Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
Graham family that now included four small children. Not only had they outgrown their three-bedroom ranch, but the law practice was located an hour away from Farmingdale in Port Jefferson, Long Island, on the north shore of Suffolk County. Once again, Phyllis’s uncle lent them a down payment—which he was happy to do since they had repaid his first loan—which allowed them to move into a spacious nineteenth-century Victorian home. A lucky break from a realtor, who took a lower commission, and cheaper housing values in Port Jefferson made the upgrade possible. The median housing value in Suffolk County in 1960 was $4,000 less than in Nassau County since it is farther from New York City; in fact, Suffolk was the most affordable of the four suburban counties considered here. The Grahams quickly fell into a comfortable routine in Port Jefferson, which, like much of Suffolk County, was filled with other white, upwardly mobile families like theirs who eagerly took advantage of the area’s infrastructure.21
Peter Graham’s suburban law practice soon began to thrive as the family climbed into the upper echelon of the middle class. Phyllis was able to hire a Scandinavian woman whom her neighbors also employed to help with cleaning. Graham may have realized homemaking as her true calling during her brief stint in the convent, but despite that and her very humble roots, she never considered this occasional help to be a luxury. As she saw it, hiring a cleaning woman was a practical concern: her home was now larger, and she had four small children who kept her busy. This assessment belies increasing financial comfort from a woman who had been laboring over a hand-cranked washing machine just five years earlier. Graham’s subsequent political involvement was similarly laced with unconscious class (and racial) privilege.22
Rockland County, which is located northwest of New York City, also underwent unprecedented postwar growth that set the stage for future antifeminist activism. In 1959, twenty-nine-year-old Margie Fitton and her husband, a grocery store manager, moved from the Bronx with their small children to a new Cape Cod-style home in West Nyack. They eventually raised ten children in that house and were still there over fifty years later. The Fittons—along with Terry Anselmi’s family—were part of a massive wave of urban migrants who moved to Rockland Country from New York City on the heels of an infrastructural and housing boom. Most families arrived after the Tappan Zee Bridge opened in 1955, which connects Rockland to neighboring Westchester County and makes it more accessible from New York City. The opening of the Palisades Parkway in 1958, a two-lane highway linking Rockland to the city and the New York State Thruway, further fueled development. Schools and commercial spaces followed, and a startling 26 percent (a little over a quarter) of all single-family homes in Rockland County in 1960 had been built, like the Fittons’ house, in the five years since the bridge and new highways had opened.23
The Fittons’ neighborhood was filled with other young white Irish Catholic families from the city embarking on an exciting suburban adventure along circumscribed gender lines. The women stayed home to raise children while their husbands went to work, many for New York City’s fire and police departments. Of the residents of Rockland County, 95 percent were white, over 60 percent of adults were married and, as in Suffolk County, there was roughly one child under five for every other woman of childbearing age.24 After growing up in northern Manhattan and spending four years in the Bronx, Fitton immediately thrilled to her suburban surroundings. “To this day, and I felt this way from the beginning,” she later noted, “I can be outside and say, ‘can you believe that I have trees?’”25 For city natives like Fitton who had grown up in working-class families often living on the margins, the trees symbolized a better lifestyle for their children. It was one that women at home all day were intimately connected to—a middle-class, suburban, female, and maternal identity with which their subsequent family-based politics would be wholly intertwined.
Annette Stern, a homemaker who led a successful campaign against the state ERA in the seventies, was equally enthralled with suburbia after moving to Westchester County in 1958. Stern was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, but she grew up in the South Bronx, where she attended public schools. Unlike the other four women, Stern grew up in a more middle-class household. She was never particularly religious like the others, and her family was Reform Jewish, not Catholic. Her father had a small business that manufactured goods for infants, and although the family was never wealthy, her mother was able to stay at home full time. After graduating from Taft High School in the Bronx and taking some courses at City College, Stern worked briefly as a secretary at her father’s company before marrying and becoming a homemaker with three sons. Her husband, Harold, ran an importing business that required frequent travel overseas; his schedule could be grueling, but because of his job, the family eventually ascended into a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in the wealthy Westchester town of Harrison. But their first stop was the county’s more economically and racially diverse Mount Vernon, a suburb directly north of the Bronx. It was the first time that Stern had lived in a detached single-family house, and she appreciated the additional space and greenery in her comfortable neighborhood of mostly older colonial homes built before World War II. Although Harold had served in the National Guard in the early fifties, the family did not seek a GI mortgage, and once they became suburbanites, Annette got involved in organizations for her children such as the Boy Scouts.26
Westchester County also expanded dramatically in the postwar years, although its population was not as homogeneous as in the other counties outside New York City. As nearby upper Manhattan and the Bronx lost residents, Westchester’s population increased by 29 percent in the fifties, with most of the growth occurring in the latter half of the decade after the Tappan Zee Bridge and New York State Thruway were built. By the sixties, Westchester’s population was a mix of three different groups: white-ethnic, upwardly mobile, middle-class urban transplants like the Sterns who had recently purchased their first single-family (often brand-new) homes in the suburbs; wealthier, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families in older affluent bedroom communities, many of whom had come decades before with the advent of the automobile (e.g., Nelson Rockefeller and his ilk); and working-class, more urban, often nonwhite denizens living in multifamily rental and subsidized housing closer to the city. Only 46 percent of housing units in Westchester in 1960 were single-family detached homes (compared to 90 percent or more in the other three counties), and 8 percent of the county was not white. Predictably, wealthier towns were almost 100 percent white with detached, single-family homes. Residents of color tended to live in one of Westchester’s six larger cities that border the Bronx and have ample multifamily rental units and subsidized housing. These varied demographics did not make the family-based politics Annette Stern and others from Westchester embraced any more inclusive, due to the racial insularity that defined most of their communities in the county. This, however, was yet to come.27
Still, the foundation for the women’s family-based activism was laid in the sixties as their daily lives became woven with the suburban experience. They had moved to the suburbs of New York City expecting better lives replete with more room, green spaces, full-time domesticity, and relative comfort compared to their working-class urban roots. For the most part, the women found all of that. Following their husbands’ lead, some occasionally groused about the high property taxes they now faced. Yet, their families were helped by the taxpayer-funded expenditures that had created thriving suburbs with the amenities and accessibility that families more accustomed to life in the city demanded. It was only when those taxpayer dollars seemed to support feminist-backed measures that they felt would weaken, instead of bolster, family life (in the recessionary seventies when money was generally tighter) that the women sought a politics of low taxation. When that occurred, they naturally turned to the stuff of their everyday lives—personal ties, community organizations, and popular shopping plazas—to defend their version of the family that was inextricably linked to (and in many ways defined by) those very same networks and structures.28
The Hidden Shape of Racial Privilege
The racial homogeneity most women encountered upon moving to the suburbs also shaped their future politics. Their families moved from mixed-race urban neighborhoods to nearly all-white suburbs, exiting New York City’s outer boroughs at a moment of significant racial turnover. In 1960, for example, around the time Terry Anselmi’s family left Queens, roughly 9 percent of the borough’s residents were not white. This percentage was far short of a majority, but the nonwhite—mostly African American—population in Queens had more than doubled since 1950,