Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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.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, 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 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
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