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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 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 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 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 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

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