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on.²⁴

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

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

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

      Forging a Suburban Politics

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

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

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

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

      Witnessing

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