Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and The Growth of The New Right by Robin M. Morris

Author:Robin M. Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Georgia Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Breadmaker Politics

When the ERA finally went to the full Georgia House in late January 1974, Kathryn Dunaway was ready to lead her first major operation. The day of the floor vote, STOP ERA volunteers gave every legislator a loaf of freshly baked bread bearing the note, “From the breadmaker to the breadwinner.”1 The gift, along with a few gently spoken words against the amendment, spoke volumes to the largely male legislature. The “breadwinner,” assumed to be male, made both money and laws to support the housewife and children. The “breadmaker,” assumed to be female, stayed home to raise the children and maintain the household. The gift of fresh bread reinforced the idea that homemakers nourished the family.

Legislators did not know, however, that all their lobbying efforts took up Dunaway’s and her volunteers’ own baking time, nor that the bread scheme was a national strategy. Privately, she thanked Chester Gray of Mom’s Bakery in Atlanta “for the donation of the many small loaves of your delicious bread.”2 The women had been too busy organizing to take time for baking. The legislators also did not know that Arizona and Missouri STOP ERA had already had success with their “bread project” that “put the libbers on the defensive.” Phyllis Schlafly shared the bread idea in a letter to state chairmen.3 Georgia women did not need to bake the bread or even think up the bread tactic.

Over the next decade, STOP ERA women continued to fight feminism with femininity. The national network, funneling strategies through state-and lower-level organizations, structured the content and the delivery of the message. Throughout the next decade, they waged war wherever they saw a threat and they made sure to do it all in a dress and with perfectly coiffed hair. The national STOP ERA network freed women from the need to develop strategy and allowed them to implement proven methods to get their message across to legislators. The bread project proved so successful that the women made lobbying with baked goods a tradition. One year, they gave legislators cakes with the accompanying poem, “You can have your cake / And eat it, too. / STOP ERA, and / See Us Through.”4

As the decade wore on, the STOP ERA women began sponsoring an annual Valentine’s Day meal for all the legislators. The flavorful meals reinforced their message of representing home and housewives while providing STOP ERA volunteers valuable face time with the legislators whose meals they served. Lee Wysong explained the tradition as “just a gesture to let them know we liked them and to stay in their good graces and maybe convert some of those who had been on the other side—and, apparently, we did!”5 When Dunaway’s adult son Marshall remembered accompanying his mother to the legislature during one visit, he marveled, “She would walk into their [legislative] offices . . . unannounced, take the cake [in] back, put it on their desk while they were talking with whoever—the governor or whoever—and she might say a few little selected words to them .

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