Molly Yard

Mary Alexander "Molly" Yard (July 6, 1912 – September 21, 2005) was an American feminist of the late 20th century who was an assistant to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and later a U.S. administrator, social activist and feminist, who served as National Organization for Women (NOW)'s eighth president from 1987 to 1991 and was a link between first and second-wave feminism.

She was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China, the daughter of Methodist missionaries. She graduated in 1933 from Swarthmore College, a coeducational college that was also the alma mater of Alice Paul. While at Swarthmore, she led a successful drive to eliminate the systematic sorority bigotry in place there after a Jewish fellow student had been denied admission to her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta. In 1938 she married Sylvester Garrett, a union that lasted until his death in 1996.

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 smear attacks on Gahagan Douglas in California.

...
Wikipedia