Southside Colleen
| 💄 | |
| Era | The Seventies |
|---|---|
| Age | 22-27 |
| Home | South Side, Chicago, IL |
| Demographic | urban, Irish Catholic, young working woman |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
Colleen is a dental assistant raised in a Daley-machine family on Chicago's South Side, who stopped going to Mass after 1968 and has not told her mother. She is the Catholic woman leaving the Church without moving left, and the Democratic vote her family assumes.
Who they stand for
The papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, issued in July 1968, reaffirmed the Catholic Church's ban on contraception. American Catholic women largely ignored it. Mass attendance among Catholics fell through the following decade, while use of the contraceptive pill did not. Colleen's bloc is the young, working Catholic woman of the Northern cities, living on her own lease and her own wage. She is neither a feminist nor a radical. The Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, the causes that matter to Upper West Side Ruth, are things Colleen reads about rather than campaigns for. Her politics come from her family and her ward. The Daley political machine found her father a job. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago shamed that machine. The 1972 Democratic convention unseated Mayor Daley's delegates in favour of delegates loyal to Jesse Jackson and Bill Singer. Young Catholics shifted to Nixon in 1972 and back to Carter in 1976, and Colleen shifted with them. Nonna Concetta's faith and party loyalty both held firm through the decade. Colleen's vote, by contrast, has become a matter of habit, and she is aware of this herself.
Playing to them
Colleen responds to being taken seriously as a worker and a voter, and to being left alone in her private life. A president who speaks to her wage, her rent, and her brother's draft status, and who never moralises about contraception, holds her support. The end of military conscription in 1973 matters more to her than any position a candidate takes on the war itself. She will not forgive a lecture, whether from a bishop or a president, nor contempt for her neighbourhood, nor a public attack on Mayor Daley that makes her family look foolish. She is not won over by the campus left. She dislikes its radicals as much as Southie Sean does, so a president does not need to court Berkeley Bruce in order to reach her. The cost of winning her support falls on the Church's side of the cast. A president who takes her position on contraception and abortion loses the support of Concordia Hilda and Nonna Concetta, and unsettles the support of West Side Ramona and Bensonhurst Sal.
Where they live
The five states where Southside Colleen makes up the largest share of the electorate in the seventies:
- Illinois
- Massachusetts
- Indiana
- Wisconsin
- Ohio