Mary Thom papers

Mary Thom was a feminist activist, author and editor of Ms Magazine. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of Paul and Susan Thom. The family soon moved to Akron where her father worked as an engineer in the steel industry. Her mother encouraged her precocious daughter's interest in Shakespeare and jazz. After attending a private girls' high school as a scholarship student, Thom went on to Bryn Mawr College where she earned a degree with honors in history in 1966. While in college, she became active in the civil rights and anti-war movements and joined the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She entered graduate school in 1966 at Columbia University, in pursuit of a PhD in European history but left in 1968 after the tumultous student strike that began there in April, 1968. She stayed in Manhattan and for the next three years, working as an associate editor at Facts on File and, in 1971, volunteered for the newly-founded National Women's Political Caucus. The following year Thom joined the staff of Ms. magazine, first as a volunteer, then a researcher, and eventually serving as editor until 1991. After she left to become a freelance writer and editor, Thom maintained an association with Ms. until 2001. While still at Ms., Thom edited the book, Letters to Ms. (1987), and in 1997 published Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and Feminist Movement. With Suzanne Braun Levine, she co-edited an oral history tribute, Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against the War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way (2007). In addition to her freelance career, at the time of her death Thom was editor-in-chief at the Women's Media Center, founded in 2005 as a non-profit progressive women's media organization by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem. An avid motorcyclist for years, Thom died April 26, 2013, when her motorcycle struck another vehicle on the Henry Hudson Parkway in Yonkers, New York. She was, according to Gloria Steinem,"one of the women's movement's best editors."