Pausing to Remember: Molly Yard

“I grew up with that whole devaluation of myself because I was female. It’s outrageous, and it stays with you all your life.”

Molly Yard

Yard passed away on September 23 at the age of 93. She led the National Organization of Women during the fight over Robert Bork’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. She was elected president of NOW in 1987 and stepped down in 1991. Yard made NOW more visible and worked against Bork, whom the Senate rejected as President Ronald Reagan’s high court nomination after a bitter political battle in 1987. She said he might provide a fifth vote to override the high court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion.

The daughter of Methodist missionaries, Yard was born in Shanghai, china, and said later that her father’s Chinese friends gave him a brass wash basin to express their sorrow that she wasn’t a boy. When Yard joined NOW’s national staff in 1978, the organization was campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. She raised more than $1 million for that drive in less than six months while lobbying in Washington.

Yard was adriving force in the National Organization of Women (NOW) and Feminist Majority Foundation. Yahoo has additional information obituary information on Yard.