Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ between homemaking and capitalism. They claimed, for example, that feminist-backed initiatives such as the Equal Rights Amendment would dangerously open the door toward communism by sending women into the paid workforce, where their focus would shift away from children and consumerism for the home. When they eventually did so, they instinctively made use of consumer spaces like the Roosevelt Field mall to reach large numbers of other women who could be convinced of their arguments.¹⁸

      Time magazine described the gendered world of Phyllis Graham and her neighbors in this era by writing that “the key figure in all suburbia, the thread that weaves between family and community—the keeper of the suburban dream—is the suburban housewife.”¹⁹ In Graham’s densely populated, middle-class (white) neighborhood, where land plots had been kept small to maximize developers’ profits, women stayed at home with their children while their husbands went to work, often commuting into the city to do so. This arrangement kept the men somewhat grounded in the more heterogeneous urban experience, while reinforcing the primacy of (white) nuclear family life and traditional gender roles for the women who saw—often at very close range outside their windows—the same gendered division of labor replicated around them. Graham and her neighbors spent their weekdays in a collective female space awash in childrearing, tending house, watching each other’s children, shopping, and running household errands. They volunteered in the county’s schools, welcomed families into their neighborhoods, and dealt with fresh construction that constantly altered everyday routes. By 1960, 95 percent of Nassau homes had telephones, which further connected Graham and her female neighbors, who were now only a quick call away when someone wanted adult companionship or a favor—or in coming years, when they needed volunteers for antifeminist causes.²⁰

      These conditions extended into neighboring Suffolk County, where the Grahams moved in 1965. After commuting into Manhattan for five years, Graham’s husband accepted a job on Long Island when one of his former law school classmates asked him to take over his suburban legal practice. The opportunity necessitated a move for the 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 СКАЧАТЬ