middleton’s were scattered and ineffective. Anti-​­ERA groups did not have substantive backing from the Catholic Church, which preferred to focus on abortion and did not offer its pulpits and vast parishioner networks to the extent that it had before.29 When Middleton and her associates arrived in Albany, they roamed the Capitol building without a plan. State senator Joseph Pisani, a Republican from Westchester County, had a professional photographer in his office at the time. The photographer captured a picture of Middleton and another woman presenting Pisani with an apple pie. The senator sent a black-​ a­nd-​­white copy of the photograph to Middleton, inscribing across the top, “Dear Claire Middleton with thanks. The pie was good and so is your cause.”30 Their trip, however, had little real impact. On 6 May 1974, the Senate approved the state ERA, just as the Assembly had done in April. The Senate’s final tally of 47-​­3 included an affirmative vote from Republican senator Pisani, who represented Nelson Rockefeller’s home turf and had embraced Middleton’s pie, but not her anti-​­ERA views. The state ERA had now passed the Assembly and Senate; all that remained was a repeat performance in 1975 before it could become a ballot referendum that November. In the coming years, many legislators—​­especially those from the four counties outside New York City like Senator Pisani—​­would learn not to ignore the concerns of Claire Middleton and others. But in the spring of 1974, opponents were just beginning to organize.31

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Figure 2. Claire Middleton and an associate present a homemade pie to State Senator Joseph Pisani in 1974, modeling the domesticity they said would be lost if the state ERA passed. Author’s collection.

The women realized that they would have to mobilize more effectively to stop the state ERA, which prompted them to create Operation Wakeup in the summer of 1974. Wakeup was an umbrella organization based in Westchester County that connected individual pockets of resistance across New York. When Middleton was in Albany with the pies, she was interviewed by a syndicated radio host. After the trip, Middleton received a call from Lillian Koegler, a social studies teacher from Westchester County who knew of her through the RTLC. Koegler, a founding member of the WUNDER group that was started at Annette Stern’s home in Westchester, had heard Middleton on the radio; she wanted to coordinate with the women upstate in HOW. Middleton agreed, and in July of 1974, Operation Wakeup held its first meeting and began plotting how to “wake up” fellow New Yorkers to the dangers purportedly posed by the state ERA. WUNDER’s Annette Stern became president of Wakeup, and a series of officers and “area contacts,” one of them Claire

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Middleton in the Plattsburgh area, were installed to coordinate messaging and lobbying tactics across the state.32 Most, but not all, Wakeup members were middle-​­to upper-​­middle-​­class, white, Catholic homemakers in their thirties and forties with time to organize, including a sizable number from the downstate suburbs where anti-​­abortion activism was strongest. Many of these women first felt unsettled in the sixties when they moved to new suburbs and confronted the Vatican II reforms, but legal abortion and the state ERA appeared to be far worse threats to traditional family life. Wakeup also attracted a small percentage of men as well as women who worked outside the home, such as Lillian Koegler, a teacher from Westchester County. Non-​­Catholics took part, too. Wakeup’s president, Annette Stern, was Reform Jewish. Some Jews, mostly socially conservative Orthodox men, were involved in the anti-​­abortion movement, but they were hardly represented in the more female and secularly oriented Wakeup. A small contingent of Mormons in New York opposed the state ERA, although they did not play a prominent role in Wakeup owing to their social insularity and concentration in more isolated rural counties upstate. While the New York State Conservative Party endorsed Wakeup’s efforts, the political affiliations of its members varied. Annette Stern, for example, was raised in New York City as a Democrat. She registered as a Republican at her husband’s request once they became comfortable suburban homeowners in Westchester County, where property taxes have always been very high. Yet party affiliation mattered very little to Wakeup. Most members were just starting to pay attention to electoral politics; they joined Wakeup (and for many, anti-​­abortion groups before that) to ensure that their lives, which were dominated by homemaking and motherhood, remained unchanged.33 Wakeup spread at the grassroots level throughout the remainder of 1974 as personal and anti-​­abortion ties fueled its growth. Just as Lillian Koegler in Westchester County had reached out to fellow RTLC member Claire Middleton living five hours north of her, similar interactions occurred throughout New York. Not surprisingly, at least six of Wakeup’s fourteen area contacts had known links to the anti-​­abortion movement. Within six months, Wakeup encompassed twenty-​­four anti-​­ERA groups and an estimated 100,000 people across the state.34 With a growing membership and infrastructure in place, Wakeup was better positioned to stop the state ERA in 1975, when the legislature would consider the amendment again before potentially allowing voters to weigh in that November. The group maintained a post office box in Stern’s hometown of

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Harrison, while members, lacking a formal headquarters, worked from their homes and over the telephone. They operated on a limited budget of whatever funds they could raise through bake sales, raffles, and other grassroots endeavors. In other words, they engaged in many of the same pursuits they had been immersed in before the abortion and state ERA battles—​­particularly in the densely populated suburbs of New York City, where parish and family-​ ­oriented networks were ubiquitous.35 As Stern argued after the legislature passed the state ERA in 1974, “It has gone this far . . . ​because our representatives succumbed to the pressure of small, well-​­organized, vociferous [feminist] groups.”36 As she saw it, more traditional women and housewives were a silent majority. But with their way of life potentially on the chopping block, they could no longer remain silent. Cay Dorney and Rudy Blaum, both members of Wakeup’s small branch in New York City, issued a warning to legislators in January of 1975 that set the tone for the state ERA debates that year: “Now, we, the opponents, are AWAKE.”37 Sensing peril, Wakeup members assumed a populist mantle to expose entrenched and unknown political dangers. Stern began asking friends and neighbors about the state ERA. She canvassed every corner of the familiar suburban world she inhabited. “I did my own little poll at the supermarket, at the dentist office, at Little League practice,” she remembered. “I just asked people, ‘Have you ever heard of ERA? What do you think it means?’ ”38 She spoke to a reported ninety-​­three people in and around her hometown in Westchester County; eighty-​­seven had never heard of the state ERA. The other six people associated the amendment with vaguely defined notions about women’s equality, without being able to say what it would specifically do.39 With seemingly little general awareness of the state ERA, Stern and her allies were determined to spread their beliefs and convince a sizable number of voters to feel the same way. In another letter to legislators in February of 1975, Wakeup posed a series of questions designed to underscore how the state ERA would hurt the family, such as “Will wives not employed outside the home be deprived of their present right to receive Social Security benefits based on their husbands’ earnings?”40 As this leading question demonstrates, the ERA fight was intensely personal for many Wakeup members. Their primary concern was maintaining a family structure like their own, where husbands function as providers and economic safety nets for their homemaker wives—​­even as the weak economy made this set-​­up increasingly difficult to maintain. Wakeup raised such concerns in countless letters, petitions, telephone calls, and visits to Albany in 1975. Members also challenged supporters

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Figure 3. Virginia (Ginny) Lavan, a vice president of Wakeup, faced a member of the Coalition for Equal Rights (CER) in a debate over the state ERA in October 1975 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute upstate. Courtesy of Rich Beyer, Rensselaer Polytechnic.

in a series of legislative hearings and debates, which they hoped would give their views an even wider audience.41 Wakeup’s growing influence was evident, if not entirely convincing, when the Assembly approved the state ERA for a second time in March of 1975. Several Assembly members mentioned Wakeup’s lobbying in the discussion that preceded the vote. The public gallery above was packed with backers and opponents of the state ERA. Women’s groups such as NOW had followed the amendment for years, but Wakeup’s presence in the chamber was new. In the end, the Assembly approved the state ERA by a vote of 128-​­15. Many legislators were squeamish about appearing to abandon women after wide-​­ranging political movements had exalted the importance of societal equality and civil (legal) rights in recent years. Self-​­serving politicians also hesitated to vote against the amendment in a state where 59 percent of its residents were female, 41 percent of women worked outside the home, and feminism was strong. Opponents were now more engaged, but Wakeup lacked the money and high profile of its adversaries—​­an assemblage of feminist, civic, and political organizations, including the state’s Democratic and Republican parties. Wakeup’s increased visibility—​­coupled with memories of the abortion battles that had involved similar concerns and activist women—​­did, however, unnerve ERA proponents.42 They responded by forming the New York Coalition for Equal Rights

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(CER) in May 1975 to push the Senate to pass the state ERA. Proponents’ need for a coalition was evident after Wakeup successfully pressed legislators for public hearings on the state ERA that March. Roughly 500 people on both sides attended to air their views. The CER was an umbrella organization that united various groups in the state supporting the ERA. Its membership eventually totaled one hundred civic, women’s, political, and religious groups across the ideological and geographic spectrum, although many were feminist ones based in and around New York City. The CER was managed by Sandra Turner, a paid organizer with deep political roots. Although Turner had worked on a statewide political campaign before—​­helping elect Democrat Mary Anne Krupsak lieutenant governor in 1974—​­her experience was much greater in New York City. Turner’s more urban orientation plagued the CER throughout the campaign, ultimately leading the state ERA to lose crucial votes in the populous suburbs outside the city where Wakeup was based and drew most of its support.43 With the CER in place, proponents helped stifle a last-​­minute procedural tactic designed to defeat the state ERA, and the amendment cleared the Senate soon after on 21 May 1975, by a wide margin of forty-​­four to fourteen votes. Wakeup had moved eleven senators into its camp, but that was not enough to stymie the state ERA’s progress. Proponents were thrilled: the amendment would now be placed on the ballot that November for what they assumed would be a decisive victory. Wakeup was disappointed, but vowed to keep fighting through the referendum that November. Most of its members feared that the state ERA would end life as they knew it. If Wakeup could convince enough voters of its views, it could defeat one of feminists’ biggest goals in a state at the epicenter of modern women’s liberation.44

Fighting for “Women Who Stand by the Sink” Two themes prevailed in Wakeup’s campaign against the state ERA—​­heartfelt, raw beliefs that resonated powerfully with the homemakers who mostly ran the group and led the charge at the polls in 1975. First, Wakeup argued that feminists were a vocal minority of women that disproportionately prevailed upon the legislature. Testifying before the State Senate in 1975, Claire Middleton recalled her first anti-​­ERA lobbying trip to Albany in 1974 with the pies, noting that “it had little impact on the New York lawmakers who apparently thought this was all a big joke.” But, she insisted, “We were not joking; we were

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convinced that the self-​­appointed female chauvinists who claimed to represent all women did not speak for the majority of American women.”45 Second, and even worse, Wakeup said that feminists degraded the homemaker role. Ceil Herman of Long Island noted, “We women who choose a career in the home are . . . ​considered by [feminists] to be servile, dishonest, inefficient, inconsistent, idiotic, passive, ignorant and ineffectual individuals.” But, she promised, “Passive we were in the past; passive we will no longer be.”46 A profound sense of alienation undergirded these statements and inspired a populist response from homemakers. Many Wakeup members were new to politics and felt themselves to be on the perimeter of influence. Their concerns, they said, were not being taken seriously. Wakeup asserted that a small faction of feminists were operating as insiders and misrepresenting what was best for women. As feminists campaigned for new legal rights for women and shared responsibilities in the home and family, traditional homemakers like Middleton and Herman felt insulted. Offering alternatives to women implied that staying at home was not as special as some first-​­generation suburban homemakers believed. By the seventies, an alleged silent majority of Americans was upset about the rapid social changes of the past decade. Wakeup members abandoned their silence to stop the state ERA and reaffirm their identities. They organized in a populist manner as concerned wives, homemakers, and mothers—​­deriving authority by focusing on the domestic and familial concerns they knew best, as other marginalized women had done in the past for various causes. Wakeup would use the resources around them (the only ones at their disposal as purported outsiders) to save their lifestyles that were defined by those very structures and support networks. Like its federal counterpart, the state ERA became a specific piece of legislation upon which opponents could graft their general anxiety about a range of issues. Claire Middleton once declared, “The anti-​­life, anti-​­God, anti-​ A ­ merican, anti-​­family forces in this country know that the Equal Rights Amendment will give them the [glue] to cement their revolutionary goals into our national and state constitutions.”47 This remark alludes to the unease—​­so poignant and unfamiliar as to be described as “anti-​­American”—​­that Middleton and other traditional (often devoutly Catholic) women had experienced in recent years. They had contended with unfamiliar suburbs and altered religious routines, while the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school prayer and legalized abortion. They were anxious about more change, especially since nobody knew how the ERA would be interpreted by legislators and the courts. Playing upon this anxiety, Wakeup launched a broadside attack. They focused

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on accusations that fit the context best, linking, for example, the state ERA to abortion when speaking to anti-​­abortion groups. In the process, the amendment was accused of a litany of offenses that spelled doom for the traditional family.48 The CER failed to address the alienation expressed by women such as Middleton and Herman; instead, it promoted vague patriotic assertions and tried to combat Wakeup’s “list of horribles,” as one proponent called its charges.49 The CER often spoke about equality, a notion deeply woven into American nationalism and ideas about the country’s founding, and one of particular resonance in the wake of the laudable southern civil rights movement. One of CER’s ads presented the state ERA as a “principle whose time is long overdue.”50 Slogans like this were familiar to voters and thought to be intrinsically American; they were also commonplace and easily forgotten. The amendment embodied an elusive concept to begin with, and the CER compounded the issue with such messaging. The specter of unisex bathrooms, whether a true possibility or not, was more tangible, and thus less likely to be forgotten in the voting booth, than patriotic sloganeering. Proponents noted that fifteen states already had state-​­level ERAs, and none of opponents’ allegations materialized in any of them. Doing so, however, ceded control of the debate to Wakeup. Instead of enumerating what new rights women would receive with a state ERA, which was hard to predict, discussions centered on Wakeup’s “list of horribles.” The proposed amendment became a Rorschach test that symbolized everything from the promise of more legal equality for women to the guaranteed destruction of family life. Opponents gave specifics and vowed to stop feminists from hurting families, which was an attractive promise for many first-​­generation homemakers who joined Wakeup and voted against the state ERA.51 While this was obvious in hindsight, the CER was initially confident of its chances for victory that November. A Louis Harris opinion poll found that Americans, by a wide 59 to 28 percent margin, favored “most of the efforts to strengthen and change women’s status in society.”52 The ERA, specifically, was favored 51 to 36 percent nationwide. The number was even higher in New York City, where a survey by the New York Daily News found that an overwhelming 80 percent favored the ERA.53 These polls followed a mostly successful session in Albany for women’s rights. In addition to the state ERA, in 1975 the legislature approved a so-​ ­called shield law that prohibited rape victims from being cross-​­examined at trials about their prior sexual experience. Insurance companies could no

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longer refuse coverage based on someone’s gender or marital status, and Governor Carey, following advice from the New York State Women’s Division, vetoed a law that would have given preference to veterans (i.e., more men than women) in civil service jobs. There had been setbacks, too. A maternity disability bill failed, as did those that would have allowed household workers (a group dominated by women) to engage in collective bargaining and middle-​ ­income families to qualify for state-​­subsidized childcare. On the other hand, a record number of nine women served in the legislature in 1975, and Mary Anne Krupsak was sworn in as the state’s first female lieutenant governor.54 Although the new rape shield law indicated that ideas about women’s sexuality had shifted leftward, these legislative results generally echoed the beliefs of the Catholic leaders and (often Catholic) women in New York who opposed measures such as legal abortion and the state ERA. Likely with innocent daughters, widows, and single mothers not of their own choosing in mind, legislators granted women legal protections to help their families, such as the added insurance provisions. But the failed collective bargaining and daycare proposals indicated that the legislature did not want to encourage even more women, including middle-​­class ones, to work outside the home. Still, progress had been made, and building on those achievements, the CER described the state ERA as a crucial next step in women’s (and America’s) march toward greater legal equality. The CER’s ads were draped in red, white, and blue colors and defied nuance, such as one bumper sticker declaring, “ERA: Vote ‘Yes’ The American Way.”55 The CER acknowledged that America had not always lived up to its promise of treating all people equally. The state ERA, it told voters, would help do so, much as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had done. One television commercial proclaimed, “The reason we don’t call it the Women’s Rights Amendment . . . ​or any other kind of amendment . . . ​is because this is a bill of, by and for all the people. . . . ​Because all people are created equal.”56 In other words, the state ERA was not designed by a radical fringe to only assist women or further feminist goals. More fully including women in the democracy would benefit everyone by making the country a better place to live. The emphasis on “people,” as opposed to “men” in the Declaration of Independence, underscored that women would now be included in the nation’s founding promise of equality. The CER often mentioned its endorsements from prominent supporters to further convey a sense of inevitability. Printed ads listed dozens of organizations that were part of the CER, suggesting that nearly everyone was for the amendment. The CER also promoted the fact that political leaders from both

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major parties backed the state ERA, including New York’s governor, Democrat Hugh Carey, and, on the (moderate) Republican side, President and Mrs. Ford and the state’s well-​­known former governor, current vice president Nelson Rockefeller. As the 1976 presidential primary got underway in 1975, the CER announced that several of Ford’s Democratic competitors, such as U.S. senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, U.S. representative Mo Udall of Arizona, and governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, supported it as well. Some politicians held press conferences to promote the state ERA, including one in Washington, D.C., that was heavily covered by the press and featured several members of Congress, including Democratic U.S. representative Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn, who hosted the event.57 Whenever possible, the CER tried to link the state ERA to patriotic celebrations of equality. On 26 August—​­Women’s Equality Day, which commemorates the passage of women’s suffrage in 1920 and the introduction of the federal ERA into the U.S. Congress in 1923—​­the CER persuaded Governor Carey to declare it “Equal Rights Amendment Day.” In doing so, Carey linked the state ERA to the nation’s upcoming bicentennial festivities. “As we celebrate the bicentennial of our nation’s fight for freedom,” his statement read, “I can think of no better way to herald the occasion than to work together to realize full equality of opportunity for all women and men.”58 In essence, passing the state ERA, which if approved by voters in 1975 would take effect in 1976, was the best way for New Yorkers to celebrate the nation’s founding promise of equality in its bicentennial year. Wakeup members gathered in protest on 26 August 1975 at Federal Hall in New York City, where the nation’s first president, George Washington, had been inaugurated. But their rally received comparatively little attention.59 Along with these patriotic slogans and endorsements, the CER tried to advertise how the amendment would be beneficial to women and the family—​ b ­ ut, as time went on, it almost exclusively responded to Wakeup’s accusations. Some CER advertisements described what proponents thought the state ERA would offer women, including more equitable child support laws that no longer required unmarried mothers to contribute an uneven 75 percent toward the cost of their children’s care.60 Unspecific, sweeping statements—​­such as “You Can Get a Lifetime Guarantee [of Equality]”—​­were far more common, followed by a long list of what the state ERA would not do. The state ERA would not force men and women to share public bathrooms, it would not undermine the traditional nuclear family by making “homosexual marriage” legal, and it would not compel homemakers to work outside the home. Exit

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Figure 4. Members of Wakeup campaign against the state ERA in March 1975 in the Buffalo-​­Niagara Falls metro area by conflating the amendment with gay rights and claiming it would lead to unisex public restrooms. Courtesy of Tonawanda News.

interviews later revealed that both sides repeating these allegations rendered them real in the minds of many homemakers and other voters whose personal circumstances seemed threatened.61 The CER’s marketing approach left ample room for Wakeup to dominate the messaging. Wakeup’s president, Annette Stern, recalled getting off to a slow start. “It’s very hard,” she noted, “to quarrel with ‘equal rights’ because it sounds like ‘Mama and apple pie.’ ”62 But, as a CER spokeswoman later concluded, fighting for an elusive principle like equality is more difficult than “setting forth a detailed legislative program.” Instead of spelling out a specific right—​­such as the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that had granted women suffrage—​­the ERA, she explained, laid out a “principle which gives guidance to legislation.”63 A legislative body or court would then have to determine how that principle was applied to actual policy to determine, for example, how the state ERA would affect marriage laws. Such concepts could be difficult for voters to grasp, leaving a wide opening for Wakeup’s “list of horribles” to spell out exactly how the state ERA would hurt women and families.64 Wakeup members sincerely believed their allegations and clung to them, even in the face of evidence—​­perhaps because the fear of losing their homemaker status was so great.

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This tactic was displayed in public debates across the state. The debates typically were hosted by various media outlets, universities, and community and religious groups. Democratic state senator and ERA proponent Carol Bellamy called facing Wakeup’s Annette Stern a “maddening” experience. Stern, she said, “would tell the audience forty-​­seven terrible things the [state] ERA would do, and when you . . . ​proved her wrong . . . ​she’d turn around and repeat them all over again.”65 Phyllis Schlafly often did the same thing, which Wakeup members had ample opportunity to observe on television and in person (often in New York City) when she flew in to spar with high-​­profile feminists based in New York. Like Schlafly, Wakeup members always presented themselves as mere housewives; doing so worked well on several fronts. Assuming a homemaker identity gave unseasoned public speakers instant credibility when discussing matters related to family life. If a member of Wakeup was proven wrong by the empirical evidence that proponents often wielded, then she could use her homemaker status to plead ignorance of political matters. Adopting this populist and maternal stance would enable her to deflect attention away from the evidence and win points by positioning herself as an innocent victim of overzealous feminist elites.66 In one debate, Mary Hober of Wakeup’s Rochester branch repeated the claim that women and men working at the Bechtel Mining Corporation in Montana had to use the same bathroom after that state passed an ERA. Selina Zygmunt, a CER leader who had heard Wakeup say that before, came prepared. She presented Hober with clarification letters from Bechtel’s lawyer and the Montana Human Rights Commission. Not only was there no unisex toilet at the camp, no women worked there. Hober dismissed the letters as complicated legal documents that everyday people and busy homemakers did not have the time to consider. Hober and others held fast to their homemaker identities, even as campaigning against feminism and the ERA (sometimes on a full-​­time basis) took them away from their homes and families. None acknowledged that irony, or that their politicking was in part made possible by recent feminist gains that had made women’s public roles more acceptable. Wakeup members were conveniently just homemakers, albeit ones temporarily pulled away from their duties to stop a potential assault on what they valued most.67 This clear and unambiguous message—​­that the state ERA would doom the family—​­tied together Wakeup’s wide-​­ranging allegations and ensured that voters did not get sidetracked by inconsistencies. One of Wakeup’s flyers from 1975, the year that Steven Spielberg’s hit film Jaws premiered, contained a

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sketch of the gaping mouth of a shark with huge, pointed teeth, flanked by alarmist words: “Warning! Warning! Equal Rights Amendment is Dangerous to Women—​­Damaging to Men[;] Devastating to Children—​­An Attack on the Family.”68 Another flyer asked a single question in large font that took up half the page, “Did you know that a vote for ERA is a vote against the family?”69 Wakeup encouraged supporters to spread this message, which worked well since the family is a popular institution. One woman upstate in Binghamton wrote an editorial in her local newspaper that compared the state ERA to “radical surgery” that would permanently alter the New York State constitution. A scary prospect, she argued, because “We can’t be guaranteed that our family life won’t be morally destroyed by the ERA.”70 Wakeup saw no need for legal equality outside the home: its members were already on equal footing in the marital and familial relations that they prized above all else. Wakeup’s Ginny Lavan from an upstate suburb outside Schenectady felt that women were neither equal nor unequal to men; they just, she explained, had separate roles to play.71 Annette Stern referred to this notion as “differ-​­equal,” a phrase that she coined to suggest that men and women had different responsibilities on an equal plane.72 Men should protect families and provide for them outside the home; women should tend to their homes and families as their husbands’ financial dependents. Wakeup’s greatest fear was that the state ERA would eliminate these, as they saw them, divinely inspired, sex-​­specific roles as it stripped women of existent privileges, including monetary ones for homemakers. This logic reveals that Wakeup members conflated civil (legal) rights with compulsory equal roles for the sexes, as if more options and legal protections for women would force them to perform actions against their will. These fears confirmed what many Wakeup members and voters had felt for years: that feminists wanted to decimate the nuclear family and homemaking role. “They are constantly trying to downgrade the role of mothers and homemakers,” one of Wakeup’s flyers argued. “Feminist leader Betty Friedan has called for a total restructuring of our society and feminist author Kate Millet has stressed women will never be truly liberated until the family is destroyed.”73 The state ERA, Wakeup asserted, would accomplish these longstanding goals in a single stroke. Ceil Herman, a homemaker and cofounder of WHEN, the Wakeup affiliate on Long Island, did not want to discount “women who stand by the sink.” She was referring to calls by some feminists to offer a more representative sample of women in school textbooks, rather than solely depicting them as homemakers, but she also more broadly felt that

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Figure 5. An Operation Wakeup flyer charging that the state ERA (and feminism more broadly) would destroy the traditional nuclear family and homemaking role. Courtesy of ERAmerica Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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feminists “neglected the majority of women who are homemakers and mothers.”74 Herman’s words reveal a common sentiment among many first-​ g­ eneration homemakers from places like her hometown on Long Island. They believed that feminists were elitists who—​­unlike women who had seen many of their own mothers forced to work outside the home—​­did not appreciate the benefits of a one-​­income, middle-​­class family lifestyle, and were therefore content to destroy it. The CER insisted that feminist goals such as the state ERA would not hurt, but would instead help, families and homemakers. Anne Borel, who worked with the CER as president of NOW’s branch in Albany, argued that the state ERA would only have an impact on “state and federal laws, not . . . ​the relationship . . . ​between a mother and her child, or a woman and her husband, except in cases of separation,” where the amendment would give her equal legal rights.75 A NOW flyer, entitled “Homemakers and the Equal Rights Amendment,” made a similar point: “Throughout the history of our great country, every advance in women’s rights . . . ​has been . . . ​heralded as ‘the death of the family.’ ” In reality, the flyer said, the ERA would help by, for example, changing domicile laws that give husbands sole legal authority to decide where their families should reside. Wives who did not comply faced desertion charges, but the ERA would grant them “the legal ability to participate in this decision [about domicile], which . . . ​affect[s] children’s schooling, continuity of medical care, and other . . . ​problems of uprooting.”76 Accordingly, the state ERA would give women more authority in the domestic and familial realm, thereby bolstering, not eliminating, the homemaking role. But many voters in New York did not buy these arguments. One housewife wrote an anonymous editorial in Ms., the feminist magazine, which mocked the CER’s efforts. “Now that you need us,” she remembers thinking before the vote, “feminists have become friends of the homemaker! You’ve derided us for years—​­so the idea is absurd!” During the state ERA campaign, this woman claimed that she and some friends were denied entrance to a NOW meeting. As “full-​­time housewives, we were firmly told that our help was neither needed nor wanted.” The ERA, she warned, “will never become an amendment until you women [feminists] abandon your obvious belief in your superiority, and your insulting put-​­down of those who live a different, more traditional lifestyle.”77 Like Terry Anselmi’s visit to a NOW meeting in Rockland County during the abortion debates, modern feminism provoked a visceral and raw response. Voting against the state ERA and joining Wakeup

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provided solidarity and validation for disaffected women who felt their lifestyles being debased. These feelings were exacerbated by a shift that had occurred by the early seventies within modern feminism. In the sixties, liberal groups such as Betty Friedan’s NOW had focused primarily—​­but not exclusively, as the abortion debates in New York revealed—​­on issues such as equal pay and employment. By the early seventies, liberal feminists were moving to more fully embrace goals promoted by the younger, radical women’s liberation movement. Matters related to sexuality and reproduction, which previously were thought to be too personal for the realm of politics, became linked to concrete policy goals; government funding for rape prevention and treatment, which both liberal and radical groups supported, is one example. The ERA was another goal that the two feminist camps embraced. Liberal, more employment-​­and civil rights-​­focused women vigorously promoted the amendment after labor leaders dropped their objections to it. They claimed that the ERA would accomplish at once what they had been doing piecemeal for the past decade: eliminate sex-​­based discrimination in the law. Radical women hoping to make “the personal political” were more animated by the ERA’s symbolism and possible benefits in areas such as marriage and divorce law. Using mutually reinforcing political tactics, liberal and radical feminist groups both joined the CER in New York to pass the state ERA.78 The reaction to these developments from women like Annette Stern in New York was predictable. As Wakeup’s Ceil Herman told a reporter from Time magazine, she became active once feminists started going after the family and homemakers with proposals like the ERA. By contrast, she said, “The women’s movement did a lot of good things in the sixties.”79 This was a common sentiment among opponents who had grown up in humble urban neighborhoods surrounded by poorly paid working women whose families needed their income to survive. But by 1975, Herman and others could no longer see eye-​­to-​­eye with feminists. As she argued, “we do not feel robbing the homemaker and mother of her rights and protection under law in order to better the position of women in employment is just, equitable or even equal.”80 Wakeup members saw the state ERA’s potential danger to the homemaking role as far more dangerous than any employment benefits it might offer working women—​­all the more true once the female workforce included those who, taking advantage of recent feminist gains, chose to work for reasons other than making ends meet. Wakeup’s campaigning often amounted to a full-​ t­ hroated defense of their own (in many cases, new) lifestyles amid a threaten-

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ing climate of economic uncertainty that they hoped would not require them to work outside the home. The women’s movement had long struggled to bridge class divides and shed its elitist image—​­issues the state ERA campaign brought to the surface and likely worsened. The CER’s Anne Borel pointed out that many women could not relate to Wakeup’s concerns. By her estimates, 43 percent of women aged sixteen and older worked for pay, 70 percent of whom did so out of financial necessity. “I wish [Wakeup] would examine the quality of other people’s lives,” Borel remarked. “They would discover that what is good for Mrs. [Claire] Middleton in West Chazy [the anti-​­abortion and Wakeup leader living in a middle-​­class suburb of Plattsburgh] is not good for the Chicana or Puerto Rican woman in Manhattan.”81 In other words, both sides tried to exploit real or imagined class and racial differences to attract voters. Were feminists powerful, well-​­connected elites who had legislators’ attention and were out to destroy humble homemakers and the traditional nuclear family? Did feminists not understand that homemaking was a prized role for many first-​­generation suburban and middle-​­class women? Or was Wakeup populated by well-​­off (white) suburban homemakers who, in the midst of a recession, were oblivious to the plight of poorer urban women of color? Both narratives were reductive, as political campaigning tends to be. Personal perceptions, not facts, often formed impressions. A demographic study of the CER and Wakeup’s memberships was never done, although studies of ERA coalitions elsewhere offer some insight. Leaders of both the CER and Wakeup appear to have been white, middle-​­and upper-​­middle-​­class women who dedicated countless hours to the state ERA in New York. One analysis of a similar campaign in Texas in 1975 found that pro-​­ERA women, on average, had higher levels of education and income and were more urban and less religious than anti-​­ERA women. This was likely true in New York as well. The state ERA had its greatest support in New York City, and the CER’s paid leader, Sandra Turner, fit the profile of a typical ERA proponent in Texas, while Wakeup’s leaders approximated opponents there. The referendum results also later showed that the state ERA was handily defeated by religious (mostly Catholic) women living either in the suburbs of New York City or in more conservative and rural areas upstate.82 Regardless of which side was actually more elite, Wakeup exploited class differences better than the CER. As the New York Times Magazine surmised, the CER’s “broad coalition was transmuted, in the public eye, into an elitist minority fringe that didn’t give a damn about homemakers or women at the

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bottom of the labor market and would, by the force of its own ambitions, push all women out of the home and into jobs.”83 Housewives like those at the core of Wakeup’s leadership worried about losing their privileges. Even some working women found Wakeup’s messaging attractive, including those hoping to be homemakers and those in lower-​­paid, unskilled, or traditionally female fields who thought that feminists only cared about access to higher-​­paid, skilled, male jobs. Similar to abortion, the state ERA pitted two sides against each other—​­both motivated by personal circumstances and aspirations—​­that could not find common ground on women and the family.

Toward Victory: Building “a Well-​­Organized, Well-​­Oiled Machine” In the months before the referendum, Wakeup built upon the ties it had amassed across the state during the legislative debates of 1974 and 1975. As Carol DeSaram, president of NOW in New York State, surmised, “It was incredibly naïve of us to think we were dealing with a bunch of sincere but misguided housewives. This was a well-​­organized, well-​­oiled machine.”84 Wakeup had several “area contacts” across the state to coordinate local fundraising, advertisement, and debate and media requests. They created a “news release chain,” where relevant events across the state such as debates would be reported to the central leadership operating from Annette Stern’s home in Westchester County; this information was then combined and reissued in the form of a press release. By September of 1975, Wakeup was sending weekly press releases—​­detailing their overall message and recent activities—​­to 400 television, radio, and newspaper contacts across the state. While Wakeup’s efforts were impressive for political novices, most of it involved women calling friends over the telephone and speaking in front of clubs to which they already belonged. In other words, Wakeup’s well-​­coordinated statewide political campaign approximated the everyday activities of its members. Wakeup was again modeling the behavior and lifestyles it hoped to save as members worked to do so—​­relying on resources around them to organize the grassroots in a populist manner against supposedly elite and well-​­connected feminists who wished them harm.85 The CER also set up a statewide political apparatus. It installed volunteer representatives in each of New York’s sixty-​­two counties to arrange events and advertisement. A press kit and newsletters helped keep everyone connected.

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But the CER’s efforts were not as organic (and thus as likely to be maintained) as Wakeup’s, and much of its high-​­level support, money, and political experience was centered in New York City, where the group’s paid leader, Sandra Turner, lived and had vast political experience.86 Although neither side had a budget on a par with typical statewide campaigns, the CER enjoyed a sizable financial advantage over Wakeup. The CER frequently asked affiliate groups like NOW to donate to the cause. The group sold five-​­dollar T-​­shirts and relied on gimmicks to raise awareness and funds, such as a bike-​­a-​­thon across Brooklyn led by supportive politicians. The CER saved money by having its television and radio advertisements produced by firms upstate that charged less than those in the New York City area. Despite these efforts, the CER fell short of its $200,000 fundraising goal, only bringing in about $80,000 and ending the campaign $8,000 in debt. Wakeup reported only raising $5,000, all from a variety of grassroots efforts. Claire Middleton in the Plattsburgh area raised about $10 an hour one day standing outside a department store, while Ruth Koblich in Buffalo collected small donations from friends and neighbors whenever possible. In doing so, Wakeup members turned to previously apolitical, family-​­oriented spaces to protect their traditional family lifestyles.87 Wakeup also shrewdly turned to tactics that members had honed in the past as members of cash-​­strapped community organizations and resourceful homemakers stretching family budgets further. President Annette Stern turned to her good friend, Lucille Bachman, whose husband was a printer in Westchester County; he produced Wakeup’s literature for pennies a page. Members called into daytime radio shows to air their views—​­reaching countless women at home during the day without spending a dime—​­and advertised for free in church bulletins and shopping circulars at supermarkets. Sympathetic, often religiously oriented groups helped out. The Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization that had organized “Right to Life Sunday” in 1972, spent about $1,000 on the radio because they thought that the state ERA would make it impossible to recriminalize abortion. When funds were running low in September of 1975, Claire Middleton wrote to fellow members of the Right to Life Committee claiming the same and asking for money to defeat the state ERA. The John Birch Society, a widely discredited conservative conspiracy group, doled out $704 in advertising.88 Wakeup even filed a lawsuit charging that the CER was supported by the state government and taxpayer dollars. In late October of 1975, the State Supreme Court ruled in Wakeup’s favor. “The spectacle of state agencies

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campaigning for or against . . . ​proposed constitutional amendments,” the ruling stated, “establishes a dangerous and untenable precedent” in a democracy like America before voters have had the chance to weigh in.89 The lawsuit was another crucial moment of transition in which women who had been raised as New Deal Democrats began to distrust big government, which they now saw as dangerously feminist-​­backed—​­sentiments that would align nicely with conservative Republican appeals for lower taxes, smaller government, and constitutional purity. Wakeup had won a major victory, but with the 4 November election less than two weeks away, members feared that substantial damage already had been done.90 In truth, both sides were worried about the upcoming vote. Polls in the final weeks showed that an estimated 60 to 70 percent of New Yorkers favored the state ERA. Wakeup remained intimidated by the CER’s support from nearly all the state’s major newspaper and media outlets, its Democratic and Republican parties, and a collection of well-​­known politicians and celebrities. But the CER had cause for concern, too. Campaigns always fret about voter apathy in an off-​­year election, and ballots in New York City in 1975, supporters’ stronghold, would only contain a series of questions, propositions, and constitutional amendments, most about dull city charter and bond issues. Ballots in the surrounding suburbs and upstate, where anti-​­ERA sentiment was high, would also have races to draw voters to the polls.91 To overcome these perceived weaknesses, both organizations raised money for a final round of advertising before the referendum, and although the CER brought in far more cash—​­$25,000 versus $3,000—​­Wakeup again spent its money more wisely. To cut costs, the CER ran most of its ads on small radio stations outside the expensive New York City media market. The CER, however, was not expected to do well in these areas, and its ads were rather vague pronouncements about equal rights that were unlikely to convert listeners who were undecided (or unaware) voters. It would have been wiser for the CER to advertise in more expensive urban markets, where its support was highest, to drive up numbers at the polls. Wakeup’s smaller budget allowed for fewer ads, but what it produced was more memorable and targeted, running on radio stations that members favored. Wakeup avoided generalities and told daytime female listeners, fellow housewives, that the state ERA would, for example, strip them of alimony and widow’s benefits. Poverty was a very alarming prospect for homemakers who worried about divorce or death robbing them of their financial security—​­all the more so for women with memories of their own mothers grudgingly working during the Depression.92

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Figure 6. One of Wakeup’s flyers against the state ERA that linked anti-​­tax sentiment to anti-​­feminism, hinting at the women’s future cooperation with conservative Republicans. Author’s collection.

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Still, the CER was much more visible in the final weeks of the campaign. In contrast to their aid with abortion, New York’s Catholic press, a potential ally for Wakeup, did little more than open its editorial pages for opponents. Wakeup members embraced this opportunity, once again using the church’s vast post-​­Vatican II network to advance traditional ideas about women and the family.93 Conversely, the secular press—​­including major newspapers and radio and television stations across the state—​­came out in favor of the state ERA. “I remember that WPIX was the only [radio] channel that came out against it,” otherwise “the media was entirely for the ERA,” Wakeup’s Pat Gmerek recalled.94 The CER’s momentum was reinforced by an elaborate get-​ ­ ut-​­the-​­vote strategy that included handing out flyers and hiring sound trucks o to broadcast pro-​­ERA messages at high-​­traffic areas.95 Gmerek spotted one of these sound trucks on election day in her Queens neighborhood, prompting her young son to say what she by then suspected, “Mommy, you’re not going to win, there’s a big truck there.”96 But as the election returns began to trickle in on 4 November 1975, they confirmed the opposite: the state ERA was defeated by a 57 to 43 percent margin, which moved Wakeup to draw conclusions far beyond the limits of state politics. Annette Stern argued that the defeat proved that feminists were a radical fringe. The “women who purportedly speak for [all] women truly don’t,” she said.97 Many like Phyllis Schlafly considered the results in New York and neighboring New Jersey—​­two states with robust feminist movements that rejected state ERAs in 1975—​­to be a death knell for the faltering federal ERA, which was four states away from ratification. Annette Stern promised to use her 100,000-​­member organization to convince the New York State Legislature to rescind its approval of the federal ERA. According to one publication funded by the conservative John Birch Society, the defeats in New York and New Jersey inspired federal ERA rescission movements in fourteen other states. While none of these initiatives succeeded, the election results in New York, an epicenter of feminism, were arguably a symbolic rejection of the federal ERA.98 The CER denied that either the federal ERA or the feminist movement was in peril. Wakeup, it said, had fed voters a steady stream of lies about the state ERA. Clinging to campaign slogans, the CER viewed the election results as a temporary setback.99 Betty Ann Tichnor, a CER leader in Rochester, told one reporter that opponents who claim “a self-​­righteous victory . . . ​better realize [that doing so] will galvanize our efforts and give strength to a principle whose time is long overdue.”100 Feminist leader and U.S. representative Bella

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Figure 7. Annette Stern, president of Operation Wakeup, signs in to vote against the state ERA in her hometown of Harrison, New York, in November 1975. Courtesy of Eddie Hausner-​­New York Times-​­Redux.

Abzug of Manhattan echoed these sentiments: “I think we’re going to win. It’s a matter of simple justice.”101 In other words, both camps dug in their heels after the vote and espoused the same arguments—​­many of them hyperbolic and ineffective—​­that they had used during the campaign. One CER affiliate conducted a post mortem on the election a few months later and concluded that Wakeup’s victory hinged on the votes of women aged eighteen to fifty-​­nine, especially suburban Catholic ones animated by issues such as abortion. Women in that subset voted in higher numbers than any other demographic in the state that year, meaning that Wakeup members successfully directed other women like them to defeat the ERA. In total, three million New Yorkers voted on the state ERA: roughly 1.3 million (43 percent) for it and 1.7 million (57 percent) against it. As the CER had feared, these numbers were skewed in Wakeup’s favor because the ballots in New York City, where proponents drew most of their strength, did not have contested races. As a result, although the state ERA won by 59 to 41 percent in New York City, it lost by 38 to 62 percent in the remaining counties in the state—​­an even more decisive margin than the statewide totals portrayed. In the four suburban counties right outside the city where Annette Stern and several Wakeup leaders lived, the amendment was defeated by majorities ranging from 52 to 61 percent. Since these were very densely populated counties, the state ERA defeat there had more impact in terms of actual votes than its failure in the

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less populous and traditionally conservative counties upstate, where it lost by as much as 72 percent in some places.102 The state ERA was reportedly hurt by some people’s negative impression of feminism. One young ticket clerk at the Albany-​­Rensselaer train station justified her vote against the state ERA by telling the New York Times Magazine, “I guess . . . ​I didn’t know what the ERA meant, but I thought it was a women’s libber type thing—​­how they don’t want men to have their own clubs, they don’t want Mother’s Day . . . ​I’m not a women’s libber at all.”103 If you already believed that “women’s libbers” wanted to destroy Mother’s Day and hurt men, Wakeup’s claims about the feminist-​­backed ERA destroying the family would not seem overblown. If you were already against the women’s movement, to the point of saying you were “not a libber at all,” then a vote on the state ERA offered you a concrete way to register your general unease with the women’s movement and other recent social changes affecting the family. One of the most important by-​­products of the state ERA fight in New York was this debate about the intersection of politics and family life. The modern women’s liberation movement had tried to make “the personal political” by pursuing matters related to reproduction, motherhood, and child care. ­Feminist-​­backed legislative proposals offered women more legal options and financial support, while others tried to reimagine the division of labor within the home. Women such as Annette Stern—​­who before had been too shy to “even ask a question at a PTA meeting”—​­stepped forth to contest this vision of women and the family.104 The ERA’s vague language led opponents and proponents alike to ascribe what they wanted to it, morphing a two-​­sentence amendment into a symbol of everything from the promise of more equitable credit laws to the onslaught of a unisex society that would decimate traditional family life, including the (often new) financial security that many opponents enjoyed as homemakers. The battle over the state ERA was another crucial turning point in moving women away from their New Deal roots and toward the GOP’s right wing. The campaign was just the beginning for thousands of women across New York, even though Wakeup’s president, Annette Stern, chose to focus on homemaking after the referendum. More than a year of intense organizing and debating had taken its toll on her. Stern had, however, left an indelible mark on politics in her first foray into the public eye. Conservative calls to lower taxes and reduce the size of the government were enticing after, as Wakeup alleged in its successful lawsuit, Stern and others came to see taxpayer-​­funded government officials and organizations as deeply committed to dangerous feminist goals

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that did not represent the desires of most women. Decades later, Stern and her husband retired in Florida, where she became a member of the conservative-​ ­led executive committee of the Palm Beach County Republican Party. By then, antifeminism was wholly synonymous with conservative Republican politics, a process that Stern had helped initiate on the grassroots level in the seventies.105 Other women more directly continued opposing feminist-​­backed initiatives after the state ERA. When they did so, groups like Wakeup (as well as anti-​­abortion ones such as RTLP and RTLC) provided vast connections to build upon across the state. Or, as one Wakeup flyer announced even before the state ERA referendum: “OPERATION WAKEUP won’t go away after ERA. [I]t has become apparent that the Women’s Lib movement fully intends to pressure lawmakers into passing laws which are detrimental to the family and to society.”106 The state ERA had galvanized thousands of traditional women and homemakers who fought in a populist manner to save their families and lifestyles from these perceived dangers, including many of the same women who had tried to outlaw abortion for similar reasons. The state ERA campaign joined conservative voters upstate with suburban women downstate like Annette Stern, uniting them around a modern-​­day politics centered on nuclear families, heterosexual marriage, and traditional gender roles. In the coming years, the previously small and insignificant conservative faction of New York State’s Republican Party tapped into these sentiments to seize power from the moderates who controlled their party, and they did so in large part by targeting the voter-​­rich suburbs of New York City. Ellen McCormack’s Democratic presidential primary campaign in 1976, which began just months after the state ERA was defeated, was another important milestone in this realignment process—​­one that underscored for many women that the Democratic Party was no longer a comfortable home for their politics.

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PART III

COALESCENCE

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CHAPTER 5

Ellen McCormack for President

The state ERA’s defeat laid important groundwork for many women to leave the Democratic Party. Although some women like Wakeup’s president, Annette Stern, registered as Republicans upon moving to the suburbs in the 1960s, they did so at the behest of their upwardly mobile husbands who had just become homeowners in high-​­tax counties such as Westchester. Still, most women remained emotionally connected to the Democratic Party that—​­along with FDR and the New Deal—​­had been revered in the white-​­ethnic enclaves of New York City during their Depression-​­era upbringings. As noted, Phyllis Graham, who followed her husband in becoming a Republican after moving to Long Island in the middle of the presidential campaign of 1960, still gave money to fellow Catholic John F. Kennedy and followed his campaign closely. She and others could do so because politics meant very little to them in these busy family-​­centered years; switching parties entailed checking a box. But by the early seventies politics was no longer so remote. Debates over legal abortion and the state ERA demonstrated how politics intersected with the domestic and familial concerns the women cared about most.1 One of Wakeup’s flyers captured this transition by warning: “Women of America—​­Ask Not What ERA Can Do For You; Ask Instead What ERA Can Do To You.”2 The wording was a play on JFK’s famous “ask not” line from his soaring inaugural address. Kennedy, a Democrat and the nation’s first Catholic president, was a hero to Catholic homemakers and others in Wakeup. His “ask not” remark implored Americans to become engaged in civic life and help those less fortunate than they, much as Catholic leaders in that era of Vatican II encouraged people to join parish groups and carry forth the church’s social justice mission. By the state ERA campaign in the mid-​­seventies, the women no longer viewed expanded government as a force for good. The amendment—​­which was

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backed by countless state agencies and representatives, to the point where Wakeup successfully sued—​­symbolized the perils of big government. The flyer gave specifics, including claiming that the state ERA would harm women by “put[ting] [their] children in govt day care centers,” “mak[ing] [them] responsible for husband[s’] debts,” and offering “no choice to stay home as full-​­time wife and/or mother.”3 With expanded government now evocative of feminist overreach and a frightening loss of privilege, the women were primed to leave the Democratic Party and align their politics with conservative Republicans promoting smaller government and lower taxation. Yet some women would not leave the party of their youth without first trying to rid it of feminist influence, as Ellen McCormack’s Democratic presidential bid in 1976 tried to do.

Figure 8. One of Wakeup’s anti-​­ERA flyers that hinted at both the women’s Catholic and Democratic roots (the front was a wordplay on a famous line from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address) and their future affiliation with small government conservative Republicans. Courtesy of New York State Archives. New York (State) Legislature. Senate. Senator (1973-​ ­1978 Karen Burstein). Women’s Issues Files.

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The New York State Right to Life Party (RTLP), which was behind McCormack’s presidential campaign, was committed to exposing anti-​­abortion sentiment in the electorate in order to push politicians to recriminalize the procedure. The RTLP was formed by Catholic housewives on Long Island in 1970 and had always been more involved in electoral politics than its allies in the Right to Life Committee and Wakeup. Since the women’s first c­ ongressional race on Long Island, they had been running anti-​­abortion candidates in local races.4 But the RTLP felt paralyzed when abortion—​­once a more manageable state matter—​­became a contested national issue after the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1973. The women admired opponents in the U.S. Congress who focused on two strategies to weaken or overturn the court decisions. Some legislators introduced bills to end the federal financing of abortions. Other members of Congress proposed a series of unsuccessful “human life amendments” that would have granted constitutional rights to unborn fetuses (thereby outlawing abortion by making it akin to murder). None of these efforts had materialized by 1975 when the women began mulling a presidential run. If anything, the situation was worsening, with supposedly related threats such as the ERA.5 As Ellen McCormack, one of the RTLP’s founders, lamented, “Everything I believe in is challenged these days.”6 The women could no longer sit on the sidelines in New York as this national epidemic unfolded: it was time to enter the political process in a more substantial way. This unlikely assortment of politicians—​­housewives from the RTLP on Long Island—​­decided to try to pass a human life amendment (HLA) by running for president of the United States. In 1976, they entered Ellen McCormack into the Democratic presidential primary on an anti-​­abortion platform. The women relied on the grassroots organizing strategies they had honed in New York to raise funds and obtain ballot access across the country. As in the past, the Catholic Church’s vast network of newspapers and parish groups were invaluable assets. McCormack’s campaign literally was managed by women at kitchen tables on Long Island, with guidance from two men who had helped in the past, one a former parish priest and the other an attorney well versed in election law. With help from a small but dedicated group of (mostly female) volunteers across the country, McCormack’s name was entered onto the ballot in twenty-​­one states. She won 267,590 popular votes and was the first woman to qualify for federal matching funds and Secret Service protection. Yet she and her Democratic presidential primary campaign have received little scholarly or popular attention.7 McCormack and her team of mostly white, middle-​­ class, Catholic

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housewives were motivated to act by two principal factors: a conviction that legal abortion was akin to murder, and an abiding concern that abortion, and feminism more broadly, undermined family life. “I am running for President,” McCormack wrote, because “women who support traditional values must express themselves in order to neutralize what the feminists are doing in our name.”8 The women believed that life begins at conception. As devout Catholics, they had heard that message reiterated in countless Sunday sermons, often when the state legislature was voting on abortion’s legality in New York. They were women who typically adhered to the Catholic Church’s ban on birth control and had four or more children. They had felt fetal movements in their own pregnancies and were certain that “babies” in utero were no different from full-​­term ones living outside the womb. A fetus’s survival is wholly dependent upon a woman’s body, but the RTLP refused to debate proponents of legal abortion on those terms. To them, a woman did not have the right to terminate a pregnancy if she, for whatever reason, chose to do so. The RTLP women were concerned with a fetus’s right to live. Embracing their church’s terminology, they saw motherhood as a blessing, and relished their ability to stay at home full time, unlike some of their own mothers. As McCormack’s comment intimated, she believed that feminists, by then the loudest proponents of legal abortion, were averse to motherhood—​­and, it followed, against homemaking and the traditional family.9 Once again, disagreement stemmed from fundamentally different views of gender. Feminists argued that gender was a socially constructed concept and designed a political program to help men and women share familial and societal responsibilities more equitably. They encouraged greater access to jobs and education, government-​­funded daycare, and the right to have a legal abortion. Feminist thinking was guided by the desire to offer women more choices; homemaking and pregnancy were valid choices, not obligations that all women must bear against their will. In contrast, the RTLP saw gender as a fixed, divinely ordered, biologically based distinction. Humanity, they thought, was divided into two different sexes, each with distinct, complementary roles, as Wakeup had argued. Ideally, men should provide for their families in the paid workforce, while women tend to children and the home. For many RTLP women, doing so was synonymous with the American dream and upward mobility—​­prizes to be savored, not burdens to shed.10 Over the past decade, however, the American social order and economy had been transformed to the point where McCormack’s vision of the family seemed increasingly untenable. Liberalized sexual mores, widely available con-

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traceptive devices like the pill, and legal abortion allowed the freedom to opt out of motherhood. Expanded educational and job opportunities for women, and an economic downturn that disproportionately affected men, posed additional challenges to the traditional division of gendered labor. Ellen McCormack, like many of her female supporters and a majority of women in the United States opposed to legal abortion at that time, was a first-​­generation suburbanite. Many women grew up under financial strain, and as new entrants into the middle class, they hoped to retain their homemaker roles.11 McCormack’s little-​­known presidential campaign was part of what one historian described as a “rational respons[e] of people who lived in a deeply gendered and profoundly precarious world.”12 Enacting an HLA to save “babies” was of paramount importance—​­so too was retaining their traditional lifestyles, and not feeling bad about doing so as feminists promoted other alternatives. The women strategically chose to run in the Democratic presidential primary rather than on an independent line using their Right to Life Party. This was done partially to avoid the difficulty of obtaining ballot access in every state on a third-​­party line. More significantly, though, the RTLP women were upset that the party of their roots—​­the party of the New Deal that had helped many of their own Depression-​­stricken families—​­seemed to be embracing legal abortion and feminism. Lamenting this perceived shift, McCormack once referenced the writer Gilbert Chesterton by saying: “Instead of distributing hats,” Democrats are now more apt to be “cutting off heads.”13 Her campaign reached out to women who felt the same way. McCormack again assumed a populist stance by positioning herself as a homemaker and mother battling elite, out-​­of-​­touch, and politically entrenched feminist interests. She and her associates cleverly exploited the resources at their disposal to save “babies” and their own way of life, as they had been doing for several years. The women hoped to expose similar sentiment among the primary electorate and move Democratic politicians and others in Congress to pass an HLA to recriminalize abortion.14 McCormack did not win enough votes to produce that outcome, but her campaign reveals that before the RTLP and others in New York became aligned with the GOP’s conservative wing, some tried to remake the Democratic Party. McCormack and her supporters gave voice to the alleged “silent majority” of Americans that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan targeted in their presidential campaigns—​­voters who rejected the perceived liberal excesses of feminism and other recent rights-​­based movements. Far from being silent, McCormack aired her concerns across the nation. As a Democratic

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presidential candidate, she modeled an attack on feminism and abortion that conservative Republicans later espoused as they usurped power from the more liberal wing of their party. McCormack’s campaign illustrates that similar activism emerged from within the Democratic Party, too—​­from Catholics like the RTLP founders who backed the social welfare measures of the New Deal and Great Society that had helped many of them, but rejected the party’s embrace of legal abortion and other tenets of modern feminism.15

The Right Strategy When the RTLP began exploring a presidential bid in 1975, the anti-​­abortion community had concluded that the best way to fight these federal Supreme Court decisions was through congressional action. Beginning with a measure introduced in late 1973 by conservative Republican U.S. senator James Buckley of New York, whose campaign the RTLP women had volunteered on in 1970, a series of unsuccessful bills was introduced to curb Medicaid funding for abortions. A small breakthrough materialized in early 1975 when legislation, sponsored by Republican representatives Lawrence Hogan of Maryland and Harold Froehlich of Wisconsin, passed prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion-​­related litigation. The following year, the Hyde Amendment would pass, ending federal funding for abortion. Several “human life amendments” (HLAs) also were proposed after the Supreme Court decisions in 1973, but few made it out of committee for a vote. Within the House of Representatives alone, twenty-​­eight HLA bills appeared in 1973 and 1974. Twenty-​­one of these bills (an overwhelming 75 percent) originated from Catholic legislators, among them eighteen Republicans and ten Democrats, even though Catholics made up less than 25 percent of the House.16 Since no progress had been made on that front, the RTLP women focused on passing an HLA. They hoped to mirror on a national scale what had happened in their first U.S. congressional race in New York, when the winner was pressured by the RTLP’s activism into abandoning his prior support for legal abortion. Jane Gilroy, a RTLP founder who had run for governor in the past, recalled that in 1976, the women hoped to “achieve a similar result in state after state . . . ​to mobilize pro-​­life voters across the nation on behalf of a constitutional amendment.”17 The RTLP planned to use television commercials to spread its anti-​ a­ bortion message across the country. The women learned that Dr. John Willke

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of Ohio, an obstetrician-​­turned-​­activist who had written a detailed handbook on abortion that many were aware of in New York, also wanted to run commercials nationwide, albeit ones independent of a political campaign. Willke hoped that his ads would motivate the electorate to push legislators into passing an HLA. The Long Island women shared this goal, but they would tie their commercials to a political candidacy. By reaching out to personal contacts and sympathetic organizations, the women had raised $76,000 to produce anti-​ a­ bortion commercials for Barbara Keating, a candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York in 1974 who was backed by the RTLP and Conservative Party—​­in a contest in which both her Democratic and Republican rivals had supported legal abortion. Without evidence, the RTLP credited the commercials with stopping hundreds of abortions in the state. The women assumed that a national campaign would push legislators to vote for an HLA and halt thousands of abortions across the United States.18 To broadcast anti-​­abortion commercials across the country, the women would have to run a candidate for national political office, which meant fielding a presidential candidate. They had learned from Barbara Keating’s Senate bid that anti-​­abortion commercials could only be aired if they were part of a political campaign. The major television networks—​­ABC, CBS, and NBC, which collectively reached 90 percent of all viewers—​­avoided granting airtime to controversial issues. If they wanted to discuss abortion, the networks would produce their own programming, not run commercials created by activists. But if the commercials were for a political candidate, in accordance with the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) so-​­called equal time law, a network had to broadcast the spots, regardless of their content, if at least one other candidate in the race had televised advertisements of any sort.19 Dependent on the FCC’s equal time law, the women decided to run in the Democratic presidential primary. They immediately ruled out using their RTLP line because each state had different, and often quite complex, rules for placing third-​­party candidates on the ballot. That left the two major political parties, and at the outset of 1975 when planning began, few imagined that incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford would face a protracted primary challenge from California governor Ronald Reagan. The Democratic Party’s open primary race seemed to offer a vast stage to air anti-​­abortion advertisements under the equal time provision.20 Pressing ideological concerns also made the Democratic primary attractive. The RTLP’s Jane Gilroy felt that by the mid-​­seventies, the Democratic Party “appear[ed] to be wavering towards promoting abortion, which

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seemed . . . ​far remove[d] from the Democrats we had grown up knowing who supported the ‘little guy.’ ”21 Women like Gilroy were a generation removed from working-​­class ethnic neighborhoods in New York City that had long been under Democratic rule. They wondered how the party of union politics and social welfare measures had become the party of feminism and legal abortion. These feelings were understandable since some of the party’s leading feminist advocates lived nearby and enjoyed outsized media coverage, including U.S. representatives Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug (D-​­N.Y.).22 This palpable sense of alienation was not unfounded: the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (1969–1972) helped transform the Democratic Party from a northern, working-​­class, Catholic, machine-​­driven organization into a more liberal, secular one led by college-​­educated professionals, including feminists. The McGovern Commission, as it was called after its chairman, Democratic U.S. senator George McGovern of South Dakota, was the brainchild of young staffers from Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign in 1968. The staffers hoped to undermine northern Catholic bosses who controlled the party’s presidential nominating process by appointing likeminded delegates—​­the same political bosses that some RTLP women remembered from their childhoods in New York City. Nearly everyone focused on what happened outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, as law enforcement attacked and arrested vastly outnumbered antiwar protesters. Few noticed what occurred inside the hall when McCarthy’s staffers passed a minority plank preventing traditional bosses from monopolizing the party’s presidential nomination process in future elections. The plank instituted quotas mandating more delegate representation from racial minorities, women, and younger people. These changes enabled the antiwar, left-​­wing McGovern to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, as a so-​ c­ alled “new politics coalition” grew in the party.23 These quotas helped align the feminist movement with the Democratic Party as Republicans moved to do the opposite. Since groups such as NOW were the largest subset of organized women in politics in the late sixties and early seventies, the Democratic Party effectively welcomed feminists into the fold by adding female delegates. Republicans did not have similar quotas that had to be met (just unenforced guidelines calling for more female delegates). Instead, the GOP began moving rightward on issues related to women throughout the seventies as feminist-​­backed “Rockefeller Republicans” were marginalized by conservatives in the party who did not support legal abortion and related goals.24

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The RTLP women did not know about the McGovern Commission, but they certainly sensed these shifting priorities. Democrats, they deduced, were “intimidated by the pro-​­abortion feminists who have such great influence in Democratic politics.”25 Since the RTLP founders were Catholic—​­and most had grown up in urban political wards where the church and Democratic officials worked together to advance social justice and eradicate poverty—​­they were angered by the perceived self-​­interest of Democratic politicians who were Catholic and backed legal abortion. The women most frequently complained about U.S. senator Ted Kennedy (brother of the revered slain president and presidential candidate) and U.S. representative Robert Drinan, both of Massachusetts, and the latter an ordained priest. Kennedy and Drinan were personally opposed to abortion, but argued that since women would continue to seek the procedure, it should remain safe and legal. The RTLP concluded that these two, like many other Democrats, were wrongly focusing on their own reelection prospects as innocent “babies” were slaughtered.26 Evidently, Ellen McCormack surmised, politicians like Kennedy and Drinan had “reached the political conclusion that it is largely conservative Republicans—​­who would not vote for them anyway—​­who regard support of abortion as a disqualifying issue.”27 The RTLP women disputed this logic and were certain that other Democrats held their views. As McCormack once explained, “The feminists are tough, and they’re noisy. But . . . ​[p]eople agree with us.”28 Anti-​­abortion Democrats were not short on numbers: they simply lacked the organization and visibility that a presidential campaign would offer. The RTLP—​­dominated by mothers who previously had no interest in politics, but now planned to run for president—​­organized on that basis as they attempted to subvert powerful feminist interests and save “babies.” The women would again rally the grassroots in a populist and maternalist manner to pass an HLA by exposing Democratic opposition to legal abortion.

The Campaign Deciding to run for president is one thing: formulating and executing a strategy to do so is another. The RTLP again turned to Gene McMahon, a sympathetic attorney and election law expert who lived on Long Island and had given them free advice in the past. With McMahon’s help, the women had formed the Pro-​­Life Action Committee (PLAC) during Barbara Keating’s

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Senate race in 1974, and at his suggestion, this became the political action committee through which they operated in 1976. The campaign was run from the homes of PLAC’s four officers—​­all RTLP founders, including Jane Gilroy and Ellen McCormack—​­as the women envisioned working to save what was contained in those familiar domestic spaces. They also relied on the help of five nearby female volunteers from the RTLP. With guidance from Gene McMahon, the women spent the next year and a half trying to take advantage of the new regulatory environment to surmount their two biggest challenges: obtaining ballot access across the country and qualifying for federal matching funds to help finance anti-​­abortion commercials. None held full-​­time jobs, and they learned to combine political work with household responsibilities, alternating between going on the road and staying behind to babysit each other’s children. The women met weekly and conducted most business over the telephone. Looking back, Jane Gilroy noted that their lack of political experience put them at a great organizing disadvantage. Yet, not being part of the political establishment enabled the women to focus on anti-​­abortion activism, without being beholden to party insiders.29 Skipping the usual initial outreach to senior Democratic politicians, the campaign began in late 1974 when Gene McMahon wrote to the anti-​­abortion contacts the women had amassed through the years. The women helped by getting in touch with friends and family outside New York. PLAC hoped to identify key leaders in each state to coordinate fundraising and get-​­out-​­the-​ v­ ote efforts on the local level. McMahon encouraged supporters to change their registration, if necessary, to the Democratic Party to vote in the primary, thereby privileging the anti-​­abortion cause over any specific affiliation.30 Jane Gilroy recalled that many “would have blithely become Socialists if we had thought it would have helped our cause.”31 Later, this exact point frustrated party insiders and feminists. PLAC used the Democratic presidential primary as a vehicle for trying to pass an HLA, with little concern for the party or its broader set of concerns, including women’s rights, by the mid-​­seventies. PLAC also began searching for a presidential candidate. Still without a one after some promising leads fell through, in August of 1975—​­as other Democrats prepared for the primaries less than six months away—​­PLAC turned inward to Ellen McCormack, the group’s vice-​­chairman (given their beliefs about gender, the women preferred to use male-​­designated titles for this traditionally male political pursuit).32 In early August, while McCormack was vacationing with her family, the others called her to urge her to run. Fran Watson, PLAC’s chairman, who by extension became McCormack’s campaign

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manager, told People magazine that their thinking went like this: “Ellen’s a woman, she’s over thirty-​­five [the legal minimum age for a presidential contender], she’s somebody we’ve worked with, and we knew she’d be qualified.”33 Her major qualification was her unwavering opposition to legal abortion. McCormack agreed to run after talking to her family. Soon after, Gene McMahon drew up a contract that stressed McCormack’s obligation to appear in the televised anti-​­abortion commercials PLAC planned to create and had built its campaign around.34 McCormack was a good candidate because she fit the composite profile of a typical opponent of legal abortion. Contemporary polling revealed that the average anti-​­abortion activist was a forty-​­four-​­year-​­old woman who grew up in a large metropolitan area, got married after high school, and likely did not attend college. She had three or more children and was a devout Catholic who attended religious services at least once a week. Her family was lower-​­middle-​­ or middle-​­class, and she tended to be a full-​­time homemaker, while her husband worked in a low-​­level white-​­collar job. McCormack and the other RTLP founders overwhelmingly shared these characteristics. McCormack was in her mid-​­forties when she ran for president. She had been married for twenty-​ ­six years to Jack McCormack, a deputy inspector with the New York City Police Department, and lived in a modest three-​­bedroom home in Merrick, Long Island. The couple had four children, ages nine to twenty-​­five, and two young grandchildren. McCormack grew up in Manhattan and attended a Catholic high school, but not college. A survey of more than nine hundred RTLP supporters conducted in 1983 revealed that the party appealed to people who also shared these traits.35 In other words, McCormack could reach voters beyond the issue of abortion. Those attracted to her presidential candidacy, notably homemakers who felt marginalized by recent gains for women, probably saw themselves—​­their views as much as their anxieties and life ­stories—​­reflected in her.36 McCormack had much more political experience, however, than most opponents of legal abortion. She described herself as a regular homemaker, but she was a founder of the RTLP with several years of campaigning in New York under her belt. She had written a weekly editorial column since 1972 that was syndicated in approximately forty newspapers, nearly all of them Catholic ones. Again placing fetal rights above those of the expectant woman, McCormack called her column “Who Speaks for the Unborn Child?” The column made her a household name in certain anti-​­abortion circles, which helped with fundraising. Equally important, it enabled McCormack to work through

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her ideas about abortion, to develop certain linkages and witty retorts that served as talking points for her presidential campaign.37 But before McCormack could reach out to supporters, her team had to raise money to produce anti-​­abortion commercials to do so, a goal that new federal laws put in closer reach. The investigations surrounding the Watergate scandal had revealed several federal election fundraising abuses, prompting President Ford to sign the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974 shortly after Nixon resigned. The reforms established the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to enforce stricter media expenditure limits and curtail how much money national party committees spent on candidates. The reforms also gave presidential candidates the option of taking public funding in the general election, and the ability to qualify for federal matching grants in the primaries.38 PLAC never anticipated competing in the general election, so they focused on the new FEC laws for primaries. To qualify for federal matching funds in a primary, a candidate had to acquire $100,000 in the following manner: $5,000 had to be raised in twenty different states, and the money had to come from individuals, not political action committees, with no one person giving more than $250. If a candidate did this, the federal government would give her or him an additional $100,000 in matching funds; it would then match every dollar raised beyond that amount. The program not only provided an obvious financial reward to help finance anti-​­abortion commercials, but fifteen states holding primaries granted automatic ballot access to candidates qualifying for federal matching funds—​­another plus for McCormack who would face obstacles erected by party insiders in her quest to run in the Democratic primary.39 Once McCormack was selected in August 1975, PLAC sent out a detailed fundraising memo to its growing list of contacts across the country. The women encouraged supporters to engage in fundraising techniques that had worked well for them in the past: canvassing door-​­to-​­door; setting up donation booths in busy shopping centers; and discussing the campaign with anti-​ a­ bortion and Catholic groups, while gaining access to their mailing lists to solicit additional money and volunteers. These suggestions reflect the grassroots nature of McCormack’s campaign, as women sat at suburban kitchen tables divining strategy with young children looming nearby—​­using the world around them supposedly to save it from feminist destruction. These techniques allowed PLAC to increase its contact list and build a successful grassroots fundraising operation throughout the primaries.40

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Figure 9. Homemakers volunteering on Ellen McCormack’s anti-​­abortion Democratic presidential campaign open donation envelopes and write thank-​­you notes at a kitchen table in Merrick, Long Island, in February 1976. Courtesy of Merrick Herald Life/Richner Communications, Inc.

PLAC’s first fundraising memo contained explicit instructions on how to qualify for federal matching funds in at least twenty states. As PLAC officer Jane Gilroy recalled, attorney Gene McMahon “would give us page after page of rules. The FEC had its laws and you had to follow them to a T because, Gene said, even if others can get away with [mistakes], we can’t. And he was right.”41 The women knew they were vulnerable as outsiders pushing to recriminalize legal abortion, at a time when feminists and the opposite desire guided most Democratic policy positions. To avoid careless errors, McMahon insisted that fundraising guidelines be included in all advertisements and press releases. Indeed, almost every mention of the campaign focused donors on helping McCormack qualify for federal matching funds to finance anti-​ a­ bortion campaign commercials.42 To maximize fundraising, PLAC strategically sent its advertisements to Catholic publications across the country. The women relied heavily on the National Catholic wire service to get materials printed in parish newspapers.

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Catholics who read church publications and were active in their parishes were more likely than the general public to hold anti-​­abortion views and donate to McCormack’s campaign. After all, church leaders had been condemning legal abortion since reforms first surfaced at the state level in the sixties. McCormack’s editorial column had run in many of these same publications since 1972, which further encouraged readers to send her money. Catholics were also historically Democrats, making McCormack’s party affiliation attractive to potential donors.43 Another attendant concern was placing McCormack’s name on Democratic primary ballots in states that did not link access to federal funding, and here again, PLAC planned to use new rules to its advantage. The goal was to qualify for at least one delegate to the Democratic National Convention that summer, which was more likely to happen if her name was entered into as many states as possible. Luckily, winning a delegate was now even easier to do on the Democratic side. After the primaries in 1972, the party adopted a proportionate delegate system. With the new rules, the winner of a primary would no longer be allocated all that state’s delegates. With the exception of Illinois and New York—​­where delegates would be selected on the ­congressional district level—​­in each primary, delegates now would be awarded based on the percentage of the popular vote that each candidate won.44 McCormack did not have to win an entire state, just enough of the popular vote to qualify for a delegate. Even earning just one delegate would entitle McCormack to a nominating speech at the convention—​­a free, potentially televised platform to talk about the anti-​­abortion cause. The winner of the Democratic primaries in 1976, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, also benefited from these changes. Instead of only competing in select primaries, Carter campaigned everywhere. Ultimately, he won most of the states, but, as a relatively unknown politician in a crowded field of ten Democrats, his initial plan, like McCormack’s, was to compete widely and pick up delegates where he could.45 With a clearer sense of the rules, in November of 1975, the women staged a press conference in Boston to generate media attention. The event was held at the Parker House Hotel, just a block from the state capitol building and a common gathering spot for pols—​­the same place that another Catholic Democrat, John F. Kennedy, had kicked off his first congressional campaign. Local volunteers in Massachusetts set up the event, enabling McCormack and her core team to fly in for the day on the Eastern Airlines shuttle. The location was strategic given Massachusetts’s large Catholic population.46 Ostensibly, McCormack was there to announce her entry into the state’s Democratic primary

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on 2 March 1976. At the event, which one reporter panned as “quietly put[ing] her presidential campaign into high gear,” McCormack also vowed to compete in the important New Hampshire primary (the first in the nation) and as many others as possible. Again showcasing maternal populism, she promised to qualify for federal matching funds to finance anti-​­abortion commercials; this, she said, would “save babies” by forcing “professional politicians” to enact an HLA.47 Campaign manager Fran Watson revealed that PLAC had raised at least $5,000 in four states—​­New York, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Indiana—​ ­and expected to do so in sixteen more.48 The press conference was well covered, which provided free advertising and other perks for PLAC’s anti-​­abortion campaign. Both the Associated Press and United Press attended, along with Newsweek magazine and a ­Boston-​­based television station with a large network of affiliates. This coverage helped remedy an observation that the New York Times made in its first article about PLAC’s campaign: “Ellen McCormack . . . ​is an unusual figure in American national politics. For one thing, the average voter has never heard of her.”49 News coverage was also important, attorney Gene McMahon learned, because it could determine ballot access. Qualifying for federal matching funds provided ballot access in fifteen states. Another method was proving that your candidate was recognized by the media. Campaign manager Fran Watson encouraged supporters to mail PLAC any news coverage they saw of McCormack. Soon after, the women subscribed to a national press clipping service to document media recognition.50 Except for the Catholic press, however, most news outlets ignored or trivialized McCormack’s campaign, and her gender often exacerbated matters. Shortly after the press conference in Boston, one male supporter in Pennsylvania dutifully sent PLAC a newspaper article from the widely read Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin; it was entitled, “A Bonnet in the Ring.” The supporter lamented, “Let’s hope the papers will stop treating [the campaign] in a semi-​ h ­ umorous vein before long.”51 Closer to home, Newsday, a popular Long Island newspaper, described McCormack in gendered, apolitical terms that became common in the press, calling her “soft-​­spoken” and “attractive.”52 Incidents like this exposed an unresolved tension in the campaign. McCormack described herself as a mother and homemaker entering politics to protect children (albeit unborn fetuses) by forcing “professional politicians” to pass an HLA. As other marginalized women had done in the past, McCormack consciously used her gender to bolster her political credibility.53 PLAC acknowledged that McCormack was an outsider in national politics, but, as a

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mother, she purported to know about saving “babies”—​­far more so than the feminist insiders pulling Democratic priorities in the opposite direction. McCormack was a mother (and therefore an expert) on at least one issue that, in the first presidential contest since abortion had been legalized nationwide, was sure to be discussed. On the other hand, PLAC was frustrated when its campaign, which revolved around a topic of extreme importance to the women, was dismissed due to McCormack’s gender and outsider status. It was impossible to have it both ways, yet the women did not change course and were continually frustrated as a result. The fight to be taken seriously as an outsider and a woman soon came to a head on Walter Cronkite’s very popular and well-​­respected CBS Evening News telecast. On 8 October 1975, campaign manager Fran Watson watched Cronkite after dinner along with millions of other Americans. She grew angry when correspondent Morton Dean said that no women were running for president in 1976. This, Dean implied, differed from 1972, when U.S. representatives Shirley Chisholm of New York and Patsy Takamoto Mink of Hawaii ran in the Democratic primary and championed core feminist concerns.54 Watson sent irate letters to Dean, various executives at CBS, and Cronkite himself, all accusing the esteemed broadcast of shoddy journalism. “As even a cursory check with the Federal Election Commission would have revealed,” Watson wrote, “a woman presidential candidate, Ellen McCormack, has been registered with the FEC for three months prior to the Dean broadcast.” Watson chided CBS for missing this fact, when others had picked up on it “through the normal journalistic process” of checking “prime sources” such as FEC filings. She worried that the slight would cripple PLAC’s fundraising. “Here we are contacting potential contributors throughout the country” about McCormack’s candidacy, while “At the very same time, a national news network tells millions of people—​­including many of our potential contributors—​­that no such candidacy exists.”55 Still without a response from CBS, a month later Watson turned to a large national anti-​­abortion organization that had roots in New York, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC). The NRLC confirmed McCormack’s candidacy in its newsletter and urged readers to send her money and complain to CBS about the slight.56 It is unclear how many NRLC members contacted CBS, but on 8 December 1975, the newscast issued an apology. There are, correspondent Morton Dean noted, at least two women running in the primaries: “Ellen McCormack, Democratic candidate supported by anti-​­abortion groups” and “Democrat Mary Britt, a custodian from Philadelphia.” This roster led Dean to

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Figure 10. Campaign literature stressing that Ellen McCormack was not a “professional politician” and underscoring her concern for “unborn bab[ies]” as she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 1976. Courtesy of Jane Gilroy.

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deduce, “All you need is ambition, a point of view that you champion, or gall or all these things” to run for president. In this trivializing manner, the venerated newscast recognized McCormack’s anti-​­abortion campaign by labeling her candidacy as “interesting” and comparing her to a female custodian whose name never appeared on a single statewide primary ballot.57 Despite this noteworthy mention, three days later on 11 December, the secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts cited a lack of demonstrated press coverage when refusing to certify McCormack’s name for the state’s upcoming Democratic primary. Two undeclared candidates—​­consumer advocate Ralph Nader and home-​­state favorite, U.S. senator Ted Kennedy—​ w ­ ere included on the ballot, despite not filing to enter the race. Gene ­McMahon immediately reached out to Secretary Guzzi to protest the oversight. He mentioned McCormack’s coverage on Cronkite’s program and enclosed additional evidence showing that the campaign had been mentioned in eighteen other publications that reached an estimated five million people in ten different states. McMahon also reported that as of 15 December 1975, PLAC’s grassroots fundraising drive had reached or exceeded $5,000 in six of the required twenty states and had contributions totaling more than $3,000 in six more.58 McMahon’s pleas were ignored, forcing PLAC to circumvent the Massachusetts political establishment. McMahon found a loophole in the law stating that if a candidate did not meet the secretary of state’s definition of being nationally recognized in the press, she or he could gain ballot access by gathering the signatures of at least 2,500 registered Democrats in Massachusetts. In order to do so by the 31 December deadline, PLAC tapped into its large network of roughly 200 volunteers in Massachusetts, many of them Catholics, who went door-​­to-​­door to collect 3,500 signatures—​­a thousand more than necessary.59 As they saw it, political insiders supporting legal abortion had sent them into the cold streets over the Christmas holiday. A female volunteer from the working-​­class suburb of Lynn, Massachusetts, asked, “Why is [McCormack] being ignored in this day of women’s rights? We would expect the press and the politician alike to provide our lady candidate with fair treatment and coverage.”60 This remark calls to mind additional paradoxes that McCormack’s campaign engendered. Several questions abounded. Should feminists acknowledge McCormack’s candidacy, especially after she became the first female presidential contender to qualify for federal matching funds and Secret Service protection? Should McCormack admit that the public platform she stood

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on was available to her because of recent feminist gains? Or did the two camps’ diametrically opposed views make such concessions impossible? Like the supporter quoted in Massachusetts, PLAC again tried to have it both ways. McCormack and her allies deployed feminist arguments and decried sexism when doing so aided their anti-​­abortion cause; they otherwise avoided the hypocrisies their campaign dragged up. Feminists also acted out of self-​ ­interest, ignoring McCormack’s historic achievements for a female candidate, while criticizing her stance on abortion. These tensions only continued to mount as the primaries wore on. PLAC’s canvassing worked in Massachusetts, and McCormack’s name was certified for the ballot on 29 December 1975; the campaign, however, faced similar obstacles erected by Democratic insiders in other states. Attorney Gene McMahon’s grasp of arcane election rules and the efforts of PLAC’s dedicated volunteers ultimately enabled McCormack’s name to appear on nineteen statewide primary ballots and in a scattering of congressional districts across New York and Ohio. With thirty-​­one states holding Democratic primaries in 1976, as opposed to state conventions or party caucuses, this amounted to access in roughly 60 percent of contests.61 By January of 1976, PLAC was close to reaching its goal of raising at least $5,000 in twenty states, as it would soon do.62 With Virginia on the verge of becoming the twentieth state, McCormack traveled there to ask supporters to help her level the playing field with federal funding. “Pro-​­abortion groups are already complaining very loudly that perhaps as much as $200,000 will come from federal tax money to our right-​­to-​­life campaign,” she remarked. “What the pro-​­abortionists fail to mention, however, is that $50 million in federal tax money comes every year to the pro-​­abortion effort” to fund the procedure for low-​­income women.63 This rationale highlighted the women’s alienation from the political establishment and fueled their populist and maternal campaign to save “babies.” Objecting to the use of federal money for feminist-​­backed causes (and only for that reason, as PLAC unironically sought those same funds for their own purpose) also signaled the women’s future partnership with conservative Republicans who learned to discuss lowering taxes in those terms. McCormack’s pleas worked, and soon after, Virginia put McCormack over the top.64 Gene McMahon wasted no time filing for federal matching funds, making McCormack the eleventh candidate that year and the first woman in U.S. history to do so (granted, the program was only a few years old). The process began on 10 February 1976, when FEC auditors descended upon the home of

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Mrs. Leonard K. Brennan, a Long Island volunteer, to check PLAC’s meticulous records for days.65 PLAC’s treasurer, Mary Jane Tobin, reported $150,000 in contributions from roughly 8,000 people who gave $250, the legal limit, or less. As Tobin put it, the money came from “very God-​­fearing people . . . ​ upset about what is happening,” but resolved to “do something to combat [it].”66 Like other single-​­issue campaigns, including abolitionist ones more than a century before, PLAC often viewed its cause in terms that were more moral or religious than political. This is unsurprising from an organization that evolved from a Catholic parish group—​­led by women who, drawing on their church’s teachings as well as their own maternal experience, viewed abortion as the sinful slaughter of innocent “babies.”67 On 19 February, the FEC approved PLAC’s request for federal matching funds. Less than a week later, a check for $100,000 arrived from the U.S. Treasury to match PLAC’s initial fundraising in that amount. The funding entitled McCormack to automatic ballot access in fifteen states and to twenty-​­four-​ h ­ our Secret Service protection. Although McCormack initially rejected the protection, she reconsidered once PLAC began receiving hate mail as the campaign received more press coverage. The Secret Service agents generated a lot of attention in suburban Long Island. Several human interest stories ran in the local papers, all of which underscored that despite receiving this protection, McCormack, a housewife from Merrick, was an outsider in the competitive (male) world of presidential politics. This narrative again irritated PLAC’s supporters, despite the fact that they promoted the same to incur political benefit.68 McCormack’s campaign had always provoked a wide range of feelings, and debate intensified once she qualified for federal funding. Public financing had been created in 1974 to cut corruption and democratize politics in the wake of the Watergate scandal. As word spread about McCormack’s funds, people on both sides of the abortion issue argued that her unlikely grassroots campaign had fulfilled that promise.69 Criticism also poured in. Republican representative Charles Wiggins of California, who had voted against the public financing reforms, called her candidacy “a perversion that could open the Treasury floodgates to candidates seeking to promote controversial causes, not win office.”70 Even shared views on abortion did not insulate the campaign from condemnation. One female columnist in New Jersey who opposed legal abortion agreed with Wiggins. In an editorial piece entitled “The Cause, Yes; Tactics, No,” she wrote that McCormack had “cheapened her crusade by mounting a false [presidential] campaign” to obtain federal dollars. In

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Figure 11. Democratic presidential contender Ellen McCormack, the first woman in American history to qualify for Secret Service protection, is escorted home by agents after a campaign trip. Courtesy of Paul DeMaria, New York Daily News/Getty Images.

essence, McCormack had played politics with what this writer felt was a moral issue: abortion.71 Predictably, organized feminists were the most upset about McCormack’s use of federal funding. As vocal proponents of legal abortion, feminist groups accused McCormack of manipulating the regulatory environment to try to recriminalize what they and the U.S. Supreme Court considered a constitutionally protected right. NOW and NARAL retaliated by suing McCormack; they charged that she was funded by the Catholic Church with ads that falsely presented PLAC as an anti-​­abortion group, not a presidential political action committee. McCormack’s pro bono attorney fought back, and although the FEC disqualified two advertisements created by supporters in San Diego, nothing more came of the charges.72 The lawsuit provided McCormack with another opportunity to raise money by positioning herself as a victim of powerful feminist-​­backed forces. In one press release, McCormack compared herself to African Americans in the Jim Crow South. Just as the “literacy test . . . ​became a way to discriminate against black people,” she claimed that as a “right-​­to-​­life candidate and a non-​ ­professional politician [who qualified] for matching funds,” she was subjected

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to more scrutiny than her Democratic competitors, all of whom supported legal abortion or conceded that the Supreme Court had settled the matter.73 The Jim Crow analogy worked well with people inclined to back McCormack. Many Americans—​­chiefly including those living a comfortable distance from the South in states like New York—​­believed that the Jim Crow restrictions had not only been immoral, but antithetical to the American reverence for (if not actual delivery of) equality and civil (legal) rights for all citizens. McCormack and other opponents likewise saw legal abortion as immoral (murder of “babies,” they said), and to remedy the situation, they too leaned on ascendant rights-​­based language. McCormack’s campaign organized mothers and other supporters in a populist manner, as they purportedly tried to subvert entrenched interests in Congress by passing an HLA that would save unborn fetuses by granting them legal rights. NOW and NARAL’s lawsuit reiterated an allegation that continually dogged McCormack: the notion that her campaign was a pawn of the Catholic Church. PLAC’s activism grew from a parish dialogue group started by a Catholic priest. For decades, the Catholic Church had been involved in the political fight over legal abortion. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the church’s governing body in America, created an extensive plan in 1975 to lobby for an HLA. Many church leaders, such as New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke, encouraged Catholics to vote for anti-​­abortion politicians; they stopped short of recommending specific candidates, but McCormack still benefited. McCormack’s strong showing in northern Kentucky, where she won 30 percent of the popular vote as opposed to roughly 6 percent statewide, was attributed to local bishop Richard Ackerman’s indirect endorsement of her candidacy two days before the primary. Catholic newspapers provided favorable free press and advertising for McCormack, and parish networks were rich with volunteers and donors.74 Critics painted these links as improprieties, prompting PLAC to defend the relationship. Jane Gilroy argued that records certified by the FEC showed that the church had not given money directly to the campaign. She defended the right of priests to speak out against abortion; if anything, she felt that their response was somewhat underwhelming.75 As McCormack once sarcastically told a reporter, “the last bishop I met was the one who confirmed me in Manhattan when I was eleven years old.”76 PLAC also denied that its campaign and the broader anti-​­abortion movement were composed only of Catholics. The women did make some overtures to Orthodox Jews and other culturally conservative religious groups that had helped them in New York in the past, but

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given the Catholic face of the anti-​­abortion movement in their home state, and their heavy reliance upon Catholic resources to generate support across the country, such statements were dubious. Unable to placate her opponents, McCormack switched tactics and played to her Catholic base by accusing the media of religious bias. As one flyer read, “Isn’t it about time somebody stood up boldly to CBS and the New York Times and said: ‘Let’s cut out the anti-​ ­Catholic bigotry and [tell] the public the truth?’ ”77 Her words were another populist rallying cry that played well to the Catholic base McCormack relied upon for money, volunteers, and votes—​­this time citing their shared religion, instead of her gender, views on abortion, or lack of political experience, as the source of discrimination. Part of the disconnect was that PLAC never viewed its anti-​­abortion activism as a religious undertaking, and the Catholic Church, which could not directly enter politics for fear of losing its tax-​­exempt status, benefited as a result. The church also campaigned for an HLA, and priests had introduced many women to the issue. But like other contemporary Catholic activists, PLAC insisted that medical science, moral decency, and basic common sense, not religious doctrine, rendered abortion akin to murder. The government had been corrupted to the point where murder was now legal, and mere housewives from Long Island, who would have preferred staying home, had to get off the sidelines. This understanding was derived from the perspective of women happily immersed in full-​­time motherhood and homemaking, prizes they sensed being undermined shortly after they achieved them. The women had felt fetal movements and watched their own babies grow to the point where, by the seventies, they had more flexibility to leave their homes temporarily to save unborn children (an area of expertise for these mothers) as much as their own lifestyles. These anxieties drove PLAC’s populist response, which was aimed at feminists and their supposedly outsized presence in politics. Two of the goals the Catholic Church embraced in the sixties—​­to better engage the laity and outlaw abortion—​­reinforced each other. The men at Vatican II who refused to relinquish power to women likely did not envision how important lay Catholics, such as the homemakers from PLAC, would one day be to them. A decade later, these men marveled as lay women with more flexible schedules used the church’s newly expanded infrastructure (newsletters, parish groups, and so on) to run for president to outlaw abortion at a time when Catholic leaders could not afford to do so themselves.78 Unable to prove a direct link to the Catholic Church or otherwise deny McCormack federal funding, proponents of legal abortion pushed Congress

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to change the financing rules. In May of 1976, Congress passed a bill stipulating that if a candidate failed to earn at least 10 percent of the popular vote in two consecutive primaries, he or she would be cut off from federal matching funds. The only candidates affected were McCormack and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington State, an unpopular hawkish Democrat in a party dominated by antiwar sentiment after Vietnam. McCormack won, on average, 3 to 5 percent of the popular vote in the roughly twenty states she competed in. PLAC argued that its tallies were significant. The presidential elections in 1960 and 1968 had been decided by less than 3 percent of the popular vote. PLAC also encouraged critics to ask Ronald Reagan, who, at a critical juncture, lost the Republican primary in New Hampshire to President Ford by 3 percent, if such a small slice of the electorate was insignificant. The women’s pleas were ignored. McCormack’s funds were cut off in May of 1976, but not before the federal government had doled out $244,000 to her anti-​ ­abortion campaign.79

The Message Federal funding enabled McCormack to garner votes to try to steer Democrats and other lawmakers away from feminist goals and toward an HLA. As Richard Nixon and George Wallace had done in the presidential arena, McCormack used populist rhetoric to identify with the so-​­called silent majority of disaffected Americans that included other Democrats upset with the party’s embrace of legal abortion and other feminist goals. On the stump and in federally financed campaign commercials, she again projected gendered populism to target other white, middle-​­class, suburban, religious homemakers. She often equated legal abortion with other feminist-​­backed proposals, such as government-​­subsidized daycare, all of which she said threatened the traditional nuclear family and the women’s roles as wives and mothers within it. To bolster her case, McCormack appealed to raw feelings of exclusion, discomfort with rapid change, the desire to retain existent privileges in a tenuous economic environment, and patriotic sentiments about equal rights (in this case, for unborn fetuses). As one of PLAC’s printed advertisements summarized: “Behind the front page [headlines] of the libbers and the liberals. . . . ​ Millions like you . . . ​make the country go, day in and day out. We know you’re there and we know you believe in the traditional values, as Ellen does.”80 McCormack reached voters by going to seventeen of the twenty states she

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competed in. She traveled without pretense on commercial airlines and in the car with other PLAC officers. Children sometimes came along, which illustrated PLAC’s message: the women were not typical political insiders; they were mothers compelled to save “babies.” McCormack’s appearances, though unprofessional when compared to her competitors, were impressively coordinated for a campaign consisting entirely of volunteers. The Long Island group relied on key leaders in twenty states to organize fundraising, recruit volunteers, generate press coverage, and plan campaign events. Whenever possible, McCormack seized upon outside speaking engagements to minimize planning and costs. McCormack’s one campaign stop in Indiana, for instance, was a speech that she gave at the Indiana Right to Life Convention. She spoke at similar gatherings elsewhere, including anti-​­abortion activist Nellie Gray’s annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January of 1976, which an estimated 65,000 people attended.81 Large forums like this helped McCormack reach a wide audience, but PLAC’s anti-​­abortion commercials did so far more effectively. Federal funding enabled PLAC to afford expensive airtime during popular, family-​­oriented television programs, such as Name That Tune and Treasure Hunt, which were sure to attract likeminded women. Other major ad buys were determined by the FCC’s equal time law. PLAC once purchased a five-​­minute block during the half-​­time of an NBA basketball game after one competitor, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, had done the same.82 Excoriating the supposedly pro-​ ­abortion media, one supporter in Colorado remarked that McCormack had to purchase as much national time as she could “to get only a small fraction of the exposure some of the other candidates get for free under the guise of news coverage.”83 By April of 1976, the commercials had reached an estimated forty million people—​­thanks to PLAC’s Jane Gilroy, who learned to negotiate and buy ads, a task she compared to purchasing grapes, since both could only be done within a very small window of time. Such comments underscored PLAC’s lack of commensurate political experience, but they also were the reason many traditional women voted for McCormack.84 To account for inexperience and reach mothers and others likely to share their views, the women filled their commercials with scientific information and humanized portrayals of fetuses. They hoped that doing so would sway voters and insulate the campaign from criticism. Of course, by only reaching out to doctors with strong anti-​­abortion views, the women overlooked the fact that even seemingly objective fields like biology involve some measure of human interpretation.85 PLAC, for example, asked the aforementioned

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abortion activist and author, Dr. John Willke of Ohio, for feedback on the rough cut of its first commercial. Willke wrote back and suggested the following edits: [The commercial states that] a D&C [type of abortion] literally pulls apart the body of the baby. Might I suggest the wording, “with this loop-​­shaped steel knife, the body of the tiny baby is cut in pieces.” On the salt poisoning things . . . ​[it would be better to say] this healthy, living unborn baby “swallows and breathes in this poisonous salt, and is slowly killed by it.” The word “salt-​­poisoning” is in fact completely accurate as per a recently published scientific paper. There can be no comeback on that phraseology.86 Proponents of legal abortion complained that such language (e.g., “living unborn baby”) and imagery were being used in a presidential campaign. Several feminist groups urged their supporters to contact media outlets in protest. As PLAC had feared, some proponents complained based on a different interpretation of the facts. An article in the Detroit Free Press accused McCormack’s campaign of reaching out to “hearts, not brains.” In arguing that an “embryo, a few weeks old, suffers and sobs like a two-​­year-​­old kid hit by a truck,” the article declared McCormack’s campaign to be “as scientific and rational as a midnight horror movie.”87 But most proponents—​­hardly medical experts themselves—​­avoided this terrain. Groups like NOW and NARAL were chiefly concerned with who should control access to abortion: the government or women themselves. Graphic commercials about what abortion entailed and how the fetus supposedly felt did little to sway those concerned with choice and access.88 PLAC viewed its commercials and entire campaign as a direct response to the women’s movement—​­even though the two sides, as in the example above, were often debating different terms. Tellingly, production on PLAC’s first commercial began in Manhattan on 26 August 1975, Women’s Equality Day, which honors the passage of women’s suffrage. As PLAC made the commercial, New York’s governor, Hugh Carey, and Mayor Abraham Beame of New York City were speaking nearby to promote the state ERA that was rejected by voters that November. First Lady Betty Ford was in upstate New York at historic Seneca Falls, site of the first women’s convention in 1848, to unveil a commemorative stamp honoring the United Nations International Women’s Year celebrations.89 Summing up her contempt for this high-​­profile feminist

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support, and again conflating the ERA with abortion, McCormack recalled, “While we were working [on an anti-​­abortion commercial] in a New York City television studio, a number of pro-​­abortion feminists were demonstrating in the city streets, and the media, as usual, were informing the public that abortion is a wonderful thing for women.”90 PLAC harnessed these feelings of alienation into a populist and maternal campaign aimed at attracting (as much as validating) voters, particularly women, who shared these sentiments. Although McCormack would have preferred talking strictly about abortion, because she was a female candidate blazing a historic trail, the media pressed her about various feminist proposals. As in the past, McCormack and her associates supported economic measures for women, such as equal pay for equal work—​­reforms in line with the Democratic Party’s embrace of labor, and ones that would have benefited the working mothers many saw as children. But when the major labor unions endorsed the ERA, no longer believing that it would invalidate protective labor laws designed to help women, McCormack and others did not follow for fear that the amendment would make it impossible to outlaw abortion.91 McCormack also said, “I believe in childcare for the poor, but I don’t favor childcare for the middle class. I think we are teaching mothers it is more prestigious to work than be home with their children.”92 Becoming middle class was supposed to ensure full-​­time homemaking; incentives to the contrary were unacceptable. Detractors pointed out the irony in McCormack presenting herself as a traditional woman as she competed in (almost exclusively male) presidential politics—​­a path that the feminists she criticized had cleared for her, including the 1972 Democratic primary contender, representative Shirley Chisholm from nearby Brooklyn. Instead, McCormack appropriated the conservative maternalism that Phyllis Schlafly and other antifeminists had espoused in recent years as they campaigned in the public eye away from their own families. McCormack promised that just as mothers watch over their children, she would protect the nation’s unborn fetuses by temporarily leaving her home to challenge entrenched political support for legal abortion.93 Finding common ground was seemingly impossible. Feminists could not overlook PLAC privileging the rights of unborn fetuses above those of women. Conversely, James Killilea, a PLAC coordinator in Massachusetts, concluded that feminists were “a fraud [for] not coming out for Ellen McCormack” as they fought to open up political opportunities for women.94 In addition, despite efforts by groups such as NOW to embrace homemakers, McCormack and her supporters felt attacked for adhering to traditional lifestyles—​­as if

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feminist gains for women diminished those performing more conventional roles.95 McCormack’s position on other issues that she had to address in the presidential arena also reflected who she and the vast majority of her supporters were: white, middle-​­class, suburban, religious (frequently Catholic) homemakers. As a mother and a grandmother who wanted a peaceful world for all children, McCormack supported gun control, favored diplomacy over war, and approved of sending economic aid, not arms, to the Middle East. As a devout Catholic, she favored school prayer, called for peace in Northern Ireland, and opposed euthanasia and the death penalty.96 Perhaps because McCormack’s family subsisted on a single police detective’s salary during an economic downturn, she also called for a thorough study of the welfare system to rid it of possible corruption. In such a tenuous economy, it was imperative that the taxpayer dollars of families like hers not be wasted. As the economy continued to spiral downward in the seventies, similar impulses led many Democrats to vote for Republican Ronald Reagan by 1980. These so-​ c­ alled Reagan Democrats were attracted to Reagan’s racialized promises to curb welfare and taxes. Many people in McCormack’s suburban enclave shared these feelings; Long Island’s Nassau County had some of the highest property taxes in the nation. It was as if certain undeserving welfare recipients were to blame for white, middle-​­class residents’ increasingly more difficult claim to suburban upward mobility—​­an undeserving poor often imagined as the black men blamed for causing riots and violence in urban neighborhoods like the ones the women had grown up in.97 McCormack’s race, class, and maternal identity also informed her opposition to school busing. She never brought up the topic, but when asked by the media, McCormack reported being “as anti-​­busing as [she was] anti-​­abortion” and used more conservative language by calling it “forced busing.”98 Like other PLAC members, McCormack lived in a mostly white, middle-​­class suburb with a good public school system. She was comfortably insulated from the busing battles occurring in major cities, including in the nearby Canarsie section of Brooklyn. She favored achieving racial balance, but insisted that “black as well as white mothers don’t want busing. What we all want is good schools.”99 McCormack again appeared to weigh in as a mother, without regard to race. Yet, she was a mother who did not face this dilemma. Had McCormack stayed in New York City, she still might have avoided busing by sending her children to parochial schools like the ones she had attended. While never overtly racist, McCormack and her allies nonetheless promoted

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a racialized politics that privileged a lifestyle largely only open to other white middle-​­class families—​­a politics focused on threats aimed at their lifestyles, such as policies that reportedly killed “babies” or would compel homemakers into the paid workforce. This personal distance from busing meant that McCormack only talked about the issue when pressed to do so by others; when this occurred, she was not engaged enough to offer alternatives to address racial imbalance in public schools.100 McCormack did little to reach out to African Americans, with one notable exception: her unfaltering support from Dr. Mildred Jefferson, a black female surgeon who became president of the National Right to Life Committee and appeared in some of PLAC’s anti-​­abortion commercials. Jefferson echoed sentiments expressed by the Black Power movement by calling “legalized abortion genocidal to black people.”101 McCormack avoided such language, but made at least one attempt to reach out to black voters with a flyer featuring Dr. Jefferson, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and comedian Dick Gregory, along with anti-​­abortion quotations attributed to each of them. Gregory and Jackson likely never agreed to serve as spokespeople for McCormack’s campaign, and PLAC’s success in reaching African Americans was meager. Yet it seems that PLAC—​­who saw themselves as an embattled minority—​­tried at least once to reach out to another marginalized subset of the population, including black nationalists who opposed legal abortion for a very different reason.102 PLAC even compared its anti-​­abortion activism to the abolitionist movement. As one anti-​­abortion newsletter surmised in describing the Democratic Party of 1976, “history repeats itself (as closely as it ever does), and the Party of Slavery is born again as the Party of Abortion.”103 McCormack compared the Roe and Doe decisions to the Dred Scott U.S. Supreme Court case in 1857, which upheld Scott’s status as a slave after he settled in the free state of Illinois. “The Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott was not really a human being,” McCormack argued, “and now [it] has ruled that a living embryo is not a human being.”104 One feminist group in New York pointed out that the cases were not analogous. The Scott decision had denied the U.S. citizenship, not personhood, of slaves.105 This comparison provided a convenient justification for PLAC’s political quest. The analogy encouraged supporters to weather adversity, just as abolitionists had done for decades. It also allowed PLAC to imply that legal abortion was akin to universally repugnant chattel slavery. By grounding their arguments in a secular American narrative about the triumph of legal justice over slavery—​­as opposed to using a morality-​­based religious tale—​­the women

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tried to avoid links to religion and the Catholic Church. For the same reason, PLAC also promoted supposedly indisputable medical evidence and a maternal rationale for opposing legal abortion. In these ways, McCormack delivered a message that reflected her white, suburban, middle-​­class, religious, and maternal perspective. Despite some outreach to others, she focused on others like her, in order to win votes and pressure politicians into passing an HLA.

End Game McCormack won relatively few votes in the end, but her campaign was happy with its impact on the race. Her average of 3 to 5 percent of the popular vote in the states she competed in, or 267,590 votes in total, amounted to three delegates heading into the Democratic National Convention that July. PLAC believed that its outreach could have been greater if the media had paid more attention. McCormack’s results often were not mentioned in televised coverage of the primaries, and she spent much of late April trying to convince reporters that she was still in the race after prominent pollster Louis Harris told the New York Post otherwise.106 Despite these setbacks, McCormack labeled her results as “an important swing vote.”107 Beyond the numbers, McCormack helped bring abortion to the forefront of presidential politics. When the primaries began, nobody knew how abortion would shape the first presidential election since the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1973. Most politicians were hesitant to take a stand on such a controversial issue, and McCormack used her campaign to corner them into doing so. Walter Cronkite speculated before the primaries began that although it is “unlikely that Ellen McCormack stands any chance at all” of becoming her party’s nominee, she could “have a major impact on the campaign by forcing political decisions on an issue that most politicians would much prefer to see buried in a time capsule.”108 Cronkite was right: it was impossible for politicians to avoid discussing abortion in 1976. On the Republican side, California governor Ronald Reagan’s challenge to sitting president Ford was fueled, in part, by Reagan’s support for an HLA. In response, Ford dropped his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, from the GOP ticket in 1976—​­a man who, as governor of New York, had fought for the state’s abortion reform law and represented the party’s fading support for feminist-​­backed goals. Despite First Lady Betty Ford’s outspoken support for legal abortion and the ERA, President Ford began

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arguing that abortion should be a state matter. He also supported the ­Republican-​­backed Hyde Amendment Congress passed in 1976 to end federal Medicaid financing for abortions. The issue was harder for Democrats who had to walk a fine line between maintaining the party’s strong Catholic base and accommodating its growing women’s caucus and groundswell of feminist support.109 Some political strategists attributed Jimmy Carter’s upset victory in the culturally conservative state of Iowa to what one newspaper called his “ambiguous stand on abortion”; he was personally opposed to legal abortion, but felt that the Supreme Court had settled the matter.110 As McCormack campaigned on an anti-​­abortion platform, a pattern emerged. Reporters began asking her competitors where they stood. Somewhat overstating McCormack’s impact, but capturing this trend, Lifeletter, an anti-​­abortion publication read widely on Capitol Hill, intoned: Jimmy Carter, George Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Birch Bayh, . . . ​toss in dozens more politicians and every major publication and TV (even radio) stations in the country—​­what do they all have in common? Just a few weeks ago, the answer would have been “nothing!” Now, everybody in America knows the answer: the abortion issue. . . . ​Democrats . . . ​are stumbling all over the issue. . . . ​That is why Ellen McCormack is a real threat to all the other Democratic hopefuls.111 McCormack took pride in forcing Democrats to talk about abortion and pressed her case at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) that July, where she hoped to insert an HLA into the party’s platform. That goal, however, was impossible by 1976. Feminist leaders in the party—​­still incensed that their abortion rights plank had been defeated in a contentious floor fight at the DNC in 1972—​­were furious when the Platform Committee again left the plank out in 1976. Democratic delegate Gloria Steinem and other well-​ k­ nown feminists began lobbying Jimmy Carter’s representatives; they stressed that they would wage another convention floor fight, and this time they had a whip system for votes. Within hours, an abortion rights plank was inserted into the 1976 DNC platform. Opponents of legal abortion, including representatives from PLAC and the Catholic Church, protested, but lacking comparable political savvy and insider ties, they failed to block the plank. Reagan’s delegates, by contrast, helped insert an HLA into the Republican platform for the first time. This initiated a split that still exists today: the Democratic Party supports abortion rights and most feminist goals, while the GOP does not.112

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As these partisan lines hardened, millions of Democrats threatened to bleed across them. Fran Watson, McCormack’s campaign manager, warned: “Mr. Carter may think he needs the feminist vote . . . ​but he’s closing the door on millions . . . ​who are being told to vote Republican” because of the abortion rights plank. Carter is telling opponents of legal abortion that “they don’t belong in the Democratic Party.”113 PLAC used the abortion rights plank to paint Carter as completely beholden to feminists and dismissive of the party’s historically strong Catholic base. McCormack’s team also complained that Carter, a born-​­again Southern Baptist, had insulted Catholic leaders by calling their views on abortion out of touch and failing to invite them to give an invocation at the DNC, as they had in the past. In truth, Carter made feminists nervous because of his equivocal stance on abortion. Still, McCormack had sounded the alarm. Could Democrats support abortion rights and hold on to the northern Catholics who had been a key constituency in the party for nearly fifty years?114 Unable to get an anti-​­abortion plank into the platform, PLAC found other ways to make its presence known at the DNC. The women helped organize a nearby rally in Manhattan’s Central Park on 11 July, which attracted 10,000 people. One PLAC supporter announced there that a million registered Democrats had signed a petition vowing not to vote for Carter because of the abortion rights plank; for dramatic effect, he opened a suitcase said to contain 85,000 signatures.115 McCormack was the keynote speaker, and in a speech given a week after the nation’s bicentennial celebrations, she repeatedly referred to the Declaration of Independence. She demanded “certain inalienable rights . . . ​life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for unborn fetuses, who, she said, should be treated the same under the law as other Americans.116 The crowd then marched to Madison Square Garden, where they surrounded the convention hall in a “circle of life” and passed out literature.117 In one final indignity for McCormack, Democratic strategists sought, unsuccessfully, to keep the two delegates who gave nominating speeches for her at the convention off television. One of them, James Killilea of Massachusetts, accused Carter of disenfranchising “millions of Democrats who favor the pro-​ ­life cause.”118 The speeches were partially responsible for bringing McCormack’s final tally in the roll call to twenty-​­two delegates from five different states.119 In his live coverage from the convention floor, Walter Cronkite referred to McCormack as the “right to life candidate who campaigned in many of the primaries” and “won a respectable vote, around two, three, five percent.”120 In the first election after Roe v. Wade, McCormack had ensured abortion’s

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place in presidential politics. PLAC’s ads reached an estimated 200 million Americans. They did not, however, inspire enough votes to push expedient politicians, including Democrats beholden to feminist interests, into supporting an HLA. Gallup polls conducted in 1976 instead indicated that a majority of Americans supported legal abortion. But the fact that abortion was talked about at all—​­in commercials, on the stump, and in the press—​­significantly altered political discourse.121 As one Long Island newspaper later editorialized, “In 1976, a housewife from Merrick ran for president. In so doing, she helped put the anti-​­abortion movement on the political map.”122 McCormack aimed her populist and maternal message at other white, middle-​­class, suburban mothers, stroking the resentments they shared. She was a mother out to save unborn “babies” by battling powerful feminist insiders and other opponents who had taken over the party of the New Deal. As McCormack once lamented, “the Democratic Party, which ha[d] traditionally been the party of the people, [had become] the party which supports the killing of pre-​­born human beings.”123 The women vowed to work from the grassroots up to readjust Democratic priorities by demonstrating electoral support for recriminalizing abortion. McCormack’s campaign was unable to do so, but the women raised important issues that led many Democrats to leave the party in coming years. Exit polls from 1980 revealed that abortion and related matters had pushed more conservative Catholic Democrats into the Republican Party, particularly among married women aged forty-​­five to sixty-​­four. Ronald Reagan’s strategists targeted these women in 1980 since this demographic reliably goes to the polls. McCormack and her supporters overwhelmingly fit this profile, proving that not all traditional Democrats switched parties silently or without a fight. McCormack’s often-​­overlooked presidential campaign in 1976 had voiced this group’s concerns loudly in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the Democratic Party from embracing the modern feminist movement and its support for legal abortion. Yet, before PLAC and its allies could fully abandon the Democratic Party and vote for conservative Republicans on the state and national levels, further ideological maneuvering was needed. The women had to embrace core Republican demands for a smaller government, lower taxes, more robust anticommunism, and individual rights—​­a process that began in the early seventies in New York with the abortion and ERA debates and escalated in the latter half of the decade as the women linked these ideas more fully to traditional nuclear family rights.124

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CHAPTER 6

Toward the GOP

New York’s abortion and state ERA battles forced many (white, often newly middle-​­class) suburban women to pay attention to politics for fear that what they cherished most—​­motherhood, homemaking, and nuclear family life—​ ­would be taken away by feminists. Wakeup’s Annette Stern emerged feeling that “feminists really put down women who stay at home. You weren’t considered doing anything worthwhile.”1 NOW and other feminist groups insisted that their reforms would strengthen motherhood and the family. First-​ g­ eneration suburban homemakers such as Stern and Phyllis Graham disagreed. Like her Catholic leaders, Graham viewed legal abortion as sanctioned murder; she also disapproved of how it enabled women to avoid their maternal duties. Full-​­time motherhood and childrearing now filled the women’s days and, given their more humble economic backgrounds, they felt fortunate to have that be the case. Graham was sure that her mother would have preferred homemaking to working in a factory. These sentiments fueled the women’s opposition to the state ERA, which they warned would compel homemakers into the paid workforce. As Graham explained, “the feminist movement was all about working at professions—​­trying to be like men or do a man’s job.”2 The two sides fought over women’s choices versus obligations; differed on whether gender was a social or biological construct; and alternately were elated or insulted by the new feminist-​­backed political, economic, and social freedoms that women won in the seventies. But abortion and the state ERA were only the beginning. On 3 April 1976, the first broadcast of Eagle Forum Presents premiered on WALK, a popular Long Island radio station. Wakeup had defeated the state ERA five months before, and the New York State Right to Life Party (RTLP) was busy running Ellen McCormack in the Democratic primaries that spring.

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In the midst of this, Phyllis Graham and Betty Lenihan, two veterans of the abortion and state ERA debates from Long Island, took their thoughts on women and the family to the airwaves. They would speak for women who “do not wish to radically change the traditional culture of our society as the women’s lib movement wishe[s] to do.” Echoing Phyllis Schlafly’s newsletters as she worked on a book soon to be published with this title, Graham and Lenihan preached the need for more “positive women.” Feminists, they said, were “motivated solely by personal selfishness [and] resentment.”3 A woman’s gender dictated that she perform certain roles as wife, mother, and homemaker; feminism allowed deviant, negative women to blame their inexplicable distaste for these roles on made-​­up accounts of gender discrimination.4 This weekly fifteen-​­minute radio program, of which Phyllis Graham became the sole host, enabled the burgeoning conservative profamily movement in New York to thwart what it perceived as liberal media, and organize followers. The program aired across Long Island from 1976 through 1979. Phyllis Schlafly, who was equally concerned with media bias, allowed Graham to call the program Eagle Forum Presents, as a tribute to her national family lobbying organization and their shared beliefs. As Graham pitched it to the radio station, her program would offer a perspective that—​­as evidenced by the state ERA’s defeat—​­was popular, but received scant media attention.5 She would showcase the views of traditional women concerned with “God, home, and country” since, Graham argued, “Modern feminists [had] done so much to destroy those ideals . . . ​among our young women.”6 Graham’s opening salvo on the radio revealed the deep alienation that she and her associates harbored—​­feelings they channeled into maternal and populist rhetoric aimed at other women who felt the same way. As they saw it, feminists were a small, elite group that was dangerously influencing policy. Wakeup’s victory at the ballot box, however, confirmed what its members had always believed: that their views on gender and the family represented a majority opinion in the state. After the state ERA referendum, this confidence pushed Wakeup to remain, as its founder Annette Stern promised, “on guard against any measure consider[ed] detrimental to women or a threat to family life.”7 Graham’s radio show was one way for Wakeup and likeminded women to do so. What began as anti-​­abortion activism in 1970 was transformed by mid-​­decade into what Wakeup and others began calling the “profamily” movement. The women soon tackled feminist proposals in areas such as marriage and divorce law, daycare, childrearing, and sex education. As they did so, they forged a modern-​­day conservative politics centered on sexuality,

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reproduction, and the family, unwittingly working with feminists to stretch the scope of politics to include these areas, even though the two camps weighed in on opposing sides. The profamily movement was national in scope, but perhaps most visible (and Catholic) in New York. The strength of organized feminism, especially in the New York City area, continuously provoked a reaction, while the prior growth of groups such as the RTLP and Wakeup created a strong base to expand upon. New York’s activists were decidedly more Catholic than other groups across the country, which were dominated by Evangelicals and other conservative Christians. Phyllis Schlafly, who had ties to women such as Phyllis Graham on Long Island, was also Catholic, although her national Eagle Forum/StopERA organization did a better job reaching out to people outside the faith than women in New York did—​­owing to religious demographics in the state, as well as the reliance upon Catholic organizations in the abortion debates that launched the state’s broader profamily movement. Graham, a devout Catholic, helped make these connections on her radio show by scouring resources such as Schlafly’s newsletter for provocative topics to cover, before looking for nearby examples of these threats. Graham and her associates in New York thus formed a prominent Catholic wing of a national response to modern feminism.8 As the profamily movement grew in the latter half of the seventies, women in New York and beyond became fixated on two feminist-​­backed, federally funded events: the meetings for the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year in 1977 and the White House Conference on Families in 1980. These efforts suffered from two fatal flaws. First, they advocated a series of objectives—​­including lesbian rights, government-​­funded childcare, and legal abortion—​­that supposedly threatened the traditional family and its prescribed gender roles. One White House workshop even proposed defining the family outside of heterosexual marriage, blood lines, and adoption to include any group bound by “bonds of affection, mutual support, and commitment which will enable adults and/or children to grow and develop into creative and productive people.”9 Second, both placed taxpayer dollars in direct service of an antifamily agenda. This new preoccupation with taxes helped those who grew up in the party of the New Deal move to the GOP’s conservative wing; this was a welcome transition after Ellen McCormack’s presidential bid left many women feeling alienated from the Democratic Party. As core tenets of Republican ideology were imagined through the lens of

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heterosexual traditional family rights, the groundwork for political realignment was laid. This process began for some as early as 1970. Terry Anselmi of the New York State Right to Life Committee in Rockland County, for example, became dismayed around that time when representatives from Planned Parenthood spoke about legal abortion at her daughter’s public (i.e., taxpayer-​ ­funded) high school. Others first thought about how their money was being used when they learned that it was funding abortions for low-​­income women. Meanwhile, the state ERA campaign highlighted the perils of big government. Once the government-​­run, taxpayer-​­funded International Women’s Year and White House Conference on Families appeared, calls for smaller government, lower taxes, and individual rights (interpreted as a mother’s right to shield her children from dangerous feminist-​­backed ideas) intensified. In this way, the GOP’s conservative wing was increasingly attractive to women like Graham who had the heterosexual, male-​­breadwinner, nuclear family in mind. To understand the roots of this process, it is useful to examine the ideas and issues that led to a divergent set of politics in the seventies—​­as feminists and their opponents competed to define the family in ways that eventually resulted in political party realignment.10

War over the Family Women’s liberation matured into a potent (though heterogeneous) political force in the seventies, pursuing equal rights for women so vigorously that the United Nations declared it to be the “Decade of Women.” The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) was founded in 1971, along with several state and local versions. The caucuses were joint efforts between members of mostly liberal (as opposed to radical) feminist groups like NOW and the growing number of female legislators. Along with abortion rights and the ERA, the NWPC lobbied for a variety of legislation on the federal, state, and local levels—​­in part because progress on the ERA, which would have covered much of the law, was stalled. Countless new laws ensured that women could not be discriminated against in areas such as business, credit, education, housing, and employment. In other words, feminists relied on a liberal, rights-​­based form of advocacy, just as other social movements, such as the recent African American civil rights movement, had done. They inserted women’s rights into the legal code where they previously had not existed. For the first time in history, the NWPC and others also crafted a range of laws to address women’s roles in the family.11

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The feminist political agenda was based on the premise that a strong family was one in which the legal rights and domestic responsibilities of its adult members were shared equitably, regardless of one’s sex. Feminists helped pass several federal laws addressing family life, including ones that offered a 20 percent tax credit for employment-​­related childcare expenses (Tax Reform Act of 1976) and reduced the amount of time one had to be married in order to qualify for a spouse’s Social Security benefits (Social Security Amendments of 1977). These examples facilitated a woman’s ability to work outside the home by providing tax relief for expensive childcare costs, while simultaneously making changes to Social Security that promoted heterosexual marriage and disproportionately helped homemakers. By advocating for the traditional nuclear family as well as for opportunities for women outside the home, feminists embraced the concept of choice. A woman’s gender should not dictate that she get married and stay at home with children. These were choices, often ones driven by financial considerations in the faltering economy of the seventies. Laws needed to offer several options for women and families, rather than relying on the assumption that women were at home caring for children full time.12 Feminists hoped to establish women and men on more equal legal terrain—​­to the point where, as U.S. representative Bella Abzug (D-​­N.Y.) said, the law and female citizenship were based on women’s “individuality as human beings in their own right,” and not only on their capacity to serve as wives and mothers.13 Feminists reiterated that all choices were equally valid, including women who chose to stay at home. One NOW memorandum described how feminists had pursued reforms that, if enacted, would aid housewives by: enabling married women to qualify for credit; advocating for better enforcement of alimony and child support payments for those facing divorce; and implementing so-​­called displaced homemaker laws to help women who had to enter the paid workforce. The memo contended that unless opponents “could cite a similar list of accomplishments,” they would have less “credibility as the homemakers’ champion and defender.”14 NOW also advertised that Eleanor (Ellie) Smeal, a feminist homemaker, was chosen as its president in 1977. Feminists thought that their agenda not only addressed economic realities for two-​­income households, but also strengthened the family by making men and women more equal partners who could choose which roles they wished to play.15 Wakeup and its allies viewed these proposals as attempts to dismantle the basic foundation of American society: the traditional nuclear family with its

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set gender roles. They claimed that feminists were out of touch with, possibly even trying to deny, their femininity. True womanhood, they felt, was anchored in the domestic sphere. Annette Stern’s comment—​­about feminists making homemakers feel worthless—​­also revealed that opposition could be personal. Just as many women became suburban homemakers with the economic security their Depression-​­era childhoods often lacked, alternate possibilities for women appeared alongside a weaker economy. Women responded by joining groups like Wakeup. They were determined to take on entrenched political interests as wives and mothers intent upon preserving their lifestyles. Choice implied that the status quo was not as valuable as the women thought; in a world where new is often perceived as better, homemakers like Stern felt devalued and did not believe that feminists had their best interests in mind.16 Hurt feelings were hardly the worst of it: opponents also accused feminists of contributing to unwelcome societal change. Wakeup members blamed feminists for inciting general unhappiness and depression among the female population, which, they said, broke apart marriages. Greater female independence—​­not male perpetrators, increased awareness, or better ­reporting—​­was allegedly even responsible for an uptick in men committing domestic abuse and rape.17 “The rising incidence of rape,” radio host Phyllis Graham told a reporter, “has been concomitant with the rise of the women’s liberation movement.”18 Accordingly, by seeking rights and rejecting traditional gender hierarchies, feminists had upset the social order and provoked men into reasserting their authority in the most brutal ways. To blunt these threats, Wakeup vowed to continue representing so-​­called traditional women. One of Phyllis Graham’s first radio guests in the spring of 1976 was Wakeup’s Annette Stern, who spoke about the future of the group she had founded. After defeating the state ERA in November of 1975, most of Wakeup’s infrastructure remained intact, with members connected through regular newsletters. Stern resigned as president after the victory, and her friend Lucille Bachman, also of Westchester County, took over; Bachman was succeeded in the fall of 1978 by Ginny Lavan, a leader upstate in Schenectady.19 As Stern told Graham in a two-​­part radio interview in 1976, “our legislators are paying attention now because of the [state ERA] win,” and “it is essential that we exist to be constantly vigilant about legislation affecting family life.”20 While feminists pursued some of the above-​­mentioned federal laws, similar reforms were advocated on the state level, enabling Wakeup to organize against a series of local and national initiatives that they deemed harmful to the family.

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The two sides passionately clashed on the issue of childcare, which feminists felt should be subsidized by the government. By 1970, 50 percent of mothers worked outside the home. The number continued to grow as the economy plummeted, while childcare costs remained high. Feminists believed government grants for high-​­quality childcare would help working parents deal with these circumstances. Beyond meeting a tangible need, feminists hoped to end what NOW called women’s “second-​­class status.” One of the group’s handouts stated that “for thousands of years,” society has falsely maintained that “because women bear children, it is primarily their responsibility to care for them.”21 If women were to enjoy full equality with men, they would need a real choice about whether or not to work outside the home. Inadequate or unaffordable childcare coupled with lower pay for women prevented many mothers from having a real choice; it simply did not pay to work. High-​­quality, government-​­funded daycare would solve this dilemma and, through legislative policy, codify the notion that a woman’s anatomy was not her destiny.22 Feminists developed a comprehensive set of childcare policies. They recommended first-​­rate care that was assessed regularly by the state. They recommended giving parents a variety of childcare options—​­including daycare centers and home-​­based programs—​­that were operated twenty-​­four hours a day to accommodate all schedules. Childcare, they believed, had to be locally controlled by parents, meet the specific needs of the community, and be subsidized by the government through a variety of measures such as tax cuts and sliding-​­scale fees based on parents’ income. Gender and racial equality were to be stressed in all childcare programs. The goal was to have excellent, unbiased care that was affordable and able to meet children’s developmental needs at various stages, including funding for preschool education. These ideas were incorporated into the childcare bill that Democratic feminist representatives from New York, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, proposed in May of 1971. The Abzug-​­Chisholm bill was the most wide-​­ranging and generously funded childcare bill ever crafted; it was eventually combined with a prior proposal by two fellow Democrats, Representative John Brademas of Indiana and Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota.23 Wakeup and other profamily activists insisted that government-​­funded daycare would undermine motherhood. Offering high-​­quality, affordable childcare for families who needed or wanted it, Wakeup feared, would diminish the choice that many members had made to stay home full time with their children. Phyllis Graham was sympathetic to women who, like her own mother, had to work to make ends meet. But she rejected incentives that

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helped women enter the paid workforce when their additional familial income was not needed. As big government became evocative of a “nanny state” that would deprive children of home-​­centered maternal care, conservative Republican calls for smaller government and lower taxes became more attractive. The government no longer appeared to be helping their (white, middle-​ class) families, which were now more economically secure; instead, it ­ threatened to tear them apart by placing beloved children in institutional care. These fears drove countless people across the nation to contact their legislators. Senator Mondale reported receiving 500 to 600 letters a day from concerned parents.24 A national scare campaign unfolded, prompting President Nixon to veto the childcare bill in 1971 after it passed the U.S. House and Senate. He justified this move by citing the “administrative unworkability” of operating such a large program, the bill’s high cost ($2 billion a year), and its “family weakening implications.”25 In truth, Nixon did not want to offend fiscal and family ­conservatives—​­whose share of the vote seemed to be growing—​­in his presidential reelection campaign in 1972. Proponents of the bill complained about the president’s political calculation. Representative Abzug faulted Nixon for validating the “baseless fear” that government-​­funded childcare would result in “children [being] brainwashed by the government.” She denounced the president as having “gravely injured and grossly insulted the women and children of this country,” solely for “short-​­term political gain.”26 Proponents unsuccessfully tried to enact similar state and federal legislation in subsequent years, but the damage had already been done. Phyllis Graham’s radio show brought the childcare debates into people’s homes on Long Island. In one of her many segments on the topic, Graham interviewed Dr. Rhoda L. Lorand, a clinical child psychologist at Long Island University whose work was featured in Phyllis Schlafly’s newsletter in October of 1975.27 Graham was eager to have her beliefs validated by a professional since her expertise in childcare, as in politics, was limited to her experience as a mother. Schlafly, a trusted source, had found an expert nearby, which made Dr. Lorand a guest tailor-​­made for Graham’s show. As with the abortion debates, having just one medical professional confirm her beliefs was an attempt to combat opponents who wielded a barrage of facts and figures designed to make Graham and her associates look like hyperbolic, naïve housewives. Dr. Lorand played the role well, disputing the feminist notion that men could take care of young children as well as women. Fathers, Lorand and Graham agreed, were influential later in life, but nothing topped a mother’s care early on.

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“Institutional daycare,” they concluded, would cause irreversible psychological harm, especially among young children whose mothers did not work out of economic necessity (as Graham’s mother had), but to “seek some kind of fulfillment or diversion.” Lorand warned that feminists were setting a dangerous precedent, essentially telling women “there is no reason you should [care for your children], the government should do it for you.” They thought this prospect seemed downright communist.28 This potent mix of red-​­baiting and defending childcare as a natural role for mothers furthered the women’s affinity for conservative Republican concerns such as small government, individual rights, and robust anticommunism. But profamily conservatives had to contend with more than policy proposals such as government-​­funded childcare: feminists also hoped to impart their ideas about gender and motherhood to the next generation through what they called nonsexist childrearing practices. The feminist Ms. magazine, which profamily activists caricatured as a “bastion of mother-​­hating, antifamily propaganda,” featured a plethora of articles about parenthood and child­ rearing that again revolved around choice.29 Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an editor at Ms., wrote that “Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.” 30 She and others encouraged parents to break free from traditional gender roles within the family so that children would internalize their behavior. Fathers might engage in more childcare and cleaning, while mothers did yard work.31 Feminists also created their own nonsexist educational content for children. The Lollipop Power Press, a feminist publishing collective in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for example, produced children’s books designed to show “non-​­sexist and non-​­stereotypical role models to empower and instruct children in very diverse life situations.”32 Notably, actress Marlo Thomas and several writers at Ms. developed a popular compilation of short stories and songs entitled Free to Be . . . ​You and Me in 1973. Thomas recruited other celebrities to help her confound longstanding gender and racial stereotypes. Songs such as “It’s All Right to Cry,” sung by former professional football player Rosey Greer, encouraged boys, even athletes, to embrace their stereotypically female emotions and nurturing sides. Stories like “Atalanta” reminded young girls that marrying a “prince charming” was not the only road to happiness.33 Phyllis Graham dismissed these ideas in an on-​­air telephone interview with Dr. Harold M. Voth of the Menninger Foundation in Kansas. Graham asked Voth, a psychiatrist and prolific author who had just released a book

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provocatively entitled The Castrated Family (1977), about the importance of “a child [being] clear on his sexual role, on his male role, or her female role.” Voth unequivocally replied, “The clearer one is on that, the healthier the personality. It is a myth that one can separate gender identity from the rest of one’s identity.” 34 As they saw it, gender was an immutable, biologically based distinction that nonsexist childrearing practices falsely presented as a socially constructed identity. Feminist ideas would inflict irreparable psychological damage upon children and “castrate” the family by removing clear lines of male authority and female dependence. Graham and others eschewed feminist endeavors such as Free to Be in favor of, as Wakeup’s by-​­laws stated, “traditional sex role identity in the Judeo-​­Christian tradition.”35 Traditional gender roles were not only integral to their own family arrangements, they were divinely inspired; it was the way families were supposed to be. Political realignment was also driven by fears of feminist-​­backed secular humanism invading schools and corrupting children. Graham, reading from an article about education in The Phyllis Schlafly Report, dedicated an entire broadcast to the topic. She defined secular humanism as a “godless religion . . . ​ practiced by most of the pace-​­setting educationists today, which declares that there is no God, no right, nor wrong . . . ​and no individuality.”36 Graham noted that while humanist ideas first were advanced by progressive educators such as John Dewey in the thirties, feminists had led the way in resurrecting these ideas in recent years. Women such as Graham and Schlafly felt that secular humanism in schools—​­which, like nonsexist childrearing methods, eschewed absolutes in favor of inquiry and nuance—​­opened the door for a host of troubles, such as feminist sex education classes. These classes, like the one Planned Parenthood ran for Terry Anselmi’s daughter at a public high school in Rockland County, similarly failed to delineate a clear sense of right from wrong.37 Wakeup also blamed humanist-​­feminist educational principles for recent attempts by groups such as NOW to ban textbooks that only depicted men and women in traditional gender roles. The group was so troubled by the matter that its by-​­laws called for “Textbooks that honor the family, heterosexual monogamous marriage, women’s role as wife and mother and man’s role as provider and protector.”38 These concerns opened the door for Graham and others to align with conservative Republicans promising to lower taxes; this, they concluded, would mean less money to fund these educational endeavors. Lest her Long Island listeners think they were immune, Graham interviewed Anne Conroy, a features writer for the Bethpage Tribune in Nassau

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County, to discuss the impact of these trends on local families. In the nearby Island Tree School District, for example, several controversial library books were banned, including Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s autobiography, Soul on Ice, which discussed incidents of rape and black rage in a white-​­dominated world. Cleaver’s raw feelings of racial exclusion were foreign to Wakeup members, while the urban violence described in his book powerfully contrasted with their lives in the suburbs. As the economy contracted, fear spread among some white Americans that the racial minorities rioting on TV were ungrateful people who, along with destroying other people’s property, squandered precious taxpayer dollars from the welfare dole—​­as hardworking citizens like them struggled to retain a foothold in the middle class. Books like Cleaver’s called to mind this foreboding mix of urban racialized violence and economic instability. Once again, the women’s politics were racialized, privileging a white, middle-​­class lifestyle they deemed to be under assault from dangerous outside forces. These alleged threats were often an amalgam of different social movements on the left, from liberal feminism to Black Power. In Graham’s interview, Anne Conroy likewise claimed that feminist Democratic U.S. representative Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn was among those fighting the hardest to keep books like Cleaver’s in local public schools.39 Graham lamented that these secular humanist-​­feminist educational practices were distancing parents from their children in ways that led her and other women to align with the GOP. Sex education programs promoted ideas about sexuality that traditional parents did not share. But beyond that, Graham and Conroy discussed how core academic subjects were changing in ways that made it harder for parents to help their children with homework. Graham saw this when she could not help her son with his “new math” assignment one night. The two women then discussed a new social studies program that Phyllis Schlafly and other profamily conservatives had targeted: MACOS (Man: A Case of Study), which analyzed how different cultures adapt to their environments. When extrapolated further, the MACOS model implied that everything, including concepts like morality, were situational. For middle-​ ­class, patriotic, religious parents who believed in a firm sense of right and wrong—​­a group Graham considered herself and her listeners to be part of—​ s­ uch curricula threatened to supersede ideas taught at home that expressed reverence for God and clear gender roles and lines of authority. For women who dedicated their lives to raising children full time, this distance between parents and offspring was very troubling. These fears, along with humanism’s purported reverence for the collective, made robust Republican anticommu-

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nism and conservatives’ pledge to protect individual rights appealing, which the women translated into a mother’s right to shield her children from disturbing outside content.40 To strengthen their arguments, profamily conservatives learned to focus on feminist-​­backed issues that hit home for many Americans, such as public education; doing so made it easier to brand feminists as antifamily. As with abortion, the two sides had radically different visions of the family that made attaining common ground nearly impossible. One side argued that gender was socially constructed, and that the law as well as social norms should support a range of choices and lifestyles for women and families. Phyllis Graham’s radio show featured an antifeminist politics that was much more static. She and profamily conservatives saw gender as divinely inspired and biologically based. The traditional nuclear family was the only acceptable model, and the desire to save the women’s beloved way of life drove them from groups like Wakeup into the political arena. Phyllis Graham and her associates would rally at the grassroots as mothers and homemakers determined to stop elite and politically entrenched feminists, whom they deemed to be anti-​­family.

The International Women’s Year Conferences These opposing worldviews collided dramatically in 1977 during meetings for the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY). The IWY stemmed from a United Nations initiative in 1975, in which member nations each sent representatives to Mexico City to design a “World Plan of Action for Women.” President Ford appointed Jill Ruckelshaus, a Republican in Rockefeller’s mold who had been President Nixon’s special assistant on women’s rights, to chair the American delegation, which was heavily composed of women from liberal feminist groups like NOW. As a result of their input, the World Plan contained several feminist-​­backed recommendations such as equal pay for women and more adequate childcare policies. Each country’s delegation was instructed to return home and devise a plan for implementing the recommendations, with the United States electing to hold a three-​­day meeting (dubbed the IWY) in Houston, Texas, in November of 1977. This gathering would be preceded by meetings in every state, where delegates to the national IWY would be chosen and a list of recommendations approved. New York’s meeting was slated for 8–10 July 1977, in Albany, with Democratic representative Abzug presiding over the plans until President

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Carter, who was in office by 1977, tapped her, as a fellow Democrat, to run the final event in Houston. The stakes were high: the IWY was federally funded and its recommendations would be given to President Carter for consideration.41 Feminists were determined to control the agenda sent to Carter and have their ideas turned into law. They hoped that the IWY would offer their goals a much-​­needed boost at a time when the federal ERA was stalled and a state like New York, where much of their leadership was based, could not pass a state-​­level ERA. The IWY coordinators planning the meeting in Houston drafted a comprehensive “National Plan of Action” that was adapted from the feminist-​­backed World Plan. In addition to supporting core feminist goals such as legal abortion and the ERA, the National Plan urged employers—​­in both public and private sectors—​­to hire more qualified women. The government would help by giving parents of both sexes easier access to high-​­quality childcare. Women who chose to stay at home with their children would have their contributions to family life affirmed with increased financial security. As in the past, the National Plan privileged the feminist-​­backed notion of choice for women, whether they chose to stay at home or not.42 Profamily women disagreed and drew on the resources of a fast-​­growing national movement to prepare for New York’s IWY meeting in July of 1977. Wakeup’s relationship with Phyllis Schlafly, which first blossomed during the state ERA battle, remained strong. Groups like Wakeup also looked to Anita Bryant, a gospel singer who gained notoriety after leading several campaigns to repeal local gay rights ordinances, beginning with her victory at home in Florida’s Miami-​­Dade County in 1977. Bryant worried that children—​­the next generation of American leaders—​­would accept same-​­sex unions, even more so if gay and lesbian couples were allowed to adopt and create their own families. Bryant, like Schlafly, often conflated homosexuality with feminism, as both challenged the primacy of the traditional nuclear family and heterosexual marital bond. In a similar regard, Wakeup had worried about the ­feminist-​­backed ERA legalizing “homosexual marriage.” Phyllis Graham and others followed Bryant’s campaigns and adopted her rhetoric about the need to safeguard children from same-​­sex unions.43 Opponents like Graham were equally incensed when they found out that the feminist-​­run IWY events would be funded by taxpayer dollars. In December of 1975, Representative Abzug persuaded fellow legislators to appropriate $5 million to pay for the IWY meetings. Wakeup and others noted that the money was awarded only one month after the state ERA was defeated in New

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York, an important geographic and intellectual center of modern feminism.44 They insisted that theirs was the majority view, with Graham telling her listeners that the IWY was a gross misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund “The latest gimmick being used by the militant women’s lib movement to foist their radical goals upon the rest of us.” Following the example in Washington, the New York State Legislature set aside $50,000 for the state meeting in Albany that July. “As if the $5 million wasn’t enough,” Graham continued, “another $50,000 . . . ​of your tax money [will be used] to promote radical, revolutionary, anti-​­family goals” in New York.45 The IWY was another crucial turning point that led profamily conservatives to advocate for lower taxes. The IWY, like Medicaid-​­financed abortions and government-​­subsidized childcare proposals in the past, heightened concern about how taxpayer dollars were being used. Ann Freihofner, a housewife and member of Wakeup from Westchester County, expressed worry along these lines to her state senator, Bernard Gordon, after the state meeting in Albany. She complained that feminists “seem to want everything for ­nothing—​ ­ ur tax bills would be astronomical if their demands are met.”46 Guided by o those like Phyllis Schlafly at the national level and radio host Phyllis Graham at home in New York, Freihofner and others concluded that lowering taxes would grind the feminist agenda to a halt by starving its revenue base. A new politics was afoot as women who were raised in the tax-​­and-​­spend tradition of the New Deal looked rightward toward the conservative wing of the GOP, with an understanding of fiscal matters hatched from their desire to protect the heteronormative nuclear family and traditional gender roles from perceived feminist threats.47 Profamily activists unsuccessfully insisted that the taxpayer money be returned or reallocated. They presented themselves as fiscally responsible housewives operating at the grassroots while feminists worked at the presidential level with their hands on the nation’s purse strings. Phyllis Schlafly pointed out that under new Federal Election Commission laws, the Democratic and Republican national conventions were each awarded $2 million in taxpayer money: feminists running the IWY would be getting $1 million more than both major parties combined. Schlafly filed a federal lawsuit in April 1976 to recover the $5 million, charging that the IWY funds violated Article V of the U.S. Constitution and the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 by giving taxpayer money to an event that would only represent one side’s viewpoint.48 Nothing came of the lawsuit, however, because the IWY organizers promised to represent all points of view among American women.

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Their promotional literature emphasized this inclusiveness. The invitation to New York’s state meeting, for example, was first read at a press conference in Manhattan by a diverse sampling of women who invited “women of all ages, incomes, viewpoints, social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds from cities, towns and rural areas” to Albany that July.49 Despite these publicized attempts to include all women, feminists tried to keep ideological opponents away from the state meetings where delegates and agenda items for Houston would be approved. Phyllis Schlafly encouraged her readers to “force the IWY to fulfill its promise by demanding equal representation on all conference planning committees, speaker lists, staff, delegates, and other personnel.”50 A national umbrella organization called the Citizens’ Review Committee (CRC) was set up to oppose the IWY, with New York’s state-​ ­level CRC dominated by members of anti-​­abortion groups and Wakeup. Phyllis Graham described in one radio broadcast how she went to the IWY office in Manhattan in May of 1977 to apply to attend the state meeting that July. She was told that an application would be sent to her when it was ready, but it never arrived. Around that time, other local CRC members visited the IWY office in Manhattan, which shared office space with NOW, to inquire about need-​­based financial scholarships to travel to Albany. According to Mary Tracy, an anti-​ ­abortion activist from Glen Cove, Long Island, Annette Stoller, director of New York’s state meeting, brushed them aside and yelled that CRC members should raise money for their own conference. Incidents like this fueled opponents’ alienation and negative impressions of feminism.51 New York’s IWY coordinators likely wanted to silence the CRC after what had occurred in some states that held meetings earlier in the year. In Hawaii and Nevada, the Mormon Church helped CRC branches turn out women to vote down the feminist-​­backed National Plan and send conservative delegates to Houston. Ellie Smeal, president of NOW, recalled that after roughly fourteen state meetings, the IWY coordinators held an emergency meeting to discuss curtailing the CRC. Smeal and other IWY organizers, for example, made “Pro-​­Plan Houston 1977” buttons to help identify their supporters. In the end, the antifeminist CRC captured about 19 percent of the delegate spots, or roughly 400 people out of the 2,000 from across the country who would go to Houston. Almost all these delegates were elected from states that, unlike New York, held meetings before the IWY coordinators hatched a plan to stop them.52 Due to this increased vigilance, New York’s CRC struggled to influence the state meeting scheduled for July. In early 1977, the national IWY organizers

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sent affiliates in each state a carbon copy of the National Plan in a memorandum entitled “Recommendations Urged for Consideration by State IWY Meetings.” New York’s coordinators welcomed the suggestions and immediately began designing panels that would generate approval for them in Albany.53 The CRC objected, with three of its members who also were involved in Catholic anti-​­abortion groups—​­Audrey Kelly of the Archdiocese of New York, Evelyn Aquila of the Brooklyn Diocese, and Miriam Barth of Buffalo—​­writing a letter to the state’s IWY director in June. The CRC women worried that if the National Plan were passed, the government, not women and families, would assume a major role in childcare. They opposed the plan’s support for legal abortion, even for rape victims, on similar grounds. The women suggested that the state amend its reproduction resolution to affirm that all “Americans . . . ​are entitled to procreate as a basic human right, in accordance with their responsibilities toward God, toward self and toward others.”54 IWY leaders ignored these pleas, as debates like this ushered in a new, more personal, and highly divisive family politics. The specter of a state-​­sponsored event weighing in on intimate family matters such as childcare and reproduction further led to calls for smaller government, individual (parental) rights, and lower taxes to stymie feminist-​­backed initiatives such as the IWY—​­all of which facilitated the women’s future cooperation with conservative Republicans. These fundamentally different perspectives collided at the New York State IWY meeting on 8–10 July 1977, with both sides eying each other suspiciously in an overcrowded and emotionally charged atmosphere. Anti-​­ abortion groups, Wakeup, and other CRC affiliates arranged buses to Albany, which prompted feminist organizations to do the same. The conference organizers expected 3,000 women to show up, but almost three times as many came, with some estimates putting the number closer to 11,000. The unexpected influx led to space constraints in the government buildings set aside for the meeting, frequent communication breakdowns, and a shortage of materials, including only thirty voting machines. Thousands of women roamed the halls, and food was in short supply. The first two days were packed with 105 workshops, where proposals from the National Plan would be discussed along with any suggestions made at the meeting. Voting was scheduled for the final day, when attendees would elect delegates to represent New York in Houston that November; they also would decide on a state agenda, which the organizers hoped would mirror the National Plan.55 The CRC women faced several hurdles upon arriving in Albany. The women were confident that if so-​­called everyday women—​­ones like them

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who had helped defeat the state ERA—​­went to Albany, their resolutions and delegates would be approved over feminist ones. But, for example, when the three CRC women who had written to the state IWY director about abortion attended the Reproductive Health-​­Medical Services Workshop, where their prefiled resolution should have been discussed, it was not on the agenda. Audrey Kelly, one of the women, approached the workshop chair about the oversight and was told that the resolution must have gotten lost in the mail. Kelly was assured that the resolution would appear at the plenary session the next day, where it would be voted on by everyone at the state meeting. When it never appeared there either, CRC members confronted Democratic state senator Karen Burstein, the rules chair in New York, who promised to contact the IWY office in Washington, D.C. The national office would determine whether or not to put the resolution on the agenda in Houston. In describing the situation to the national coordinators, Burstein noted that support for legal abortion far outweighed the CRC’s views at the state meeting. Burstein’s unscientific assessment ensured that the women’s resolution never emerged for a vote in Houston.56 The delegate selection process in Albany was similarly fraught since the organizers tried to determine much of it beforehand. CRC members and others who wished to run for one of the eighty-​­eight delegate or five alternate spots waited in line for up to four hours just to enter their names into consideration. The organizers nominated a slate of women whose names they had chosen in advance. Their list—​­which included sympathetic politicians, prominent feminist leaders such as Betty Friedan, and several others actively involved in the women’s movement—​­unexpectedly faced more challenges from the left than from the right. The black, Hispanic, Asian, and radical caucuses derided the overwhelmingly white, middle-​­and upper-​­class, liberal feminist organizers for not paying sufficient attention to race and class in crafting their slate. In the end, the final delegate list from New York was more inclusive along these lines, although the same cannot be said for ideological diversity.57 A call log maintained by the national IWY office in Washington, D.C., documented the plight CRC members faced in Albany. A conference organizer, for example, called the national office seeking permission to ban opponents from a workshop on homemakers because they were communicating loudly on walkie-​­talkies. Lillian Koegler, a RTLC and Wakeup member, was unable to nominate someone as a delegate. The CRC logged over 300 such infractions and instructed members to contact lawmakers to discredit, maybe even cancel, the national meeting in Houston. Most complaints described

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perceived breaches of parliamentary procedure and the inability to distribute CRC literature. But one woman, Phyllis Hyrosa, complained that her colleagues were tripped at a session. The cramped quarters and long days fueled these tensions that were born from vastly different outlooks and years of struggle in New York State.58 In the end, a feminist agenda and delegate slate were approved in Albany. On the final night, Jeanne Edgar, an editor at Ms. magazine, recalled staying up late with IWY volunteers and staff—​­including Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Lieutenant Governor Mary Anne Krupsak—​­to make hundreds of copies of the feminist-​­backed agenda and list of delegates. As Edgar put it, “our teamwork paid off . . . ​and the group that went to Houston from New York State was solidly feminist.”59 Being in charge of the proceedings and having an estimated four-​­to-​­one advantage in numbers had its benefits. Although voter registration was scheduled to close on 9 July, the CRC alleged that it was reopened on 10 July to register busloads of feminists who were brought in to vote. The CRC nominated thirty women to go to Houston, but none of them won. Ultimately, 3,600 votes were cast for delegates. The organizers decided to take a voice vote on their agenda, which was adapted from the National Plan and workshop sessions; the resolutions would be considered as a package. The CRC protested, hoping to consider each plank individually, but its request was refused. After scanning the crowd for reportedly only a few seconds, the organizers declared that their agenda had passed.60 Feminists were ecstatic about the results in New York. Sally Boggan, a woman involved at the grassroots level on Long Island, confidently predicted in the New York Daily News that the movement (and some of its biggest objectives, such as the stalled federal ERA) were about to get a much-​­needed boost from the IWY.61 The CRC considered the state agenda to be an assault on the traditional family, and along with opposing resolutions in favor of the ERA, legal abortion, and federally subsidized childcare, the women rejected its support for gays and lesbians. Phyllis Graham devoted nearly a minute of her fifteen-​ ­ inute weekly broadcast to denouncing the presence of lesbians and groups m such as the National Gay Task Force at the state IWY meeting—​­their physical presence alone, to say nothing of the gay and lesbian rights plank that was approved in Albany. “Lesbians were everywhere in sight, and many of them were IWY staff members,” Graham informed listeners.62 In the CRC’s view, the traditional nuclear family (with heterosexual marriage at its center) was the bedrock of American society and its capitalist economy. Lesbian and gay relationships recalled images from Cold War propaganda depicting Soviet

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home life with multiple adults of the same sex living together. In reality, extended families often shared communal housing in the Soviet Union; two grown men cohabitating there were far more likely to be related to one another than to be lovers. Still, as the Cold War persisted and gays and lesbians remained (despite recent advances) on the margins of society, linking communism to homosexuality conveniently disparaged both the nation’s chief geopolitical enemy and the same-​­sex relationships that Graham and others found unacceptable.63 While homosexuality was not embraced, it did not fuel the women’s politics the way that feminism did. Despite the strength of homophile networks (and later gay and lesbian liberation groups) in nearby New York City, women such as Graham did not follow these movements to the extent they did local feminist ones. The Catholic Church’s disproportionate focus on abortion contributed to this fact. Throughout 1969, for example, Catholic parishes across the state were far more apt to broadcast opposition to the ongoing abortion debates in Albany than to denounce (or even discuss) lesbians and gay men standing up to the police that year at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan. This division filtered down to the grassroots level. Gays and lesbians offended Graham and her allies insofar as they defied the nuclear family model they rallied to save. The political movements behind gays and lesbians, however, provoked far less worry because their major goals—​­such as legal protections for gays and lesbians in the workplace—​­had less legislative success than feminist-​ b ­ acked ones. Graham consequently spent more time denouncing the mere presence of lesbians at the state meeting, seen as equal parts menace to the traditional family and social oddity, than discussing their political agenda.64 The CRC’s fervent belief in heteronormative gender roles undergirded its opposition to seemingly unrelated planks adapted from the National Plan as well. The state agenda, for example, advised the president to appoint women to leadership roles in government jobs and federally funded cultural and media institutions. Feminists hailed these proposals, which were based on the premise that women deserved as much choice and opportunity in the workplace as men.65 Graham considered the subtext of these planks to be that “women should be given preferential treatment in federal jobs and grants, even if the women are not better qualified and are not supporting spouses and children, and the men are.”66 Graham argued on her broadcast that married men (presumably with dependents) should be given special employment consideration in the contracting economy that made it harder for men to be sole provider/female-​ breadwinners. She and her associates valued the male-​­

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­ omemaker paradigm so deeply that life became a zero-​­sum game. Any h woman choosing to work necessarily took a job away from a breadwinning husband trying to support his family; a man not working could compel his wife to leave the home to do so. Graham and others had seen this in their more humble upbringings, and they were determined to protect their newly acquired privilege and accompanying traditional division of labor. They would enter politics as wives, mothers, and homemakers—​­craftily using the resources at their disposal, as a housewife might do when forced to make a quick meal on the spot. The women would model what could be lost if they did not stop feminists from assaulting their traditional way of life.67 These concerns were carried into the national IWY meeting that took place from 18 to 21 November 1977 in Houston. An impressive 2,000 delegates, including 400 antifeminists, most elected at earlier state meetings, came to Houston, as did countless celebrities and three first ladies: Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and Rosalynn Carter. Supporters considered the IWY to be a historic achievement, which resulted in a twenty-​­six-​­point National Plan of Action that contained all the core elements approved of in New York, most of which had been outlined before the state meetings began.68 While proponents celebrated, profamily activists held counter rallies in Houston and across the country. Phyllis Schlafly hosted an event at Astro Arena in Houston, which attracted an estimated 20,000 people—​­ten times as many as at the IWY. Members of the CRC in New York held a protest for about 300 people at the Ramada Inn in Albany. These events generated a great deal of press coverage, allowing profamily activists to continue their assault against the IWY and feminism.69 For months and even years, the IWY served as fodder to disparage feminist goals. Schlafly periodically published photographs of the IWY in her newsletter, typically doing so as a fundraising tool to fill her coffers. Four months after Houston, Schlafly ran a collage of sensational signs that had appeared at the national meeting. One read: “Lesbians for Wages for Housework”; others proclaimed “I [love] NY. NY Supports ERA; NY Supports Reproductive Freedom; NY supports sexual preference.”70 A government-​­funded presidential initiative that endorsed legal abortion, the ERA, gay and lesbian rights, and federally subsidized childcare were easily caricatured. IWY coordinators stressed that the National Plan would benefit women and families by, for example, allowing the growing number of two-​­income families to afford high-​­quality childcare with government assistance. Still, opponents had put feminists on the defensive. Carter created a task force to address the National

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Plan, but its planks were implemented slowly and all but stalled during the president’s all-​­consuming reelection campaign against social conservative Ronald Reagan. The traditional family and its prescribed gender roles were deeply ingrained in American civic and religious life. Anything presented as an attack on God, home, and country—​­after the social movements of the prior decade, and in the midst of a recession and the continuing Cold War—​ ­faced tall odds.71

Predictable Dissent: The White House Conference on Families The convergence of politics and concerns about the family led to the White House Conference on Families in 1980. During the 1976 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter led the way in discussing various problems facing American families, including rising rates of divorce, out-​­of-​ ­wedlock births, juvenile crime, drug abuse, and unemployment. He promised to hold a conference on the topic if he were elected president, an idea that grew from the Senate subcommittee hearings on the family that Democratic U.S. senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who became Carter’s vice president, held in 1973. Carter appointed Joseph Califano, Jr., an aide with policy experience in President Johnson’s administration, as his advisor on the family. During the campaign, Califano produced a thorough analysis of how the government could better help families through various programs. Carter was impressed, and as president, he nominated Califano to be secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). Part of Secretary Califano’s new job was to manage the White House Conference on Families (WHCF), which he immediately began working on.72 The WHCF was designed to bring together scholars, policy experts, religious leaders, community organizers, and average Americans through a series of state and regional meetings that would produce a set of recommendations for the president. As with the International Women’s Year, each state would hold a series of meetings to vote on an agenda and elect delegates. But rather than have one national conference as the IWY had in Houston, the WHCF would consist of three regional events held in 1980 in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. In New York, more than 6,000 people attended five state meetings, where they approved an agenda and elected fifty-​­six delegates who, along with another sixty-​­seven people appointed by the governor, went to the

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Eastern Regional WHCF in Baltimore.73 As the official report from the WHCF triumphantly declared, a total of 500 state forums were held; in all, 125,000 people voted to elect 2,000 delegates to the three regional meetings, where they “worked together to hammer out an agenda for families” that was sent to the White House (and promptly disregarded as Carter became a lame duck and the Reagan administration prepared to move into the White House).74 As the New York Times reported, the concept of the family was so politicized by 1980 that the WHCF, “once seemingly the simplest of President Carter’s campaign promises to keep,” was soon “mired in controversy, rumor, and suspicion.”75 The WHCF was originally scheduled for 1979, but it was pushed back after controversy erupted when Secretary Califano named Patsy Fleming of HEW to chair the conference. The choice of Fleming, an African American divorcee with three teenage sons, was criticized heavily by influential Catholic editorial writers such as Father Andrew Greely. Califano, a Catholic himself, seemingly buckled under pressure and named a cochair to serve with Fleming. He denied that doing so was related to pressure from the conservative Catholic right. Fleming resigned in protest. She was replaced by former Democratic representative Jim Guy Tucker of Arkansas, who, although he was married to a divorced woman with children from her previous marriage, lived a lifestyle that was more acceptable to defenders of the traditional nuclear family. The Fleming controversy was emblematic of the central issue that plagued the WHCF from start to finish: wholly different visions of the family, which led to fights over delegate spots and divergent policy prescriptions.76 Profamily activists envisioned the family in its heteronormative traditional nuclear form and made recommendations accordingly. Cay Dorney, a member of Wakeup who attended one of New York’s state meetings for the WHCF, later shared her thoughts with Newsday, a widely read newspaper on Long Island. Dorney felt that “abortion, alternate lifestyles, ERA, federal daycare centers, flexible work time and sex education in schools” were “moral issues which undermine the definition of the nuclear family as ‘a family where the husband supports his home and children, and the wife . . . ​takes care of the home.’ ” Phyllis Schlafly echoed Dorney’s comments in the same article, noting that it “was a travesty to call it a family conference” when those in charge were “in favor of calling homosexuals a family.”77 Schlafly and profamily activists in New York defined the family through heterosexual marriage, blood relationships, and the legality of adoption—​­with all members performing clear roles dictated by their gender. Other variants were a perversion of God’s intent, basic morality, the arrangement upon which

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America’s capitalist economy was built, and, again in the case of the WHCF, use of taxpayer dollars.78 More liberal and feminist groups dismissed this narrow definition of the family and pointed to recent demographic trends. By 1980, 44 percent of women nationwide had full-​­or part-​­time jobs, with many working to mitigate the impact of the weak economy. On Long Island, where Wakeup’s Cay Dorney had made her statement, that number was roughly 43 percent in 1980, up from 35 percent in 1970; a reported one-​­third of women from the area did not live in nuclear families. For these reasons, Dorney’s opponents recommended policies such as federally subsidized daycare and flexible work time for parents of both sexes.79 These familiar political battles loomed over the delegate selection process in New York. At each of the five state meetings, feminist groups competed against Wakeup and anti-​­abortion organizations for delegate spots. Over 1,200 people attended the meeting at Fordham University in the Bronx, where tensions ran the highest in the state, perhaps because Wakeup and the Right to Life Party and Committee were so strong in the New York City area. One unruly attendee, Paul Morrissey of Queens, who was president of a group called Morality Action Committee, was charged with third-​­degree assault after he hit Meta Mulcahy, a board member of Catholic Alternatives, because she went against her church’s teachings on abortion. Most of the twenty-​­four state delegate seats assigned at Fordham went to, as the New York Times pointed out, “Feminists and . . . ​ethnic minorities,” including members of groups such as NOW, Catholics for Free Choice, Lesbians for Free Choice, Planned Parenthood, and Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers.80 Only one known member of Wakeup was elected as a delegate: Evelyn Aquila, the woman who had tried to pass an anti-​­abortion plank at the IWY state meeting. These results were perhaps inevitable at a conference put together by a Democratic administration in an era when feminists had a strong presence among party insiders—​­the people who often run these events. Conservative profamily activists foresaw these challenges. But, again relying on populist and maternal arguments as well as grassroots organizing principles, they attended the state meetings anyway, determined to express their views (in at least one case, by brute force).81 The delegate results in each state mirrored those in New York, which marginalized profamily conservatives at the three regional WHCF meetings. Some activists attended the regional meetings and staged dramatic walk-​­outs to publicize their cause. Others like Wakeup’s Evelyn Aquila filed so-​­called

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minority reports to refute, for example, the conference’s support for abortion rights and comprehensive sex education in public schools.82 Many more profamily activists simply stayed home from the regional meetings after striking out at the state level. John Middleton, who chaired the New York State Right to Life Committee in the mid-​­seventies, and whose wife, Claire Middleton, was an anti-​­ERA leader in Wakeup, was among those who did not attend. He had learned from his prior political involvement that those in command of the delegate slate always control the agenda at any big meeting—​­and that agenda is almost always decided in advance as at the IWY. Middleton called the left-​­leaning, taxpayer-​­funded, predetermined agenda that emerged from the WHCF meetings a “devastating blow for the family.”83 The final resolutions affirmed the vision of women and the family that feminists had promoted over the past decade. To be sure, some planks were compatible with conservative ideas and received support from both sides, such as tax policies to encourage in-​­home care for elderly and handicapped people. This proved that it was not simply the use of taxpayer dollars in service of the family that irked activists like Phyllis Graham, many of whom were raised as Democrats. Graham and others only objected when tax money was used in ways that they perceived to be harmful to the traditional nuclear family and its attendant gender roles. Opponents saw far more of these suggestions, including proposals to give Social Security benefits to housewives. Often with their own situations in mind, women like Graham who were gravitating toward conservative Republican ideology argued that this would amount to an additional tax for one-​­income families struggling to stay afloat (since homemakers would have to start paying into the system). WHCF officials unsuccessfully tried to minimize such controversy. At the regional meeting in Baltimore, the organizers decided not to create an official definition of the family since efforts to do so at the state level in places like New York had not gone well. The final WHCF agenda also underscored parental preference when recommending a variety of federally funded daycare options. But despite these precautions, profamily activists were not placated. They saw a radically different vision of the family bleeding through almost every plank, even ones that did not obviously do so like the Social Security proposal.84 Such friction was inevitable because two separate streams of politics—​ ­both of them female-​­led and focused on women and the family—​­had developed in the decade leading up to the WHCF. The feminist political strand

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recognized the demographic diversity of American families, was sensitive to the changing economy, envisioned women’s citizenship as independent of their capacity to serve as wives and mothers, and looked to the government to ensure that men and women were afforded equality inside and outside the home. The profamily movement refuted the notion that gender roles were socially constructed and advocated policies that only acknowledged the family in its heterosexual nuclear form. The abortion debates, state ERA battle, and subsequent disputes over the IWY and WHCF in New York led Graham and others to become suspicious of government (i.e., feminist) interventions related to the family. Only reducing the size of the government to exclude these areas of oversight, lowering taxes to defund feminist aims, and bolstering individual (parental) rights would save the traditional nuclear family. The women were willing to temporarily step away from their own homes to protect this vision, even if that meant facing entrenched political opposition. Their state ERA victory had shown them the power of mobilizing in a populist fashion at the grassroots as concerned homemakers and mothers.85 Perhaps the only point profamily activists and feminists agreed on by 1980 was that everyday familial concerns (“the personal”) had become political—​ ­and for women like Graham, it had become decidedly Republican. This was even clearer after Ellen McCormack’s Democratic presidential campaign had shown many women that the party of the New Deal had left them behind by supporting modern feminist goals. These beliefs about gender and the family led the profamily movement to Ronald Reagan’s more conservative Republican Party that was solidified in New York and elsewhere by 1980. This was a very different GOP from Nelson Rockefeller’s party that had partnered with liberal Democrats and feminists to support issues such as legal abortion and the ERA. A closer look at state and federal elections in New York in 1980 brings these forces of political realignment into fuller view.

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PART IV

REALIGNMENT

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CHAPTER 7

Making a More Conservative Republican Party

By the late 1970s, Nelson Rockefeller’s reign appeared to be over in New York (and the nation). Even after he was tapped to serve as Gerald Ford’s vice president in 1974, the state’s Republican Party remained a tightly managed, top-​ d ­ own operation under Rockefeller’s thumb. He and his allies supplied much of its organization and money—​­sometimes from Rockefeller’s own personal fortune—​­and their influence was decidedly moderate, profeminist, and centered in New York City. When Ford replaced Rockefeller with the more conservative Senator Bob Dole (R-​­Kan.) on the 1976 ticket in response to a protracted primary challenge on the right from former California governor, Ronald Reagan, the spurned vice president still delivered nearly all New York’s 135 delegates at the Republican National Convention to secure the president’s nomination. After that last show of force, however, Rockefeller left politics and retreated to private life before dying in 1979. His departure opened the door for more conservative leaders to rise to power. Republican county officials elected the energetic Dr. Bernard Kilbourn, a dedicated conservative who gave up his dental practice and began building the state party from the ground up. With Kilbourn at the helm, conservatives became local party chairmen and further marginalized the last vestiges of Rockefeller’s more moderate wing.1 Conservative Republicans realized that embracing profamily politics would help them consolidate their power in the state; in turn, anti-​­abortion and antifeminist groups were increasingly attracted to conservative Republican rhetoric. Wakeup’s Pat Gmerek, who was brought up as a New Deal Democrat, was moved to collect nominating signatures for Ronald Reagan in 1976. Gmerek thought that only Reagan, as opposed to Ellen McCormack in the Democratic primary that year, stood a real chance of becoming president.

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Gmerek hoped to turn the GOP into a more conservative party that, unlike Democrats and Rockefeller’s allies, did not endorse legal abortion and other feminist aims.2 For Gmerek and other women, lowering taxes, as conservative Republicans promised to do, meant defunding taxpayer-​­financed feminist initiatives like the IWY. The women equated big government with objectionable proposals such as the state ERA. Individual rights, as the Right to Life Committee’s Terry Anselmi had learned, included the right of parents to keep feminist-​­backed education out of their children’s taxpayer-​­financed public schools.3 The economic downturn in the seventies led to conditions that made conservative Republican promises especially attractive in the suburbs of New York City where Terry Anselmi and others lived. As communities grew across Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester Counties at unprecedented rates in the decades after World War II, New York City shed residents and revenue, to the point where it faced near bankruptcy in 1975. These four surrounding suburban counties had some of the best public schools in the state, which often correlated with expensive property taxes. Even with less money coming in from the state as it worked to bail out New York City, many high-​­performing suburban school districts refused to reduce spending, which provided yet another impetus to raise already high property taxes. In Nassau County’s famed Levittown community, for example, property taxes skyrocketed by a staggering 23 percent in 1975.4 Conservative Republicans exploited these conditions to win favor in these counties, which accounted for a quarter of all votes in the state by 1980. They blamed a profligate urban left in both parties for hurting suburban homeowners: from New York City’s Democratic mayor, Abraham Beame, who reportedly had caused the fiscal crisis, to Vice President Rockefeller, who was at first unable to convince President Ford to supply much-​ ­needed federal aid. This economic climate persisted in subsequent years, ensuring that the Republicans who filled the power vacuum created by Rockefeller’s departure from politics in 1976 were conservatives calling for measures such as lower property taxes and less government spending. Joseph Margiotta, the conservative leader of the Nassau County GOP on Long Island, soon became the most powerful state party chair and a top power broker in New York.5 Women from groups like Wakeup fanned the flames with family-​­centered appeals. Radio host Phyllis Graham worked with other conservative profamily activists to distill these seemingly complex fiscal matters into language easily understood by fellow homemakers. She explained that the recent property tax

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hikes would eat into family budgets, possibly sending mothers into the paid workforce. A breadwinner crisis was potentially at hand. Vote for conservative Republicans, Graham warned women in these populous suburbs, or be forced to work outside the home like some of their mothers during the Depression. Taking a cue from conservative Republican strategists, Graham and her associates branded their politics as “family values” by 1980. Doing so allowed them to align with a very popular institution (the family), reaffirm their homemaker status, and project antifeminist beliefs without appearing to eschew rights for their own sex. The “profamily” label that surfaced during the state ERA battle similarly helped them defuse assertions that they were against equality, a notion upon which the United States allegedly was founded and which is an integral part of American nationalism.6 The results of New York’s gubernatorial race in 1978 paved the way for this close partnership between profamily women and conservative Republicans. The Long Island-​­based Right to Life Party had always been more involved in electoral politics than its allies in the state’s broader profamily movement. After the women saw in Ellen McCormack’s Democratic presidential campaign how much easier it was when they did not first have to gather signatures to have the RTLP (not the candidate, but the mere party) appear on the ballot, they became intent upon winning a “regular line.” The RTLP learned that if it won at least 50,000 votes in a gubernatorial race, it would have a guaranteed spot on the ballot in every political race in New York for the next four years (a regular party line, as it was called). The women could then select a candidate to appear on its line in each contest, allowing more time to concentrate on winning votes to aid the anti-​­abortion cause. In 1978, they ran Mary Jane Tobin, a founder of the RTLP, for governor of New York. Tobin received enough votes to qualify for a regular party line, which made it easier for the RTLP to run its own candidates and cross-​­endorse people from other parties. In doing so, the RTLP demonstrated to politicians—​­notably conservative Republicans looking to grow their base—​­how an anti-​­abortion stance could mean the difference between victory and defeat.7 The RTLP’s new cross-​­endorsement powers shaped the U.S. Senate race in New York in 1980. During the Republican Senate primary, longtime incumbent senator, Jacob Javits, sought reelection. As he campaigned across the state, Javits acknowledged that he was a Republican in Rockefeller’s mold who embraced feminist goals such as legal abortion and the ERA. But the political climate had changed in the state and Republican Party in the six years since he last ran. Javits lost the GOP primary to Al D’Amato, a little-​­known conservative

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town supervisor from Long Island who was cross-​­endorsed by the RTLP, a designation that later provided his margin of victory in the general election.8 As the GOP’s suburban-​­based right wing gained ascendency, it set the stage for Ronald Reagan’s victory in New York—​­a state that, the New York Times noted, was “once the most arid political terrain” for his conservative politics.9 In 1976, Reagan was barely competitive in New York after Rockefeller locked in the state’s delegates for Ford. Just four years later, the state, particularly the four suburban counties that the women had organized, was central to Reagan’s victory strategy. He announced his candidacy in New York and named several people in the state to prominent advisory roles. At the Republican National Convention in 1980, conservatives dominated New York’s delegation and platform discussions. At every turn, the RTLP and its allies vied for Reagan’s attention and forced him to address their concerns; they also insisted that he did not need to court liberal, profeminist Republicans like Javits to win. Reagan’s fidelity to conservative ideas about women and the family played a role in his winning New York, just as it did elsewhere in the country. If this was the end result in New York, then a major turning point was Mary Jane Tobin’s gubernatorial bid in 1978. A closer look at Tobin’s populist and maternal campaign is warranted, as it captured many of the economic and social anxieties (and the intersection between the two) that led conservative Republicans such as Reagan and Al D’Amato to victory two years later.10

Mary Jane Tobin for Governor As talk turned toward New York’s gubernatorial race in 1978, the women who ran the Right to Life Party on Long Island foresaw an opportunity to have more leverage in state politics. As always, the RTLP did not seek to get elected, but to compel “professional politicians” to vote for anti-​­abortion measures. This group of mostly housewives imagined themselves as outsiders challenging the political insiders who sanctioned the slaughter of innocent “babies.” As in the past, the women would adopt a populist and maternal tone in the gubernatorial contest, supposedly entering the fray temporarily to battle entrenched pro-​­abortion interests on a shoestring budget. The odds they faced were high, but it was a matter of life or death. The women may have been on the margins of political power, but they were mothers who knew how to keep “babies” alive, and they would leave their own homes to try to do so. The RTLP was not, however, merely a group of housewives and mothers.

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After running Ellen McCormack for president in 1976, some women felt that running for governor would be easy. The RTLP was confident that it could win at least 50,000 votes to qualify for a regular party line for the next four years, a period that would overlap with the U.S. Senate and presidential contests in 1980. If it did so, RTLP volunteers would no longer have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to obtain ballot access. In theory, the party could field a candidate in every race in the state, ideally moving a U.S. senator, maybe even a president, to finally prod Congress to outlaw abortion nationwide with a Human Life Amendment (HLA). Since 1970, the women had won a steady 3 to 5 percent of the vote in each race they had entered. With a regular line on the ballot, the RTLP would become an officially sanctioned third party in New York like the Liberal and Conservative parties, and expedient politicians would vie for its cross-​­endorsement. This later transpired, but from the onset, the women could not have predicted how much conservative Republicans would covet RTLP backing in their attempt to rid the GOP of its more liberal (Rockefeller) wing that embraced measures like legal abortion.11 When the RTLP officers first convened in the spring of 1978, their thoughts were attuned to more basic concerns such as finding a gubernatorial candidate. They decided to run Mary Jane Tobin as governor and Ellen McCormack as lieutenant governor. Tobin recalled how casually the women decided on these arrangements as they gathered in a suburban home with children noisily playing nearby. “Oh,” Tobin remembered, “I said I’d like to run for governor and [Ellen McCormack] said fine.”12 Once again, the actual candidates were subordinate to the cause. Although she had never run for office before, Tobin was a founder of the RTLP who had been involved in all its races. As McCormack’s treasurer in 1976, she had meticulously collected and sorted donations from across the country to qualify for federal matching funds. By 1978, Tobin was a registered nurse living in Merrick, Long Island, with her husband, a corporate vice president, and their children. Although she now worked while her kids were in school to maintain the family’s middle-​ ­class lifestyle, she discovered how to blend her new occupation with anti-​ a­ bortion volunteerism. Tobin had recently been named president of a new organization in the area called the Nassau County Division of Doctors and Nurses Against Abortion.13 Tobin’s professional experience was an asset as the RTLP again sought to shine a spotlight on fetuses. Proponents of legal abortion were concerned with maintaining access to the procedure, which they framed as a necessary woman’s right since a fetus is wholly dependent upon its mother’s body for survival.

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Opponents preferred to bypass this debate over access and women’s rights; instead, they humanized fetuses by discussing growth in the womb. Tobin’s medical training allowed her to more fluidly discuss fetal development and avoid sticky questions about access and women’s rights. This was a useful screen as she criticized feminists for their stance on legal abortion while capitalizing upon the gains they recently had won for women by running for the highest political office in the state. Tobin continuously likened embryos and fetuses to babies out-​­of-​­utero, which enabled her to argue, like the leaders of her church, that legal abortion was akin to sanctioned murder. 14 By now accustomed to a familiar playbook, the RTLP created a form letter in May of 1978 that introduced Tobin and solicited money to fund anti-​ ­abortion commercials. The women mailed the letter to allies across the state and beyond and encouraged them to circulate it widely. The form letter explained why anti-​­abortion commercials, due to the FCC equal time law, could only be aired within the context of a political campaign. The commercials were necessary, the letter argued, because of “the silence of the New York press and TV” on abortion.15 As the women saw it, the gubernatorial race would provide a visible platform to educate the public about their views in the hope of stopping abortions—​­both by causing individual women to reconsider their choices and by unearthing anti-​­abortion sentiment in the electorate that would pressure lawmakers in Washington, D.C., into passing an HLA. The RTLP’s political aims hit closer to home as well since both of Tobin’s Democratic and Republican rivals supported legal abortion. Her introductory campaign letter stressed that Perry Duryea, the Republican gubernatorial nominee and current minority leader in the State Assembly, had cast a crucial vote in favor of New York’s abortion reform law in 1970. Tobin also criticized incumbent governor Hugh Carey, the Democratic candidate, for continuing to cover Medicaid abortions in language that revealed the women’s growing penchant for lower taxes and smaller government. The Hyde Amendment that had outlawed federal (taxpayer) funding for abortions in 1976 stipulated that state and local governments could continue covering the procedure for low-​ ­income women. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this prerogative in 1977. The RTLP was upset that under Governor Carey, New York was one of fewer than ten states still paying for Medicaid abortions. Duryea initially approved, but began opposing state funding once he entered the gubernatorial race in order to earn the cross-​­endorsement of the Conservative Party, which he won.16 True success, Tobin wrote, was forcing Carey, Duryea, and other political candidates to realize, all the more so if the RTLP earned a regular party line, that

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they “may face the same threat from Right to Life in future elections” if they do not oppose legal abortion.17 The RTLP believed that if its campaign could remake Albany into an anti-​ ­abortion political capital, it would have an impact beyond the state. Tobin’s initial letter optimistically predicted that “Just as the defeat of the New York State ERA [in 1975] signaled the death knell of the national ERA movement, . . . ​the passage of pro-​­life legislation in New York State will have far-​ ­reaching consequences for the national pro-​­life effort.”18 Given the strength of feminism in New York, the state ERA’s defeat had provided an effective fundraising and recruiting pitch for national opposition groups such as Phyllis Schlafly’s StopERA. If Tobin’s campaign led to legislation in Albany that weakened federal abortion policy, the RTLP assumed that other states would follow. Tobin’s comparison between the state ERA battle and her anti-​­abortion campaign is unsurprising since both causes attracted similar followers. Tobin’s letter noted, for instance, that Carolyn Dlugozima of nearby Floral Park, Long Island, would be collecting funds for the gubernatorial campaign—​­the same woman who had started an anti-​­ERA group affiliated with Wakeup. The RTLP had not played a major role in defeating the state ERA, but its members opposed the amendment. Above all, they feared the ERA would make it impossible to outlaw abortion.19 Tobin praised Wakeup for opposing an extension of the federal ERA ratification deadline in 1978, and she urged the group in a telegram to keep up its “courageous fight against those well-​­financed elements . . . ​who are seeking to undermine and destroy respect for life and the integrity of the family.”20 Like Tobin, many people saw the two as conjoined threats. Just as legal abortion offered women an escape from motherhood by killing “babies,” opponents worried that the ERA would eliminate gender-​ s­ pecific roles for the male breadwinner and female homemaker. Both of these scenarios would decimate the nuclear family, in which women were focused on children and domesticity. To prevent these fears from being realized, groups such as the RTLP and Wakeup mobilized as humble mothers and homemakers to challenge those in power who allegedly wished traditional families like theirs harm. The RTLP depended on electoral politics to do so, and Tobin’s gubernatorial bid was one of its most successful campaigns. In the Democratic presidential primary in 1976, McCormack only appeared on the ballot in four of New York’s thirty-​­nine U.S. congressional districts. A lack of volunteers to gather nominating signatures and the simultaneous challenge of managing ballot

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access in twenty other states accounted for this disparity. By 1978, the RTLP had learned from its mistakes. With the help of volunteers across the state and Gene McMahon, the attorney who had always dispensed free advice to the women, Tobin’s campaign won ballot access in all thirty-​­nine districts. The party did not run any other candidates that year, so it had more time to dedicate to this process; its contacts across the state also had grown during McCormack’s presidential campaign. The RTLP cobbled together $64,000 by relying on tactics that had worked before, such as going door-​­to-​­door and soliciting funds in busy shopping centers. The women were now adept at converting the suburban infrastructure around them into a lucrative grassroots fundraising operation. The money mostly came from small donations, but many party insiders gave larger sums. Ellen McCormack’s family, for example, contributed $992 to the campaign.21 Tobin’s more systematic approach led her to hire a press secretary, Richard Bruno, who was involved in local anti-​­abortion activism. Bruno first met Tobin in 1978 as he and others in Rockland County were gathering signatures to get her name on the ballot. Rockland County had a very active branch of the Right to Life Committee (RTLC), which had worked to repeal New York’s abortion reform law in 1972 before Governor Rockefeller issued a veto. But unlike the Right to Life Party, the RTLC could not legally endorse candidates or sponsor them for office. Bruno had always been more interested in electoral politics. In 1972, he attempted to run against his Republican state assemblyman, Eugene Levy, who had voted for legal abortion. He gathered 1,500 signatures for his candidacy, but Levy challenged many of them. Unable to get on the ballot in that race, Bruno tried to mount similar challenges in subsequent years, but none materialized. Since ballot access had eluded him in the past, Bruno was intrigued by the RTLP’s effort to win a regular party line. He agreed to sign on without pay as Tobin’s press secretary.22 Bruno, who ran a fireplace and chimney servicing company in Rockland County, was an odd choice for a press secretary; but his resourcefulness and passion aided the campaign. By his own admission, Bruno was not a good writer. He even lacked the typing skills needed to create a press release. As a successful small business owner, however, he knew how to delegate responsibilities. Bruno was also able to dedicate vast amounts of time and money (in total, $1,900 of the $64,000 the campaign raised) toward Tobin’s gubernatorial run. These were rare traits among most of the men the RTLP women and their allies knew—​­men who were typically mid-​­level employees beholden to bosses and financial constraints, unlike Bruno, who ran his own profitable business

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and had a more flexible schedule. Abortion was the only political issue that Bruno cared about as a devout Catholic following church doctrine. His zeal was not commonly exhibited by other men in New York, except among certain Catholic priests and other key male supporters such as the RTLP’s attorney, Gene McMahon. But like the mothers and homemakers trying to stop legal abortion and related causes, Bruno and these men shared the women’s ideas about gender and family. Fetuses were babies, and making it legal to kill them undercut the familial roles and lifestyles that these activists valued most.23 Bruno’s organizational skills lent the RTLP, which normally operated around kitchen tables in busy domestic spaces, a new air of professionalism. Bruno hired Stewart Ain, a reporter from the New York Daily News who needed work while the newspaper was on strike. The men met every morning at 6:30, usually at Bruno’s chimney business, to read all the national newspapers and a smattering of regional ones to ascertain the top stories of the day. They paid attention to what, if anything, related to abortion. With Ain—​­who needed money during the strike and had no real opinion on abortion—​­at the typewriter crafting prose, the two created a press release based on the day’s news. Bruno then called Tobin at her Long Island home to ensure that she was comfortable with what they wrote. Once he got her approval, Ain sent the release to his press contacts with Bruno’s name on it.24 Bruno made sure that Tobin had an informed position on the major issues being debated in the news. Tobin spoke out most frequently and passionately about the need to enact an HLA that would outlaw abortion by granting unborn fetuses constitutional rights. Echoing McCormack’s presidential bid and official Catholic doctrine, she spoke out against euthanasia and capital punishment. Yet she also criticized Governor Carey for vetoing a bill that would have permitted capital punishment, arguing that it was preferable to abortion since it did not “involve the taking of an innocent human life.” Tobin clearly missed her own hypocrisy since the RTLP claimed to protect all forms of life. As McCormack had done, she too opposed busing (something that would not affect her in the suburbs, but potentially threatened the neighborhoods in New York City where many women had grown up). Tobin continued to oppose the ERA and link it to abortion, saying that she could not “support any legislation which could jeopardize the cause of the unborn child.” She approved of giving state aid to private schools, likely with the Catholic parochial schools that many women and their children had attended in mind.25 In other words, like her allies in New York’s anti-​­abortion and antifeminist circles,

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Tobin promoted a politics that reflected a white, overwhelmingly Catholic, middle-​­class suburban orientation. The women cherished this lifestyle that their families had built in recent years and were willing to make sacrifices to maintain it, even if that meant running for governor to do so. Like radio host Phyllis Graham, Tobin mixed ideas about gender and the family with core Republican concerns. She accused her opponents, Republican Assemblyman Perry Duryea and incumbent Democratic Governor Carey, of wasting taxpayer dollars by “appoint[ing] their friends to ‘no-​­show’ jobs” and “flying around the state at public expense” on unnecessary business trips to promote their political campaigns.26 As she saw it, her opponents not only advocated legal abortion, but they were dangerously out of touch with the lives of most New Yorkers. Elite professional politicians literally were flying above ordinary citizens, far removed from everyday family life as they wasted taxpayer dollars. Tobin conversely positioned herself as a champion for average citizens struggling to make ends meet, not unlike a resourceful housewife stretching scant household dollars or a PTA mother perpetually forced to work with a small budget. In doing so, she promoted a politics that conservative Republicans across the state and the nation soon would routinely e­ spouse—​ ­ ne that linked anti-​­abortion and antifeminist sentiment with anti-​­elitism and o calls for smaller government and lower taxes. Tobin delivered her message across the state by adhering to two dictates of similarly underfunded campaigns: take advantage of outside help and maximize your coverage in friendly territory. The campaign created its own flyers, but Tobin benefited from other anti-​­abortion groups printing and distributing material for her. To secure free coverage, Tobin agreed to be interviewed whenever possible. Bruno tried to place advertisements in the print media, although many were refused because of their editorial content. The campaign also maximized its visibility by using about half its $64,000 budget to produce and air television commercials. As in prior campaigns, the ads ignored the candidate and questions about access in favor of what Tobin, a registered nurse, positioned as irrefutable “facts about the life of the pre-​­born baby.”27 The spots aired during family-​­and female-​­centered programs, such as the Phil Donahue Show, that presumably attracted voters who shared Tobin’s views. Most of the commercials ran in upstate New York, an area that was more conservative and likely to yield votes. The upstate media markets were relatively cheap to advertise in, and the RTLP had fewer people there. The downstate suburbs were part of the far more expensive New York City media market. Fortunately, however, the Long Island-​­based RTLP was represented

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well on the ground downstate, as the women tapped into a vast web of existent civic and religious groups. These decisions proved to be wise ones.28 Although Tobin was vastly outspent and barely visible compared to her opponents, she easily qualified for a regular party line, making the RTLP the only official anti-​­abortion political party in the country. Ellen McCormack later told the New York Times that based on voter contact in the days leading up to the election, she was optimistic about winning a party line. Tobin’s final tally was 130,193 votes: more than double what she needed, and more votes than the 123,457 that the Liberal Party received. Only 4.9 million New Yorkers voted in 1978, the lowest turnout in the state since 1942. In New York City, only 50 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. Since the order in which each political party appears on the ballot is determined every four years by the results of the gubernatorial race, the RTLP assumed Line D on the ballot (the fourth line) behind the Conservative Party, pushing the thirty-​­year-​­old Liberal Party to the fifth spot. The low turnout that year, especially in New York City where support for legal abortion was high, aided Tobin, even though the candidate the Liberal Party cross-​­endorsed, incumbent Democratic governor Carey, won the overall contest by roughly 272,000 votes.29 Tobin’s results were hailed as proof that the broader anti-​­abortion movement had come of age politically in New York. In addition to Tobin’s success, the Right to Life Committee had set up a separate political action committee a month before the 1978 election to support anti-​­abortion politicians in the two major parties. Several of these candidates won, leaving New York with anti-​­abortion representation among 55 percent of the State Senate (including four newcomers), 43 percent of the Assembly (including ten newcomers), and 33 percent of its delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives (including two newcomers). These results hinted at the increasing influence of single-​ i­ssue parties and campaigns by the late seventies—​­whether measured by Tobin’s results in New York or by narrowly focused property tax opponents in California who passed Proposition 13 that same year.30 Tobin’s 130,193 votes were mostly from the downstate suburbs and upstate. The RTLP earned more than twice the votes of the Liberal Party upstate (roughly 47,000 versus 100,000), with “upstate” defined as all counties excluding New York City and the four surrounding suburban counties where many profamily leaders lived. Tobin unsurprisingly received her largest plurality on Long Island, where she earned roughly 33,000 votes, or a quarter of her total. In effect, she did best in places where the state ERA had little support in areas in the downstate suburbs and upstate where conservative 1975—​­

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Republican county chairs were looking to consolidate their power, and soon would vie for the RTLP’s cross-​­endorsement as a means to do so. As this occurred, both the women and rising conservative Republicans saw new value in mixing profamily rhetoric and policy proposals with calls for smaller government, lower taxes, and individual (parental) rights.31 The RTLP immediately turned to its new cross-​­endorsement powers after earning a regular line. Tobin defiantly told the New York Times after the election that it was “now evident that just as the major party candidates have courted the Liberal Party [cross-​­]endorsement, they must now turn their attention to the Right to Life Party.”32 The women planned a series of meetings across the state to discuss how best to proceed forward. Finding someone to fill the line was prudent since the fourth row of the ballot in every race in the state (until at least 1982) would contain the party’s name, with or without a candidate. Cross-​­endorsing someone from a major party—​­who already had a campaign infrastructure in place—​­was ideal because the party could conserve its resources while still using the line.33 The RTLP’s first opportunity to cross-​­endorse came just months later in March of 1979 in a special election on Staten Island for a State Assembly seat. As a viable player in state politics for the first time, Tobin, as titular head of the RTLP, was invited to a meeting with Serphin Maltese, the executive director of the Conservative Party. The two chairs agreed to endorse James P. Molinaro, the Staten Island Conservative Party chairman. Sensing an ally in the Conservative Party’s mission to shift the Republican Party to the right, Maltese told the press that he foresaw his party and the RTLP continuing to collaborate in the future. Tobin refuted this assertion, likely recalling how the Conservative Party had endorsed Republican Perry Duryea, a proponent of legal abortion, in the 1978 gubernatorial race. “We are not in a box with the Conservative Party,” she told the New York Times, “or else we wouldn’t have started our party.”34 Tobin’s comment highlighted the party’s absolute fidelity to the anti-​­abortion cause, not to mention the women’s growing political confidence. The returns from that special election seemingly confirmed the RTLP’s new sense of entitlement. As expected in this left-​­leaning district on Staten Island, the Democratic candidate won. The Liberal and Republican lines placed second and third, while Molinaro, the Conservative and RTLP candidate placed last. But, in an unexpected twist, Molinaro won more votes on the RTLP’s line than on the Conservative Party’s line: 902 versus 768 for the Conservative Party that he led in the area. Although few people paid attention to

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this special election, its results put the state’s political leaders on alert. As thoughts turned toward bigger contests to come in the future, it was clear that both the RTLP and the issue of abortion would be formidable forces to contend with in New York State politics.35 In the off-​­year elections that November of 1979, the RTLP continued to make important strides. The women endorsed 600 candidates, although few waged campaigns that were as active as Tobin’s had been in 1978. In Westchester County, for example, the RTLP found ninety candidates to run on its line, eighty-​­seven of whom also were listed on another line, mostly the Republican and Conservative party ones—​­a notable change in Westchester, where Rockefeller had resided and ruled just years before. The three candidates listed only on the RTLP line were simply lending their names to the cause.36 As one such candidate, Marilyn Joan O’Lear, a single woman with a full-​­time job, health problems, and no financial resources, told the press: “All they want is my name. . . . ​They don’t expect me to build up a budget and go out grandstanding.”37 Although only 2.5 million voters went to the polls in 1979, about half as many as in 1978, the RTLP had a good showing that boded well for 1980, when candidates for every office including the presidency and the U.S. Senate would be on the ballot in New York. The party averaged around 4 or 5 percent of the vote in each county. While the Conservative Party did slightly better, the two emerged with virtually the same amount of bargaining power. The results were most dramatic on Long Island. In Nassau County, where the RTLP was founded, its totals rose from 4 percent in 1978 to 7 percent in 1979, with fewer than 2,000 votes separating it from the Conservative Party in most contests. The RTLP’s volunteer attorney, Gene McMahon, predicted that the party would win 300,000 votes in 1980, or more than double the 130,000 votes that Tobin had won in 1978. “Clearly, with these results,” ace political reporter for the New York Times, Frank Lynn, deduced, “the new party will have some leverage in close elections as it tries to pressure candidates for the legislature and congress to adopt its anti-​­abortion position next year [in 1980].”38 The RTLP had created a viable swing vote and won a regular party line to more effectively compel politicians to embrace anti-​­abortion legislation. Indeed, the RTLP was a force to contend with in 1980. The elections that year were a critical point in America’s rightward turn. In New York, the result was no different—​­and that year the RTLP’s core issues and constituency helped conservative Republicans further marginalize Rockefeller’s old wing in the downstate suburbs that the governor once had ruled.

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Reagan, D’Amato, and the Election of 1980 Events that took place at a Republican Party dinner on Long Island in May 1980 epitomized the more conservative political tenor in New York. The dinner was hosted by Joseph Margiotta, the newly powerful conservative chairman of the Nassau County Republican Party, which, in this growing area of Long Island, had become the largest GOP club in the state. An estimated 4,200 people attended, making it the biggest Republican event in New York that year. Ronald Reagan had just won the state’s Republican presidential primary, running the first active campaign in memory (in the past, Rockefeller had hand-​­picked most candidates and banned primary races for fear of sullying nominees before the general election). Reagan wanted to keep his momentum going and win New York’s forty-​­one electoral votes that November. He accepted Margiotta’s offer to be the dinner’s keynote speaker, and that night he locked up 105 of the state’s 123 delegates to the upcoming Republican National Convention—​­far different than in 1976, when thanks to Rockefeller’s heavy hand, Reagan only won nineteen delegates. A new tradition of conservative power politics had replaced Rockefeller’s prior dominance.39 Margiotta planned to celebrate the rising power of fellow conservative Republicans that night, but underlying tensions in the party surfaced on account of Jacob Javits also attending the dinner. Javits was the longest-​­serving U.S. senator in state history and an heir apparent of Rockefeller who was up for reelection in 1980. Margiotta was working to rid the state party of remaining holdovers like Javits, and he did not want to promote his reelection. He was not even going to invite Javits to the dinner, but Reagan insisted that he do so. Reagan’s campaign saw that New York’s political culture was shifting rightward, but after what had happened in 1976, it felt that victory in the state hinged on uniting conservatives and GOP moderates like Javits. Strategists feared that failing to do so would make 1980 as devastating for Reagan as 1964 was for Barry Goldwater. Margiotta and other conservatives in the state were convinced that Reagan’s camp was wrong. Their wisdom, however, was not yet apparent.40 Javits needed Reagan far more than the reverse as he faced his first primary race since initially running for the U.S. Senate in 1956. Nassau County GOP chairman Margiotta and his allies were behind Javits’s challenger, Al D’Amato, a conservative Republican town supervisor from Hempstead, Long Island. Margiotta may have kowtowed to Reagan by inviting Javits to the dinner, but he defiantly hung a fifty-​­yard banner across the ballroom that

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optimistically read, “Nassau County Salutes Our Own Al D’Amato—​­United States Senator from New York.” The Conservative and Right to Life parties also endorsed D’Amato in 1980, with Mary Jane Tobin directing her followers to promote the candidacy of this fellow Long Islander in any way they could. The RTLP even engaged in hardball politics with Reagan by essentially forcing him to beg for its cross-​­endorsement. Both Reagan and D’Amato ultimately won the state, in part by marrying profamily issues to economic ones as ­middle-​­class families like those of the RTLP women struggled through the recession. These results seemed to indicate that Javits’s faction of the GOP was irrelevant, as those like Chairman Margiotta had posited all along, in an election year when conservatives and profamily activists tried to demonstrate their new power in the state at every juncture of the presidential and U.S. Senate contests.41 From the beginning of the 1980 election cycle, the presidential race was one of the most exciting in state history since Reagan made winning New York a priority. Reagan’s strategists calculated that he needed to hold the states that Ford won in 1976, plus pick off some of the electorally rich ones that had gone to Carter that year—​­states that seemed to be shifting rightward in recent years, and ones where Reagan could put together his desired coalition of moderate Republicans, conservatives, and disaffected Democrats. New York and its forty-​­one electoral votes, the second largest tally in the country, were a coveted prize, despite the fact that Reagan had once been one of the state’s most vocal critics. He had, for example, advised President Ford not to bail out New York City as it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in 1975, calling it an immoral and corrupt welfare wasteland.42 But as the 1980 campaign heated up, Reagan tempered his tone and looked for ways to indicate his commitment to the state. He kept conservatives, including profamily activists, happy by recommending positions such as lower taxes, an end to détente with the Soviets, the defeat of the ERA, and an HLA to outlaw legal abortion. At the same time, he tried to attract GOP moderates and disaffected Democrats in the state. He announced his entrance into the presidential race at a Hilton in New York City in November of 1979. By beginning his candidacy in Manhattan, at what had been the epicenter of more liberal Republicanism, Reagan hoped to show that New York (and the Northeast) were a priority for conservatives like him, unlike in the past. He appointed several New Yorkers to key leadership positions. Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman William J. (Bill) Casey of Long Island was chosen as his national campaign manager, while conservative

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representative Jack Kemp became his chief spokesman and chairman for policy development. Kemp, a popular former professional football player and antitax crusader from suburban Buffalo, ensured that the campaign had representation upstate to supplement Casey and Margiotta’s conservative faction in the downstate suburbs.43 The state’s first Republican Senate primary in decades was equally exciting as Al D’Amato took on the more liberal Javits. As D’Amato wrote to his supporters, “I am running in the primary against Jacob Javits because, for years, he has been masquerading as a Republican while voting as a liberal Democrat.”44 Playing to those struggling to retain a foothold in the suburban middle class, voters that the RTLP and Wakeup also attracted, D’Amato painted Javits as a wealthy elitist with a fancy address in Manhattan. He even noted that his seventy-​­six-​­year-​­old rival had a motor neuron disease that made walking more difficult. When he gave specifics, D’Amato assailed his opponent for voting against the recent Kemp-​­Ross bill, which would have provided a tax cut for small businesses and families; he ignored Javits’s explanation that he had done so because of the nation’s growing budget deficit, another core conservative concern.45 In contrast, D’Amato stressed that he was only forty-​­three years old and lived a middle-​­class lifestyle on Long Island that was being hurt by the liberal monetary policies Javits championed. He featured his wife and four children on campaign literature to underscore his relative youth and traditional middle-​­class suburban lifestyle. As women from groups like the RTLP and Wakeup worried about shrinking household budgets possibly forcing them into paid work, D’Amato’s antitax rhetoric, as much as his smiling traditional family that could have been their neighbors, were attractive.46 In response, Javits tried to shed the liberal label; in fact, he had long maintained that “the adjective ‘progressive’ more accurately describe[d] [his] political beliefs.” As he explained in one speech, “Progressives have always led the truly meaningful movements in the Republican Party,” whether it be Lincoln ending slavery, Teddy Roosevelt’s conservation programs and trust-​ ­busting, or Richard Nixon opening up diplomatic relations with China. Far from being “a flaming liberal,” Javits said, a progressive Republican mixed this “quality of enlightenment” with “a relatively conservative philosophy on many issues,” although he declined to list them. In addition, a progressive had “the courage to leave party lines when the time or the issue demand[ed].”47 He was, in essence, conservative on important fiscal matters, with a direct lineage to some of the GOP’s most exalted leaders. Javits also looked for other ways to win over conservatives and voters like

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Figure 12. A flyer from New York’s Republican U.S. Senate primary in 1980, in which Al D’Amato promised he was the only truly conservative candidate in the race, not longtime incumbent Senator Jacob Javits, a Republican in Rockefeller’s mold. Courtesy of Conservative Party Papers, ME. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany Archives.

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the RTLP women. His polling firm advised him to add language about shrinking the size of the federal government to his stump speech—​­which, for many women, meant defunding feminist-​­backed, taxpayer-​­financed initiatives. In a last-​­ditch attempt to win votes in this rightward-​­leaning environment, Javits’s friend and colleague in the U.S. Senate, conservative icon Barry Goldwater, made a commercial for him. Goldwater did not call him a conservative, but he argued that Javits could hold the seat (and his important committee positions) for Republicans and continue using his vast legislative experience and seniority to benefit New Yorkers.48 Despite this outreach, many conservatives and their profamily allies were unable to overlook that Javits, like Rockefeller, backed several important feminist causes. On Women’s Equality Day on 26 August 1980—​­the sixtieth anniversary of women’s suffrage and less than two weeks before the GOP Senate primary—​­Javits spoke at a rally for the federal ERA. The best way to honor the anniversary was to pass the ERA, he said, so that the U.S. Constitution would reflect full equality for women in areas other than suffrage. Javits reminded the crowd that he had procured federal funding for family planning, teenage pregnancy programs, battered women’s shelters, and rape prevention and treatment. If reelected to the Senate, he promised to continue defending legal abortion, the ERA, and federal funding for childcare. With these priorities, Javits easily won over feminist groups in New York such as NOW and the Abortion Rights Brigade, while the Right to Life Committee lined up behind D’Amato. These outside organizations could bring in votes, but being cross-​­endorsed by a third party was a far more reliable way to guarantee support on election day.49 D’Amato sought the Conservative Party line, while Javits accepted the Liberal Party’s endorsement. The Liberal Party’s decision was no surprise since it had endorsed Javits in the past. Conversely, even before D’Amato had entered the race, Conservative Party leaders began raising money for a “Dump Javits” campaign in 1979. As J. Daniel Mahoney, the party’s chairman, told a reporter from the Syracuse Post Standard, “With Nelson Rockefeller gone . . . ​Javits can be challenged in a Republican primary by a candidate backed by the Conservative Party.”50 Hoping to be that candidate, D’Amato began pursuing the Conservative line after declaring his candidacy in January of 1980; by March, he had it. This cross-​­endorsement was important since D’Amato lacked the fundraising capabilities of the more seasoned Javits. The Conservative Party ended up contributing $100,000 to D’Amato’s primary campaign.51 D’Amato also sought and won the Right to Life Party’s endorsement. As proof of the party’s new prominence in the state, Joseph Margiotta, the pow-

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erful Nassau County conservative Republican chairman who had championed D’Amato from the start, reached out to Mary Jane Tobin. D’Amato also met with Richard Bruno, Tobin’s former gubernatorial campaign press secretary, to push for the party’s cross-​­endorsement. To bolster his case, D’Amato sent Bruno an extraordinary 100 newspaper articles that mentioned him endorsing the (symbolic) HLA that had passed in his home county of Nassau. As a strong anti-​­abortion advocate from Long Island, D’Amato was a fitting candidate for the RTLP to back in its first statewide election since earning a regular party line.52 When the RTLP’s newly formed statewide committee met in June of 1980, it voted to endorse him. As Marie O’Connor, wife of the Erie County RTLP chair upstate, told The Buffalo News, the cross-​­endorsement was necessary since Javits’s support for legal abortion made his candidacy “totally unacceptable” to her party.53 The RTLP lacked the financial resources of the more established Conservative Party, but D’Amato’s campaign was impressed that it had won 3 to 5 percent of the vote in recent elections, notably in the suburbs outside New York City that now made up a quarter of the state’s electorate. The RTLP’s help in the GOP primary included a pro-​­D’Amato form letter that Tobin wrote and encouraged the candidate’s campaign to circulate widely. The party also produced five sixty-​­second television commercials that aired in the New York City media market that covered the populous downstate suburbs. The ads featured a Catholic nun and cost about $4,000, which the women gathered by their usual grassroots methods. The nun criticized Javits for trying to ensure that doctors could not be fired from hospitals for performing abortions. The ads were a clear attempt to energize the RTLP’s base: Catholic women and mothers in places like Nassau County who were primarily motivated by the anti-​­abortion cause. The D’Amato campaign welcomed the ads, mindful of the fact that if the RTLP’s base turned out on election day, it could tip the scales in its favor in a close primary race.54 As D’Amato solidified his cross-​­endorsements from the Right to Life and Conservative parties, Reagan sought to do the same. His campaign was convinced that winning votes on these lines was necessary since New York’s Liberal Party was backing moderate Republican John Anderson, a losing candidate in the 1980 GOP presidential primary, in the general election. Anderson had the potential to attract both Democrats and more liberal Republicans in New York—​­two groups that Reagan’s camp thought they had to make inroads with if he were to carry the state. The Conservative Party understood this predicament and cross-​­endorsed Reagan early on. This was not a hard decision:

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Reagan was the first unequivocally conservative GOP presidential candidate since Goldwater in 1964. The RTLP refused to do the same, taking months to decide between giving Reagan its line and placing Ellen McCormack on it, who agreed to run. Since New York was the only state in the country with an official RTLP, if McCormack ran on its line, the women would then have to enter her name as an independent candidate in as many other states as possible. As a practical matter, it would make more sense to have a higher-​­profile national candidate like Reagan use the RTLP line in New York.55 The RTLP drew criticism from several allies as the women dragged their feet into the summer of 1980. Most anti-​­abortion groups, including the national and New York State Right to Life Committees, endorsed Reagan in 1980. He, after all, was campaigning for an HLA and approved of the recent Hyde Amendment, which had banned federal funding for abortion. But the RTLP was upset that Reagan had signed an abortion reform law as governor of California in 1967, a decision he later regretted. The party also criticized Reagan for agreeing with abortion in cases where it was necessary to save the life of the mother—​­an exception the RTLP officers felt would be manipulated by doctors and patients. Reagan’s overtures to Javits created further suspicion. This hard line turned off many anti-​­abortion groups in New York and across the country. The National Pro-​­Life Political Action Committee, which endorsed Reagan, for instance, criticized the RTLP for “holding up unreasonable . . . ​standards,” which prompted McCormack to resign as a member of the group’s advisory council.56 The RTLP made more enemies when it ran print advertisements during the Republican presidential primaries that criticized Reagan’s abortion reform law as governor.57 Still, Reagan’s campaign deputies in New York continued to pursue the RTLP’s cross-​­endorsement throughout the spring and summer of 1980 before falling short. Frustrated by the RTLP’s indecision, Roger Stone, Reagan’s Northeast regional coordinator, publically expressed his annoyance with the RTLP in June, telling reporters that since McCormack had no chance of winning the presidency or even her state, he predicted that most anti-​­abortion voters in New York, including the women’s faithful following in the downstate suburbs, would back Reagan with or without the RTLP’s endorsement. Mary Jane Tobin retaliated by telling fellow Long Islander Bill Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager, that the RTLP would no longer negotiate with Roger Stone—​­only with Casey or, preferably, Reagan himself. As a testament to the RTLP’s growing importance, Reagan called McCormack. The RTLP was flattered, but still clung to principle and endorsed McCormack. The women certainly had undergone a

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metamorphosis in the past decade, from homemakers raised as New Deal Democrats who were largely uninterested in politics, to activists being courted by someone who became the most conservative Republican president since Herbert Hoover. While endorsing Reagan would have been the most pragmatic course, the women’s refusal to do so matched what had motivated them to leave their homes in the first place: unequivocal opposition to legal abortion, without exception, as opposed to the desire to win political campaigns.58 Yet, on the surface, the RTLP’s refusal to cross-​­endorse Reagan was ironic; he unequivocally backed an HLA, and his nomination led to the marginalization of many feminist leaders and goals. Reagan’s nomination provided Phyllis Schlafly and her profamily allies with new prominence in the GOP, unlike just four years before when Rockefeller’s faction still ruled the state party and groups such as the feminist Republican Women’s Task Force wielded more power.59 The resultant Republican platform in 1980, unlike the Democratic one, was devoid of all prior feminist goals. Instead, it backed measures that “respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.”60 Among related goals, “family values,” a phrase that was popularized in that election, included ending the party’s forty years of support for the ERA. The Republican platform in 1980 contained a generic statement that called for equal rights for women but lacked a specific policy proposal behind it, making it merely a symbolic gesture.61 This situation differed from the Democratic convention that nominated President Carter for a second term in 1980. Although feminists had an uneasy relationship with the president because he personally opposed abortion—​­a fact that had led many to back Senator Ted Kennedy in the Democratic primaries that year—​­most came around by the convention. Several feminists served as Democratic delegates, and they were rewarded with a platform that called for keeping abortion legal, passing the ERA, government-​­funded childcare, and antidiscriminatory employment laws. The Democratic Party had reaffirmed its commitment to the feminist movement, as the GOP moved away to embrace what it now called “family values.”62 After the Democratic convention in Manhattan that August, New York’s political community turned toward the U.S. Senate primary in September—​ ­the results of which further moved the GOP into the family values camp. Conservative anti-​­abortion candidate Al D’Amato defeated Jacob Javits, the last major “Rockefeller Republican” officeholder in the state, by a large margin of 70,000 votes (56-​­44 percent). D’Amato took New York City (5,100 votes) and the upstate counties (2,000 votes) rather narrowly, but won a decisive

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victory on Long Island (63,000 votes, with 46,000 votes coming from his home county of Nassau). Across the downstate suburbs, where conservative Republican chairmen such as Joseph Margiotta presided alongside many anti-​ ­abortion and anti-​­ERA leaders in the state, D’Amato led in some cities and towns by wide margins of two or three to one.63 As the New York Times surmised, “It was the votes of conservative, ­middle-​ ­class, inward-​­looking suburban communities like these that have produced one of their own, Alfonse M. D’Amato, as the state’s Republican candidate for the United States Senate.”64 D’Amato won by presenting himself as a conservative protégé of Ronald Reagan. More than that, he was supposedly just another average middle-​­class suburban family man fed up with tax-​­and-​­spend liberals like Javits in the current recessionary climate. D’Amato also attacked Javits’s feminist stance on issues related to women and the family—​­which some voters in these populous suburbs, thanks to those such as conservative radio host Phyllis Graham, linked to high taxes.65 As D’Amato moved on from the primary to the general election, he unexpectedly faced two competitors on the left. Javits remained in the race by running on the Liberal Party’s line. The Democratic candidate was U.S. representative Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn, who had been in the House of Representatives since 1973. Holtzman held positions that were popular in New York City—​­including her tough stance against Nixon in the Watergate hearings, her prior opposition to the Vietnam War, and her plans to enact tougher handgun controls. Like Javits, Holtzman supported women’s rights. She notably sponsored a bill that extended the federal ERA’s ratification deadline from 1978 to 1982. Groups such as NOW were torn over who to endorse in the general election, but most chose Holtzman over Javits since she was a strong feminist woman. The general consensus in the state’s political community was that Javits could never win on a minor party line; he should accept the primary results and drop out rather than siphon support from Holtzman by splitting the liberal vote. But Javits refused to listen, and many braced for what just months before had seemed highly unlikely: the election of Al D’Amato, a little-​­known conservative town supervisor from Hempstead, Long Island, to the U.S. Senate.66

Women, “Family Values,” and Victory at the Polls In the end, D’Amato and Reagan won in New York in 1980 by doing well in the suburbs of New York City as well as upstate—​­both areas of strength for

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Figure 13. Echoing Ronald Reagan in the presidential race in 1980, Republican U.S. Senate nominee Al D’Amato painted conservatism as the prescription to help average suburban families like his (and those of the women in this book) through difficult economic and social dislocations. Courtesy of Conservative Party Papers, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany Archives.

conservative Republicans, and, not coincidentally, places that family values women had organized and won in recent years. Reagan won 47 percent of the vote, compared to 44 percent for Carter and 7 percent for John Anderson on the Liberal line. He swept the downstate suburbs, and lost only eight of the state’s sixty-​­two counties to Carter: four counties predictably in New York City, and the other four upstate, including the Democratic working-​­class strongholds of Buffalo and Rochester. D’Amato won in an even closer race, with roughly 45 percent of the vote, compared with 44 percent for Holtzman,

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the Democrat, and 11 percent for Javits. D’Amato and Holtzman were separated by only 91,000 votes. Holtzman won New York City and two additional counties, but her city totals were low for a Democrat because Javits had cut into them on the Liberal Party line. D’Amato took the downstate suburbs and won even more decisively than Reagan upstate. Exit polling showed that upstate voters perceived Holtzman to be too liberal in the Senate race due to, for example, her votes to cut military spending, while Carter offered a much more moderate Democratic option on the presidential line.67 The Democratic and Republican platforms in 1980 could not have been more different regarding issues of women and family, and each side sought to interpret the election results in light of that fact. Phyllis Schlafly declared that the profamily movement had elected Reagan and laughed about seeing feminist leaders such as Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine, and Ellie Smeal, then president of NOW, crying on television. The RTLP and its allies in New York boasted that nearly all its candidates had won. Feminist groups pointed out that in New York and elsewhere, comparatively little time was devoted to women’s issues. They said that the slumping economy and the brewing American hostage situation in Iran, not issues like abortion, were on voters’ minds. NOW added that four feminist-​­backed women were elected across the country to the U.S. House of Representatives, bringing the total number of women in Congress to twenty-​­one, twelve of whom shared NOW’s goals.68 In truth, Reagan and D’Amato won in places such as New York by attracting suburban voters, a group that was outpacing its urban counterparts. For the first time that year, D’Amato’s home county of Nassau on Long Island had the most votes of any of the state’s sixty-​­two counties. The four downstate suburban counties collectively accounted for a striking 25 percent of the vote in 1980. Reagan won these counties by 321,000 votes, which was more than double his 163,000 margin of victory in the state. D’Amato won the downstate suburbs by 140,000 votes, which was far more than the 91,000 that separated him from Holtzman. To attract these voters, Reagan and D’Amato espoused a message that mixed support for conservative family values with Republican promises to lower taxes and bolster anticommunism. These appeals were particularly popular in the downstate suburbs, given their increasing property taxes during a recessionary climate, as well as the fact that they were home to extensive anti-​ a­bortion and anti-​­ERA networks. Women from groups like the RTLP and Wakeup had laid important groundwork for Reagan and D’Amato—​­especially in the heavily populated suburbs of New York City—​­by linking antifeminist appeals to issues like lowering taxes and defending against communist threats.69

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Reagan also won by targeting the overlapping Catholic vote in New York. Although Catholics only accounted for 36 percent of the state’s population, 60 percent of whom were historically Democrats, their vote was an important bellwether. Carter had won New York in 1976 with 57 percent of the Catholic vote, compared to 42 percent for Ford. Part of Carter’s decline in New York in 1980 was attributable to his only winning 46 percent of the Catholic vote, compared to 40 percent for Reagan and 6 percent for Anderson. Reagan consolidated Catholic support by promising to fund parochial schools and enact an HLA. Voters like the profamily women prioritized these issues, as their politics had always been filtered through a middle-​­class, suburban, Catholic, and maternal lens.70 Although the economy and national defense were the biggest concerns in 1980, both Reagan and D’Amato benefited from anti-​­abortion votes. Fewer than 100,000 votes separated D’Amato and Holtzman in the U.S. Senate race. Javits undoubtedly siphoned votes from Holtzman among people who supported legal abortion, but the RTLP was able to claim that D’Amato’s 151,000 votes on its line exceeded his margin of victory in the race. D’Amato captured roughly 20,000 more votes on the RTLP line than Mary Jane Tobin had earned in the gubernatorial contest in 1978, with 51,307 coming in 1980 from Long Island. In stark contrast, Ellen McCormack only won 27,000 votes on the RTLP line in the 1980 presidential race. As Reagan’s aid Roger Stone had predicted, about 134,000 anti-​­abortion voters in New York backed D’Amato for senator and Reagan for president—​­likely because Reagan had a better chance of winning the presidency than McCormack. Reagan beat Carter by 163,000 votes in the state, which highlights the importance of these 134,000 anti-​­abortion votes. These results were consistent with Reagan’s embrace of an HLA and desire to maintain the ban on federal funding for abortions.71 The 1980 election results showed that married, middle-​­aged white women, the same demographic that the profamily movement attracted, delivered crucial votes for Reagan and D’Amato. An AP/NBC News poll released on election day showed that men supported Reagan over Carter by 56 to 35 percent, while women were divided more closely, with 47 percent for Reagan versus 45 percent for Carter. The same survey found a stronger correlation between opinions on the ERA and voting, with opponents voting for Reagan and supporters for Carter, than between subjects such as national defense and one’s vote. A “gender gap” was hyped in the media, but the real divide was not between the sexes: it was between white men and married women, who supported Reagan in large numbers, and single white women, who went

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overwhelmingly for Carter. The economy, taxes, hostage situation, and national defense may have been the major issues in the 1980 election, with only 11 percent of the electorate reportedly voting for Reagan’s “conservatism” (a term pollsters and social scientists have interpreted to mean his social conservatism on issues such as abortion and the ERA). But that percentage obscures the fact that many voters, including Wakeup and anti-​­abortion activists, linked fiscal and social matters. Some homemakers, for instance, may have reported going to the polls to lower taxes and help the economy by voting for Reagan, but they primarily did so as a means to defund feminist initiatives and ensure that a second income (their own) would not be needed in their families. Candidates such as Reagan and D’Amato knew that this mix of fiscal and social conservatism was attractive to the demographic most likely to go to the polls: married white women aged forty-​­five to sixty-​­four.72 But women in that demographic did more than simply vote; in New York, they built a foundation for the 1980 election results. Throughout the seventies, women such as Mary Jane Tobin had created a viable profamily voting bloc—​­a powerful new swing vote that conservative Republicans leveraged in their ongoing quest to move the state party to the right. For this reason, D’Amato and Reagan pursued the RTLP’s cross-​­endorsement aggressively in 1980. This backing enabled a previously unknown conservative candidate like D’Amato to unseat Jacob Javits, a more liberal, profeminist Republican who had served in the U.S. Senate longer than anyone else in state history. The 1980 election may have hinged on issues such as the economy, but it was no accident that D’Amato and Reagan did their best in counties upstate and in the downstate suburbs. Both were areas where the state ERA had little support and the RTLP was strong. On issues of women and family, the Republican Party in New York no longer resembled Rockefeller’s GOP by 1980, thanks in part to the activism of Mary Jane Tobin and her female allies in the broader family values movement.

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EPILOGUE

The Politics of Women, Gender, and Family After 1980

New York State exemplifies the political shift that took place across the nation in the seventies, as the Republican Party became increasingly associated with conservative family values and the Democratic Party embraced feminist goals. The term “family values” has become ubiquitous in the years since it first appeared in the Republican Party platform in 1980. Its precise meaning, and the differences between the major parties on matters related to women and the family, are widely known. Voters who embrace traditional gender roles and the heterosexual nuclear family have not always been happy with the politicians who purport to represent their family values, whether it be conservative Republican president Ronald Reagan refusing to exert real muscle on a Human Life Amendment or similar disappointments on the state level. Many politicians find it easier to make family values claims on the campaign trail or from the sidelines. Ideological purity often does not accord well with governing and the compromises needed to pass legislation. Much to the disappointment of the New York State Right to Life Party and its allies across the country, this has been especially true with respect to abortion since polling continues to show that a majority of Americans favor legal abortion in some form. While several states have implemented abortion restrictions in the years since 1973, as the pivotal Roe decision opened the door for them to do, neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor Congress has entirely stripped women of the constitutional right to an abortion—​­just as activists in New York in 1972 were thwarted in their attempt to outlaw the state’s abortion reform law.1 Some individual legislators in New York and elsewhere have defied expectations in each party. Occasionally, Republicans who support legal abortion

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or anti-​­abortion Democrats make headlines, but in the years since 1980, they have become exceptions to the general rule. These legislators are at odds with their party’s national leadership, as feminist and family values interest groups remain very important to the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Such atypical candidacies are usually only viable when a majority of constituents share these out-​­of-​­sync views, as is often the case for Republicans representing more left-​­leaning districts in places such as New York City, where Rockefeller’s more liberal wing of the GOP was once based. There is little common ground between the major parties today on policies related to women and the family—​­a result that Catholic homemakers helped produce decades ago at suburban kitchen tables in places like Long Island.2

A State and Nation Reckon with Family Values Democratic politicians in New York, particularly Catholic ones, have adjusted tactics in response to the state’s family values movement. Pat Moynihan, a Catholic, modeled a more centrist politics in 1976 when he ran to the right of feminist icon Bella Abzug in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary. Moynihan demonstrated how to straddle support for legal abortion, which he and his party were committed to, with reaching out to fellow Catholics, who remained an important bellwether vote. Moynihan stressed his personal opposition to abortion, but maintained that individual women should have a choice. Other Catholic Democrats in the eighties and beyond, such as U.S. representative Geraldine Ferraro of Queens, New York, and Mario Cuomo, a popular three-​ t­ erm governor, learned that instead of arguing that legal abortion was a constitutional right that allowed women to control their own bodies, as Abzug and her allies often said in the seventies, the issue could be repositioned. Their moderated approach accounted for the GOP’s desire to keep government from interfering with individual rights (even though conservative Republicans never conceived of abortion that way, instead preferring an expanded government that ensures its illegality). Abortion, Democrats began saying, was a difficult, but wholly private, choice that women should make in consultation with doctors, loved ones, and religious leaders.3 As Ferraro lamented in 1981, “As a supporter of free choice, I am quite often accused of being anti-​ ­family . . . ​because I do not believe that I [as a representative of the government] have a right to tell other women how to run their private lives.”4 In representing a district at the intersection of strong feminist and family

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values support, Ferraro became adept at navigating the rightward-​­leaning political culture of the eighties. Ferraro represented the fictionalized Archie Bunker’s district in Queens, an area that, as in the hit TV show All in the Family, was heavily Catholic, economically depressed, historically Democratic, and culturally conservative. Like their Catholic leaders, Ferraro’s constituents generally supported the social welfare measures of the New Deal and Great Society, especially those that had benefited them. But they were unhappy with Democrats’ embrace of feminism and related movements after the party’s internal McGovern Commission. Ferraro began promoting a brand of family values that positioned both Democratic social welfare proposals (e.g., national health insurance that could help constituents stay afloat economically) and feminist reforms (e.g., legal abortion, which ensures all children are wanted) as compatible with helping families. She often talked about her time as a criminal prosecutor, where she had seen victims of rape and incest forced to carry pregnancies to term; legal abortion, she said, would help these women and girls heal and reconstruct their personal and family lives. As an avowed feminist, Ferraro promised not to end traditional family life. In fact, she said, she lived it, with a husband, three children, and a dog—​­she even drove a station wagon. She supported traditional lifestyles like hers as well as other arrangements, and she saw the government as a tool for protecting various possibilities for the family. In these ways, she tried to walk a fine line between New Deal-​­inspired and modern-​­day Democratic politics.5 Ferraro’s training in a corner of Queens that flanked the feminist epicenter of Manhattan and Long Island’s Nassau County, where the RTLP was formed, made her an excellent vice-​­presidential pick in 1984. That year, Democrat Walter Mondale, who had been vice president under Jimmy Carter, faced the popular and charismatic incumbent president Ronald Reagan who campaigned on the claim that he had jump-​­started the U.S. economy. Democrats had to turn out their base to win, including the party’s strong feminist bloc, and at least replicate the tallies Carter had received in 1980 from (single) women and others who supported measures such as legal abortion and the ERA. The campaign hoped that picking Ferraro, a supporter of these feminist-​ b ­ acked initiatives and the first woman chosen as part of a major party’s presidential ticket, would turn out that subset of the electorate. Yet, in a political climate dominated by conservative family values, Ferraro was hardly a feminist firebrand who would repel other potential voters. She had learned to strike a careful balance between the two sides in Queens by promoting her own lifestyle and framing social welfare measures and feminist reforms as

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consistent with family values—​­albeit a form of the family predicated on the feminist notion of choice and the ability to exist in less traditional forms. In the end, Ferraro’s bifurcated approach was not realized. Her candidacy was sidetracked by her husband’s previously incorrect tax filings (that had since been amended), thereby fueling the Republican caricature that Democrats were profligate spenders unable to be trusted with the nation’s purse strings. Ferraro never became vice president, but given the high profile of New York State politics and her closely covered nomination, Democrats across the country soon adopted similar rhetoric about women and the family in the era’s more rightward-​­leaning political culture.6 But Democrats in New York and across the nation did more than shift language: some altered political strategy as well. When the Equal Rights Amendment failed in 1982 after a decade-​­long struggle to ratify it, feminist politicians resisted numerous opportunities to reintroduce it. They knew that family values activists would derail any attempt to do so. This decision was part of a more general migration to the right in the mid-​­eighties by Democrats who created groups such as the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Even if sometimes just in rhetoric as opposed to substance, both major parties moved rightward on several issues—​­from welfare and foreign policy to those related to women and the family. On balance, however, the Democratic Party has embraced the goals of modern feminism. Meanwhile, the family values movement has found a home within the GOP and successfully made its concerns a dominant paradigm with which both parties must reckon.7 Liberal feminist organizations that get out the vote for Democratic politicians have mostly followed suit. The National Organization for Women, for instance, transitioned from an organization that gave a lot of leeway to local chapters as it expanded across the country in the sixties and seventies to a very rigidly centralized one based in Washington, D.C., from the eighties onward. NOW became less confrontational on the local level, initiating fewer protests and lawsuits, and morphed into a more educationally focused national lobby that relies on power politics to pressure (mostly Democratic) politicians. The group’s pledge in 1984 to use letter-​­writing campaigns and phone banking to highlight sexism inherent in Social Security benefits is but one example of this shift.8 The family values movement—​­with its grassroots Catholic component and more prolific, top-​­down, Evangelical base—​­has been most visible during presidential elections, such as in 1992. That contest featured the first baby boomer to top a major party’s ticket when Bill Clinton clinched the Demo-

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cratic nomination and faced World War II veteran and incumbent Republican president, George H. W. Bush. With Clinton and Bush pitted against each other, the race became a referendum on the political movements that came of age in the sixties alongside Clinton and other baby boomers. The nation was forced to debate Clinton’s attempts to avoid serving in the Vietnam War and his prior exposure to drugs. Another subset of the Right focused on his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a fellow baby boomer, and her relationship to modern feminism. Her inexperience in national politics led to an inept musing that appeared to demean homemakers who “stayed at home baking cookies.” The situation was enflamed when her husband tried to compliment her intelligence and career experience as an attorney and longtime advocate for women and children by claiming that by backing him, a voter would get “two for the price of one.” As a result, Hillary Clinton became a perennial target for the family values Right.9 Few could forget Republican activist and former Nixon protégé, Pat Buchanan, a failed contender in the 1992 GOP primary and himself a devout Catholic, stepping up to the podium at the party’s convention that year to malign the Clintons. “Friends,” Buchanan declared, “this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America—​­abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court [regarding abortion], homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat.”10 In a few sentences, Buchanan managed to combine longstanding Republican opposition to big government with the party’s more recent embrace of anti-​ ­abortion sentiment and divinely inspired traditional gender roles within the family and broader society. A political pragmatist forced to contend with such ire, Clinton tempered her comments in order to help her husband get elected in 1992.11 Clinton’s support for feminism was often on display, however, in her role as First Lady during her husband’s two terms in the White House. She first used her platform to push for the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which granted certain employees job security of up to twelve weeks for new parents and others taking time off to care for their families. Both these situations disproportionately affect women, since they typically interrupt their careers to care for children and other family members; this is partially due to pay discrimination that has led women to make less money than men who might otherwise take time off. The FMLA, along with similar legislation that Clinton backed as First Lady, adhered to the feminist notion of choice by giving women more job security in the workforce while also making it easier

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for them to care for family members and children at home. After successes like this, and in spite of some humiliating setbacks such as her failed attempt to pass a national healthcare plan and her husband’s marital infidelity, Clinton decided to strike out on her own by running for the U.S. Senate from New York in 2000—​­a place she had never lived—​­which once again pulled the state’s politics into the national spotlight.12 As a U.S. Senate candidate in 2000, Clinton reverted back to moderating her support for feminism. She assembled a team of local experts who made it clear that, despite the state’s overall image as a left-​­leaning bastion of feminism, it also contained an organized Right that was particularly offended by her prior advocacy. Perhaps taking cues from the retiring senator Pat Moynihan, whose seat Clinton sought to fill, she too carefully framed her support for feminist reforms such as legal abortion. Much like other Democrats in the state since the eighties, notably Catholics such as Moynihan, Cuomo, and Ferraro, she talked about abortion as a personal decision for women. This formulation is predicated on abortion being a woman’s right, not one under the purview of the state—​­the same idea that feminists like Bella Abzug tried to communicate in the seventies. Yet, unlike the language Abzug and others used to express that idea, this phrasing was tailor-​­made for a more rightward-​ l­eaning political environment where language about women’s rights was obscured by (typically Republican) rhetoric about individual rights and smaller government.13 Clinton instead capitalized upon her gender in a more traditional way during her first Senate run. In a state that had never had a female U.S. senator, Clinton kicked off her campaign with a listening tour where she asked potential constituents what they needed. In doing so, she highlighted her (supposedly feminine) consensus-​­building skills, which contrasted nicely with the (traditionally male) aggressive campaign styles of her opponents in the Republican Party: U.S. representative Rick Lazio and mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City, the latter who eventually withdrew from the race. Banking on her celebrity, political connections, and Lazio’s poor debate performances and abrasive qualities, Clinton won the race and served one and a half terms in the Senate before becoming U.S. secretary of state in 2009.14 Clinton perhaps learned these lessons in feminist moderation too well, in ways that possibly led to her defeat in the Democratic presidential primary race against senator Barack Obama in 2008. Using the internet this time, Clinton launched her presidential bid in late 2007 with a virtual listening tour. She at first shied away from promoting the fact that she was considered

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the first woman in American history to have a decent shot of getting the presidential nomination of a major party. She focused on proving that she was tough enough to be commander-​­in-​­chief, a plan that had arguably led her years before to vote for the Iraq War authorization in 2003. This vote enabled the lesser-​­known Obama, who as a state senator in Illinois in 2003 had made a speech against the invasion of Iraq, to take a decisive lead in the 2008 primaries. By then, the Iraq War was very unpopular, especially among Democrats.15 Clinton’s decision to minimize her feminist credentials was unsurprising since, as I saw on the ground four years earlier, President George W. Bush had relied on conservative family values—​­including opposition to legal abortion and same-​­sex marriage—​­to drive voters to the polls in 2004. Despite some concern about the underlying methodology, exit polls from the 2004 contest showed that 80 percent of voters who cared about conservative family values chose Bush in 2004 over his Democratic opponent, U.S. senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who supported legal abortion and other tenets of modern feminism. I observed this as I canvassed in Rhode Island. Many people, notably older Catholic women like those in this book, turned me away from their doors. Kerry, a fellow Catholic, alarmingly supported legal abortion. The women I met professed to have a different version of family values, which spurred my desire to investigate the origins of their politics. Clinton likely hoped to avoid Kerry’s fate in 2008. But as the long Democratic primary race dragged on, and her chance of making it to the general election became less likely, she began embracing the historic nature of her campaign in a last-​­ditch effort for votes. By the end of the 2008 Democratic primary, Clinton was routinely making overtly feminist appeals and talking about the proverbial glass ceiling she hoped to shatter. Seeing the excitement that this rhetoric unleashed among supporters, Clinton embraced much of the same in the 2016 presidential race—​­most noticeably after she secured the Democratic nomination, making her the first woman to do so in a major party.16 No sooner was Clinton out of the Democratic primary in 2008 than governor Sarah Palin of Alaska was named the running mate of the Republican nominee, U.S. senator John McCain of Arizona. Palin was the first female vice presidential candidate in Republican history, and only the second woman to be on a major party’s presidential ticket (following Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984). Unlike Ferraro and Clinton, however, Palin’s party did not contain widespread feminist support that had to be addressed in ways that did not offend more conservative voters. Palin was free to shatter political barriers for

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women while campaigning on an antifeminist platform, much as Ellen McCormack had done in 1976. Palin did that for the most part. She opposed legal abortion, for example, by often talking about a time when she considered having an abortion before purportedly seeing the error of her ways. But like Ellen McCormack and her allies, Palin promoted certain aspects of modern feminism. She often praised feminist-​­backed Title IX legislation, which allowed her and other female athletes to take part in well-​­funded organized sports in school. Just like the women in New York who hailed from humble origins and promoted equal pay for those of their sex forced to seek outside employment, Palin selectively embraced feminist policies that accorded with her own biography. She also was fond of noting the history-​ ­making aspects of her nomination. Mostly, however, Palin promoted herself as a champion of traditional family values. She was wise to do so since running in her party on a family values platform has worked well for the past several decades—​­even if it was not enough to elect a Republican ticket in 2008, after questions about Palin’s competence surfaced and the national economy collapsed on the GOP’s watch.17 In recent years, family values politics has proceeded so far that its proponents have tried to reframe the debate to ensure that they are not accused of waging a “war on women,” as the media have dubbed proposals that curb women’s rights. As medical technology has progressed, opponents of legal abortion now go to even greater lengths to humanize fetuses. Conservative family values Republicans routinely discuss seeing their own grown children’s first ultrasounds in utero. Some politicians have even claimed that Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider that also performs other aspects of female healthcare, profits from the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses—​­an allegation that has been proven false despite leading to taxpayer-​­funded congressional hearings that defied conservative language about smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Yet, as the story of the family values movement in New York in the seventies reveals, fiscal and social conservatism have never been two distinct entities. Through the years, many activists have been motivated primarily by their desire to protect the traditional nuclear family. Fiscal matters and the size of government only become germane if taxpayer dollars and the expanded state appear to be harming their narrow definition of family values. If more costly tactics such as congressional hearings are deemed necessary in the future, fiscal responsibility and other such rhetoric will again take a backseat to family values in American politics.18

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The Long Shadow of New York’s Family Values Movement Much as on the national level, the GOP in New York has remained tethered to conservative family values since 1980. With the exception of Republicans running in areas where feminist sentiment is strong, New York’s GOP has maintained its more suburban, conservative, nuclear family focus. Republican Rudy Giuliani, who served two terms as mayor of New York City from 1994 through 2001, was a notable exception. When Giuliani began mulling a mayoral run in 1992, after falling short in 1989, he told the New York Times that throughout his career as a U.S. attorney, he had “worked hard to re-​­kindle” the party’s “Rockefeller, Javits, Lefkowitz [state attorney general under Rockefeller] tradition.”19 Giuliani supported legal abortion, gay and lesbian rights, and related goals that the state (and national) Republican Party had eschewed over a decade before. Yet, in New York City—​­where polling consistently showed, for example, that legal abortion was very popular—​­these positions were tenable for a Republican. While in the mayor’s office, Giuliani was cross-​ e­ ndorsed by New York’s Liberal Party and frequently at odds with the state Conservative Party and the GOP over positions related to women and the family, despite sharing most of their fiscal, law enforcement, and security-​ ­related goals.20 The case of New York’s U.S. Senate race in 1982, however, was far more typical, proving that Reagan’s and D’Amato’s victories in 1980 were not aberrant occurrences. Three Republicans ran in the GOP Senate primary that year. Candidates Whitney Seymour, a former U.S. attorney, and Muriel Siebert, who had been a state banking superintendent, vigorously defended President Reagan’s record. But unlike Reagan and the other Republican contender in the Senate race, state assemblywoman Florence Sullivan of Brooklyn, Seymour and Siebert supported legal abortion. Sullivan, conversely, was against legal abortion and was cross-​­endorsed by the Right to Life and Conservative parties. The three Senate candidates had nearly identical platforms; they differed only on abortion. Despite raising only $45,000, compared to her opponents’ combined $437,000, Sullivan easily won the primary with crucial support on the RTLP line. Sullivan earned 39 percent of the vote, compared with Siebert’s 32 percent and Seymour’s 29 percent. In the general election, Sullivan lost to incumbent Democratic senator Pat Moynihan by a large margin (65 versus 35 percent), but her primary victory illustrated the continued importance of an

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anti-​­abortion stance in GOP state politics. Arguably, Sullivan would have done better in the general election if she had not been paired against Moynihan, a moderate on women and the family.21 Events surrounding Senator D’Amato’s second reelection campaign in 1992 highlighted the vast distance that Republicans had traveled since Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s reign in the state. In the spring and summer of 1992, Larry Rockefeller, an environmental lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council and a nephew of the late governor, considered challenging D’Amato in the Republican Senate primary. Sounding much like his uncle, Larry Rockefeller flaunted his support for legal abortion and the environment in the press. He insisted that a majority of Republicans in the state felt the same way, despite at least a decade’s worth of electoral evidence to the contrary. Rockefeller’s musings about a possible Senate run garnered outsized media attention given his famous last name and the potential for an intraparty squabble unlike anything in the state since D’Amato’s first primary race against Jacob Javits in 1980.22 But while the press was hankering for a showdown, the state Republican Party was not. Conservative Republican leaders in the downstate suburbs led the way by digging up Federal Election Commission filings that showed that Larry Rockefeller had donated to Democratic candidates in the past; they also challenged his nominating signatures. By the fall of 1992, Rockefeller had dropped out of the race. D’Amato won the primary unopposed and went on to a third term in the U.S. Senate.23 D’Amato, perhaps more than anyone else in the state, was the face of New York’s Republican Party after Nelson Rockefeller’s death in the late seventies. As one anonymous GOP strategist told the New York Times in March 1992, “The [state] Republican Party is a suburban, blue-​­collar party now. . . . ​The high WASPs have moved left. They’re Democrats now. We used to be a progressive Protestant party. Now we’re a conservative Catholic party.”24 Polling confirmed this assertion: in 1992, 52 percent of Republicans in the state were Catholic, as opposed to 36 percent Protestant. This shift is unsurprising given the institutional priorities of the Catholic Church in the prior decades. On the heels of Vatican II, the church encouraged the growth of parish groups that were filled by new, less affluent suburbanites in the sixties—​­a move that attracted housewives with disposable time who hoped to build a sense of community after leaving close-​­ knit urban neighborhoods. The church then directed the women’s attention toward outlawing abortion, setting in motion what became conservative family values politics. D’Amato was a Catholic

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from Long Island who embraced anti-​­abortion and other family values positions alongside fiscal conservatism. These positions were very popular in the downstate suburbs where property taxes were sky-​­high, which hurt less affluent families in the economic downturn of the early nineties, and where the link between taxation and feminist measures had long existed. Larry Rockefeller’s more liberal, urban, feminist orientation probably would have doomed his candidacy in the Republican primary if conservative party leaders had not done so first.25 The downstate suburbs that influenced the rightward shift within the state Republican Party have retained their overall importance. As many people learned when all eyes turned to New York’s Democratic and Republican presidential primaries in 2016, at a time when few states had competing contests to occupy the media, political strategists have long divided the state into three regions: the four counties of Rockland, Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk, known as the “downstate suburbs,” plus New York City and “upstate,” composed of the remaining fifty-​­three counties. The downstate suburbs grew to make up a quarter of all votes in the state after a massive influx of white, newly middle-​­class migrants like the women in this book moved there in the decades after World War II—​­developments spurred by redlining and other restrictive racial practices in the mortgage industry. In the new millennium, the downstate suburbs continue to average roughly a quarter (24 percent) of the state’s total vote, with the city and upstate splitting the balance. The city leans left, with upstate tilting rightward; the downstate suburbs are an important tipping point, where the victor there wins the state. Since Democratic registration in these four counties is nearly even with that of Republicans today, thanks to many middle-​­class families like those considered here being priced out of the area and moving to bordering Orange County upstate, the downstate suburbs are not always a lock for Republicans. In the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, for instance, Democrat Barack Obama won these suburbs, and therefore the state. But if Republicans are to have a chance in statewide elections, they must secure their base upstate and woo the downstate suburbs, where appeals that marry social and fiscal conservatism are a solid bet, as family values women learned decades ago. This synergy is particularly effective in the current political climate where, despite assertions to the contrary, social and economic conservatism have comingled for decades.26 The issues raised by profamily and anti-​­abortion groups in the seventies continue to shape New York’s Republican Party, even after many of the women who laid the groundwork for these changes retreated to private life. Wakeup

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(or the New York State Pro-​­Family Federation, as it was renamed in 1979) disbanded in the early eighties. The group’s decision to do so divided along two lines. By then, some members felt that their family values were being addressed adequately by the Republican Party, an organization with far superior resources and visibility. Others were less hopeful. They looked at the fact that abortion was still legal despite their best efforts and concluded that their time and energy in politics had been for naught. Many of Wakeup’s allies in the anti-​­abortion movement felt the same way. Unlike Wakeup, however, the Right to Life Committee in the state (and nation) has remained politically active, despite some of its original members not doing so.27 New York’s Right to Life Party also continued to function after its founders moved on. The RTLP maintained its close ties to the Republican Party and exercised its cross-​­endorsement powers into the new millennium. Yet, as the vast majority of Republicans in New York became reliably anti-​­abortion, the RTLP’s tallies dwindled. In the 2002 gubernatorial race, it failed to earn at least 50,000 votes and lost its official third-​­party status, which made it much harder to cross-​­endorse candidates. Most of the RTLP’s founders had left politics by then, many for the same reasons that sent Wakeup members retreating to private life. Ellen McCormack, for example, ended her political career after her far less successful presidential run on the RLTP line in 1980. Like the others, she continued to care about the anti-​­abortion cause. In 1985, she wrote a book called Cuomo v. O’Connor. In it, she criticized Democratic governor Mario Cuomo, a Catholic, for supporting legal abortion and publicly remarking that Catholic archbishop (later cardinal) John O’Connor of New York should stay out of politics. In other words, McCormack and her RTLP allies found other outlets to express what they had articulated in the political arena once the GOP’s leadership embraced their views.28 These outcomes make sense when viewed in conjunction with the female political mobilization that took place in the seventies. In the decade leading up to 1980 in New York, some women were uncomfortable with the growing feminist movement(s) that surrounded them. They felt that goals such as legal abortion and the ERA undermined the traditional nuclear family and their roles as wives and mothers within it. The women were determined to do something and began mobilizing politically. In doing so, they unwittingly worked alongside feminists to change politics by moving familial concerns from the private realm to the public arena. Women, especially Catholic homemakers across the heavily populated downstate suburbs, organized using the tools at their disposal—​­from the local church groups that proliferated after

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Vatican II to the budding civic, social, and commercial infrastructure that surrounded them. The women soon formed statewide groups such as Wakeup, which defeated the state ERA in 1975. As they moved on to oppose the ­feminist-​­backed, federally funded International Women’s Year, they began advocating for smaller government and lower taxes, both core Republican demands that they linked to heterosexual traditional family rights. The Democratic Party many had grown up identifying with, on the other hand, had alienated them by embracing the feminist movement. The women moved into electoral politics to defend their vision of women and the family, as the powerful example of New York state in the seventies demonstrates. By the end of the decade, the Right to Life Party had earned a regular ballot line for cross endorsement and produced a viable family values voting bloc that conservative Republicans wisely co-​­opted. New York’s political climate in 1980 looked very different from 1970, the year that a coalition of feminists, Rockefeller Republicans, and Democrats outside heavily Catholic districts passed the country’s most expansive abortion reform law. When one peels back the layers of political change that occurred in that crucial ten-​­year span, the women in this book come into view: sitting at kitchen tables plotting strategy, promoting the traditional nuclear family and static gender roles, and whipping up votes as they would dinner. The mostly Catholic homemakers who made these populist appeals on the grassroots level are often overshadowed by the national Evangelical and antifeminist organizations that contemporaneously espoused conservative family values. But in New York state in the seventies, women such as Ellen McCormack—​­working in the suburban periphery surrounding the urban epicenter of modern feminism—​­created a viable family values movement, as they helped remake politics and move the GOP to the right in ways that both major parties had to contend with in New York and beyond.

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ARCHIVAL SOURCE AND INTERVIEW LIST

Abbreviations used in notes given in parentheses Libraries/Foundations, Microforms, and Archival and Manuscript Collections Archdiocesan Archives and Library, Archdiocese of New York, St. Joseph’s Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y. (ADNY) • Parish Financial Records Series • Parish LL2–A54 Series Archives, Marymount Manhattan College Library, New York, N.Y. (MMC) • Geraldine A. Ferraro Papers Archives, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, Calif. (RRPL) • Morton Blackwell Files • Dee Jepsen Files Archives, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wis. (WHS) • Ruth Cusack Papers Diocesan Archives, Diocese of Rockville Centre, Rockville Centre, N.Y. (DRC) • Chancellor’s Office Collection Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y. (Cornell) • Constance Cook Papers, #2881 • Constance Cook, interview by Ellen Chesler, January 1976, Schlesinger-​­Rockefeller Oral History Project, transcript, Interviews by Kathryn M. Moore, #21-​­32-​­2360 (Constance Cook, interview by Ellen Chesler) • Jean O’Leary Papers, #7321 Dr. Joseph R. Stanton Human Life Issues Library and Resource Center, Our Lady of New York Convent, Bronx, N.Y. (SHLL) • Volume I: 1972 through December 1975 Binder, The Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign Papers (EMPBI) • Volume II: January 1976 through April 1976 Binder, The Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign Papers (EMPBII) • Volume III: May 1976 through 2004, Plus Appendix Binder, The Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign Papers (EMPBIII) Human Life Foundation, Inc., New York, N.Y. (HLF) Long Island Collection, Queens Borough Public Library, Jamaica, N.Y. (QPL)

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230  Archival and Interview List Microforms & Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, New York, N.Y. (NYPL) • Frances Nathan Papers • NOW Long Island-​­Nassau Newsletter, Herstory, Berkeley, Calif.: Women’s History Library; Wooster, Oh.: Micro Photo Division, Bell and Howell Co., 1972– (NOW LI, Herstory, NYPL), • Women’s National Abortion Action Committee Newsletter, Herstory, Berkeley, Calif.: Women’s History Library; Wooster, Oh.: Micro Photo Division, Bell and Howell Co., 1972– (WONAAC Newsletter, Herstory, NYPL) Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LOC) • ERAmerica Records • Daniel P. Moynihan Papers • William A. Rusher Papers M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, N.Y. (UA-​­SUNY) • Conservative Party of New York State Records • Tanya M. Melich Papers New York State Archives, Cultural Education Center, Albany, N.Y. (NYSA) • 10996-​­89 Committee Reports and Public Hearing Transcript • L0016 Transcripts of Assembly Debates 1974–1979 • L0017-​­86 Stanley Fink Subject Files • L0101-​­87 Karen S. Burstein Women’s Issues Files (Burstein Files) • L0236-​­02 Abortion Legislation File New York State Library, Cultural Education Center, Albany, N.Y. (NYSL) Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. (Columbia) • Bella S. Abzug Papers • Martha Baker Papers Rockefeller Family Archives, The Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. (RAC) • Record Group 15 Nelson A. Rockefeller Gubernatorial Papers (RG 15 NARGP) • Record Group 26 Nelson A. Rockefeller Vice Presidential Papers (RG 26 NARVP) Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, Office of the Archivist, Brooklyn, N.Y. (BD) • Chancery Canon Law Subject Files Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (SL) • Elizabeth Holtzman Papers • Letters to Ms. 1970-​­1998 • National Abortion Rights Action League Records (NARAL Records) • National Organization for Women Collection (NOW Collection) Senate Records Office, Capitol Building, Albany, N.Y. (SRO) • State of New York, Senate, Abortion Debate, Bill No. S. 8566, No. A. 12005, transcript, microfilm (18 March 1970) • State of New York, Senate, New York State Equal Rights Amendment Debate, Bill No. S. 7600, No. A. 9030-​­A, transcript, microfilm (6 May 1974) Special Collections and University Archives, University Libraries, Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Stony Brook, N.Y. (SB-​­SUNY) • Jacob K. Javits Collection • Long Island National Organization for Women: Nassau Chapter Collection

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Archival and Interview List  231 Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University Libraries, New York, N.Y. (NYU) • National Organization for Women: New York City Chapter Records (NOW NYC) Westchester County Historical Society Archive, Elmsford, N.Y. (WCHS)

Private Collections Personal Collection of Richard Bruno, Piermont, N.Y. Personal Collection of Margaret (Margie) Fitton, West Nyack, N.Y. Personal Collection of Jane Gilroy, Merrick, N.Y. Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham, Port Jefferson, N.Y. • Eagle Forum Presents, digitized MP3 recording (EFP) Personal Collection of Bruce N. Gyory, Political Consultant, Albany, N.Y. Personal Collection of Claire Middleton, Plattsburgh, N.Y. Personal Collection of Virginia (Ginny) Lavan Taylor, Mission Viejo, Calif.

Interviews Theresa Anselmi, interview by author, December 4, 2007, Pearl River, N.Y., tape recording Theresa Anselmi, interview by author, June 7, 2011, West Nyack, N.Y., tape recording Constance Cook, interview by Ellen Chesler, Cornell Margaret Fitton, interview by author, December 4, 2007, Pearl River, N.Y., tape recording Margaret Fitton, interview by author, June 7, 2011, West Nyack, N.Y., tape recording Jane Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007, New York, tape recording Jane Gilroy, interview by author, June 4, 2011, Merrick, N.Y., tape recording Patricia Gmerek, interview by author, 25 January 2008, telephone, tape recording Phyllis Graham, interview by author, 7 December 2007, Port Jefferson, N.Y., tape recording Phyllis Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011, Port Jefferson, N.Y., tape recording Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008, telephone, tape recording John Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008, telephone, tape recording Phyllis Schlafly, interview by author, 19 January 2007, telephone Annette Stern, interview with Phyllis Graham, Part II, Undated 1976, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham Annette Stern, interview by author, July 18, 2011, telephone, tape recording Virginia Lavan Taylor, interview by author, 3 March 2008, telephone, tape recording

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NOTES

Introduction. Inventing a New Politics of Family Values 1. Jane Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Jane Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions,” email message to author, 30 October 2007; Monsignor Florence D. Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 2nd ed. (Yonkers, N.Y.: U.S. Catholic Historical Society, 1999), 383; Phyllis Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 2. Gerald Benjamin and T. Norman Hurd, eds., Rockefeller in Retrospect: The Governor’s New York Legacy (Albany, N.Y.: Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, 1984); Joseph F. Zimmerman, The Government and Politics of New York State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Jo Freeman, “Who You Know Versus Who You Represent: Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties,” in The Women’s Movements of the United States and Western Europe: Feminist Consciousness, Political Opportunity and Public Policy, ed. Mary Katzenstein and Carol Mueller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 215–44; Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage Through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Mark Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party (New York: Encounter, 2007); Richard Norton Smith, On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Random House, 2014); Timothy J. Sullivan, New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 3. Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Theresa Anselmi, interview by author, 4 December 2007; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Adam Welinsky to Jimmy Carter, “The Northern Campaign and the Catholic Problem,” Memorandum, Undated 1976, 1–27, Catholic Strategy (1) Folder, Box OA 12450, Morton Blackwell Files, RRPL. 4. Edward P. DeBerri, James E. Hug, Peter J. Henriot, and Michael J. Schultheis, Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret, 4th ed. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2003), 5–49, 54; Richard Ryan, “Why Not Follow This Leader—​­Discover Yourself,” Tablet Magazine, 13 February 1975, microfilm, NYPL. 5. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Margaret Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Anselmi, interview by author, 4 December 2007; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of

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234  Notes to Pages 4–8 Population: Vol. 1, Part 34, Sec. 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1974), 34–72; Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue. 6. Annette Stern, interview with Phyllis Graham, Part II, undated 1976, EFP. 7. Jane Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Theresa Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Margaret Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Annette Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 8. Stern, interview with Graham, Part II. 9. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963). 10. Jane Sherron De Hart, “Gender on the Right: Meanings Behind the Existential Scream,” Gender and History 3, 3 (Autumn 1991): 256; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011; Freeman, “Who You Know,” 215–44. 11. Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Grove, 2008), 320; Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12. Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 204; Matthew D. Lassiter, “Inventing Family Values,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 14–15; Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 383. 13. Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Gilroy, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 14. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 15. “Homemakers and the Equal Rights Amendment,” Flyer, Undated, Folder 18, Carton 209, NOW Collection, SL; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 16. U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population: Vol. 1, Part 34, Sec. 1, 34–36. 17. Frank Lynn, “To Margiotta, City Isn’t Enemy,” New York Times, 22 January 1978, LI1; Frank Lynn, “New York GOP Sees Power Shift Within the Party,” New York Times, 6 November 1980, A1; Frank Lynn, “Nassau Leads as Suburbs Gain Power in State,” New York Times, 21 December 1980, A1; Wolfgang Saxon, “Bernard Kilbourn, 81, Republican State Chairman,” New York Times, 7 July 2005, B10; Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1969), 98–121; Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate (New York: Coward-​ ­McCann, 1970), 175–84. 18. Zimmerman, The Government and Politics of New York State, 53–65; Neal R. Peirce, “Report/Ethnic Switches, Rockefeller Support Boost Nixon Chances in New York State,” National Journal, 28 October 1972, 1672–76; George J. Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), 33–48; Frank Lynn, “Right to Life Party Gains Leverage,” New York Times, November 18, 1979, LI1. 19. Robert D. McFadden, “President Supports Repeal of State Law on Abortion,” New York Times, 7 May 1972, 1; James F. Clarity, “Governor Reported Irked by Nixon’s Abortion Views,”

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Notes to Pages 8–10  235 New York Times, 9 May 1972, 1; Dick Zander, “Extensive Reagan Effort Predicted in New York,” Newsday, 15 July 1980, Reagan 1980 Folder, Box 9, Series 8, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY; Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue. 20. Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 21. Lisa McGirr introduced the term “kitchen-​­table activists” in her groundbreaking analysis of the rise of conservatism from the grassroots upward in Orange County, California; see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); see also John A. Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Gregory L. Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). 22. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Vintage, 1991); Pamela Johnston Conover and Virginia Gray, Feminism and the New Right: Conflict over the American Family (New York: Praeger, 1983); Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right: Women in the Political Economy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Tanya Melich, The Republican War Against Women: An Insider’s Report from Behind the Lines (New York: Bantam, 1996); William Saletan, Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon, 1996); Kristen Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 23. Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012); Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade Against Communism (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2008); Paige Meltzer, “Maternal Citizens: Gender and Women’s Activism in the United States, 1945–1960” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 2009). 24. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011; Gerald M. Costello, “Ellen McCormack: Still Fighting,” NC News Service, 21 June 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL; U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population, 34–72; “Man and Woman of the Year: The Middle Americans,” Time 95, 1, 5 January 1970; Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Gillian A. Frank, “The Color of the Unborn: Anti-​­Abortion and Anti-​­Busing Politics in Michigan, 1967–1973,” Gender and History 26, 2 (August 2014): 351–78; Rieder, Canarsie; Formisano, Boston Against Busing. 25. Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Lassiter, “Inventing Family Values,” 13–28; Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of

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236  Notes to Pages 10–18 Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Neil J. Young, “ ‘The ERA Is a Moral Issue’: The Mormon Church, LDS Women, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment,” American Quarterly 59, 3 (September 2007): 623–44; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); “Agenda Report: Documentation for General Meeting, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Action Items,” Memorandum, Undated 1975, 5–7, 17–20, November 1975, Washington, D.C., Catholic Church Folder, Box 602, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia; Daniel K. Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-​­Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 26. Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 383–95; Church of the Curé of Ars, Curé of Ars: 1926–2001 (Dallas: Taylor, 2002), 37, 367; Elaine Tyler May, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (New York: Basic, 2010), 123–26. 27. Anselmi, interview by author, 4 December 2007. 28. Emphasis mine. Bishop David F. Cunningham, bishop of Diocese of Syracuse, “Statement on Abortion,” Memorandum, 1–2, March 1970, Abortion Study Material 1970 Folder, Box 1, L0236-​­02 Abortion Legislation File, NYSA. 29. Cynthia Gorney, Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (New York: Touchwood, 1998), 109, 342; Dubow, Ourselves Unborn. 30. Sonya Michel and Robyn Rosen, “The Paradox of Maternalism: Elizabeth Lowell Putnam and the American Welfare State,” Gender and History 4 (Autumn 1992): 367–70; Ellen J. McCormack to New York State Senators, 11 March 1970, Abortion Study Material 1970 Folder, Box 1, L0236-​­02; Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-​­Suffrage Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 31. Michel and Rosen, “The Paradox of Maternalism”; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 32. Annelise Orleck, “ ‘We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public’: Militant Housewives During the Great Depression,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 2000), 376–92. 33. Michelle Nickerson introduced the term “housewife populism” to describe the activism of anticommunist housewives working on the grassroots level in Los Angeles County, California, in the 1950s and 1960s (see Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, xiv–xv). 34. Ibid., xiv–xvi, xxi, 30, 101, 172–73; Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 5, 10–11, 118, 133–35. 35. Emphasis theirs. Operation Wakeup, c/o M. Breitenbach, “What Rights and Benefits Will New York Women Lose Under the Women’s Lib ‘Equal Rights’ Amendment?” Pamphlet, Undated, Personal Collection of Margaret Fitton.

Chapter 1. Becoming a Suburban Family 1. Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 2. Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 3. Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic, 2000), 88–105.

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Notes to Pages 19–25  237 4. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 282. 5. Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic, 2011); Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 6. See, for example, Matthew D. Lassiter’s discussion of “color-​­blind” conservatism and racial discourse in Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 1–2; Rieder, Canarsie, 57–94; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 234–59; Self, American Babylon, 96–132. 7. Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 8. Chris Kristensen, John Levy, and Tamar Savir, The Suburban Lock-​­Out Effect: Suburban Action Institute Report #1 (White Plains, N.Y.: Suburban Action Institute, 1971), 1, Westchester County Historical Society Archive, Elmsford, N.Y., WCHS; Edward J. Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A. (Syosset and Garden City, N.Y.: Friends of Nassau County Museum and Doubleday, 1974), 195–98. 9. As historian Michelle Nickerson writes in her groundbreaking study of conservative women in Los Angeles County in the years after World War II, “personal histories offer insight into how conservative ideas took shape out of women’s daily lives.” Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, 50–51. 10. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 11. Ibid.; Lawrence Downes, “Sisters for Life,” New York Times, 10 August 2013, n.p.; Colleen McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America (New York: Basic, 2011). 12. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 190–99, 202–9; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963); Part 6 (1963), 34–36, 34–52, 34–60, 34–82, 34–119; 1970 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34, Sec. 1 (1974), 34–12; Patricia Gordon and Ann Harris, Yesterdays in the Merricks (North Merrick, N.Y.: Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburgh, North Merrick Public Library, 1975), 48–49; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 16. U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963), 34–49, 34–50; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 17. Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 202–19, 242–44, 252–54, 341–44; U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963), 34–49, 34–50; Part 6 (1963), 34–36, 34–60, 34–82, 34–119. 18. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1990); Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 202–19, 242–44, 252–54, 341–44; Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 19. Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 209. 20. Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows; U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Housing: Vol. I, Part 6 (1963), 34–52; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 21. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of

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238  Notes to Pages 25–31 Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963), 34–50; Part 6 (1963), 34–36, 34–60; 1970 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34, Sec. 1 (1974), 34–72, 34–111. 22. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 23. Jeff Canning, “Westchester County Since World War II: A Changing People in a Changing Landscape,” in Westchester County: The Past Hundred Years, 1883–1983, ed. Marilyn E. Weigold (Valhalla, N.Y.: Westchester County Historical Society, 1983), 212; Linda Zimmerman, ed., Rockland County: Century of History, 1900–2000 (New City, N.Y.: Historical Society of Rockland County, 2002), 178–80; U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Housing: Vol. I, Part 6 (1963), 34–36; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 24. U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963), 34–50. 25. Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 26. Westchester County Records, Housing Deed for Harold P. and Annette Stern, 15 August 1967, Department of Assessment, City Hall, Mount Vernon, N.Y.; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 27. U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963), 34–13, 34–22, 34–50; Part 6, 34–36; “Westchester County Town Facts,” Suburban Homes Guide: Westchester County Edition 16, 1 (Summer–Fall 1976): 7, 9–11, WCHS; Kristensen, Levy, and Savir, The Suburban Lock-​­Out Effect, 1; Housing Deed for Harold P. and Annette Stern. 28. Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 240–52; Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows, 143–57; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 29. Jane Gilroy, “Question: Intra-​­Church Relations Committee,” email message to author, 28 July 2011; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 195–211, 244–45; U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 3 (1963), 34–49; 1970 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34, Sec. 1 (1974), 34–72. 30. Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 31. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 1–2; Rieder, Canarsie, 57–94; Kruse, White Flight, 234–59; Self, American Babylon, 96–132. 32. U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963), 34–107; Housing Deed for Harold P. and Annette Stern; Leonard Buder, “N.A.A.C.P. Accuses 2 L.I. School Zones: Complaint to State Charges de Facto Segregation,” New York Times, 1 August 1962, 63. 33. Buder, “N.A.A.C.P. Accuses 2 L.I. School Zones”; Merrill Folsom, “Mt. Vernon Seeks Integration Key: City Divided by a Railroad Bars Stopgap Measures,” New York Times, 22 September 1963, 73; William Borders, “Mt. Vernon School Plan Draws Angry Rebuff by Negro Leaders,” New York Times, 4 March 1966, 21. 34. “Suburban Ballot on School Issues: Fewer Budgets Resisted—​­Voting Continues Tonight,” New York Times, 6 May 1964, 36; Borders, “Mt. Vernon School Plan”; Formisano, Boston Against Busing. 35. Leonard Buder, “Mount Vernon Negroes Criticize Rezoning,” New York Times, 24 March 1962, 8; “Suburban Ballot”; Borders, “Mt. Vernon School Plan”; Priscilla Murolo, “Domesticity and Its Discontents,” in Westchester: The American Suburb, ed. Roger Panetta (New York: Fordham University Press; Hudson River Museum, 2006), 356–64; George Raymond, “Rebuilding Our Cities: Urban Renewal in Westchester County,” in Westchester County: The Past Hundred Years, 1883–1983, ed. Weigold, 244–57; Canning, “Westchester County Since World War II,” 233–34; Jeanne F. Theoharis, “Introduction,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, ed. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–15; Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).

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Notes to Pages 31–39  239 36. U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34 (1963), 34–34, 34–107; 1970 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34, Sec. 1 (1974), 34–18, 34–96; Ralph Blumenthal, “More Negroes Are Moving to Westchester,” New York Times, 26 February 1967, 1, 71; Kristensen, Levy, and Savir, The Suburban Lock-​­Out Effect, 1. 37. Housing Deed for Harold P. and Annette Stern; “Westchester County Town Facts,” 9–11; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 38. U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population, Vol. I, Part 34, Sec. 1 (1974), 34–18, 34–96; “Westchester County Town Facts,” 9–11. 39. U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population: Vol. I, Part 34, Sec. 1 (1974), 34–72; Blumenthal, “More Negroes Are Moving to Westchester,” 71; “Police in Nyack on the Alert During a Black Power Rally,” New York Times, 26 August 1967, 14; “Fire Bombs Thrown in Nyack Unrest,” New York Times, 7 September 1967, 30; M. A. Farber, “Suburban Schools Face Big-​­City Problems,” New York Times, 3 September 1968, 32; Zimmerman, Rockland County: Century of History, 225. 40. Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 41. Reginald G. Damerell, Triumph in a White Suburb: The Dramatic Story of Teaneck, N.J., the First Town in the Nation to Vote for Integrated Schools (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 9–11. 42. Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 43. U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population, Advance Report, General Population Characteristics, Report No. 34 (1971), 15; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 44. Damerell, Triumph in a White Suburb, 9–11, 300, 304, 332, 351; Rieder, Canarsie.

Chapter 2. Vatican II and the Seeds of Political Discontent 1. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II; Timothy J. Sullivan, New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 2. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 3. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 4. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II; Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 5. Historian John McGreevy explains that “Catholics used the parish to map out—​­both physically and culturally—​­space within all of the northern cities.” John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-​­Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15. 6. Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011. 7. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II, 22; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 8. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 10–20; Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 340. 9. Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 340–47, 359; The Official Catholic Directory of 1960 (New York: Kennedy, 1960), 189, ADNY. 10. Joan de Lourdes Leonard, CSJ, Richly Blessed: The Diocese of Rockville Centre, 1957–1990 (Marceline, Mo.: Walsworth, 1991), 7–10, 48–60.

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240  Notes to Pages 40–48 11. Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, 201; Leonard, Richly Blessed, 7–10, 48–60; “Infant Jesus Parish: Today and Tomorrow,” Booklet, Undated 1964, Parish Files, Chancellor’s Office Collection, DRC; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 12. Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 383; McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II, 16–23. 13. Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 383–435; Church of the Curé of Ars, Curé of Ars, 37; Rev. Matthew K. LePage, “Liturgical Renewal from the Pastor,” Parish Newsletter, Undated, Parish Files, Chancellor’s Office Collection, DRC; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 14. DeBerri et al., Catholic Social Teaching, 45–49, 54. 15. LePage, “Liturgical Renewal from the Pastor.” 16. DeBerri et al., Catholic Social Teaching, 45–55; John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 127–57. 17. DeBerri et al., Catholic Social Teaching, 45–87; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 127–57. 18. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II, 23–25; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 19. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II, 67–71, 169–71, 183; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 167–71, 218–19, 236, 338; Amy Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 40–42, 48, 60. 20. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Church of the Curé of Ars, Curé of Ars, 25–26, 41. 21. Elaine Tyler May, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (New York: Basic, 2010), 123–26; McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II, 73, 85–86, 190–201. 22. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 23. “Carpenter, Frank David, S.M.M.,” Memorandum, Undated 1972, Personnel Files, Chancellor’s Office Collection, DRC; Steven Greenhouse, “Archbishop Lefebvre, 85, Dies: Traditionalist Defied the Vatican,” New York Times, 26 March 1991, B8; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 24. Graham, interviews by author, 7 December 2007, 13 June 2011. 25. “Status Animarum 1950, Report of the Church of St. Anthony’s, Nanuet, New York,” 11 January 1951, Nanuet-​­St. Anthony’s Folder, Parish Financial Records Series, ADNY; “Status Animarum 1953,” 16 January 1954; “Status Animarum 1955,” 17 January 1956; “Status Animarum 1960, 30 April 1961; “Status Animarum 1965,” 15 February 1966; Father Edmund Netter, “Comprehensive Pastoral Report, 1971–1972,” Undated, St. Anthony 480 Folder, LL2–A54 Series, ADNY. 26. Rev. Martin J. Flynn, “Church Report for 1957: Curé of Ars Parish,” 31 December 1957, 1, Spiritual Reports File, Chancellor’s Office Collection, DRC; Rev. Francis Liller, “Spiritual Report for 1961: Curé of Ars Parish,” 18 January 1962, 1; Church of the Curé of Ars, Curé of Ars Parish, 35–39, 41–45; Leonard, Richly Blessed, 301–7; Jane Gilroy, “Question: Intra-​­Church Relations Committee,” email message to author, 28 July 2011. 27. Church of the Curé of Ars, Curé of Ars Parish, 35–39, 41–45; Leonard, Richly Blessed, 301–7, 367; McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II, 67–71; Gilroy, “Question: Intra-​­Church Relations Committee.” 28. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 151. 29. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 30. Cohalan, A Popular History of the Archdiocese of New York, 355–56.

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Notes to Pages 48–60  241 31. DeBerri et al., Catholic Social Teaching, 54–57; Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue, 5–9, 166. 32. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 33. LePage, “Liturgical Renewal from the Pastor”; DeBerri et al., Catholic Social Teaching, 54; Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 34. Michel and Rosen, “The Paradox of Maternalism,” 367–70; Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 35. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 36. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 37. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), 63–94. 38. Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 39. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; DeBerri et al., Catholic Social Teaching, 45–87; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 127–57; Self, All in the Family, 17–41. 40. McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II; Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 127–57. 41. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 175–78; Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight, 170–71; Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 270–80; Richard Norton Smith, On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Random House, 2014); Sullivan, New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism. 42. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 175–78; Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight, 170– 71; Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 270–80; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 195–211, 244–45. 43. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 44. Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 270–72. 45. Ibid., 271. 46. Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 47. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 48. Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight, 1–19; Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 276; Frank Lynn, “Suburbs’ Power Mirrored in Tally of GOP Victors,” New York Times, 9 November 1980.

Chapter 3. Abortion and Female Political Mobilization 1. Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007; Father Edmund Netter, “Comprehensive Pastoral Report, 1971–1972,” Undated 1971–1972, St. Anthony 480 Folder, LL2–A54 Series, ADNY. 2. Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid.; New York State NARAL, Inc., “Abortion and Family-​­Related Votes, 1970–1976,” Memorandum, Undated, Previous Voting Records Must Be Kept Folder, Box 1, Frances Nathan Papers, NYPL; “Eugene Levy, 63, Republican Member of New York Senate,” New York Times, 13 July 1990, B8.

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242  Notes to Pages 60–65 5. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 216–81; DeBerri et al., Catholic Social Teaching, 54–57; Williams, Defenders of the Unborn; Ellen J. McCormack to New York State Senators, 11 March 1970, Abortion Study Material 1970 Folder, Box 1, L0236-​­02 Abortion Legislation File, NYSA. 6. Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue, 5–9, 166; Williams, Defenders of the Unborn; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 7. Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled; Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 8. As noted, Michelle Nickerson coined the term “housewife populism” to describe activist housewives in southern California mobilizing against communist threats in the fifties and sixties; see Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, xiv–xvi. 9. Ibid., 30; Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled; Dubow, Ourselves Unborn, 107–11; Sonya Michel and Robyn Rosen, “The Paradox of Maternalism: Elizabeth Lowell Putnam and the American Welfare State,” Gender and History 4 (Autumn 1992): 367–70; McCormack to New York State Senators, 11 March 1970; Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-​ ­Suffrage Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 10. “Drama of Life Before Birth,” Life 58, 17 (30 April 1965): 54–68; Albert Rosenfeld, “Pushed Out into a Hostile World,” ibid., 69–72a; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 11. Dubow, Ourselves Unborn; Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Rickie Solinger, Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 12. Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007. 13. Constance Cook, interview by Ellen Chesler, January 1976, 27, Cornell; Adam Welinsky to Jimmy Carter, “The Northern Campaign and the Catholic Problem,” Memorandum, Undated 1976, 1–27, Catholic Strategy (1) Folder, Box OA 12450, Morton Blackwell Files, RRPL. 14. Cook, interview by Chesler, January 1976, 50; Bonnie Eissner, “Constance Cook: Engineering Abortion Law Reform in the New York State Legislature, 1968–1970” (Undergraduate Honors Thesis, Cornell University, 1994), 22, 58–60. 15. Cook, interview by Chesler, January 1976, 47–50; Eissner, “Constance Cook,” 36–37; Lawrence Lader, Abortion II (Boston: Beacon, 1973); Fred P. Graham, “Abortions: Moves to Abolish All Legal Restraints,” New York Times, 16 November 1969, Folder 267, Box 26, Counsel’s Office—​­Subseries 4, RG 15 NARGP, RAC. 16. Graham, “Abortions: Moves to Abolish All Legal Restraints”; Cook, interview by Chesler, January 1976, 31–33, 47; Nina Baehr, Abortion Without Apology: A Radical History for the 1990s (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 33, 46–47; David J. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 343; Eissner, “Constance Cook,” 36–37; “Legal Abortion: Who, Why, and Where,” Time 98, 13 (27 September 1971): 75. 17. Cook, interview by Chesler, January 1976, 43. 18. Ibid., 41–42. 19. Marilyn Goldstein, “Wives Lead LI Abortion Repeal Drive,” Newsday, 16 January 1970, 3A, Long Island Studies Institute, Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y.; Nassau Committee for Abortion Law Repeal, Flyer, Undated 1970, Abortion Study Material 1970 Folder, Box 1, L0236-​ ­02 Abortion Legislation File, NYSA; Ruth Cusack, interview by Karen M. Lamrose, 9 September

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Notes to Pages 65–70  243 1992, transcript, 1–11, Ruth Cusack Papers, WHS; Lader, Abortion II, 123–28; Cook, interview by Chesler, January 1976, 41–42; Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 344, 356–57, 361–67. 20. Betty Friedan, “Abortion: A Woman’s Civil Right” (speech given at First National Conference for Repeal of Abortion Laws, Chicago, 14 February 1969), Folder 16, Carton 49, NOW Collection, SL. 21. Alfred Miele, “Irate Gals Abort a Reform Hearing,” New York Daily News, 14 February 1969, Abortion-​­1969-​­NFL Folder, Box 1, L0236-​­02 Abortion Legislation File, NYSA. 22. Ibid.; “Women Invade Abortion Hearing,” Newsday, 14 February 1969; Baehr, Abortion Without Apology, 40–42. 23. Susan Brownmiller, “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’: A Member of the Women’s Liberation Movement Explains What It’s All About,” New York Times Magazine, 15 March 1970, 230; Kipp Dawson, “The N.Y. Law: A History of the Struggle,” WONAAC Newsletter, 15 July 1972, 2, Herstory, NYPL; Lader, Abortion II, 161. 24. Friedan, “Abortion: A Woman’s Civil Right”; Williams, Defenders of the Unborn. 25. New Yorkers for Abortion Law Repeal, “Defeat of Abortion Reform Bill Urged by New York REPEAL Group,” Press Release, 7 April 1970, 1, Abortion Study Material 1970 Folder, Box 1, L0236-​­02 Abortion Legislation File, NYSA; Committee for the Cook-​­Leichter Bill, “Chronicle of Activities,” Memorandum, Undated 1970, NY State Campaign 1970–71 Folder, Carton 4, NARAL Records, SL; State of New York, Senate, Abortion Debate, Bill No. S. 8566, No. A. 12005, transcript, microfilm (18 March 1970): 1472–77, SRO; Cook, interview by Chesler, 50–57; Lawrence Lader, Abortion II, 126–29, 131. 26. Francis Cardinal Spellman to “Dearly Beloved in Christ,” 6 February 1967, C.2350-​­1 Abortion Folder, Box 31, Chancery Canon Law Subject Files, BD; Bishop Francis J. Mugavero, “Proposed Liberalization of Abortion,” Memorandum, 6 February 1967, ibid.; Raymond Nelson to the Honorable Dominick L. DiCarlo, 19 February 1967, BD; Lader, Abortion II, 57–60; Williams, Defenders of the Unborn; May, America and The Pill, 123–26. 27. Cook, interview by Chesler, January 1976, 47. 28. Ibid.; Richard Pérez-​­Peña, “ ‘70 Abortion Law: New York Said Yes, Stunning the Nation,” New York Times, 9 April 2000, 1; Lader, Abortion II, 135–46. 29. State of New York, Assembly, Speaker Perry B. Duryea, Presiding, Abortion Debate, Bill No. S. 8556-​­A., No. A. 12005, transcript (9 April 1970), 207–8, Public Information Office, New York State Legislative Office Building, Albany, N.Y.; Cook, interview by Chesler, January 1976, 28, 127–34; Lader, Abortion II, 135–46. 30. Eissner, “Constance Cook,” 59–60. 31. Graham, “Abortions: Moves to Abolish All Legal Restraints”; “Abortion,” Memorandum, September 1974, 3, Folder 51, Box 6, New York Office Vice Presidential Series 1974–1977—​­Vice Presidential Confirmation Hearings 1974, RG 26 NARVP, RAC; Jane E. Brody, “Abortion: Once a Whispered Problem, Now a Public Debate,” New York Times, 8 January 1968, 28. 32. “A Brief History,” New York State Right to Life Committee, www.nysrighttolife.org/ brief_history; Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007. 33. Lader, Abortion II, 161. 34. John Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 35. Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 36. Frank Lynn, “Suburbs’ Power Mirrored in Tally of GOP Victors,” New York Times, 9 November 1980. 37. Anselmi, interview by author, 4 December 2007.

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244  Notes to Pages 71–79 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. “Foes and Backers of Abortion Laws March in 3 Cities,” New York Times, 21 November 1971, 95; “Anti-​­Abortion Forces Attempt to Counter November 20 Actions,” WONAAC Newsletter, December 1971, 4, Herstory, NYPL; Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007. 43. Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007. 44. Michael T. Kaufman, “Abortion Clinic Formally Opens as Nearby Church Tolls Protest,” New York Times, 27 January 1972, 30. 45. Anselmi, interview by author, 4 December 2007; Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007; Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 1–19. 46. Lader, Abortion II, 149–61. 47. “Hempstead Abortion Curb Upset as Beyond Village Authority,” New York Times, 1 February 1972, 34. 48. U.S. Catholic Conference, “Rockville Centre Diocesan Guidelines on N.Y. Abortion Law,” Press Release, 9 July 1970, C.2350-​­1 Abortion Folder, Box 31, Chancery Canon Law Subject Files, BD; Mrs. Edward J. Kane to Monsignor James King, 23 July 1970, ibid.; Monsignor James King to Joseph F. Brody, 28 July 1970, ibid.; Right to Life Petition, Undated 1970, ibid.; “Bishops Directives,” Memorandum, Undated 1970, ibid.; Ellen Fairchild, “Legislative Recommendations for New York State,” Memorandum, October 1970, ’70 Legis. Family Folder, Box 70, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell. 49. Edward J. Golden to New York State Legislature Members, 13 January 1972, 1972 L. Abortion Reference Folder, Box 86, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell; “New York Attacked,” WONAAC Newsletter, December 1971, 5, Herstory, NYPL; “Victory in New York,” WONAAC Newsletter, 1 March 1972. 50. “Abortion Protest,” NOW LI, March 1972, 3, Herstory, NYPL; Right to Choose,” NOW LI, July 1972, 4; “Abortion,” NOW LI, September 1972, 8; “Women’s Right to Abortion Under Attack in NY,” WONAAC Newsletter, 1 April 1972, 3. 51. “Metropolitan Briefs: Elective Abortions Banned in Nassau County Center,” New York Times, 29 February 1972, 39. 52. Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007. 53. Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 54. Rev. Martin J. Flynn, “Church Report for 1957: Curé of Ars Parish,” 31 December 1957, 1, Spiritual Reports File, Chancellor’s Office Collection, DRC; Rev. Francis Liller, “Spiritual Report for 1961: Curé of Ars Parish,” 18 January 1962, 1; Church of the Curé of Ars, Curé of Ars: 1926–2001, 35–39, 41–45; Leonard, Richly Blessed, 301–7; Gilroy, “Question: Intra-​­Church Relations Committee,” email message to author, July 28, 2011. 55. Judy Kessler, “A Long Island Housewife Campaigns for the Presidency on the Antiabortion Issue,” People, 22 March 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Jane Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions,” email message to author, 30 October 2007. 56. McCormack to New York State Senators, 11 March 1970. 57. John Pascal, “Abortion: The Issue That Won’t Go Away,” Newsday, 9 October 1977, EMPBIII, SHLL. 58. Therese D. Siller, “Testimony Before the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Re: S.J. Res. 108, ‘Declaring a Policy of Population Stabilization,’ ” 8 October 1971, 2, 7, Personal

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Notes to Pages 79–84  245 Collection of Jane Gilroy; Pro-​­Life Action Committee (PLAC) to Pro-​­Life Individuals and Groups, Undated, EMPBIII, SHLL; Westchester Coalition for Legal Abortion, Flyer, May 1975, 2, NYS-​­NARAL Sample Book Folder, Box 1, Frances Nathan Papers, NYPL. 59. “Mrs. McCormack Endorsed for President,” The Wanderer, 2 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Jane Gilroy, “The Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign: Changing the Culture Through Politics and the Media” (conference paper given at Nassau Community College, Garden City, N.Y., 13 October 2004), 3, Personal Collection of Jane Gilroy; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions”; Goodier, No Votes for Women. 60. Pascal, “Abortion: The Issue That Won’t Go Away.” 61. Robert J. Spitzer, The Right to Life Movement and Third Party Politics (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 30–32, 40–44, 57–60. 62. Pascal, “Abortion: The Issue That Won’t Go Away”; Maurice Carroll, “The Unlikely Beginning of the Right to Life Party,” New York Times, 25 November 1978, 25; Gilroy, “Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign,” 3; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions.” 63. “Education or Politics? Why Not Both?” The Wanderer, 16 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Jane Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions,” 17 January 2008; Jane Gilroy, “Re: Response to S. Taranto’s Questions,” email message to author, 19 January 2008. 64. Jane Gilroy, “Statement of Jane Gilroy, Right to Life Party Candidate for Governor,” Press Release, 21 August 1970, Personal Collection of Jane Gilroy; Robert Mindlin, “Statewide Anti-​ ­Abortion Slate to Be Headed by LI Mother of 5,” Long Island Press, 21 August 1970, QPL. 65. Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 66. Gilroy, “Statement of Jane Gilroy.” 67. Ibid.; New York State Right to Life Party, Press Release, 21 August 1970, Jane Gilroy Personal Papers; Robert Mindlin, “Statewide Anti-​­Abortion Slate to Be Headed by LI Mother of 5,” Long Island Press, 21 August 1970, QPL; Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism; Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. 68. Gilroy, “Statement of Jane Gilroy”; Jane Gilroy to author, 27 November 2007; Lassiter, The Silent Majority. 69. Alfonso A. Narvaez, “Assembly Approves $47-​­Million in Funds for Parochial Schools,” New York Times, 12 May 1972, 46; “. . . Albany Regresses,” New York Times, 15 May 1972, 34; “Abortion Seen Up to Woman, Doctor,” Washington Post, 25 August 1972, Folder 407, Box 39, Counsel’s Office—​­Subseries 4, RG 15 NARGP, RAC. 70. Edward J. Golden to New York State Legislature Members, 7 January 1972, 1972 L. Abortion Orgs. Anti-​­Folder, Box 86, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell; “Albany County RTL, Schenectady County RTL . . . ,” Capitol Region Life Line Newsletter 9 (9 April 1972): 3, ibid.; Alfonso A. Narvaez, “Abortion Repeal Urged in Albany,” New York Times, 18 April 1972, 43; Lader, Abortion II, 198–200. 71. Robert D. McFadden, “Lobbying on Abortion Increases at Capitol,” New York Times, 8 May 1972, 43. 72. Ibid. 73. “Education or Politics? Why Not Both?” The Wanderer, 16 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 74. Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Lader, Abortion II, 201. 75. Rev. Paul G. Driscoll to the Honorable Perry B. Duryea, 28 March 1972, Folder 209, Box 21, Counsel’s Office—​­Robert R. Douglas 1959–1972, RG 15 NARGP, RAC. 76. Ibid.; Emanuel R. Gold to Bishop Francis J. Mugavero, 8 October 1970, C.2350-​­1

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246  Notes to Pages 85–88 Abortion Folder, Box 31, Chancery Canon Law Subject Files, BD; Right to Life Petition, Undated 1970, ibid.; Monsignor James King to Emanuel R. Gold, 14 October 1970, ibid.; Terence Cardinal Cooke, “Abortion Law Repeal Is Everyone’s Duty,” Catholic News, 22 April 1971, 1, 1972 ­Abortion—​­Catholic Material Anti-​­Folder, Box 85, Constance Cook Papers #2881, Cornell. 77. Catholic Bishops of New York State, Joint Pastoral Letter, 9 April 1972, 1972 Abortion—​ ­ atholic Material Anti-​­Folder, Box 85. C 78. New York State Catholic Committee, “What Can I Do?” Insert, 9 April 1972, 1972 ­Abortion—​­Catholic Material Anti-​­ Folder, Box 85. 79. “Abortion Law Repeal Urged By Bishop,” Albany Times Union, 9 April 1972, Abortion—​ ­Catholic Material Anti-​­Folder, Box 85; Charles J. Tobin to Honorable Members of the New York State Legislature, 12 April 1972, ibid.; Grace M. Mueller to Most Rev. Joseph L. Hogan, 14 April 1972, 1972 L. Abortion—​­Corr. From Non-​­Constituents-​­Pro Folder, ibid. 80. “35,000 March for Life,” “Latest Activities in the Bronx,” Bronx Right to Life Committee Newsletter, May 1972, 1, 1972 L. Abortion Reference Folder, Box 86, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell; Edward J. Golden to New York State Legislature Members, 5 March 1972, 1972 L. Abortion Orgs. Anti-​­Folder, ibid.; Lader, Abortion II, 198–99. 81. “Thousands Here Urge Repeal of Abortion Statute,” New York Times, 17 April 1972, 27. 82. Ibid.; Self, All in the Family. 83. “Abortion Law in Danger,” New York Times, 29 April 1972, 30; “Buckling at Albany,” New York Times, 11 May 1972, 44; Linda Lamel, “And They Called It Legislation,” NOW LI, June 1972, 2, Herstory, NYPL. 84. Emphasis hers. Roslyn Willet, “Statement on Abortion,” Press Release, 28 April 1972, 1972 L. Abortion Orgs. Pro Folder, Box 86, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell. 85. Robert D. McFadden, “President Supports Repeal of State Law on Abortion,” New York Times, 7 May 1972, 1; James F. Clarity, “Governor Reported Irked by Nixon’s Abortion Views,” New York Times, 9 May 1972, 1; William S. Stevens, “Nixon Abortion Stand Stirs Debate,” UPI, 8 May 1972, 1972 L. Abortion Clippings Folder, Box 85, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell; Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic, 1994). 86. William E. Farrell, “Abortion: On This Issue Even Legislators Can Be Sincere,” New York Times, 14 May 1972, E4. 87. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Nixon Blunder: President’s Entry into N.Y.,” Ithaca Journal, 24 May 1972, 1972 L. Abortion Clippings Folder, Box 85, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell. 88. William E. Farrell, “Nixon Has Edge Among Catholics Here,” New York Times, 17 September 1972, 51. 89. Constance Cook, “Statement on Donovan-​­Crawford, Unrevised from the Record,” Press Release, 9 May 1972, 1–6, 1972 L. Abortion Reference Folder, Box 86, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell; Fred Corota to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Memorandum, 10 May 1972, Folder 750, Box 71, Counsel’s Office—​­Subseries 4, RG 15 NARGP, RAC; William E. Farrell, “Assembly Votes to Repeal Liberalized Abortion Law,” New York Times, 10 May 1972, 1; Alfonso A. Narvaez, “Abortion Repeal Passed by Senate, Sent to Governor,” New York Times, 11 May 1972, 1; Lader, Abortion II, 196–207. 90. Office of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Press Release, 13 May 1972, Folder 51, Box 6, New York Office Vice Presidential Series 1974–1977—​­Vice Presidential Confirmation Hearings 1974, RG 26 NARVP, RAC.

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Notes to Pages 88–94  247 91. Alan F. Guttmacher, M.D., “Memorandum on Conference with Governor Rockefeller,” 20 December 1972, Folder 407, Box 39, Counsel’s Office—​­Subseries 4, RG 15 NARGP, RAC. 92. Ibid.; Office of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Press Release; Lader, Abortion II, 196–207. 93. Michael Whitman to James B. Ayers, Memorandum, 23 January 1973, Folder 407, Box 39, Counsel’s Office—​­Subseries 4, RG 15 NARGP, RAC; “Abortion,” WONAAC Newsletter, February/March 1973, 5, Herstory, NYPL; Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 587–99; “Abortion, Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton,” Law Library—​­American Law and Legal Information, http://law.jrank.org/ pages/3908/Abortion-​­Roe-​­v-​­Wade-​­Doe-​­v-​­Bolton.html. 94. Jon Margolis, “Ruling Takes Pressure Off Albany Legislators,” Newsday, 23 January 1973, 3, microform, Long Island Division, QPL. 95. Office of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Press Release, 4 February 1973, Folder 407, Box 39, Counsel’s Office—​­Subseries 4, RG 15 NARGP, RAC; “Right to Choose,” NOW LI, August 1972, 7, Herstory, NYPL; Nancy Borman, “Out of the Catacombs, and into the Abortion Apocalypse!” Majority Report 2, 9 (January 1973): 5, ibid. 96. “Abortion Rights Limited,” NOW York Woman, June 1974, 5, Herstory Microforms, NYPL; Fitton, interview by author, 4 December 2007; John Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 97. Jeannie I. Rosoff, “Is Support of Abortion Political Suicide?” Family Planning Perspectives 7, 1 (January–February 1975): 13–15; Max H. Seigel, “U.S. Court Overturns Curb on Medicaid Abortions,” New York Times, 23 October 1976, 1. 98. Maurice Carroll, “Ottinger Runs 2d, Goodell Poor Third—​­Conservative Aided by Suburban Vote,” New York Times, 4 November 1970, 1; “Buckley Speaks at Conservative Awards Dinner,” Buckley Newsletter 1, 1 (February–March 1971): 1, Folder 5, Box 13, William A. Rusher Papers, LOC; Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), 40–61; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Sullivan, New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, 111–38; Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 1–19. 99. Smith, On His Own Terms.

Chapter 4. Equal Rights and Profamily Politics 1. Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 2. Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1. 3. Ibid., 1–20; Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 212–42. 4. League of Women Voters of New York State, “Fable & Facts: The Equal Rights Amendment in New York State,” Pamphlet, Undated, ERA State Campaign Literature Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 5. Ibid.; Lawrence Klepner and Lesle Lustgarten to Senator Karen S. Burstein, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY State Campaign Organiz. Speakers Data Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; State of New York, Senate, New York State Equal Rights Amendment Debate, Bill No. S. 7600, No. A. 9030-​­A, transcript, microfilm (6 May 1974), 7365, SRO. 6. “Ambitious Project,” Operation Wakeup Newsletter, Undated, ERA Opposition Arguments US and NYS incl. Schlafly Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Judy Klemesrud, “As New York Vote on Equal Rights Nears, Two Sides Speak Out; Pro Con,” New York Times, 18 September 1975, 46; State of New York, Senate, New York State Equal Rights Amendment

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248  Notes to Pages 94–100 Debate, Bill No. S. 2824, transcript, microfilm (21 May 1975), 5290–5322, 5414–15, 5475, 5454–55, 5581, SRO. 7. State of New York, Senate, Hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the New York State Equal Rights Amendment, Bill No. S. 2824, transcript, microfilm (11 March 1975), 204, SRO. 8. “ERA by Counties,” New York Daily News, 6 November 1975, 17C, Personal Collection of Claire Middleton; “Erie County LWV Asks Why,” New York State Voter, Summer 1976, 2, Humanities and General Research Room, NYPL; Linda Moscarella to Ms., 25 September 1976, Folder 243, Carton 7, Letters to Ms. 1970–1998, SL. 9. “Housewives, $5,000 Beat ERA,” Newburgh News, 3 December 1975, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; Lisa Cronin Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” Ms., March 1976, 92, 96. 10. “Ginsburg to Rap on ERA,” The New Feminist 2, 8 (Fall 1969): 3, Herstory, NYPL; “ERA Petitions Sent to Ginsburg,” NOW LI, 26 March 1970, 6, ibid.; Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, 1–14. 11. Pro-​­ERA Coalition, Memorandum, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 12. Ibid.; Nancy E. Baker, “ ‘Too Much to Lose, Too Little to Gain’: The Role of Rescission Movements in the Equal Rights Amendment Battle, 1972–1982” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2003), 210–15. 13. State of New York, Assembly, New York State Equal Rights Amendment Debate, Bill No. A. 9030-​­A, transcript (24 April 1974), 5147–69, Box 2, L0016 Transcripts of Assembly Debates 1974–1979, NYSA; The New York Red Book: An Illustrated Yearbook of Authentic Information Concerning New York State, Its Departments and Political Subdivisions and the Officials Who Administer Its Affairs, 1974, 82nd ed. (Albany, N.Y.: Williams Press, 1974), 179, 237. 14. Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 15. Ibid. 16. Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 50; Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 17. “Lookback Week of March 8–14: 25 Years Ago—​­1974,” Plattsburgh Press Republican, 8 March 1999, A5, Personal Collection of Claire Middleton. 18. Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 19. Stern, interview with Phyllis Graham, Part I, Undated 1976, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham. 20. Pamela Warrick, “Senate Wavering on Rights Measure,” Newsday, 31 March 1975, ERA-​ ­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Klemesrud, “As New York Vote on Equal Rights Nears”; Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008; Virginia Lavan Taylor, interview by author, 3 March 2008, telephone, tape recording. 21. Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 22. Phyllis Schlafly to Claire Middleton, 10 April 1974, Personal Collection of Claire Middleton. 23. Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008; Taylor, interview by author, 3 March 2008. 24. Pat Yungbluth to Jan Pittman-​­Liebman, 24 August 1975, Folder 32, Carton 197, NOW Collection. 25. Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008.

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Notes to Pages 100–106  249 26. Schlafly to Middleton, 10 April 1974. 27. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 225. 28. Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 29. The Catholic Church had opposed the ERA in prior decades when it and the labor movement still feared it would eliminate protective labor legislation for women. After courts began to rule in the mid-​­sixties that legal equality was best achieved by adding rights to the sex that did not have them, rather than stripping both men and women of rights in order to be equal, labor unions, no longer fearing the fate of protective labor legislation (and in part inspired by modern feminism to reject such legislation from a bygone era) began supporting the ERA. The Catholic Church, however, said little and directed its energies toward legal abortion in the sixties and onward. See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 155, 251–81; Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 30. Joseph Pisani to Claire Middleton, Undated 1974, Personal Collection of Claire Middleton. 31. State of New York, Senate, New York State Equal Rights Amendment Debate, Bill No. S. 7600, No. A. 9030-​­A, transcript, microfilm (6 May 1974), 7366-​­75, SRO; The New York Red Book . . . ​1974, 58, 62, 66–69, 81, 99; Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 32. Rudolph P. Blaum, E.R.A. in an ERA of ERROR (Forest Hills, N.Y.: John Paul Jones Enterprises, 1977), 23–25, 46; “New Women’s Group Claims ERA Dangers,” Daily Item, 6 June 1974, 25, Personal Collection of Annette Stern; Operation Wake Up, Letterhead, undated, ibid.; Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 33. “ERA Defeat: ‘Lies,’ or ‘Out of Touch’?” Long Island Press, 5 November 1975, 1, 3, QPL; Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 34. Operation Wakeup, Letterhead, undated, Personal Collection of Annette Stern; State of New York, Senate, Hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the New York State Equal Rights Amendment, Bill No. S. 2824, transcript, microfilm (11 March 1975), 197–98, SRO. 35. Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 36. “New Women’s Group Claims ERA Dangers.” 37. Mrs. Cathryn Dorney and Captain Rudolph Blaum to New York State Legislators, 6 January 1975, ERA Opposition Arguments US and NYS incl. Schlafly Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 38. Stern, interview with Graham, Part I. 39. Ibid. 40. W.U.N.D.E.R to the Legislators of the State of New York, 3 February 1975, ERA Opposition Arguments US and NYS incl. Schlafly Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 41. Pro-​­ERA Coalition, Memorandum, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, Burstein Files, NYSA. 42. State of New York, Assembly, New York State Equal Rights Amendment Debate, Bill No. A. 2543, transcript (18 February 1975): 725, 737–45, 750, 761, 765, Box 5, L0016 Transcripts of Assembly Debates 1974–1979, NYSA; Pamela Warrick, “Senate Wavering on Rights Measure,” Newsday, 31 March 1975, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Pro-​­ERA Coalition, Memorandum, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder; Lawrence Klepner and Lesle Lustgarten to Senator Karen S. Burstein, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY State Campaign Organiz. Speakers Data Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 43. Pro-​­ERA Coalition, Memorandum, Undated 1975, 1–14; “Some Hits and Misses at ERA Hearing,” Long Island Press, 12 March 1975, ERA-​­NY State Press Con. Non-​­Camp. Lit. Folder,

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250  Notes to Pages 106–110 Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Paula Berstein, “ERA Debate: Will Passage Help or Hurt?” New York Daily News, 8 April 1975, ERA-​­NY State Press Con. Non-​­Camp. Lit. Folder; Klemesrud, “As New York Vote on Equal Rights Nears”; Schlafly, interview by author, 19 January 2007, telephone. 44. “Special Edition: ERA Alert,” Woman Lobbyist 1, 4 (5 May 1975): 1–2, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Gene Spagnoli, “Fem Rights Gain in the Legislature,” New York Daily News, 14 May 1975; State of New York, Senate, New York State Equal Rights Amendment Debate, Bill No. S. 2824, transcript, microfilm (21 May 1975), 5475, 5581, SRO; Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 45. State of New York, Senate, Hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the New York State Equal Rights Amendment, Bill No. S. 2824, transcript, microfilm. 46. Ibid., 535. 47. Ibid., 203–4. 48. Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 96; Claire Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 49. State of New York, Senate, Hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the New York State Equal Rights Amendment, Bill No. S. 2824, transcript, microfilm, 22. 50. Sheridan Lyons, “ERA Supporters: Fear Defeated It,” Democrat and Chronicle, 6 November 1976, 8B, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor. 51. Ibid.; “Ambitious Project,” Operation Wakeup Newsletter, undated, ERA Opposition Arguments US and NYS incl. Schlafly Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Gene Spagnoli, “Ballot Issue: Are Women Equal?” New York Daily News, 30 October 1975, 66, ERA NY State Folder, Box 615, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia. 52. Louis Harris, “ ‘Harris’ 59% Support Women’s Movement,” New York Post, 19 May 1975, ERA-​­NY State Press Con. Non-​­Camp. Lit. Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 53. Harris, “ ‘Harris’ 59% Support Women’s Movement”; Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 64–66, 92, 94, 96. 54. “Women’s Rights and the 1975 Legislative Session,” Women New York 1, 1 (November 1975): 2–3, ERA-​­NY Campaign I Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Pro-​­ERA Coalition, Memorandum, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, ibid. 55. Emphasis theirs. “ERA: Vote ‘Yes,’ The American Way,” Bumper Sticker, Undated 1975, ERA State Campaign Literature Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 56. Emphasis theirs. People for Equal Rights/Madison North Marketing Communications Agency, “1 (30) TV Spot,” 30 July 1975, transcript, ERA-​­NY State Campaign Organiz. Speakers Data Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 57. Judith Bender, “State ERA Endorsed by Betty Ford,” Newsday, 5 May 1975, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Patrick J. Cunningham to Democratic Party Candidates, Members of the State Committee, and County Chairpersons, 15 October 1975, ERA-​ ­NY State Press Con. Non-​­Camp. Lit. Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; “Tuesday, Nov. 4, VOTE YES Equal Rights Amendment,” Flyer, Undated 1975, ERA State Campaign Literature Folder; Spagnoli, “Are Women Equal?”; Office of U.S. Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, “Statement on New York, New Jersey Equal Rights Amendment Press Conference,” Press Release, 31 October 1975, SI Women—​­ERA Press Conference Folder, Box 167, Elizabeth Holtzman Papers, SL. 58. Governor Hugh L. Carey, “Proclamation,” Press Release, 26 August 1975, ERA-​­NY Campaign I Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 59. Angela Cabrera to State Assembly Speaker Stanley Steingut, 29 August 1975, ERA-​­NY Campaign I Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; “1776, 1976,” Flyer, undated 1975, ERA

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Notes to Pages 110–116  251 Opposition Arguments US and NYS incl. Schlafly Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Hugh L. Carey to Bella S. Abzug, 18 August 1975, Carey, Hugh L. Folder, Catalogued Corr. Box C-​­G, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia; Blaum, E.R.A. in an ERA of ERROR, 48. 60. NOW New York State, Memorandum, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder; New York Coalition for Equal Rights, “Tuesday, Nov. 4, Vote Yes Equal Rights Amendment,” Flyer, Undated 1975, Burstein Files, NYSA. 61. New York Coalition for Equal Rights, “On Tuesday November 4, 1975, You Can Get a Lifetime Guarantee,” Flyer, Undated 1975, ERA State Campaign Literature Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 62. Stern, interview with Graham, Part I. 63. Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 96. 64. Ibid.; State of New York, Senate, Hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the New York State Equal Rights Amendment, Bill No. S. 2824, transcript, microfilm (11 March 1975), 22; Operation Wake-​­Up, “On Nov. 4th Vote NO!” Flyer, Undated, Folder 32, Carton 197, NOW Collection, SL. 65. Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 65. 66. New York State League of Women Voters, “Let’s Talk Sense About the ERA!” New York State Voter, January 1975, 3, No Folder, Box 3, Long Island National Organization for Women: Nassau Chapter Collection, SB-​­SUNY; Lyons, “ERA Supporters: Fear Defeated It”; Operation Wake-​­Up, “On Nov. 4th Vote NO!” 67. Lisa Cronin Wohl, “Phyllis Schlafly: ‘The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority,’ ” Ms., March 1974, 55. 68. Operation Wakeup, “Warning! Warning! Equal Rights Amendment is Dangerous to Women—​­Damaging to Men[;] Devastating to Children—​­An Attack on the Family,” Flyer, Undated 1975, Personal Collection of Annette Stern. 69. WHEN, a Member Organization of Operation Wakeup, “Did You Know That a Vote for ERA Is a Vote Against the Family?” Flyer, New York Anti-​­Material Folder, Box 102, ERAmerica Records, Manuscript Division, LOC. 70. Patricia Van Etten, “Logical Anti-​­ERA Reasons Exist,” Binghamton Press, 8 October 1975, Folder 77, Box S8-​­2, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY. 71. Judith Merrill, “Equal Rights Amendment: ‘Its Passage Will Disrupt Family Unit,’ ” Sunday Record Herald, 2 November 1975, 16, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor. 72. Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 73. Emphasis theirs. WHEN, “Did You Know That a Vote for ERA Is a Vote Against the Family?” 74. “End of an ERA?” Time, 17 November 1975, 65, ERA NY State Folder, Box 615, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia. 75. “NOW Has Broad Support; Albany Lib Leader Says,” Knickerbocker News Union Star, 8 May 1974, 2C, CEC Bills File A. 9030-​­A Folder, Box 136, Constance Cook Papers, #2881, Cornell. 76. “Homemakers and the Equal Rights Amendment,” Flyer, Undated, Folder 18, Carton 209, NOW Collection, SL. 77. Emphasis hers. A Member of Stop ERA, Letter to the Editor, Ms., April 1976, 8. 78. NETWORK, “Catholics and the Equal Rights Amendment,” Pamphlet, Undated 1975, ERA State Campaign Literature Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1980).

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252  Notes to Pages 116–122 79. “End of an ERA?” Time, 17 November 1975, 65, ERA NY State Folder, Box 615, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia. 80. Mike Hurewitz, “ERA Is THE Statewide Issue on Tuesday,” Long Island Press, 2 November 1975, 23, QPL. 81. “NOW Has Broad Support.” 82. Klemesrud, “As New York Vote on Equal Rights Nears”; Linda Greenhouse, “Defeat of Equal Rights Bills Traced to Women’s Votes,” New York Times, 6 November 1975, 1, 32; “Erie County LWV Asks Why,” New York State Voter, Summer 1976, 2, Humanities and General Research Room, NYPL; Kent L. Tedin, David W. Brady, Mary E. Buxton, Barbara M. Gorman, and Judy L. Thompson, “Social Background and Political Differences Between Pro-​­and Anti-​­ERA Activists,” American Politics Quarterly 5, 3 (July 1977): 395–404. 83. Martha Weinman Lear, “You’ll Probably Think I’m Stupid,” New York Times Magazine, 11 April 1976. 84. Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 66. 85. Blaum, E.R.A. in an ERA of ERROR, 50; “Erie County LWV Asks Why,” New York State Voter, Summer 1976, 2, Humanities and General Research Room, NYPL; Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 66. 86. Klemesrud, “As New York Vote on Equal Rights Nears.” 87. Louise Leiker, “2 View [sic] of ERA Defeat: Was It Prayer or Scare?” Buffalo Courier Express, 6 November 1975, 11–12, Folder 77, Box S8-​­2, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY; “State ERA,” New York Coalition for Equal Rights Newsletter, 17 October 1975, 1, ERA-​­NY State Campaign Organiz. Speakers Data Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Mary R. Bee to Sandy Turner, 20 October 1975, ibid.; Pro-​­ERA Coalition, Memorandum, Undated 1975, 5–11, ERA-​­NY Legislative Campaign Folder, ibid.; “Holtzman Leads Bike-​­A-​­Thon,” Brooklyn Coalition for Equal Rights Newsletter, undated 1975, ERA-​­NY State Press Con. Non-​ ­Camp. Lit. Folder, ibid.; Klemesrud, “As New York Vote on Equal Rights Nears”; “Housewives, $5,000 Beat ERA,” Newburgh News, 3 December 1975, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 92, 96. 88. Claire Middleton to Members of the Board of the New York State RTLC, 14 September 1975, Personal Collection of Margaret Fitton; Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 92; Blaum, E.R.A. in an ERA of ERROR, 57; Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008; Gmerek, interview by author, 25 January 2008. 89. Stern v. Kamarsky, 84 Misc. 2d 447 (Sup. Ct. New York County 1975): 448–53, 452. 90. Baker, “ ‘Too Much to Lose, Too Little to Gain,’ ” 273; Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 91. Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 94; Lear, “You’ll Probably Think I’m Stupid”; Gmerek, interview by author, 25 January 2008. 92. Frank Lynn, “State Equal Rights Vote Jeopardized by Public Apathy,” New York Times, 31 October 1975, 24; Maurice Carroll, “Drive for Women’s Rights Culminates at Polls Today,” New York Times, 4 November 1975, 1, ERA NY State Folder, Box 615, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia; “Housewives, $5,000 Beat ERA,” Newburgh News, 3 December 1975, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor. 93. “The Equal Rights Amendment Weighs Heavily upon the State,” The Tablet, 30 October 1975, 21, 25, microforms, NYPL. 94. Gmerek, interview by author, 25 January 2008. 95. Richard N. Hughes, “WPIX Editorial #75–51, New York State ERA,” 1 April 1975,

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Notes to Pages 122–131  253 transcript, ERA-​­NY State Press Con. Non-​­Camp. Lit. Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; “No Special Privileges or Penalties for Women,” Albany Times Union, 16 May 1975; “Yes on ERA—​ ­Amendment I,” Buffalo Evening News, 14 October 1975; Cliff Love, “WABC Radio Editorial No. 24–1975, We Support the Equal Rights Amendment,” 18, 19, 20 October 1975, transcript, ERA-​ ­NY State Press Con. Non-​­Camp. Lit. Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Mark Gasarch to County Coalitions—​­Election Day Coordinators, Undated 1975, ERA-​­NY State Campaign Organiz. Speakers Data Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; “State Proposition and Amendments,” Long Island Press, 31 October 1975, 45, QPL. 96. Gmerek, interview by author, 25 January 2008. 97. “ERA defeat: ‘Lies,’ or ‘Out of Touch’?” Long Island Press, 5 November 1975, 1, 3, QPL. 98. Ibid.; Lyons, “ERA Supporters: Fear Defeated It”; Phyllis Schlafly, “NEW YORK & NEW JERSEY—​­HALLELUJAH!” Eagle Forum, November 1975, 1, SL; Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, 13; Baker, “ ‘Too Much to Lose, Too Little to Gain,’ ” 327–28, 343–46, 355. 99. “Voters Deal ERA a Crushing Defeat; Housing Rejected; Court Curb Ok’d,” Knickerbocker News Union Star, 5 November 1975, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; “Results of Vote on ERA,” New York Times, 6 November 1975, 33. 100. Lyons, “ERA Supporters: Fear Defeated It.” 101. Edward Hudson, “Mrs. Friedan Says ‘Lies’ Led to Amendments’ Loss,” New York Times, 5 November 1975, 22. 102. “Results of Voting in the City and Suburbs: Vote on ERA,” New York Times, 6 November 1975, 86; Linda Greenhouse, “Defeat of Equal Rights Bills Traced to Women’s Votes: Rights Bill Loss Laid to Women’s Votes: The Unisex Toilets, ‘Vote Against Family’ Complacency Noted,” New York Times, 6 November 1975, 1, 32; “Erie County LWV Asks Why,” New York State Voter, Summer 1976, 2, Humanities and General Research Room, NYPL; Betsy Ruechner, “ERA Defeat Pinned on Women,” Democrat and Chronicle, 6 November 1976, 8B, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; Linda Moscarella to Ms., 25 September 1976, Folder 243, Carton 7, Letters to Ms. 1970–1998, SL; Wohl, “The ERA: What the Hell Happened in New York?” 92. 103. Lear, “You’ll Probably Think I’m Stupid.” 104. Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 105. Ibid. 106. Emphasis theirs. Operation Wakeup, c/o M. Breitenbach, “What Rights and Benefits Will New York Women Lose Under the Women’s Lib ‘Equal Rights’ Amendment?” Pamphlet, undated, Personal Collection of Margaret Fitton.

Chapter 5. Ellen McCormack for President 1. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011; Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 2. Emphasis mine. “Women of America . . . ,” Pamphlet, Undated, ERA Opposition Arguments US and NYS incl. Schlafly Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 3. Ibid. 4. Bob Mauro, “Education or Politics? Why Not Both?” The Wanderer, 16 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 5. Rosoff, “Is Support of Abortion Political Suicide?” 13–15; Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 205. 6. Jo Ann Price, “Presidential Hopeful McCormack No Feminist,” Catholic Standard, 8 April 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 7. Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 10 August 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL; Dorothy

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254  Notes to Pages 132–138 Vredenburgh Bush, secretary, The Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, New York City, July 1976 (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1976), 316–28. 8. Ellen McCormack, “Voter Pamphlet Statement,” EMPBI, SHLL. 9. Jane Gilroy, A Shared Vision: The 1976 Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign (Denver, Colo.: Outskirts Press, 2010); Gorney, Articles of Faith, 109, 342; Kristen Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1; Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 204; “Drama of Life Before Birth,” Life 58, 17, 30 April 1965, 54–68; Albert Rosenfeld, “Pushed Out into a Hostile World,” ibid., 69–72a; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011. 10. Jane Sherron De Hart, “Gender on the Right: Meanings Behind the Existential Scream,” Gender and History 3, 3 (Autumn 1991): 253–56; Stern, interview by author, 16 February 2008. 11. Spitzer, The Right to Life Movement and Third Party Politics, 83–84. 12. De Hart, “Gender on the Right,” 261. 13. Ellen McCormack, “March for Life” (speech given at the March for Life Rally, New York, 11 July 1976), EMPBIII, SHLL. 14. Gilroy, “The Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign: Changing the Culture Through Politics and the Media,” 3, 10. 15. William Saletan, Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism. 16. Rosoff, “Is Support of Abortion Political Suicide?” 13–15; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 17. Emphasis hers. Jane Gilroy, “Introduction of Ellen McCormack” (speech given at the March for Life Rally, Washington, D.C., 22 January 1976), EMPBII, SHLL. 18. PLAC to Pro-​­Life Individuals and Groups, undated, EMPBIII, SHLL; Maurice Carroll, “Javits Wins a 4th Term, Defeating Ramsey Clark,” New York Times, 6 November 1974, 1; Les Brown, “Anti-​­Abortion Spot Seen as Editorial,” New York Times, 9 November 1974, 63; Emily Langer, “John ‘Jack’ Willke, a Father of Anti-​­Abortion Movement, Dies at 89,” Washington Post, 23 February 2015; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 19. PLAC, “Why Must Right to Life Commercials Be Taken in a Political Context?” Memorandum, 28 July 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Bob Mauro, “Education or Politics? Why Not Both?” The Wanderer, 16 October 1975. 20. PLAC Colorado Coordinators to Friends of Life, Undated, EMPBIII, SHLL. 21. Jane Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions,” email message to author, 17 January 2008. 22. Price, “Presidential Hopeful McCormack No Feminist.” 23. Spitzer, The Right to Life Movement, 89; Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue, 4–6, 9. 24. Stricherz, Why the Democrats Are Blue, 163–66; Rymph, Republican Women, 189–204. 25. “Wanted: Your Support in a Right to Life Presidential Campaign,” Our Sunday Visitor, 23 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 26. James R. Dickenson, “Politics Today: A Joker That Could Make or Break Game,” Washington Star, 5 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 27. Ellen McCormack, “Letter to the Editor,” The Pilot, 5 December 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 28. Price, “Presidential Hopeful McCormack No Feminist.” 29. Nick Thimmesch, “Funding the Candidate from Merrick,” Newsday, 24 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; Jane Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions,” email message to author, 30 October 2007. 30. Gilroy, “Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign,” 2–3; “Anti-​­Abortion Candidate

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Notes to Pages 138–143  255 Nears Matching Fund Goal,” Washington Star, 27 January 1976, A3, A6, Printed-​­Miscellaneous Folder, Box 638, Bella S. Abzug Papers. 31. Gilroy, “Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign,” 2. 32. Proposed Agreement Between PLAC and Nellie J. Gray, 12 July 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Agreement Between PLAC and Ellen McCormack, 26 August 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 33. Judy Kessler, “A Long Island Housewife Campaigns for the Presidency on the Antiabortion Issue,” People, 22 March 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 34. Agreement Between PLAC and Ellen McCormack, 26 August 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Ellen McCormack, “Right to Life” (speech given before the Right to Life Convention, 24 June 1976), EMPBIII, SHLL. 35. Ellen McCormack, “Voter Pamphlet Statement,” undated, EMPBI, SHLL; Price, “Presidential Hopeful McCormack No Feminist”; Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 194–97; Spitzer, The Right to Life Movement, 58, 83–100. 36. McCormack, “Voter Pamphlet Statement.” 37. “Woman Eyes White House,” Daily Press, 4 December 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Voter Pamphlet Statement, submitted by PLAC, undated, ibid.; Kessler, “A Long Island Housewife Campaigns for the Presidency”; Price, “Presidential Hopeful McCormack No Feminist.” 38. Anthony Corrado, Daniel R. Ortiz, Thomas E. Mann, and Trevor Potter, eds., The New Campaign Finance Sourcebook (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 12–27. 39. “Ad Hoc Caucus for PLAC,” Brookings Daily Register, 1 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 40. PLAC to All Those Collecting Funds for the Ellen McCormack Campaign, 8 September 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 41. Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 42. PLAC to All Those Collecting Funds. 43. Ibid.; “Mrs. McCormack Endorsed for President,” The Wanderer, 2 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; “Pro-​­Life Advocate Enters Race for President,” National Catholic News Service, 11 December 1975, ibid.; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 44. R. W. Apple, Jr., “Complex Rules on Picking Delegates Alter Shape of Democrats’ ’76 Nomination Drive,” New York Times, 21 January 1975, 17. 45. The 1976 Democratic primary contenders included Gov. Jimmy Carter (Ga.), Rep. Morris Udall (Ariz.), Sen. Frank Church (Idaho), Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.), Gov. Jerry Brown (Calif.), Gov. George Wallace (Ala.), Sen. Hubert Humphrey (Minn.), Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Sen. Birch Bayh (Ind.), and Ellen McCormack. Udall was Carter’s closest competitor, often placing second. “The Campaign and Election of 1976,” American President: An Online Reference Resource, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, http://millercenter .org; Eugene McMahon to Fran Watson, 21 January 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Apple, “Complex Rules on Picking Delegates.” 46. “Woman Heats Up Presidential Race,” Boston UPI, 16 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Schenck Travel Agency to Jane Gilroy, 12 November 1975. 47. “Woman Heats Up Presidential Race.” 48. “Merrick Grandmother Will Run for President,” New York News, 16 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; “Merrick Has Woman Candidate for President,” Merrick Life, 20 November 1975. 49. “Anti-​­Abortion Candidate for President,” New York Times, 30 November 1975, 126. 50. Jane Gilroy to Pressclips, Inc., 18 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 29 November 1975.

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256  Notes to Pages 143–148 51. Quotation from Joseph P. Wall to Fran Watson, 22 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; “A Bonnet in the Ring,” Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 16 November 1975, 1. 52. Nick Thimmesch, “Funding the Candidate from Merrick,” Newsday, 24 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 53. See, for example, Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. 54. Fran Watson to Walter Cronkite, 3 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Jo Freeman, We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). 55. Watson to Cronkite, 3 November 1975. 56. “Yes, CBS, There Really Is a Woman Candidate,” National Right to Life News, December 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 57. Morton Dean, “1976 Presidential Race,” CBS Evening News, 8 December 1975, transcript, EMPBI, SHLL. 58. Eugene McMahon to Paul Guzzi, 15 December 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; “Putting a Non-​ ­Candidate on the Primary Ballot,” Boston Phoenix, 30 December 1975, ibid. 59. “Putting a Non-​­Candidate on the Primary Ballot”; “ ‘Right to Lifer’ on Ballot,” Patriot Ledger, 2 January 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 60. “Right-​­to-​­Life Candidate on State Ballot,” Daily Item, 5 January 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 61. The nineteen states where McCormack’s name appeared on statewide Democratic primary ballots were N.H., Mass., Vt., Fla., Wis., Pa., Ind., Ga., Neb., Conn., Md., Mich., Ore., Ky., Tenn., R.I., S.Dak., Calif., and N.J. She was on the ballot in one district in N.Y. (the fourth congressional district, in which she and many PLAC officers lived) and in eleven districts in Ohio. Eugene J. McMahon to Bruce A. Smathers, 22 December 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Eugene J. McMahon to Allen Beerman, 30 December 1975, ibid.; PLAC, “Presidential Candidate Makes Pro-​­Life TV Commercials,” Press Release, 5 September 1975, Pro-​­Life Action Committee (Ellen McCormack) Folder, Carton 4, NARAL Records, SL. 62. Dan Hertzberg, “LIer Close to U.S. Funding for the Abortion Issue,” Newsday, 29 January 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 63. Ellen McCormack, “Virginia Speech,” 1 February 1976, transcript, EMPBII, SHLL. 64. “Anti-​­Abort Candidate Gets OK,” New York Daily News, 20 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 65. “The Right to Life Candidate,” Newsweek, 9 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; “Anti-​­Abort Candidate Gets OK,” New York Daily News, 20 February 1976; FEC Chairman and Vice Chairman to the Secretary of the Treasury, 25 February 1976, ibid. 66. “Federal Agents Audit Merrick Presidential Candidate’s Fund-​­Drive,” Merrick Life, 12 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 67. Spitzer, The Right to Life Movement, 30–32, 40–44, 57–60. 68. U.S. Treasury to PLAC, Photocopies of Federal Matching Funds Checks ($100,000.00 check dated 25 February 1976, $34,738.53 check dated 12 March 1976), EMPBII, SHLL; “McCormack in Majors,” Newsday, 26 February 1976, ibid.; “White House Hunting: Does Secret Service Make Ellen Nervous?” New York Daily News, 16 March 1976, ibid.; Eileen Shanahan, “Foe of Abortion Qualifies for U.S. Aid,” New York Times, 26 February 1976, 21. 69. Charles S. Liptone, M.D., “Degree of Cruelty,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 2 April 1976; Betsey Mikita, “Public Funding: The Only Way,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 April 1976. 70. “Antiabortion Blitz Planned with Campaign Funds,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 29 January 1976, EMPBII, SHLL.

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Notes to Pages 149–154  257 71. Maura Rossi, “The Cause, Yes; Tactics, No,” Beacon, 13 May 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL. 72. Ellen McCormack, “Statement on NARAL Charges,” Press Release, 23 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; “NOW Seeks IRS Probe of Church’s Political Funds,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 29 January 1976, ibid.; “ ‘Pro-​­Life’ Candidate Sure She’ll Get Funds,” Washington Star, 18 February 1976, ibid.; NARAL, Press Release, 17 February 1976, Abortion Organizations NARAL Folder, Box 605, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia; Gilroy, “Ellen McCormack Presidential Campaign,” 13–14. 73. McCormack, “Statement on NARAL Charges.” 74. “Agenda Report: Documentation for General Meeting, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Action Items,” Memorandum, undated 1975, 5–7, 17–20 November 1975, Washington, D.C., Catholic Church Folder, Box 602, Bella S. Abzug Papers; “Catholic Bishops Launch New Anti-C ​­ hoice Campaign,” Options 2, 11, December 1975, Abortion Organizations General WEAL Folder, Box 605, ibid.; “Family Life Bureau Backs Abortion-​­Related Bills,” The Tablet 68, 11, 3 April 1975, 11, Brooklyn Diocese (BD); Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 75. Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions,” 17 January 2008, email. 76. Price, “McCormack No Feminist.” 77. “Wanted: Your Support in a Right to Life Presidential Campaign,” Our Sunday Visitor, 23 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 78. Ibid.; “Anti-​­Abortion Candidate for President,” New York Times, 30 November 1975, 126; “Abortion Campaigners,” Village Voice, 2 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions”; Gorney, Articles of Faith, 109. 79. “Mrs. McCormack Is Cut from More FEC Funding,” Long Island Press, 28 May 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL; Marcy Jankovich to Democrats, 8 June 1976, ibid.; Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 10 August 1976, ibid.; Ellen McCormack, “Right to Life” (speech given before the Right to Life Convention, 24 June 1976), ibid. 80. “The Next President of the United States?” Harmonizer, 16 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 81. Mary R. Hunt to Ellen McCormack, 29 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; “Candidacy Is Announced,” Tribune, 6 November 1975, ibid.; “Right to Life Announces McCormack’s Candidacy,” Harmonizer, 9 November 1975; Ellen McCormack to Mary Hunt, 18 November 1975, ibid.; Ellen McCormack, “March for Life,” Press Release, 22 January 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; “Rally Demands Ban on Abortion,” New York Times, 23 January 1976, 20; Vincent Lavery and Roberta Genini to Friends of Pro-​­Life in Fresno, Calif., 7 May 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL; Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions.” 82. Colorado PLAC Coordinators to Supporters, 29 May 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL; “Pro-​­Life Action Committee Sponsoring Ellen McCormack, Portland, OR Commercial Schedule,” Memorandum, 8 May 1976, ibid.; Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 29 November 1975, ibid; Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 3 April 1976, ibid; Fran Watson to Pro-​­Life Contacts, 11 April 1976, ibid.; Eugene J. McMahon to Jane Gilroy, 13 April 1976, ibid. 83. Colorado PLAC Coordinators to Supporters, 29 May 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL. 84. Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions”; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007. 85. “ ‘Pro Life’ Campaigner Stages a Horror Show,” Detroit Free Press, 29 April 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 86. Willke to Watson, 12 November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 87. “ ‘Pro Life’ Campaigner Stages a Horror Show.” 88. “Very Important,” Rhode Island Coalition for Abortion Rights Newsletter, 15 May 1976,

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258  Notes to Pages 154–158 EMPBIII, SHLL; Westchester Coalition for Legal Abortion, flyer, May 1975, 2, NYS-​­NARAL Sample Book Folder, Box 1, Frances Nathan Papers, NYPL. 89. “Ellen McCormack’s Campaign to Bring Out Pro-​­Life Issues,” National Right to Life News, November 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; PLAC to Friends of the Right to Life, 2 January 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; Leslie Maitland, “Byrne and Carey Ask Passage of Equal Rights Amendments,” New York Times, 27 August 1975, 37; Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions.” 90. “Mrs. McCormack Endorsed for President,” The Wanderer, 2 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL. 91. “Mrs. McCormack Says . . . ,” New York Times, 19 February 1976; “McCormack’s Stand on Issues Other than Abortion,” Draft Memorandum, 31 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; “Merrick Grandmother Will Run for President,” New York News, 16 November 1975. 92. “Mrs. McCormack Says. . . .” 93. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Vintage, 1991), 256; Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism; Gilroy, “Response to S. Taranto’s Questions.” 94. Gilroy, A Shared Vision, 204. 95. “Abortion Campaigners”; Spitzer, The Right to Life Movement, 55. 96. “McCormack’s Stand on Issues Other Than Abortion,” Draft Memorandum, 31 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; “The Right to Life Candidate,” Newsweek, 9 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; Kessler, “A Long Island Housewife Campaigns for the Presidency.” 97. Ellen McCormack, “March for Life” (speech given at the March for Life Rally, New York, 11 July 1976; Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Smits, Nassau: Suburbia, U.S.A., 212. 98. Gerald M. Costello, “Ellen McCormack: Still Fighting,” NC News Service, 21 June 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL. 99. Ibid. 100. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 1–2; Costello, “Ellen McCormack: Still Fighting”; Rieder, Canarsie. 101. “Abortion in the Campaign: Methodist Surgeon Leads the Opposition,” New York Times, 1 March 1976. 102. “Abortion in the Campaign: Methodist Surgeon Leads the Opposition,” New York Times, 1 March 1976; PLAC, Flyer, 6 April 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; The Black Power movement posited that black population growth would strengthen black political power. Accordingly, abortion, birth control, and forced sterilization were positioned as attempts by the white power establishment to diminish black political power. Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right. 103. “King Carter was formally crowned . . . ,” Lifeletter, no. 11, 21 July 1976, 1, HLF. 104. “Abortion Foe Has Solid Core of Support,” New York Times, 2 March 1976. 105. Westchester Coalition for Legal Abortion, Flyer, May 1975, 2, NYS-​­NARAL Sample Book Folder, Box 1, Frances Nathan Papers, NYPL. 106. Marcy Jankovich to Democrats, 8 June 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL; Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 10 August 1976, ibid. 107. Ellen McCormack, “Right to Life” (speech given before the Right to Life Convention, 24 June 1976), EMPBIII, SHLL. 108. Walter Cronkite, “1976 Presidential Race,” CBS Evening News, 30 January 1976, transcript, EMPBII, SHLL.

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Notes to Pages 159–163  259 109. Jim Castelli, “Shriver Argues for Alternatives in Life Concerns,” The Pilot, 17 October 1975, EMPBI, SHLL; Paul O’Hara, “The Presidential Candidates and Abortion,” West Nebraska Register, 13 November 1975, ibid.; “Abortion Stands May Be Crucial for Ford, Reagan,” Washington Star, 4 February 1976, A6; Max H. Seigel, “U.S. Court Overturns Curb on Medicaid Abortions,” New York Times, 23 October 1976, 1; Julian E. Zelizer, The American Congress: The Building of Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 709–10. 110. “Abortion Haunts Capital Campaigns,” National Observer, 14 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL. 111. Emphasis theirs. “Ford’s Flop . . . ​Why McCormack Has Them Worried,” Lifeletter, no. 3, 19 February 1976, 1, HLF. 112. Myra McPherson, “Sisters vs. Sisters,” Washington Post, 13 July 1972, A-​­1, A-​­20; “Dem. Abortion Stance Work of Jimmy Carter,” National Catholic Register, 27 June 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL; DNC and RNC party platforms are available at “The American Presidency Project,” University of California, Santa Barbara: www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 113. “ ‘Pro Life’ Candidate Charges Democratic Convention Shutout,” Religious News Service, 21 June 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL. 114. Lifeletter, no. 11, 21 July 1976, 1, HLF; Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 10 August 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL. 115. Ellen McCormack, “March for Life” (speech given at March for Life Rally, New York, 11 July 1976), EMPBIII, SHLL; “ ‘Pro Life’ Candidate Charges Democratic Convention Shutout,” Religious News Service, 21 June 1976, ibid.; Andrew J. Shea to Eugene J. McMahon, 28 June 1976, ibid.; “McCormack Man Talks of Surprise,” New York Post, 14 July 1976, ibid.; Peter Kihss, “10,000 Anti-​­Abortionists Attend a Protest Rally,” New York Times, 12 July 1976, 62. 116. Ellen McCormack, “March for Life” (speech given at the March for Life Rally, New York, 11 July 1976), EMPBIII, SHLL. 117. Peter Kihss, “10,000 Anti-​­Abortionists Attend a Protest Rally,” New York Times, 12 July 1976, 62; “Pro-​­life March . . . ,” New York State Right to Life Committee Newsletter, June 1976, 1, Albany State Library Archives, Albany, N.Y. 118. Bush, The Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, 303. 119. Ibid., 316–28. 120. Emphasis mine. Walter Cronkite, “The Democratic Convention,” WCBS/TV network programming, 14 July 1976, transcript, EMPBIII, SHLL. 121. Fran Watson to Friends of the Right to Life, 10 August 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL. 122. “100 Who Shaped A Century,” Newsday, 19 December 1999. 123. “Dem. Abortion Stance Work of Jimmy Carter,” National Catholic Register, 27 June 1976, EMPBIII, SHLL. 124. Zillah Eisenstein, “Antifeminism in the Politics and Election of 1980,” Feminist Studies 7, 2 (Summer 1981): 187–205; Donald T. Critchlow, “Mobilizing Women: The ‘Social’ Issues,” in The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies, ed. W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 293–94.

Chapter 6. Toward the GOP 1. Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011. 2. Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 3. National Organization for Women Mid-​­Suffolk Chapter, “Eagle Forum Presents,” NOW Hear This 2, 5, May 1976, 1, Folder 7, Box 26, NOW NYC, NYU.

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260  Notes to Pages 163–167 4. Graham, interview by author, 7 December 2007. 5. Phyllis Schlafly, “How to Cope with TV & Radio Bias,” Eagle Forum, June 1976, 2, Eagle Forum 1978–81 Folder, Box 7, Series 7, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​ S­ UNY; Graham, interview by author, 7 December 2007. 6. Phyllis Graham letter to author, 12 September 2008. 7. Operation Wakeup, “Statement by Annette Stern,” Press Release, 23 April 1975, 1–3, Operation Wakeup Anti-​­ERA 1975 Folder, Box 14, Series 7, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY. 8. Ibid.; Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right,” Feminist Studies 7, 2 (Summer 1981): 206–46. 9. White House Conference on Families, Summary of State Reports, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: White House Conference on Families, 1980), 129. 10. Anselmi, interview by author, 4 December 2007; Phyllis Graham, “Taxation,” 11 June 1977, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham; Graham, “In The Name of Education,” Part II, 19 September 197x [sic], ibid.; Petchesky, “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right,” 207; Marjorie J. Spruill, “Gender and America’s Right Turn,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the Seventies, ed. Bruce Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 72. 11. “A Women’s Bill of Rights 1976: Spend a Day in Albany,” Flyer, undated 1976, Folder 9, Box 16, NOW NYC, NYU; David Becker and Virginia Bessey, “Significant Women’s Issues Legislation Enacted Since 1970,” Family Policy Insights 1, 10 (8 September 1982): 1–12, Women’s Rights Legislative Folder, Box OA 10773, Dee Jepsen Files, RRPL; Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003), 61–65; Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse.com, 2000), 170–229. 12. Becker and Bessey, “Significant Women’s Issues Legislation.” 13. Bella Abzug to Ethel King, 30 June 1972, Correspondence 1972 Folder, Box 598, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia. 14. Toni Carabillo, “Who Really Cares About Housewives,” Memorandum, undated, Folder 17, Carton 29, NOW Collection, SL. 15. Ben A. Franklin, “A New President for NOW, Eleanor Cutri Smeal,” New York Times, 28 April 1977, 18, Folder 45, Box 149, Elizabeth Holtzman Papers, SL; Phyllis Schlafly, “NOW Elects a New President,” Eagle Forum, May 1977, 2, Eagle Forum 1978–81 Folder, Box 7, Series 7, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY. 16. Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011; Graham, interview by author, 13 June 2011. 17. Lois Uttley, “Area Meeting Sheds Light on Beliefs of ‘Pro-​­Family’ Forces,” Knickerbocker News Union Star, 21 November 1977, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; Diane Weathers, “An Interview with Phyllis Schlafly: Is Liberation Really Good for Women?” Family Circle, 18 September 1979, 26, 62, 64, 66, Folder 32, Carton 87, NOW Collection, SL. 18. Uttley, “Area Meeting Sheds Light on Beliefs of ‘Pro-​­Family’ Forces.” 19. Rudolph P. Blaum, E.R.A. in an ERA of ERROR (Forest Hills, N.Y.: John Paul Jones Enterprises, 1977), 57; Ginny Lavan and Jan Millet, Operation Wakeup Newsletter, September 1978, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; “Mrs. Lavan Elected State Wake Up Head,” Schenectady Daily Gazette, undated 1978, ibid.; “By-​­Laws of the New York State Pro-​­Family Federation, Inc.,” undated 1979, 1, ibid.

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Notes to Pages 167–171  261 20. Stern, interview with Phyllis Graham, Part 2, undated 1976, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham. 21. Tery Zimmerman, “NOW Task Force on Childcare,” Memorandum, November 1973, Folder 35, Carton 42, NOW Collection, SL. 22. “Why Feminists Want Childcare,” Memorandum, 3 July 1974, Folder 35, Carton 42, NOW Collection, SL; Chris Grubb, Eleanor Limmer, Evelyn McFaden, and NOW Childcare Committee, “A Syllabus on Day Care,” Booklet, undated, Folder 51, Carton 209, ibid.; Florence Dickler to Chapter Presidents, 31 July 1970, Folder 14, Box 10, NOW NYC, NYU. 23. National Organization for Women, “Statement Regarding the Creation of a National Network of Childcare Centers” (paper given at White House Conference on Children, Washington, D.C., 13–18 December 1970), Folder 14, Box 10, NOW NYC, NYU; Vicki Lathom to NOW Executive Committee, Board Members, and Florence Dickler, Memorandum, 12 April 1971, Folder 15, Box 10, ibid.; Miriam Kelber to Elinor Guggenheimer, 18 January 1972, Correspondence Outgoing NY Office 11/1971–1/1972 Folder, Box 41, Bella S. Abzug Papers. 24. Phyllis Schlafly, “Mondale Baby-​­Sitting Bill,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 10, 2, sec. 1, September 1976, 3, SL.; National Coalition for Children, “ACU Legislative Alert,” Flyer, 31 October 1975, Child & Fam. Services Act Folder, Box 4, Series 7, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY; Ed Zuckerman, “Child-​­Care Law Proponents Hit ‘Scare’ Campaign,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 15 November 1975, ibid.; “A Ranting Mail Campaign,” Washington Post, 19 February 1976, 18. 25. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Representative Bella Abzug of New York speaking about President Nixon’s Veto of the Child Development Act, S. 2007, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record, 117, pt. 196 (14 December 1971), Childcare Speeches, Statements, Testimony & Congressional Record Folder, Box 140, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia. 26. Ibid. 27. Dr. Rhoda L. Lorand, Ph.D., to Senator James Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly Report 9, 3, sec. 2, October 1975, 3, SL. 28. Rhoda L. Lorand, interview with Phyllis Graham, undated, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham. 29. Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (New York: Free Press, 2004), 41–42. 30. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Down With Sexist Upbringing,” New York, 20 December 1971, 110. 31. Ibid.; Ellen Willis, “To Be or Not to Be a Mother . . .” Ms., October 1974, 28, 34–36; Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Motherhood!” Ms., May 1973, 48. 32. “Lollipop Power Press,” Online Finding Aid, Lollipop Power Press Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 33. Craig Wilson, “Marlo Thomas: ‘Free to Be’ for You and Me, 35 Years Later,” USA Today, 6 October 2008. 34. Dr. Harold Voth, interview with Phyllis Graham, 25 June 197x, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham. 35. “By-​­Laws of the New York State Pro-​­Family Federation, Inc.,” Memorandum, Undated 1979, 1–2, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor. 36. Phyllis Graham, “In The Name of Education,” Part II, 19 September 197x, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham.

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262  Notes to Pages 171–176 37. Ibid.; Jo-​­Ann Abrigg, “In the Name of Education,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 10, 5, sec. 1, December 1976, 1–4, ibid. 38. “By-​­Laws of New York State Pro-​­Family Federation.” 39. Anne Conroy, interview with Phyllis Graham, 17 October 197x, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham; John Kifner, “Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther Who Became G.O.P. Conservative, Is Dead at 62,” New York Times, 2 May 1998, A1. 40. Conroy, interview with Graham, 17 October 197x; “Teaching Man to Children,” Time, 19 January 1970. 41. Mary Knoblauch, “Ringing in a New Decade for Women,” Chicago Tribune, 28 December 1975, WA1; Clare Crawford, “From Watergate to Womankind, Bill and Jill Ruckelshaus Fight for Their Ideas,” People, 12 April 1976, www.people.com; Bella Abzug to Members of the NYS Women’s Meeting—​­IWY Coordinating Committee, 12 May 1977, Women IWY New York Meeting Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Lois A. West, “The United Nations Women’s Conference and Feminist Politics,” in Gender Politics in Global Governance, ed. Mary K. Meyer and Elisabeth Prugal (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 179–80. 42. Ida Schmertz to Program Committee and Coordinating Committee, 18 February 1977, IWY New York 1.8 Folder, Box 1, Jean O’Leary Papers, #7321, Cornell; National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, “Recommendations Urged for Consideration by State IWY Meetings,” Memorandum, Undated 1977, First NYS Women’s Meeting 1977 Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 43. Ginny Lavan and Jan Millet, “Phyllis Schlafly Has Asked Me to Write . . . ,” Operation Wakeup Newsletter, September 1978, 2, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; “Bella Stirs Controversy in NT,” Tonawanda News, 29 March 1976, New York Folder 1, Box 102, ERAmerica Records, LOC; Anita Bryant Ministries to Friend, Undated, Right Wing Folder, Box 145, ibid.; “Anita Bryant,” Playboy, May 1978, 73–74, 250, Folder 2, Box 2, Series 8, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY. 44. Phyllis Schlafly, “The Commission on International Women’s Year or, Bella Abzug’s Boondoggle,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 9, 6, sec. 2, January 1976, 1–3, SL; Phyllis Schlafly to Eagle Forum Members, 31 March 1977, Folder 112, Box 150, Elizabeth Holtzman Papers, SL. 45. Phyllis Graham, “ERA and Gimmicks of Radical Women’s Liberation,” 17 July 1977, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham. 46. Mrs. Ann Freihofner to Senator Bernard Gordon, 25 July 1977, First NYS Women’s Meeting 1977 Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 47. Schlafly, “Bella Abzug’s Boondoggle,” 3; “Medicaid,” New York State Right to Life Committee Newsletter, July 1978, 1–2, NYSL; “Mrs. Lavan Slaps Stratton on ERA Extension Stand,” Schenectady Daily Gazette, 16 August 1978, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor. 48. Phyllis Graham, “ERA and Gimmicks of Radical Women’s Liberation,” 17 July 1977, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham; Schlafly, “Bella Abzug’s Boondoggle,” 3, SL; Phyllis Schlafly, “Lawsuit Filed Against IWY Commission,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 9, 10, sec. 2, May 1976, 3, ibid. 49. New York State Women’s Meeting, “Calling All Women,” Flyer, Undated 1977, IWY New York 1.8 Folder, Box 1, Jean O’Leary Papers, #7321, Cornell. 50. Phyllis Schlafly, “IWY Commission Gets $5 Million,” Eagle Forum, June 1976, 1, Eagle Forum 1978–81 Folder, Box 7, Series 7, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY. 51. Phyllis Graham, “ERA and Gimmicks of Radical Women’s Liberation,” 17 July 1977, EFP,

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Notes to Pages 176–179  263 Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham; New York State Women’s Meeting—​­IWY, Press Release, 19 July 1977, First NYS Women’s Meeting 1977 Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 52. Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, eds., Bella: An Oral History (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 196–200; “But the Biggest Bad News,” Lifeletter, no. 12, 10 August 1977, 2, HLF. 53. National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, “Recommendations Urged for Consideration by State IWY Meetings,” Memorandum, Undated 1977, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Ida Schmertz to Program Committee and Coordinating Committee, 18 February 1977, IWY New York 1.8 Folder, Box 1, Jean O’Leary Papers, #7321, Cornell; New York State Women’s Meeting, “Schedule of Events, 8–10 July 1977,” Memorandum, Undated, 1st NYS Women’s Mtg. Folder, Box 8, Martha Baker Papers, Columbia. 54. Audrey Kelly to Annette Stoller, 23 June 1977, First NYS Women’s Meeting 1977 Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files. 55. Phyllis Schlafly, “IWY: A Front for Radicals and Lesbians,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 11, no. 1, sec. 2, August 1977, 1, SL; “Estimated Attendance State and Territorial IWY Meetings,” Memorandum, September 1977, Folder 112, Box 150, Elizabeth Holtzman Papers, SL; Paula Bernstein, “10,000 Fems Add to the Shrill of It All,” New York Daily News, 10 July 1977, Folder 14, Box 1, Series 8, Tanya M. Melich Papers, UA-​­SUNY; Claire Middleton, interview by author. 56. Audrey Kelly to Annette Stoller, 23 June 1977, First NYS Women’s Meeting 1977 Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Evelyn Aquila to Senator Karen Burstein, 20 July 1977, ibid.; Senator Karen Burstein to Mary Burke Nicholas, 3 August 1977, ibid. 57. Jennifer Dunning, “Women at Albany Meeting Vote to Support Abortion,” New York Times, 11 July 1977, Folder 14, Box 1, Series 8, Tanya M. Melich Papers, UA-​­SUNY; Jennifer Dunning, “At State Women’s Conference, a New Constituency Speaks Up,” New York Times, 15 July 1977, ibid.; Lois Uttley, “Women’s Meeting Votes ‘Progressive’ Resolutions,” Knickerbocker News Union Star, 11 July 1977, ibid.; Beth Fallon, “NY Feminists Score Sweep of 93 Tex. Convention Seats,” New York Daily News, 26 July 1977, ibid.; Nan Robertson, “NY Delegation to Women’s Conference Is Decidedly Feminist,” New York Times, 26 July 1977. 58. “The New York State International Womens [sic] Committee,” New York State Right to Life Committee Newsletter, August/September 1977, 3, NYSL; Kathryn Clarenbach to Linda Colvard Dorian, 9 July 1977, 1–2, Folder 112, Box 150, Elizabeth Holtzman Papers, SL; IWY Citizens’ Review Committee of New York State, Memorandum, 8–10 July 1977, First NYS Women’s Meeting 1977 Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Phyllis B. Hyrosa, Memorandum, undated 1977, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor. 59. Levine and Thom, Bella: An Oral History, 199–200, 200. 60. Jennifer Dunning, “Women at Albany Meeting Vote to Support Abortion,” New York Times, 11 July 1977, Folder 14, Box 1, Series 8, Tanya M. Melich Papers, UA-​­SUNY; David Behrens, “Feminists Stave Off a Platform Challenge,” Newsday, 11 July 1977, ibid; Paula Bernstein, “Abortion Was Main Issue at Women’s Meeting,” New York Daily News, 12 July 1977, Folder 7, ibid.; Beth Fallon, “NY Feminists Score Sweep of 93 Tex. Convention Seats,” New York Daily News, 26 July 1977, ibid.; U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina speaking on “Who Really Represents the Views of the Majority of American Women,” Public Law 94–303, 9 5th Cong., 1st sess. Congressional Record 123, pt. 19 (21 July 1977): 4221, 24227, 24230, Folder 123, Box 150, Elizabeth Holtzman Papers, SL. 61. Sally Boggan, “Women Activists,” New York Daily News, 9 August 1977, Folder 14, Box 1, Series 8, Tanya M. Melich Papers, UA-​­SUNY; Behrens, “Feminists Stave Off a Platform

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264  Notes to Pages 179–184 Challenge”; Janice Prindle, “Albany Women’s Meeting: Making the Movement Safe,” Village Voice, 8 August 1977, ibid. 62. Graham, “ERA and Gimmicks of Radical Women’s Liberation.” 63. Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 64. Stern, interview by author, 18 July 2011; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Fitton, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Gilroy, interview by author, 4 June 2011; Fred Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America’s Debate on Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)? 65. National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, “Recommendations Urged for Consideration by State IWY Meetings,” Memorandum, Undated 1977, First NYS Women’s Meeting 1977 Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA. 66. Graham, “ERA and Gimmicks of Radical Women’s Liberation.” 67. Ibid. 68. National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, Office of Public Information, Press Release, 21 September 1977, IWY 1.5 Folder, Box 1, Jean O’Leary Papers, #7321, Cornell; “Women March on Houston,” Time, 28 November 1977, http://www.time.com; De Hart, “Gender on the Right: Meanings Behind the Existential Scream,” 253. 69. Phyllis Schlafly, “Pro-​­Family Rally in Houston: Nov. 19,” Eagle Forum, October 1977, 1, SL; Phyllis Schlafly, “What Really Happened in Houston,” and “Pro-​­Family Rally Attracts 20,000,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 11, no. 5, sec. 2, December 1977, 2, SL; Susan Brickman, “Oppose IWY Resolutions—​­Women’s Group Hits Houston Parley,” Schenectady Daily Gazette, 21 November 1977, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; Schlafly, interview by author, 19 January 2007. 70. Phyllis Schlafly, “Pictures Taken at the Houston IWY Conference,” Phyllis Schlafly Report 11, no. 8, sec. 2, March 1978, 3–4, SL. 71. Uttley, “Area Meeting Sheds Light on Beliefs of ‘Pro-​­Family’ Forces.” 72. James P. Gannon, “1976: The Year of the Family,” Wall Street Journal, 15 September 1976, 26; Colman McCarthy, “The Government’s—​­And the Family’s—​­Obligation to the Family,” Washington Post, 29 January 1977, A15; Shirley Zimmerman, Family Policy: Constructed Solutions to Family Problems (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001), 15, 21. 73. White House Conference on Families, Listening to America’s Families, Action for the 80’s: A Report to the President, Congress, and Families of the Nation (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1980), 8–9, 130–31, 134–35, 153, 192. 74. Ibid., 9. 75. Roger Wilkins, “U.S. Family Conference Delayed Amid Disputes and Resignations,” New York Times, 19 June 1978, NJ13. 76. Ibid.; Family Service Association of America, “White House Conference on Families Postponed,” Highlights 4, 3 (May–June 1978): 5, Homemakers’ Equal Rights Association Folder, Box 115, ERAmerica Records, LOC; Garry Clifford, “After Some On-​­the-​­Job Training with Wife Betty, Jim Guy Tucker Heads Up the Conference on Families,” People, 7 January 1980, www .people.com. 77. Nancy Churnin, “A Conference on the Family Inspires a National Dispute,” Newsday, 24 June 1980, 9, Family Folder, Box 9, Series 7, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY. 78. Gmerek, interview by author, 25 January 2008.

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Notes to Pages 184–192  265 79. Dianne Greenberg, “Parley to Assess Changing L.I. Family,” New York Times, 13 January 1980, L11. 80. Nadine Brozan, “Feminists Gain Family Conference Posts,” New York Times, 28 January 1980, D10. 81. White House Conference on Families, Listening to America’s Families, 109. 82. Erin Kelly, “7,000 Conduct Own Families Conference,” Los Angeles Times, 13 July 1980, A3; White House Conference on Families, Listening to America’s Families, 109–10. 83. John Middleton, interview by author, 21 January 2008. 84. White House Conference on Families, Listening to America’s Families, 18–19, 45; White House Conference on Families, Summary of State Reports, vol. 1, 129; Nancy Churnin, “A Conference on the Family Inspires a National Dispute,” Newsday, 24 June 1980, 9, Family Folder, Box 9, Series 7, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY; Beverly Stephen, “Family: A Matter of Definition,” Los Angeles Times, 29 June 1980. 85. Phyllis Graham, “Liberation of Children,” 14 January 1979, EFP, transcript, 3, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham.

Chapter 7. Making a More Conservative Republican Party 1. Smith, On His Own Terms; Zimmerman, The Government and Politics of New York State, 59; Thomas P. Ronan, “Party Workers Don’t Live on Pay,” New York Times, 14 August 1977, 368; Frank Lynn, “Widening a Base,” New York Times, 29 August 1976, 345; Lynn, “Reagan Pays Visit to His Opponents from New York,” New York Times, 19 August 1976, 30. 2. Frank Lynn, “ ‘Hidden’ Ford Supporters Found in New York Slates,” New York Times, 8 July 1976, 1; Lynn, “Reagan Pays Visit to His Opponents from New York”; Malcolm Wilson, “The Man and Public Servant,” in Rockefeller in Retrospect: The Governor’s New York Legacy, ed. T. Norman Hurd and Gerald Benjamin (Albany, N.Y.: Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, 1984), 25; Gmerek, interview by author, 25 January 2008. 3. Stern, interview by author; Anselmi, interview by author, 7 June 2011; Critchlow, “Mobilizing Women,” 293–301. 4. Pranay Gupte, “State Suburbs Face Rise in School Tax,” New York Times, 10 July 1975, 1; Frank Lynn, “To Margiotta, City Isn’t Enemy,” New York Times, 22 January 1978, LI1. 5. Pranay Gupte, “State Suburbs Face Rise in School Tax,” New York Times, 10 July 1975, 1; “Ford to City: Drop Dead; Vows He’ll Veto Any Bail-​­Out,” New York Daily News, 30 October 1975, 1–3; “Raise Places Margiotta in a Class by Himself,” New York Times, 5 January 1978, B8; Frank Lynn, “Suburbs’ Power Mirrored in Tally of GOP Victors,” New York Times, 9 November 1980, WC1. 6. Phyllis Graham, “Taxation,” 11 June 1977, EFP, Personal Collection of Phyllis Graham; Stern, interview with Graham, Part I, Undated 1976, ibid.; Zaretsky, No Direction Home; Self, All in the Family (2012). 7. Maurice Carroll, “The Unlikely Beginning of the Right to Life Party,” New York Times, 25 November 1978, 25; John Omicinski, “The Fourth Line on the Ballot,” Empire (June–July 1979): 16–17, Campaign of 1980 (1) Folder, Box 5, Subseries 2, Series 1, Javits Collection, SB-​­SUNY. 8. Frank Lynn, “Right to Life Party Shows Its Strength: Qualifies for Future Ballot Line—​­May Get Liberals’ No. 4 Spot,” New York Times, 10 November 1978, A1, B2; Lynn, “Suburbs’ Power.” 9. Maurice Carroll, “Reagan Confident in New York Area: He Will Challenge Any Slates That Are Not Committed to Him,” New York Times, 13 November 1979, 1. 10. Lynn, “Suburbs’ Power Mirrored in Tally of GOP Victors”; Melich, The Republican War Against Women, 125, 144; Critchlow, “Mobilizing Women,” 294.

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266  Notes to Pages 193–200 11. Carroll, “The Unlikely Beginning of the Right to Life Party.” 12. Omicinski, “The Fourth Line on the Ballot.” 13. Ibid.; Mary Jane Tobin to Richard Bruno, 16 May 1978, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; Mary Jane Tobin for Governor Committee to Friends of Life, May 1978, ibid.; Lynn, “Right to Life Party Shows Its Strength.” 14. Tobin for Governor Committee to Friends of Life, May 1978; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 127–57; Dubow, Ourselves Unborn. 15. Tobin for Governor Committee to Friends of Life, May 1978, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno. 16. Ibid.; Richard Bruno to Father, 1 November 1978, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; “Family Planning and Abortion-​­Related Votes: 1970–1976,” Albany Memo 1, no. 5, July 1976, Family Planning N.Y. State Folder, Box 321, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia; Office of Senator Karen Burstein, “Burstein/Bellamy Cost Study Indicates City-​­ Funded Abortions ‘Fiscally Sound,’ ” Press Release, 31 December 1977, Abortion Medicaid Funding Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files, NYSA; Peter Slocum, “Assembly Nixes Abortion Funds Cut,” New York Daily News, 3 April 1981, Abortion Folder, Box 1, L0017-​­86 Stanley Fink Subject Files, NYSA. 17. Tobin for Governor Committee to Friends of Life, May 1978. 18. Ibid. 19. Pamela Warrick, “Senate Wavering on Rights Measure,” Newsday, 31 March 1975, ERA-​ N ­ Y Legislative Campaign Folder, Box 1, Burstein Files; Pat Corry and Carolyn Dlugozima, Letter to the Editor, Long Island Catholic, 23 October 1975, 7, QPL; Tobin for Governor Committee to Friends of Life. 20. “Anti-​­ERA Group Opens State Fight,” Albany Times Union, 12 November 1978, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor. 21. Lynn, “Right to Life Party Shows Its Strength.” 22. The New York Red Book . . . ​1974, 208–9; Bruno, interview by author, 8 April 2008. 23. Omicinski, “The Fourth Line on the Ballot”; Bruno, interview by author, 8 April 2008. 24. Bruno, interview by author, 8 April 2008. 25. Tobin for Governor Committee, “Positions of Mary Jane Tobin,” Memorandum, Undated 1978, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno. 26. Ibid. 27. Tobin for Governor Committee to Friends of Life. 28. Ibid.; “Present TV Coverage—​­Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester,” Memorandum, Undated 1978, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; North Country Pro Life Research Committee, “The Candidates—​­How They Stand on Abortion,” Flyer, Undated 1978, Personal Collection of Claire Middleton; Frank Lynn, “Fledgling Right to Life Party Unseats Liberals as No. 4,” New York Times, 16 December 1978, 27; Bruno, interview by author, 8 April 2008. 29. Carroll, “The Unlikely Beginning of the Right to Life Party”; Omicinski, “The Fourth Line on the Ballot.” 30. Lynn, “Right to Life Party Shows Its Strength”; “Election ’78,” New York State Right to Life Committee Newsletter, December 1978, 2, NYSL; Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight, 248. 31. Frank Lynn, “For Reagan and D’Amato, Island Is Likely Key to State,” New York Times, 2 November 1980, LI1; “New York State Gubernatorial Election 1978: Vote of Conservative and Right to Life Parties by County Alphabetically,” Memorandum, Undated, Lobbying Folder, Box 1, Frances Nathan Papers, NYPL; Omicinski, “The Fourth Line on the Ballot.” 32. Lynn, “Right to Life Party Shows Its Strength.”

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Notes to Pages 200–204  267 33. Glenn Fowler, “Anti-​­Abortion Party May Take Stands on Other Issues,” New York Times, 11 November 1978, Folder 25, Box 3, Series 2, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY; Mary Jane Tobin for Governor Committee to Friends of Life, 11 November 1978, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; “Challenge for Right,” Knickerbocker News Union Star, 4 October 1980, Right to Life Party Folder, Carton 8, NARAL Records, SL. 34. Frank Lynn, “Conservatives Seek Tie with Right to Life Party,” New York Times, 12 March 1979, B3. 35. Frank Lynn, “Right to Life Party’s Gain,” New York Times, 5 April 1979, B12; “The Dramatic Change Is the Direct Result . . . ,” Lifeletter, no. 6, 23 April 1979, 2, HLF. 36. Charlotte Evans, “Minor Party Tries to Prove Itself,” New York Times, 4 November 1979, WC14; Frank Lynn, “Anti-​­Abortion Party Gaining Strength,” New York Times, 13 November 1979, B2. 37. Evans, “Minor Party Tries to Prove Itself.” 38. Frank Lynn, “Right to Life Party Gains Leverage,” New York Times, 18 November 1979, LI1. 39. Due to changes made by the Republican National Committee, New York State had only 123 delegates to the Republican National Convention in 1980, as opposed to 135 in 1976. John B. Connolly to Bernard Kilbourn, 8 December 1979, telegram, RNC 1980 (1) Folder, Box 41, Subseries 2, Series 5, Javits Collection; Frank Lynn, “Reagan Speaks to 4,200 at Dinner of Nassau GOP,” New York Times, 16 May 1980, B5. 40. Lynn, “Reagan Speaks to 4,200 at Dinner of Nassau GOP”; Reagan Bush Campaign Committee, Press Release, 22 August 1980, Campaign Press Releases 1980 Folder, Box 48, Subseries 1, Series 5, Javits Collection. 41. Lynn, “Reagan Speaks to 4,200 at Dinner of Nassau GOP.” 42. Michael Kramer, “What President Reagan Would Mean for New York,” New York, 28 April 1980, Reagan 1980 Folder, Box 9, Series 8, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY; Frank Lynn, “Presidential and Senate Races Highlight New York Voting,” New York Times, 3 November 1980, B7; Maurice Carroll, “Generally Liberal States Prove the Folly of Generalizing,” New York Times, 9 November 1980, A7. 43. Dick Zander, “Extensive Reagan Effort Predicted in New York,” Newsday, 15 July 1980, Reagan 1980 Folder, Box 9, Series 8, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY; Jack Kemp, Statement (speech given at a news conference at the Capitol Hill Club, Washington, D.C., 12 March 1980), 1–2, Jack Kemp 1980 March 12 Folder, Box 77, Subseries 1, Series 1, Javits Collection; Maurice Carroll, “Reagan Confident in New York Area: He Will Challenge Any Slates That Are Not Committed to Him,” New York Times, 13 November 1979, 1. 44. Al D’Amato to Republican, July 1980, 1, Alphonse D’Amato 1980 Folder, Box 33, Subseries 2, Series 5, Javits Collection. 45. D’Amato for U.S. Senate, “Biography of Al D’Amato,” Memorandum, Undated 1980, Alphonse D’Amato 1980 Folder. 46. Ibid.; D’Amato for U.S. Senate, Press Release, 16 July 1980, 1–2, Campaign Press Releases 1980 Folder, Box 48, Subseries 1, Series 5, Alphonse D’Amato 1980 Folder; Al D’Amato to Fellow American, Undated 1980, 1–4, Correspondence Memos 1980 Folder, Box 15, Subseries 2, Series 1, ibid.; “D’Amato’s TV Spots Hit Javits,” Syracuse Herald Journal, 8 August 1980, Folder 24, Box 2, Series 2, Conservative Party of New York State Records. 47. Jacob K. Javits, “DRAFT: What Is a Liberal Republican,” Memorandum, December 1975, 1–3, What Is a Liberal Republican (DRAFT) Folder, Box 64, Subseries 1, Series 1, D’Amato 1980 Folder.

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268  Notes to Pages 206–209 48. Tully Plesser to Jacob Javits, “Background Summary for Debates,” Memorandum, 28 August 1980, 1–2, Campaign 1980 (2) Folder, Box 46, Subseries 1, Series 5, Javits Collection; Campaign Office of Jacob K. Javits, “Goldwater Endorses Javits in Commercial,” Press Release, 15 August 1980, Goldwater Endorses Javits 1980 August 15 Folder, Box 79, ibid. 49. NOW NYC Board of Directors to NOW NYC Members, 28 October 1980, Folder 12, Box 16, NOW NYC; Abortion Rights Brigade, “Demonstrate Against D’Amato: Enemy of Women,” Flyer, Undated 1980, Folder 7, Box 22, ibid.; Campaign Office of Jacob K. Javits, “Women’s Issues: The Javits Program for the Decade,” Memorandum, Undated 1980, 1–5, Campaign Materials 1980 (1) Folder, Box 5, Subseries 2, Series 1, Javits Collection. 50. “ ‘Dump Javits’ Campaign,” Syracuse Post Standard, 5 December 1979, Folder 23, Box 2, Series 2, Conservative Party of New York State Records, UA-​­SUNY. 51. Serphin Maltese to New York City Conservative Party Leaders, 15 August 1980, Folder 24, Box 2, Series 2, Conservative Party of New York State Records; J. Daniel Mahoney to Concerned Conservative, Undated 1980, 1–3, Alphonse D’Amato Folder 2, Box 7, Series 7; Marjorie Kaplan, “New Image for a New Territory,” Newsday, 12 January 1980, Election Campaign 1980 Folder, Box 8, Series 7, ibid.; J. Daniel Mahoney to Richard Bruno, 23 May 1980, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; Peter Slocum, “2 Parties Gave D’Amato a Right Hand Up,” New York Daily News, 10 September 1980, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno. 52. Al D’Amato to Richard Bruno, 27 May 1980, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; Frank Lynn, “This Time, Javits Has No Shortage of Rivals,” New York Times, 15 June 1980, Campaign 1980 R+P (5) Folder, Box 38, Subseries 1, Series 5, Jacob K. Javits Collection; Frank Lynn, “Abortion Dividing 2 Parties,” New York Times, 12 July 1981, Right to Life Party Folder, Carton 8, NARAL Records, SL. 53. George Borrelli, “Buffalo to Be Site for RTLP Session,” Buffalo News, 6 March 1980, U.S. Senate 1980 Folder, Box 12, Series 8, Conservative Party of New York State Records. 54. Peter Slocum, “2 Parties Gave D’Amato a Right Hand Up,” New York Daily News, 10 September 1980, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno. 55. Carroll, “Conservatives Give Reagan Line on the New York Ballot,” New York Times, 16 September 1980, Folder 24, Box 2, Series 2, Conservative Party of New York State Records. 56. Frank Lynn, “Anti-​­Abortion Groups Split on Reagan’s Candidacy,” New York Times, 22 June 1980, 28. 57. “About the Only Sour Note . . .” Lifeletter, no. 4, 10 March 1980, 3, HLF; “N.Y.S. Right to Life PAC,” New York State Right to Life Committee Newsletter, Summer 1980, 3, NYSL; Frank Lynn, “Right to Life’s Political Dilemma,” New York Times, 20 July 1980, Right to Life Party Folder, Carton 8, NARAL Records, SL. 58. Lynn, “Anti-​­Abortion Groups Split on Reagan’s Candidacy”; Lynn, “Right to Life’s Political Dilemma”; Ellen McCormack to Right to Life Party State Committee, 29 July 1980, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; Bruno, interview by author, 8 April 2008. 59. Melich, The Republican War Against Women, 124–25, 144, 160–61. 60. Emphasis mine. Frank Lynn, “Javits Deplores G.O.P. Policies; Foe Backs Them,” New York Times, 15 July 1980, B9. 61. Helen Milliken, “Family of Americans for ERA” (statement given at the Republican National Convention, Detroit, Mich., 13 July 1980), 1–3, Republican Convention Folder, Box 28, ERAmerica Records, LOC; Critchlow, “Mobilizing Women,” 301; Melich, The Republican War Against Women, 148. 62. Democratic National Committee, “1980 Democratic Platform Issues of Special Interest

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Notes to Pages 209–215  269 to Women,” Memorandum, Undated 1980, 1–6, ERA Platform DNC 1980 Folder, Box 16, ERAmerica Records, LOC; NOW, “Resolution Supporting President Carter,” Memorandum, 5 October 1980, Folder 12, Box 16, NOW NYC. 63. Frank Lynn, “D’Amato Beats Javits in GOP Race; Rep. Holtzman Democratic Victor; Buckley Triumphs in Connecticut,” New York Times, 10 September 1980, 1; Frank Lynn, “D’Amato Victory Increases Stature of Island in GOP,” New York Times, 14 September 1980, LI1, Folder 24, Box 2, Series 2, Conservative Party of New York State Records. 64. Tom Buckley, “After Javits the GOP Turns Right with D’Amato,” New York Times, 19 October 1980, SM10. 65. Ibid. 66. Eleanor Smeal to Friend, Undated 1980, 1–4, Campaign 1980 R+P (3) Folder, Box 37, Subseries 1, Series 5, Javits Collection; Katherine Seelye, “Is Al D’Amato Hiding Behind Mom’s Skirts,” Journal News, 23 October 1980, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; Richard Ottinger to Jack Javits, 26 October 1980, 1980 Campaign Folder, Box 47, Subseries 2, Series 1, Javits Collection; The Liberal Party, “The New York Senatorial Race,” Press Release, 2 November 1980, 1–2, Press Releases 1980 Folder, Box 48, Subseries 1, Series 5, ibid. 67. Michael Kramer, “The Senate Race: A Win for Anderson,” New York, 22 September 1980, 12, Campaign 1980 (1) Folder, Box 38, Subseries 1, Series 5, Javits Collection; Frank Lynn, “Javits Is Far Behind,” New York Times, 5 November 1980, A1; Lynn, “Suburbs’ Power”; “1980 United States Presidential Election Results,” Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, http://www .uselectionatlas.org. 68. Phyllis Schlafly, “Pro-​­Family Movement Elects Reagan,” Eagle Forum, November 1980, 1, Family Services Association of America Folder, Box 115, ERAmerica Records, LOC; “What Happened?!” Lifeletter, no. 16, 5 November 1980, 1–2, HLF; Eleanor Smeal, “Statement on 1980 Election Results,” Press Release, 5 November, 1980, 1–2, Elections 1980-​­PR Fact Sheets Folder, Carton 8, NARAL Records, SL; NOW, “How Women Candidates Fared at the Polls,” Press Release, Undated 1980, Folder 15, Carton 100, NOW Collection, SL; NOW, “Right Wing Victory Claims Distorted,” Press Release, Undated 1980, 1–2, ibid. 69. Frank Lynn, “New York GOP Sees Power Shift Within the Party,” New York Times, 6 November 1980, A1; Frank Lynn, “Nassau Leads as Suburbs Gain Power in State,” New York Times, 21 December 1980, A1; Sandra Lebever, Arthur Ackerson, and Rockland County Commissioners of Elections, “Official Canvass, General Election,” Press Release, 4 November 1980, Personal Collection of Richard Bruno; Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, 175–84. 70. “Ethnic/Blue-​­Collar Strategy Outline,” Memorandum, 10 December 1982, 1–2, Catholic Strategy (1) Folder, Box OA 12450, Morton Blackwell Files, RRPL; Elizabeth Dole to Edwin Meese, James A. Baker, Michael Deaver, “Ethnic/Catholic Strategy,” Memorandum, Undated, 1–6, ibid.; Adam Welinsky to Jimmy Carter, “The Northern Campaign and the Catholic Problem,” Memorandum, Undated 1976, 1–3, ibid. 71. Lynn, “Suburbs’ Power.” 72. ERAmerica, “Women’s Concerns Cause Change in Voting Pattern,” Press Release, 26 August 1981, 1980 Women’s Voting Patterns Statistics Folder, Box 29, ERAmerica Records, LOC; Eisenstein, “Antifeminism in the Politics and Election of 1980”; Critchlow, “Mobilizing Women,” 294.

Epilogue. The Politics of Women, Gender, and Family After 1980 1. “Abortion Campaigners,” Village Voice, 2 February 1976, EMPBII, SHLL; Spitzer, The Right to Life Movement, 55; Self, All in the Family, 358–95.

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270  Notes to Pages 216–223 2. Jo Freeman, “Feminism vs. Family Values Women at the 1992 Democratic and Republican Conventions,” Off Our Backs (January 1993): 2–3, 10–17, http://www.jofreeman.com. 3. Geraldine Ferraro (speech most likely given at a fundraiser hosted by senator Wyche Fowler of Georgia at the Democratic Club, Washington, D.C., 22 June 1981), Speeches May 30–June 25, 1981 Folder, Box 46, Geraldine A. Ferraro Papers, MMC; “Congresswoman Bella Abzug’s Record: Women’s Rights,” Flyer, 20 July 1976, 1–4, Abzug Notes and Memoranda Folder, Box 599, Bella S. Abzug Papers, Columbia; Suzi Weaver to Joe Crangle and Pat Moynihan, “What’s to Be Talked About During the Last Ten Days of the Campaign,” Memorandum, 2 September 1976, 1–2, Folder 6, Daniel P. Moynihan Papers, LOC; Daniel P. Moynihan, “In Defense of the Family,” Press Release, 1 September 1976, p. 5, Folder 10, Container I-​­493, ibid.; Saletan, Bearing Right. 4. Ferraro, speech. 5. Ibid. 6. Eisenstein, “Antifeminism in the Politics and Election of 1980”; Donald T. Critchlow, “Mobilizing Women: The ‘Social’ Issues,” in The Reagan Presidency, ed. Brownlee and Graham, 294; Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960 (New York: Knopf, 1989), 171–80. 7. William F. Buckley, Jr., “Reagan: A Relaxing View,” National Review (28 November 1967): 1348; William C. Berman, America’s Right Turn from Nixon to Clinton, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Saletan, Bearing Right. 8. Katherine Turk, “Out of the Revolution, into the Mainstream: Employment Activism in the NOW Sears Campaign and the Growing Pains of Liberal Feminism,” Journal of American History 97, 2 (September 2010): 399–423; “ ‘Women’s Truth Squad on Reagan’ Pickets Republican Fundraiser,” Memorandum, 8 June 1984, Folder 15, Box 13, NOW NYC. 9. Margaret Carlson, “The Hillary Factor: Is She Helping or Hurting Her Husband?” Time, 14 September 1992, 30. 10. Patrick J. Buchanan, speech at the Republican National Convention, Houston, 17 August 1992, www.buchanan.org. 11. Carlson, “The Hillary Factor.” 12. Mary Douglas Vavrus, Postfeminist News: Political Women in Media Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 132–61; Andrew E. Scharlach and Blanche Grosswald, “The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993,” Social Science Review 71, 3 (September 1997): 335–59. 13. Vavrus, Postfeminist News, 132–61. 14. Ibid. 15. Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 375–93. 16. Gary Langer and Jon Cohen, “Voters and Values in the 2004 Election,” Public Opinion Quarterly 69, 5 (Special Issue 2005): 744–59; Jim Wallis, “The Message Thing,” New York Times, 4 August 2005, A19. 17. Collins, When Everything Changed, 375–93. 18. John Eligon and Michael Schwirtz, “Senate Candidate Provokes Ire with ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comment,” New York Times, 19 August 2012; Jeremy W. Peters, “Republicans Alter Script on Abortion, Seeking to Shift Debate,” New York Times, 15 July 2015. 19. Todd S. Purdum, “D’Amato Is Facing GOP Challenger,” New York Times, 8 July 1992, A1. 20. Ibid.; Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight, 320–33.

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Notes to Pages 224–226  271 21. George Borrelli, “GOP Candidates for Senate Bring Campaign Here, Stand Divided on Abortion Issue,” Buffalo Evening News, 11 July 1982, Folder 7, Container II-​­61, Daniel P. Moynihan Papers, LOC; Frank Lynn, “3 Meet for First Debate in G.O.P. Senate Race,” New York Times, 22 July 1982, Folder 3, ibid.; “Senate Nomination to GOP’s Sullivan,” Peekskill Star, 24 September,1982, Folder 5, ibid.; Maurice Carroll, “Moynihan Wins Overwhelming Victory,” New York Times, 3 November 1982, B5. 22. Lindsey Gruson, “D’Amato’s Persistence Shows His Party’s Shift,” New York Times, 1 March 1992, 26; Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight, 294–96. 23. Gruson, “D’Amato’s Persistence Shows His Party’s Shift.” 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.; Marlin, Fighting the Good Fight, 294–96. 26. Bruce N. Gyory, “The Crouching Future of New York State Politics—​­What the 2002 General Election Returns Reveal,” Memorandum, 13 December 2002, Personal Collection of Bruce N. Gyory, Political Consultant; Gyory, “Regionalism Resurfaces in the Primaries,” Memorandum, 22 September 2010, ibid.; Self, All in the Family, 424–25; “1980–2012 United States Presidential Election Results,” Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, http://www.uselectionatlas.org. 27. “By-​­Laws of the New York State Pro-​­Family Federation, Inc.,” Undated 1979, 1, Personal Collection of Virginia Lavan Taylor; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Taylor, interview by author, 3 March 2008; Bruno, interview by author, 8 April 2008. 28. Frank Lynn, “Politics; Right to Life Slate: All Long Island,” New York Times, 28 September 1986; Ellen McCormack, Cuomo v. O’Connor: Did a Catholic Politician Make an Anti-​­Catholic Appeal? (Commack, N.Y.: Dolores Press, 1985); Richard Pérez-​­Peña, “With Insufficient Votes, New York’s Liberal Party Loses Place on the Ballot,” New York Times, 6 November 2002, B13; Zimmerman, The Government and Politics of New York State, 64–65; Gilroy, interview by author, 27 October 2007; Bruno, interview by author, 8 April 2008.

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INDEX

Abortion Rights Brigade, 206 Abzug, Bella, 3, 51, 94, 123, 136, 166, 168–­69, 173–­74, 179, 216, 220 Ackerman, Bishop Richard, 150 African American(s), 29–­31, 33, 41, 48, 52, 60, 97, 149, 157 Ahern, Bishop Patrick, 85 Albany (New York), 9, 59–­60, 63–­64, 66–­67, 69–­70, 73–­74, 77–­80, 82–­83, 85–­86, 88, 90, 100–­102, 104, 106, 108, 115, 173, 175–­81, 195 Anderson, John, 207, 211, 213 Anselmi, Theresa (Terry), 11, 17–­19, 23, 26, 28, 33–­34, 46, 70–­73, 75–­76, 82–­83, 115, 165, 171, 190 Anticommunism(t), 9, 13, 161, 170, 212 Antisuffrage (antisuffragists), 12, 79 Aquila, Evelyn, 177, 184 Assembly (New York State), 66–­68, 76, 87, 96–­97, 101, 105, 194, 199, 200 Associated Press (AP), 143 Baird, Bill, 74, 86 Baltimore, Maryland (regional meeting, White House Conference on Families, 1980), 182–­83, 185 Barth, Miriam, 177 Bathrooms (co-­ed), 94, 111 Bayh, Birch, 110, 159 Beame, Abraham, 154, 190 Bellamy, Carol, 112 Bethpage Tribune, 171 Birth control, 4, 23, 39, 44–­45, 60, 67, 74, 132. See also Catholic Church

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Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School for Girls, 21, 43 Black Power, 157, 172 Blaum, Rudy, 104 Blumenthal, Al, 64–­65, 67, 75 Boggan, Sally, 179 Borel, Anne, 115, 117 Boston (Massachusetts), 31, 142–­43 Brademas, John, 168 Breadwinner (male), 4–­6, 95, 165, 180, 191, 195 Britt, Mary, 144 Bronx (New York City), 3, 17–­18, 26–­27, 29–­31, 33, 38, 184 Brooklyn (New York City), 3, 18, 20–­22, 26, 33, 38–­39, 44, 48–­50, 73, 110, 155–­56, 172, 177, 210, 223 Brooklyn Diocese, 39, 177 Bruno, Richard, 196–­98, 207 Bryant, Anita, 174 Buchanan, Patrick, 87, 219 Buckley, James, 90–­91, 134 Buckley, William F., 91 Buffalo (New York), 100, 119, 177, 204, 211 Buffalo News, 207 Bunker, Archie (All in the Family television show character), 217 Burstein, Karen, 130, 178 Bush, George H. W., 219 Bush, George W., 1, 221 Busing, 10, 30–­33, 83, 156–­57, 197 Byrn, Robert, 74–­75

274 Index Califano, Joseph, 182–­83 Carey, Hugh, 110, 154, 194, 197–­99 Carey, Vincent, 80, 84 Carter, Jimmy, 110, 142, 159–­60, 174, 182–­83, 203, 209, 211–­14, 217 Casey, William J. (Bill), 203–­4, 208 Caso, Ralph, 75 Catholic Alternatives, 184 Catholic Church, 4, 11, 13, 23–­24, 26, 37, 40, 42, 45, 48, 50–­51, 59, 60, 62, 68–­69, 76, 82, 84–­85, 97, 101, 122, 131–­32, 149–­51, 158–­59, 180, 224; and birth control, 4, 23, 39, 44, 60, 67, 132; and bishops, 10, 11, 39, 43, 45, 48, 67–­68, 74, 85, 150, 226; and Brooklyn Diocese, 39, 177; and cardinals, 48, 73, 84–­85, 87, 150, 226; and Catholic voting patterns, 6, 48, 53–­54, 60, 63–­64, 67–­68, 70, 73–­75, 79, 84, 87, 90, 129–­30, 134, 136, 142, 146, 150–­51, 159, 160–­61, 164, 177, 183, 207, 213, 216–­20, 224, 226–­27; and encyclicals, 3, 41–­42, 48, 197; and hospitals, 38–­39, 42, 74, 207; and Human Life Bureau, 77, 79, 84, 90; and leaders, 1, 2, 9, 11, 36–­37, 40–­42, 48, 50–­51, 60–­61, 67, 75, 79, 84–­85, 92, 109, 129, 150–­51, 160, 162, 217; and New York Archdiocese, 38, 84, 177; and nuns, 21, 36, 38–­39, 42–­44, 46–­47, 67, 83, 85, 207; and parish priests, 2, 10, 38, 40–­43, 45–­47, 59–­60, 65, 69, 77, 79, 81, 83–­85, 90, 131, 137, 150–­51, 197; and parishes, 2–­3, 11, 18, 28, 35–­41, 43–­48, 51, 59–­60, 69–­70, 72–­73, 77–­79, 81, 84–­85, 92, 104, 129, 131, 139, 140–­42, 148, 150–­51, 180, 224; and parishioners, 1–­3, 6, 10–­11, 17–­18, 21–­23, 26, 28, 34–­39, 42–­43, 46–­48, 51, 55, 60, 62, 67–­68, 70, 77, 84–­85, 87, 92, 97, 103, 107, 109, 117, 123, 129, 131–­32, 134, 137, 139, 141–­42, 151, 156, 160, 183, 197–­98, 207, 216, 221, 226, 227; and parochial schools, 3, 17, 21, 28, 34, 36, 38–­39, 42–­44, 46, 48–­49, 67, 83, 156, 197, 213; and popes, 41–­42, 44–­45, 48, 51; and publications, 47, 67, 69, 92, 119, 141–­42, 151; and Rockville Centre Diocese, 39, 77; and tax-­exempt status, 11, 36, 76, 79, 151; and traditions,

19, 35, 40, 43, 45, 107; and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 10, 74, 150; and Vatican II, 11, 34–­37, 39–­48, 50, 54–­55, 59–­60, 63–­64, 67, 69, 84, 86, 103, 122, 129, 151, 224, 227 Catholics for Free Choice, 184 CBS Evening News, 135, 144, 151 Central Park (New York City), 85, 160 Champlain Valley Right to Life (New York), 70, 93 Chesterton, Gilbert, 133 Childcare, 2, 5, 13, 77, 88, 99, 109, 155, 164, 166, 168–­70, 173–­75, 177, 179, 181, 206, 209. See also daycare Chisholm, Shirley, 3, 136, 144, 155, 168 Citizens’ Review Committee (CRC), 176–­81 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 3 Cleaver, Eldridge, 172. See also Soul on Ice Clinton, Bill, 218–­19 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 219–­21 Commercials (televised anti-­abortion ads), 78, 134–­35, 138–­41, 143, 153–­54, 157, 194, 207 Committee for Cook-­Leichter, 66, 68 Communism(t), 9, 13, 24, 41, 170, 180, 212 Comstock, Anthony, 63 Conroy, Anne, 171–­72 Conservative Party, New York State, 7, 54, 91, 103, 135, 190, 194, 199–­201, 205–­7, 211, 223, 225 Constitution (New York State), 93–­94, 96, 99, 107, 113 Constitution (U.S.), 74, 93, 111, 175, 206 Cook, Constance (Connie), 63–­68, 74–­75, 83, 88–­89, 96 Cooke, Terence Cardinal, 73, 84–­85, 87, 150 Cook-­Leichter Bill, 66–­68. See also Abortion reform law (1970, New York State) Crawford, Edward, 83 Cronkite, Walter, 144, 146, 158–­60 Cuomo v. O’Connor (book), 226 Cuomo, Mario, 216, 220, 226 D’Amato, Alphonse (Al), 14, 191–­92, 202–­4, 206–­7, 209–­14, 223–­24 Davidson, Jacqui, 98

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Index 275 Daycare, 5, 94, 109, 132, 152, 163, 168, 170, 183–­85. See also Childcare Dean, Morton, 144 Death penalty, 83, 156 Declaration of Independence, 109, 160 Democratic Leadership Council, 218 Democratic National Committee, 1 Democratic National Convention (DNC), 73, 136, 142, 158–­60 Democratic Party, 3, 8, 37, 47–­48, 51, 60, 63, 68, 72, 125, 129–­30, 133–­36, 138, 155, 157, 159–­61, 164, 209, 215, 218, 227 DeSaram, Carol, 118 Dewey, John, 171 Dialogue group (anti-­abortion), 2, 11, 36, 47, 77–­78, 84, 150. See also Right to Life Party, New York State (RTLP) Dlugozima, Carolyn, 195 Doe v. Bolton (U.S. Supreme Court case), 63, 69, 74, 80, 89, 93, 131, 134, 158, 215 Donovan, James, 74–­75, 83 Donovan-­Crawford Bill, 83–­89 Dorney, Cay, 104, 183–­84 Downstate suburbs, 7, 60, 94, 103, 198–­99, 201, 204, 207–­8, 210–­12, 214, 224–­25. See also Long Island; Nassau County; Rockland County; Suffolk County; Westchester County Draft (U.S. military), 42, 87, 94, 108, 219 Dred Scott (U.S. Supreme Court case), 157 Driscoll, Reverend Paul, 46–­47, 77, 79, 84, 90 Duryea, Perry, 194, 198, 200 Eagle Forum, 163–­64. See also Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum Presents, 3, 45, 162–­64, 167, 169, 173, 176, 190–­91. See also Phyllis Graham Edgar, Jeanne, 179 Equal pay, 4, 51, 97, 116, 155, 173, 222 Equal Pay Act of 1963, 4, 51 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), federal, 10, 12, 17, 24, 45, 51, 93–­94, 96–­100, 107, 110–­12, 115–­17, 122, 131, 218, 155, 158, 165, 174, 179, 181, 183, 195, 197, 203, 206, 209–­10, 213–­14, 217–­18, 226 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), New York

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State, 3, 5, 26, 92–­125, 129–­31, 154, 161–­63, 165, 167, 174, 178, 181, 186, 190–­91, 195, 199, 214, 227 Equal Rights Amendment Day, 110 Esposito, John, 97 Euthanasia, 156, 197 Evangelical(s), 1, 10–­11, 70, 164, 218, 227 Evans, Rowland, 87 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), 219 Family values, 1–­3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 191, 209, 211–­12, 214–­19, 221–­22, 224, 225, 226–­27 Farmingdale (Nassau County, Long Island, New York), 22, 25, 33, 50, 54 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 135, 153, 194 Federal Election Commission (FEC), 140–­41, 144, 147–­50 175, 224 Federal Housing Authority (FHA), 4, 22–­23 Federal matching funds, 131, 138, 140–­41, 143, 146–­48, 152, 193 Feminine Mystique, The, 4, 19. See also Betty Friedan Ferraro, Geraldine, 216–­18, 220–­21 Fetus(es), 5, 11, 37, 45, 46, 50, 59–­62, 65, 70–­71 75, 79–­81, 85–­86, 90, 92, 131–­33, 137, 143–­44, 147–­48, 150–­55, 157, 160–­61, 192–­95, 197, 222 Fields, Sylvia, 65–­66, 78 Fitton, Margaret (Margie), 18, 20, 25–­26, 32, 37–­39, 46, 59–­64, 67–­70, 73, 75–­76, 82–­83 Fleming, Patsy, 183 Floral Park (Nassau County, Long Island), 195 Ford, Betty, 110, 154, 158, 181 Ford, Gerald (Jerry), 91, 110, 135, 140, 152, 158, 173, 189–­90, 192, 203, 213 Fordham University, 74, 184 Free to Be . . . ​You and Me, 170–­71 Freeport (Nassau County, Long Island), 49 Freihofner, Ann, 175 Friedan, Betty, 4, 19, 51, 63–­65, 67, 90, 94, 99, 113, 116, 178. See also The Feminine Mystique Froehlich, Harold, 134

276 Index Gallup (polling), 82, 161 Gender gap (Republicans, 1980), 213 GI Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act), 22–­23 Gilroy, Jane, 2, 6, 8, 12, 18, 23, 38, 43–­44, 46–­51, 53, 77, 80–­82, 134–­36, 138, 141, 150, 153 Ginsberg, Martin, 65 Giuliani, Rudy, 220, 223 Gmerek, Patricia (Pat), 122, 189, 190 Golden, Ed, 69–­70, 75, 83, 90 Goldwater, Barry, 202, 206, 208 Goodell, Charles, 91 Graham, Phyllis, 2, 18, 20–­25, 33, 38–­43, 45–­46, 50, 54, 129, 162–­65, 167–­76, 179–­81, 185–­86, 190–­91, 198, 210. See also Eagle Forum Presents Grassroots fundraising, 1, 19, 92, 95, 104, 118–­19, 138–­41, 144, 146, 148, 153, 181, 195–­96 Gray, Nellie, 153 Great Depression, 13, 18, 48, 53 Greer, Rosey, 170 Gregory, Dick, 157 Griswold v. Connecticut (U.S. Supreme Court case), 67 Gross, Abraham (Rabbi), 85 Happiness of Womanhood (HOW), 98, 101–­2. See also Wakeup (Operation Wakeup) Harlem (New York City), 30–­31 Harrison (Westchester County, N.Y.), 27, 32, 99, 104, 123 Head Start, 49–­50 Hempstead (Nassau County, Long Island), 74, 202, 210 Herman, Ceil, 107–­8, 113, 115–­16 Highway (expansion), 20, 23–­24, 26–­27, 52 Hober, Mary, 112 Hogan, Lawrence, 134 Holtzman, Elizabeth, 110, 172, 210–­13 Homosexual(ity), 110–­11, 164, 174, 179–­81, 183–­84, 219, 223 Hoover, Herbert, 52, 209 Hospital ordinances (abortion), 74

House of Representatives (U.S.), 90, 134, 199, 212 Housewife populism, 13, 61 Houston (Texas), 173–­74, 176–­79, 181–­82 Human life amendment (HLA), 10, 80, 90, 131, 133–­35, 137–­38, 143, 150–­52, 158–­59, 161, 193–­94, 197, 203, 207–­9, 213, 215 Human Life Coordinator/Bureau, 77, 79, 84, 90. See also Catholic Church Hyde Amendment, 75, 134, 159, 194, 208 Hyrosa, Phyllis, 179 Inalienable Rights Committee of America, 75, 78. See also Right to Life Party, New York State (RTLP) Indiana (Democratic presidential primary, 1976), 110, 143 Indiana Right to Life Convention, 153 Infant Jesus Catholic Parish, 39–­41, 45 Jackson, Henry (Scoop), 152 Jackson, Jesse, 157 Javits, Jacob, 14, 191–­92, 202–­10, 212–­14, 223–­24 Jefferson, Dr. Mildred, 157 Jews, 22, 26, 33, 64, 70, 85, 103, 150 Jim Crow (laws), 97, 150 John Birch Society, 119, 122 John Paul II, pope, 45 John XXIII, pope, 41, 44, 48 Johnson, Lyndon B. (LBJ), 3, 48–­49, 182 Keating, Barbara, 135, 137 Kellenberg, Bishop Walter, 39 Kelly, Audrey, 177–­78 Kemp, Jack, 204 Kennedy, Edward (Ted), 137, 146, 209, Kennedy, John F. (JFK), 48, 54, 93, 129, 130, 142 Kennedy, Robert, 73 Kerry, John, 1, 221 Keynes, John Maynard, 53 Kilbourn, Dr. Bernard, 189 Killilea, James, 155, 160 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 31 Kitchen t­ able activists (term), 9

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Index 277 Louis Harris (polling), 108, 158 Lynn, Frank, 201. See also New York Times

Kitchen ­table politics (term), 8 Knights of Columbus, 85, 119 Koblich, Ruth, 119 Koegler, Lillian, 102–­3, 178 Krupsak, Mary Ann, 68, 106, 109, 179 Lader, Larry, 86 Lavan, Virginia (Ginny) Taylor, 105, 113, 167 Lazio, Rick, 220 Leichter, Franz, 66 Lenihan, Betty, 163 Lent, Norman, 80 Leo XIII, pope, 41 LePage, Reverend Matthew, 40–­41, 45 Lesbians for Free Choice, 184 Levitt, William, 22 Levy, Eugene, 59–­60, 196 Levy, Norman, 88 Liberal Party, New York State, 199, 200, 206, 207, 210, 212, 223 Life magazine, 61, 81 Lollipop Power Press, 170 Long Beach (Nassau County, Long Island), 74 Long Island, 4, 18, 20, 32, 52, 74–­75, 80–­81, 89, 91, 131, 135, 148, 151, 156, 201–­2, 217; and abortion, 77–­79, 84; and D’Amato, 202–­4, 207, 210, 212, 225; and Catholicism, 11, 35, 39, 44, 46, 77, 79, 84, 90, 131, 216; and Dorney, 184; and Herman, 107, 113, 115; and Curé of Ars Catholic Parish, 44; and McCormack, 2, 139, 141, 143; and McMahon, 137; and Infant Jesus Catholic Parish, 40–­41; and Gilroy, 2, 46, 49, 51, 53; and Margiotta, 190; and Ginsberg, 65; and Tobin, 193, 195, 197, 199, 213; and Tracy, 176; and Levy, 88; and Graham, 22, 25, 45, 50, 54, 129, 163, 169, 171; and RTLP, 191–­92, 198; and Cusack, 66, 68, 78; and Boggan, 179; and State Park Commission and Expressway, 23; and WALK, 162; and Casey, 203; and Women of Honest Equality in National Women’s Groups, 99 Lorand, Dr. Rhoda L., 169–­70 Los Angeles, California (regional meeting, White House Conference on Families, 1980), 182

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MACOS (Man: A Case of Study), 172 Mahoney, J. Daniel, 206 Maltese, Serphin, 200 Manhattan (New York City), 8, 27, 31; and Abzug, 3, 51, 123; and Blumenthal, 64; and Democratic National Convention, 209; and Ferraro, 217; and Fitton, 26, 37, 59; and Graham, 21–­22, 25; and IWY, 176; and Javits, 204; and Leichter, 66; and McCormack, 139, 150; and PLAC, 154, 160; and Planned Parenthood Center, 73; and Reagan, 203; and Redstockings, 66; and Right to Life Sunday, 85–­86; and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 85; and state Republican Party, 3; and Stonewall Inn 180; and Women’s March for Life, 79 Marcantonio, Vito, 59 March for Life, 73, 79, 153 Margiotta, Joseph, 54, 190, 202–­4, 206, 210 Massachusetts (Democratic presidential primary, 1976), 146 Maternalism(t), 12–­13, 50, 61, 81, 95, 110, 137, 155 McCarthy, Eugene, 136 McCormack, Ellen, 2, 78–­79, 82, 84, 125, 130–­34, 137–­62, 164, 186, 189, 191, 193, 195–­97, 199, 208, 213, 222, 226–­27 McGovern, George, 87, 136 McGovern-­Fraser Commission (Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection), 51, 136–­37, 217 McMahon, Eugene (Gene), 79, 137–­39, 141, 143, 146–­47, 196–­97, 201 Medicaid, 8, 75–­76, 90, 134, 159, 175, 194 Merrick (Nassau County, Long Island), 11, 84; and Catholicism, 46, 77; and Gilroy, 2, 44, 46, 49, 77; and Levy, 88; and McCormack, 2, 139, 141, 148, 161; and Tobin, 193 Metropolitan Right to Life Committee, 75 Middleton, Claire, 70, 93, 95, 97–­103, 106–­8, 117, 119, 185 Middleton, John, 70, 185 Millet, Kate, 113

278 Index Mink, Patsy Takamoto, 144 Minneapolis, Minnesota (regional meeting, White House Conference on Families, 1980), 182 Molinaro, James P., 200 Mondale, Walter, 168–­69, 182, 217 Morality Action Committee, 184 Mormon(s), 3, 10, 70, 103, 176 Morrissey, Paul, 184 Mount Vernon (Westchester County, N.Y.), 27, 29–­33, 70 Mount Vernon Committee for Life (Westchester County, N.Y.), 70 Moynihan, Patrick (Pat), 216, 220, 223–­24 Ms. magazine, 115, 170, 179, 212 Mulcahy, Meta, 184 Nader, Ralph, 146 Name That Tune (television program), 153 Nassau County (Long Island), 4, 7, 18, 20, 22–­25, 32, 39, 45, 52–­54, 65, 74–­75, 91, 171, 190, 201–­3, 207, 217; and population growth, 20, 23, 38–­39, 52; and taxes, 156, 190. See also Farmingdale; Floral Park; Freeport, Hempstead; Long Beach; Merrick Nassau County Division of Doctors and Nurses Against Abortion, 193 National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), 65–­66, 86, 149–­50, 154 National Basketball Association (NBA), 153 National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY), 1977, 164, 173–­79, 181–­82. See also National Plan of Action; New York State IWY Meeting (Albany); World Plan of Action National Gay Task Force, 179 National Organization for Women (NOW), 4, 51, 63, 218 National Plan of Action, 174, 181, 218. See also National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY) National Pro-­Life Political Action Committee, 208

National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 165 NBC News, 135, 213 Nebraska (Democratic presidential primary, 1976), 143 Netter, Reverend Ed, 46, 69 New Deal, 1, 3, 18, 48, 50, 52, 60, 91, 120, 124, 129, 133–­34, 161, 164, 175, 186, 189, 209, 217 New Hampshire (Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, 1976), 143, 152 New York City, 154–­56, 164, 180, 184, 189–­90, 197–­99, 203, 207, 209–­12, 216, 220, 223, 225 New York Coalition for Equal Rights (CER), 105–­6, 108–­12, 115–­20, 122–­23. See also Sandra Turner New York Daily News, 108, 179, 197 New York Post, 66, 158 New York Radical Women, 65 New York State IWY Meeting (Albany), 173–­82, 185–­86. See also National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY) New York State Pro-­Family Federation, 226. See also Wakeup (Operation Wakeup) New York Times, 70, 82–­83, 86–­87, 143, 151, 183–­84, 192, 199–­201, 210, 223–­24 New York Archdiocese, 38, 84, 177 Newsday, 143, 183 Nixon, Richard M., 8, 82–­83, 87, 91, 133, 140, 152, 169, 173, 204, 210, 219 Northern Ireland, 156 Novak, Bob, 87 Nuclear family, 2, 9, 23–­24, 47, 54, 95, 110, 113, 114, 117, 152, 161–­62, 165, 166, 173–­75, 179–­80, 183, 185–­86, 195, 215, 222–­23, 226–­27 O’Connor, Marie, 207 O’Lear, Marilyn Joan, 201 Obama, Barack, 220–­21, 225 O’Connor, John Archbishop/Cardinal, 226 Office of Economic Opportunity, 50 Orange County (New York), 225

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Index 279 Orangetown (Rockland County, New York), 74 Ottinger, Richard, 91 Palin, Sarah, 221–­22 Parker House Hotel, 142 Paul VI, pope, 44 People magazine, 139 Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 143 Phyllis Schlafly Report, 101, 163–­64, 169, 171, 181. See also Phyllis Schlafly Pisani, Joseph, 101, 102 Pius XI, pope, 41, 48 Planned Parenthood, 67, 71–­74, 165, 171, 184, 222 Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 170 Police, 5, 26, 32, 49, 139, 156, 180 Port Jefferson (Suffolk County, Long Island), 25, 39, 45 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, 93 Pro-­choice, ix, 66, 89 Profamily, 163–­64, 168, 170, 172–­75, 181, 183–­86, 189–­91, 199–­200, 203, 206, 209, 212–­14, 225 Pro-­Life Action Committee (PLAC), 137–­61. See also Right to Life Party, New York State (RTLP) Queens (New York City), 13, 17–­18, 21, 28, 33, 49, 77, 83, 122, 184, 216–­17 Race (demographics in New York), 1, 9, 19, 26–­34, 42, 48, 50, 156, 178 Rape, 108–­9, 116, 167, 172, 177, 206, 217 Reagan Democrats (term), 156 Reagan, Ronald, 8, 91, 133, 135, 152, 156, 158–­59, 161, 182, 186, 189, 192, 202–­3, 207–­15, 217, 223 Redstockings, 51, 65–­66 Republican National Convention (RNC), 175, 189, 192, 202 Republican Party (GOP), 1, 3, 7–­9, 14, 19, 37, 47, 53–­54, 64, 70, 74, 91, 95, 124–­25, 133, 136, 159, 161, 164–­65, 172, 175, 186, 189–­93, 200, 202–­4, 207, 209, 214–­16, 218, 220, 222–­27

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Republican Women’s Task Force, 209 Rhode Island, 1, 3, 221 Right to Choose (coalition), 89 Right to Life Committee, National (NRLC), 90, 144, 157 Right to Life Committee, New York State (RTLC), 46, 69, 70, 72–­77, 81, 83–­84, 89–­90, 91–­93, 97–­98, 100–­103, 119, 125, 131, 165, 178, 185, 190, 196, 199, 206, 208, 226 Right to Life Party, New York State (RTLP), 2, 6, 7–­13, 36, 47, 76–­77, 79–­84, 88, 90–­92, 125, 131–­39, 162, 164, 184, 191–­201, 203–­4, 206–­9, 212–­15, 217, 223, 226–­27. See also Dialogue group (anti-­abortion); Inalienable Rights Committee of America; Pro-­Life Action Committee (PLAC); Women for the Unborn Right to Life Sunday, 84–­86, 119 Rockefeller Republicans, 3, 52–­53, 63, 68, 70, 79, 82, 136, 227 Rockefeller, Larry, 224–­25 Rockefeller, Nelson A., 3, 7–­8, 14, 27, 37, 52–­53, 60–­62, 64, 68, 74–­75, 80–­84, 87–­88–­89, 91, 93, 101, 110, 158, 186, 189–­90, 192, 196, 201–­2, 205–­6, 209, 214, 216, 223–­24 Rockland County (New York), 11, 18–­20, 25–­26, 33, 37, 69, 70, 73, 79, 82, 115, 171, 196; and Catholicism, 39, 59; and Friedan, 4, 51; and police, 32; and population growth, 46; and race: 26, 33; and RTLC, 73–­74, 165, 196. See also Orangetown; West Nyack Rockville Centre Diocese, 39, 77 Roe v. Wade (U.S. Supreme Court case), 10, 63, 69, 74, 80, 89–­90, 93, 131, 134, 158, 160, 215 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (FDR), 3, 18, 48, 50, 52, 129 Roosevelt, Theodore (Teddy), 204 Ruckelshaus, Jill, 173 Schenectady (New York), 68, 113, 167 Schlafly, Phyllis, 6, 10, 93–­94, 99–­101, 112, 122, 155, 163–­64, 169, 171–­72, 174–­76, 181, 183, 195, 209, 212. See also Eagle Forum; Phyllis Schlafly Report; StopERA

280 Index School prayer, 107, 156 Senate (New York State), 59–­60, 64, 66–­67, 88, 96, 101, 106, 199, 204 Senate (U.S.), 78, 90, 135, 138, 169, 182, 191, 193, 201–­3, 205–­6, 209–­14, 216, 220, 223–­24 Seneca Falls (New York), 154 Seymour, Whitney, 223 Siebert, Muriel, 223 Silent majority, 6, 9, 73, 82–­83, 91, 104, 107, 133, 152 Siller, Terry, 78 Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, 184 Smeal, Eleanor (Ellie), 166, 176, 212 Social Security, 104, 166, 185, 218 Solomon, Gerald, 97 Soul on Ice, 172. See also Eldridge Cleaver Soviet Union, 5, 101, 179–­80, 203 Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 48. See also Catholic Church, cardinals St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Parish, 46, 59, 69–­70. See also Catholic Church, parishes St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Parish, 37. See also Catholic Church, parishes St. Francis’s Roman Catholic Parish, 37–­38. See also Catholic Church, parishes St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 85. See also Catholic Church, parishes Staten Island (New York City), 200 Steinem, Gloria, 6, 159, 179, 212 Stern, Annette, 3–­4, 18, 26–­27, 29–­32, 34, 54, 81, 99–­100, 102–­4, 111–­13, 116, 118–­19, 122–­25, 129, 142, 162–­63, 167, 183 Stoller, Annette, 176 Stone, Roger, 208, 213 Stop ERA, 100, 164, 195. See also Phyllis Schlafly Suffolk County (Long Island, New York), 4, 7, 18, 20, 23, 25–­26, 32, 35, 38–­39, 52, 65, 70, 74, 190, 225; and population, 20; and race, 25, 33. See also Port Jefferson Suffrage (suffragists), 12, 73, 110–­11, 154, 206 Sullivan, Florence, 223–­24 Tichnor, Betty Ann, 122 Time magazine, 24, 116

Title IX (legislation), 222 Tobin, Mary Jane, 148, 191–­201, 203, 207–­8, 213–­14 Tracy, Mary, 176 Treasure Hunt (television show), 153 Tucker, Jim Guy, 183 Turner, Sandra, 106, 117, 119. See also New York Coalition for Equal Rights (CER) Udall, Mo (Morris), 110 United Nations, 154, 165, 173 United Press International (UPI), 143 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 74, 150 U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), 182–­83 U.S. Supreme Court, 10, 63, 67, 69, 74, 80, 88–­90, 93, 107, 131, 134, 149, 150, 157–­59, 194, 215, 219 Vatican II, 11, 34–­37, 39–­48, 50, 54–­55, 59–­60, 63–­64, 67, 69, 84, 86, 103, 122, 129, 151, 224, 227. See also Catholic Church Virginia (Democratic presidential primary, 1976), 147 Vocal minority, 7, 106 Voth, Dr. Harold M., 170–­71 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 3 Wakeup (Operation Wakeup), 94–­95, 102–­8, 110–­25, 129–­32, 162–­64, 166–­68, 171–­78, 183–­85, 189–­90, 195, 204, 212, 214, 225–­27. See also Happiness of Womanhood (HOW); New York State Pro-­Family Federation; Women for Honest Equality in National Women’s Groups (WHEN); Women UNited to Defend Existing Rights (WUNDER) Wallace, George, 152, 159 War on Poverty, 49. See also Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) Washington, D.C., 10, 73, 110, 153, 175, 178, 194, 218 Watergate, 91, 140, 148, 210 Watson, Fran, 138, 143–­44, 160 West Chazy (New York), 70, 98, 117

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Index 281 West Nyack (Rockland County, N.Y.), 26, 46, 60 Westchester County (New York), 21, 26, 29, 32, 38, 52, 54, 70, 99, 101–­3, 119, 167, 175, 201; and population growth, 20, 27, 31–­32; and Annette Stern, 3, 18, 26, 29, 32, 54, 99–­100, 103–­4, 118–­19, 167. See also Harrison; Mount Vernon White House Conference on Families (WHCF), 1980, 164–­65, 182–­86 “Who Speaks for the Unborn Child?” (syndicated column), 139 Wiggins, Charles, 148 Willke, Dr. John, 134–­35, 154 Wisconsin (Democratic presidential primary, 1976), 143 Women for Honest Equality in National Women’s Groups (WHEN), 99, 113. See also Wakeup (Operation Wakeup)

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Women for the Unborn, 78–­79. See also Right to Life Party, New York State (RTLP) Women UNited to Defend Existing Rights (WUNDER), 99–­100, 102. See also Wakeup (Operation Wakeup) Women’s Division (New York State), 109 Women’s Equality Day, 110, 154, 206 Women’s March for Life, 73, 79 World Plan of Action, 173–­74. See also National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY) World War II, 1, 6, 9, 13, 18, 22–­23, 27, 38, 48–­49, 52, 90, 94, 219, 225 Yungbluth, Pat, 100 Zygmunt, Selina, 112

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As a decade’s worth of work draws to a close, I am humbled by all the people and institutions that made this book possible, especially those that offered crucial financial assistance. In recent years, my colleagues at Ramapo College of New Jersey generously funded five summers of full-­time work on the book. I am also thankful that Ramapo’s Salameno School of Humanities and Global Studies paid for my travel to a dozen major conferences, where I benefited from invaluable feedback. Earlier on, the History Department at Brown University sponsored two years of focused research and writing. The American Association of University Women offered me a year-­long fellowship at a critical juncture in 2008–­9; I was honored to receive this award from an organization that has fought for the education and equity of women and girls for over a century. I also received a generous Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies in 2008–­9. Several additional grants made this book a reality, including those from the Schlesinger Library and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Larry J. Hackman Research Residency Program at the New York State Partnership Trust and Archives, and the Grants-­in-­Aid Program at The Rockefeller Archive Center. I appreciated the professionalism and interest of countless archivists across New York State and the country. In particular, I would like to thank those at the University at Albany; Columbia University; Cornell University; Dr. Joseph R. Stanton Human Life Issues Library and Resource Center; Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Human Life Foundation; Library of Congress; Long Island Collection at the Queens Borough Public Library; Marymount Manhattan College; Merrick Public Library; New York State Partnership Trust and Archives; New York University; Rockefeller Archive Center; Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York; Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn; Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre; Ronald Reagan Presidential Library; Senate Records Office in Albany,

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284 Acknowledgments

New York; Stony Brook University; Westchester County Historical Society; and Wisconsin Historical Society. This book could not have been written without help from the women and men who talked to me over the past decade about their prior involvement in New York State politics. Many people put me in contact with their former associates and sent me personal files that augmented my research. Thank you, Terry Anselmi, Richard Bruno, Margie Fitton, Jane Gilroy, Pat Gmerek, Phyllis Graham, John Harrington, Ginny Lavan Taylor, Claire and John Middleton, Phyllis Schlafly, and Annette Stern. Your stories shaped every aspect of the narrative, and I am sorry that some of you did not live to see the finished product. I sincerely hope that I captured your experiences. In recent years, my lifestyle has converged with much of what you mobilized to defend as I got married, became a mother, and bought a house in the suburbs of New York City. Our politics never aligned, but the final manuscript should reflect a more empathetic portrayal of what motivated you to leave your homes and organize in the seventies. I was fortunate to begin this journey with a wonderful team of advisors at Brown University—one that has continued to support my professional development. Naoko Shibusawa was helpful throughout and urged me to think about race more carefully, which the manuscript now better addresses. Mari Jo Buhle and Robert Self worked together seamlessly as my co-­advisors. Mari Jo, thank you for nurturing my commitment to women’s history and convening a writing group to keep me and my colleagues on track. I was honored to be part of your last cohort at Brown. I owe an incredible intellectual debt to Robert Self. Robert transformed the project, shaped my understanding of postwar America, and taught me a great deal about scholarship and mentoring. I was lucky to have wonderful editors in the University of Pennsylvania Press’s Politics and Culture in Modern America Series. Bob Lockhart was the best possible editor. His enthusiasm about my research (and understanding of how personal and work obligations can sometimes cause delays) motivated me to complete the book as soon as I could. Bob knows my work inside-­out, wrote letters for me when asked, and offered essential guidance at the end. I would be remiss not to acknowledge Margot Canaday, one of my series editors, who twice read entire drafts of the manuscript and offered poignant, clear, and encouraging commentary (and who was willing to share those thoughts in several recommendation letters). In part thanks to Margot, I was able to present portions of the book in 2013 and 2014 at workshops sponsored

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Acknowledgments 285

by the Department of History at Princeton University. The guidance I received from attendees at those sessions was smart and useful. Margot was at the workshop in 2014 and again offered keen insight. Finally, I wish to thank Alison Anderson at Penn Press, who was wonderful to work with in the final stages of the book’s production. I will never be able to adequately thank (or recall) the long list of colleagues, outside readers at University of Pennsylvania Press, accomplished scholars, and students who made this book much better than it otherwise would have been. Any errors or inadequacies that remain are solely my responsibility. The following people have nurtured this book to publication: Lara Couturier, Nicole Eaton, Jessica Foley, Gillian Frank, Ronnie Grinberg, Kevin Kruse, Paige Meltzer, Michelle Nickerson, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Erica Ryan, Catherine Rymph, Derek Seidman, Daniel Williams, Natasha Zaretsky, Leandra Zarnow, members of the ongoing Women and Gender History Writing Group at New York University, and those who attended the inaugural Phil Zwickler Memorial Writing Workshop for Historians of Sexuality and Gender in the summer of 2012. Gillian (Gill) Frank, one of the best editors I know, deserves special recognition for providing extensive comments on different portions of my work in 2014, first at Ramapo and then at Princeton (in additional to his feedback at the Zwickler workshop). Finally, I wish to thank my wonderful students at Ramapo College who pushed me to refine my analysis as I communicated some of the book’s key findings in the classroom. One of these students, Francesca Simone, served as a supremely capable research assistant in the spring of 2015, when she gathered copyright permissions for the photographs that appear in this book. Another top student, Samantha Sproviero, worked on the book’s index in the fall of 2016, which was a tremendous help to me. Other friends and colleagues propelled me along, including those who have not yet read the manuscript. You helped me survive the laborious writing process and my first years as a rooky professor struggling to balance a heavy work load with growing family obligations. Thank you to new and old friends in Ridgewood, Mahwah, Ithaca, Albany, Providence, New York City, Boston, and beyond. You have dutifully asked about the project (even when you probably wondered what was taking so long), hosted me on research trips, and provided welcome respite from the often solitary pursuit of writing a book. As always, my family has been the biggest source of love and inspiration. My parents, Terrie and Joe Taranto, have always believed in me and encouraged me to reach my fullest potential. My three brothers, Joe, Jim, and John

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Taranto, and members of my extended family, especially Marra and Giselle Balagat, helped me in various ways. This book was a constant presence in my daughter’s first three years. Thank you, Gwen, for keeping me focused on what is most important in my life; you also made me a much more focused and productive writer during the finite hours that you were in the expert and loving care of the teachers and staff at Lightbridge Academy in Mahwah, New Jersey. I am equally grateful to my son, Henry, whose impending arrival provided the best (and most pressing) motivation to finish the book. Above all, my husband, Vincent Balagat, helped me from start to finish, from reading over my graduate school applications to pouring through drafts of the manuscript. Thank you for everything. I look forward to many more happy years together.

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