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for governor and Democrat Arthur Levitt (no relation to the housing developer) for comptroller. Results like this were common in these four counties throughout the fifties and sixties. Third parties like the Liberal and Conservative parties often cross-endorsed candidates, which alternately helped or hurt the two major parties and contributed to split decisions.⁴²

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

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

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

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

      PART II

      AWAKENINGS

      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.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

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