Mary Alexander "Molly" Yard (July 6, 1912 – September 21, 2005) was an American feminist and social activist who served as the eighth president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) from 1987 to 1991 and was a link between first and second-wave feminism.
Early life and education
She was born in Shanghai, China, the third daughter of Methodist missionaries. Following her birth, a Chinese friend of her father gifted him "a brass bowl, as consolation for her being a 'useless' third daughter". She grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan until she was 13, when her family moved to the United States and settled in Connecticut.
Early career and politics
She became active in Democratic Party politics, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s worked with the Clark-Dilworth team to unseat the entrenched city machine in Philadelphia. Two years later, she worked in Helen Gahagan Douglas' unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate against second-year Congressman Richard Nixon's effective campaign attacks on Gahagan Douglas in California.
She moved to Pittsburgh in 1953, where she worked in the gubernatorial campaign of Mayor David L. Lawrence in 1958, led the Western Pennsylvania presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and George McGovern in 1972, led the unsuccessful campaign to get NAACP President Byrd Brown the Democratic nomination to Congress, and was co-chair with Mayor Joseph M. Barr of the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of state Senator Jeanette Reibman in 1976.
In 1963, Yard was the Western Pennsylvania organizer for the March on Washington. In 1964, she led local protests in favor of the passing of the Civil Rights Act. In September, she was briefly arrested during a nonviolent NOW demonstration at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C. in response to the Catholic Church's stances on birth control, abortion, and homosexuality.
Yard convinced her brother, Lou Harris, "to identify polling results by gender," which allowed Harris to demonstrate gender gaps in voting. As NOW president, she opposed U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War, saying Americans should not be fighting for "clan-run monarchies" in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that denied women's rights.
Yard retired in 1991 following a stroke in May of that year.
Recognition and awards
In 1991, she was honored in Paris by the French Alliance of Women for Democratization for her pioneering work in reproductive rights; she had been a leader in the effort to get Paris-based manufacturer Roussel Uclaf to make the so-called "French abortion pill" (the "morning-after pill", RU-486) available in the United States.
She received the Feminist Majority Foundation's lifetime achievement award for "tireless work for women's rights, for women and girls in sports, for the Equal Rights Amendment for Women, for civil rights for all Americans, for her championing of the trade union movement, and her devotion to world peace and non-violence."
Personal life and death
Yard married Sylvester Garrett in 1938 (d. 1996); the couple had two sons and a daughter. In the late 1980s she lived in Ligonier, Pennsylvania.