NOW leader Yard dies at 93

Molly Yard, a former president of the National Organization for Women who fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, legal access to contraception and abortions and revitalization of the feminist movement, died Wednesday at a nursing home in Pittsburgh, where she lived. She was 93.

She ran NOW from 1987 to 1991 after a lifetime of activism in Democratic politics and on civil rights issues. Unstoppable until she had a stroke in 1991, she recovered enough to work through the 1990s with the Feminist Majority Foundation on its task force on women and girls in sports.

Yard was among the leaders of the opposition in 1987 to Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. She helped identify the existence of gender gap in voting patterns and assisted in reviving Title IX’s prohibition against gender discrimination in federally funded sports. She led the campaign to win approval for the import of RU-486, or mifepristone, the French “abortion pill.” Under her leadership, NOW’s membership grew from 140,000 to 250,000.

With a booming voice, a to-the-ramparts style and a willingness to take positions considered politically extreme, she attracted more than the normal share of attacks. “The hardline Yard often sounds like an IWW organizer at a lumberjacks’ rally,” Newsweek once said.

Labor arbitrator Sylvester Garrett, her husband of 57 years, died in 1996. A daughter, Joan Hickock Garrett-Goodyear, died in 1992.

Survivors include two sons, James Garrett of Pittsburgh and John Garrett of Rochester, N.Y.; and five grandchildren.