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Mary Alexander Yard (July 6, 1912 &#x2013; September 21, 2005) was an American feminist

She was president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), serving from 1987 to 1991.

Early life
Yard was born in Shanghai on July 6, 1912, as the third of four daughters. Her parents, James M. and Mabel Yard, were Methodist missionaries. She grew up in Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan Province. She later credited her childhood in China with inspiring her passion for social activism. She witnessed many deaths from cholera and recalled hearing girls screaming at having their feet bound. She later said that she was "born a feminist".

When she was thirteen, her father proposed on a speaking tour in the United States on his belief that the missions should be run by Chinese heads. He angered a number of his superiors and was asked to leave. The family moved back to the United States and her father worked as director of religious activities at Northwestern University until his activism work in the areas of "race relations, the peace movement and labor organizing" led to him being fired. Yard's mother worked as the primary breadwinner during this period, supporting the family through the Great Depression by running a mail-order business with imported Chinese goods.

Yard attended Swarthmore College, graduating with a political science degree in 1933. While attending the university, she became active in student politics. She successfully campaigned to abolish all sororities on campus after discovering that her own sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, had a policy against admitting Jewish students. One of her classmates, Sylvester Garrett, resigned as president of his own fraternity, Delta Upsilon, in his own protest. The couple realised they had a lot in common and later married in 1938, although Yard kept her maiden name. Her husband became a well-known labor arbitrator. They had three children: James, John, and Joan.

Social activism
As her family was unable to afford to send her to law school and all state scholarships in Pennsylvania were given to men, Yard began working as a social worker after graduation but she soon changed careers. She served as an officer with the American Student Union, a left-wing youth organization, alongside Joseph Lash, Murray Kempton and James Wechsler. [...] While working in this role, she became friends with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt after drawing her attention with criticism of the New Deal. The two women worked together to create the Washington Student Service Bureau. Yard later co-founded and served as a board member for Americans for Democratic Action. [...] A Republican politician in Philadelphia accused her of being a communist in 1949. She sued the local Republican chapter and received $1,500 (equivalent to $ in ) and a front-page apology in the paper.

The following year, Yard and her husband moved to California so Garrett could teach at Stanford University and Yard soon became involved in Democratic politics in the state. She supported representative Helen Gahagan Douglas in her 1950 Senate campaign against Republican Richard Nixon. The family later moved to Pittsburgh where Yard became involved in local civil rights and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. She remained active in electoral politics and worked on Senator Joseph S. Clark's 1956 and 1962 Senate campaigns in Pennsylvania, as well as John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign. In 1964, she contested a seat in the Pennsylvania legislature although she was unsuccessful. Later, during the early 1980s, she encouraged her brother-in-law, Louis Harris, to separate polls by gender. This evidenced the gender gap in approval polls for President Ronald Reagan.

In the 1970s, Yard became involved with the National Organization for Women (NOW) after her frustration with the treatment of female delegates by the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee. She served on the organization's political action committee from 1978 to 1984, and then as the political director from 1985 to 1987.

Yard was actively involved with the campaign to have the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratified in Illinois. She organized a march of more than 12,000 people at the Republican National Convention when the Illinois state legislature voted not to ratify the amendment. NOW also joined a group of other feminist organizations to protest the Pope's visit to the United States in September 1987 due to frustration with the Catholic Church's views on abortion, birth control, homosexuality and women's rights. Yard was arrested outside the Vatican Embassy for participating in the non-violant demonstration.

Eleanor Smeal, then president of NOW, suggested that Yard run for president in 1987. She challenged Noreen Connell, president of the New York state branch of NOW, for the presidency. Connell argued that NOW was ignoring women who were still observing traditional family roles.

Presidency of NOW
Immediately following her election as president, Yard championed the NOW campaign to encourage women to run for political positions at all levels, entitled the “feminization of power”.

The membership of NOW increased to 250,000 while Yard was the president, and its annual budget increased 70 percent, to over $10 million.

The organization opposed the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1987. Yard was actively involved in this issue, leading a protest outside the Capitol Building on the first day of the confirmation hearings and testifying [...].

She also called for the impeachment of President Ronald Reagan over the Iran–Contra affair.

The Illinois chapter of NOW endorsed Paul Simon in the 1990 Illinois Senate race, but Yard and the national branch considered supporting the Republican nominee, Lynn Morley Martin. The same year the organization set up a commission comprised of former politicians, including John Anderson, Ramsey Clark and Rose Bird, to advise on "the formation of a third-party coalition of feminists, environmentalists and social-justice activists".

Death and legacy
Yard died at the Fair Oaks Nursing Home in Pittsburgh on September 20, 2005, at age 93.