Molly Yard papers

The Molly Yard papers include biographical material, personal and professional correspondence, speeches, testimony, photographs, reports, conference material, and research and subject files. The bulk of the papers date from 1930 to 1992 and focus primarily on Yard's political activism and professional life, though they do contain some personal material and memorabilia. Major topics addressed by Yard's papers include Democratic Party politics in Pennsylvania and the U.S., the student movement of the 1930s and 1940s, the Civil Rights movement, the National Organization for Women, the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, and feminist organizing from the 1960s to the 1990s. The papers also document Yard's family life; her close associations with many other activists and political figures including Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Lash, and George McGovern; her crucial role in revitalizing the National Organization of Women in the 1980s; and the extent to which NOW had become, by the 1980s and 1990s, a lobbying organization deeply involved in many areas of the Washington, D.C. political structure. There is extensive documentation of the 1956, 1960, 1968, and 1976 Presidential campaigns; Joseph Sill Clark's campaigns for U.S. Senate (Pennsylvania) in 1956 and 1968; Molly Yard's campaign for seat on the Pennsylvania State Assembly (1964), and to be delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1974 and 1980; and the campaigns of George M. Leader and David L. Lawrence for Governor of Pennsylvania in 1955 and 1957. There are also materials documenting Molly Yard's involvement in the YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh and in the civil rights movement there in the 1960s; the political and economic aspects of public education in Pittsburgh; Americans for Democratic Action; and the National Organization for Women, and women's rights in general. Yard's work with the International Student Assembly, the International Student Service, the American Youth Congress, from 1934 to 1945, are also extensively documented. There are also subject files concerning topics of concern to youth during the 1930s and 1940s, including militarism in education, pacifism, student activist groups in Europe, and communism and socialism; there is also information about the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). There is a relatively small amount of biographical information that includes Yard's college essays; a return trip to China in 1938; correspondence; photographs of Yard and others; numerous awards; and audiovisual materials documenting political issues in which Yard held an interest, including political campaign songs, and documentary footage about George McGovern and Richard M. Nixon.