Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York by Stacie Taranto (review)

In the last several years, there has been an increased focus on the importance of grassroots activism by white suburban women in fueling the rise of modern conservatism. In Kitchen Table Politics Stacie Taranto provides an important addition to this existing scholarly project. Grounded in in-depth oral history and archival materials uncovered in "basements and attics" (2), Taranto reinforces the value of social history methodologies in gaining better insight into major issues and questions of political and gender history.

Taranto draws on important works like Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors and Michelle Nickerson's Mothers of Conservatism. As she points out, however, these books primarily center on the 1950s and 1960s and on anticommunist politics and Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. Taranto picks up where these stories leave off by concentrating on the 1970s and the politics of family values. She also shifts the focus away from Evangelicals in the Sunbelt south and west and toward Catholics in New York state.

Kitchen Table Politics challenges the dominant image of New York politics in the 1960s and 1970s as only defined by northeast liberalism and second-wave feminism. She reconstructs the path of several women from their origins as urban, working-class New Deal Democrats and as they migrated with their large families into the four suburban counties surrounding New York City. In doing so, she shows the remarkable similarity in their life histories and how they provide a counterpoint not just to the typical story of conservative women, but also the Reagan Democrat. This archetype has been primarily assumed to be male and motivated by racial backlash rather than female and galvanized by abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Whereas studies of modern conservatism have tended to overlook the Catholic Church, Taranto illuminates its importance to the rise of the right, noting especially the significance of Vatican II reforms. While some of the women opposed the reforms and longed for the traditional practices, the Church's new emphasis on outreach and parishioner groups and involvement provided an important infrastructure for later mobilization. She offers new insight into the dynamics of suburban parishes during this moment of change and especially how priests and their parishioners responded to religious and social changes. While Vatican II served as a watershed moment, it was New York's law legalizing abortion in 1970 that truly propelled these suburban women into action. Taranto analyzes the ways in which they saw abortion as a violation of heteronormative and homogenous visions of the nuclear family and proper gender roles. Kitchen Table Politics tracks how the focus of their opposition expanded beyond abortion and included their success in defeating the state Equal Rights Amendment in 1975 and their efforts to disrupt the Conference on International Woman's Year in 1977 and the White House Conference on Families in 1980.

Taranto illuminates the activists' fierce and populist-inflected antipathy toward mainstream feminists while at the same time interrogating how these conservative women also made the personal political. Taranto explains how both their political ideology and organizing tactics were culled from their experiences as suburban housewives, which connected them with a long tradition of maternal politics even if the women themselves did not necessarily acknowledge the links. While many of the activists had significant parallels with Phyllis Schlafly and were in communication with her, Taranto emphasizes that their tactics were largely homegrown. She provides compelling evidence drawn from her interviews to highlight their beliefs and their own views of their activism. Taranto treats her subjects with enormous empathy and takes them seriously, which enriches the book significantly.

Almost from the outset, these women saw the potential of electoral politics to spread their message and exert their clout. Several members formed the Right to Life Party and in 1976 one of the founders, Ellen McCormack, a Long Island housewife and political novice, entered the 1976 Democratic Presidential primary. The campaign helped to push abortion to the...