Candidate Backed by Smeal Elected President of NOW

PHILADELPHIA — Molly Yard, a septuagenarian with a gift for rafter-rattling oratory and the endorsement of outgoing President Eleanor Smeal, was elected Saturday night as president of the National Organization for Women.

Yard, who refuses to divulge her exact age, pointing out that Susan B. Anthony was campaigning for the vote for women well into her eighties, defeated Noreen Connell, 40, president of New York state’s NOW, by a margin of about 2 to 1.

Connell had charged that NOW has “lost once too often” on its issues to remain credible, has shifted too much power from chapters to the national board and has lost touch with “the real world” and the needs of women.

Agreed on Goals

The candidates agreed on NOW’s goals, including passage of an equal rights amendment by 1992, defeat of anti-abortion referendums and the blocking of confirmation of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. But they disagreed on how to achieve these goals.

Yard, taking the podium as supporters belted out, “Hello, Molly,” pledged that women will run for office at every level in every state in 1988. She said: “The time has come for us to say in a loud and clear voice, ‘we know our place, we know our power. We will take our place and we will take the power.’ ”

It was a resounding reply to those who have been questioning whether the women’s movement is dead, or at least stalled. Throughout NOW’s three-day conference, which closes today, speakers have denied that there is a requiem for feminism.

Yard, who has never before held a national NOW office, is a longtime liberal who was a campaign precinct organizer for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her 1950 campaign against Richard M. Nixon for a U.S. Senate seat from California.

Civil Rights Activist

She has been a civil rights activist, has worked in the labor movement and for Democratic Party reform.

Yard calls Pennsylvania home, but lives part-time in Washington, where she is national political director for NOW. She is married to Sylvester Garrett, a labor arbitrator, and has three grown children and four grandchildren.

Connell, who acknowledged from the start being the underdog, had called for “strong, fresh leadership” in an organization that for seven of its 21 years has been led by Smeal. Smeal did not run for reelection in order to initiate a “feminization of power” campaign, to begin in September under the aegis of the Fund for a Feminist Majority.

Earlier Saturday, NOW conferees gave a buoyant reception to Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who has said she will run for President if the money and “the enthusiasm is there.” They presented her with both.

It was Schroeder’s most tumultuous reception to date as she received $351,344 in checks and pledges from delegates to the NOW national conference.

Schroeder supporters said the amount represents donations of $250 or less per person, totaling $5,000 in each of 23 states, which would qualify her for matching federal funds. “Everything we’re counting has names, addresses and telephone numbers,” Smeal said. “It’s serious.”

‘Run, Pat, Run!’

Chants of “run, Pat, run!” rang through the ballroom of the Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel as 2,000 cheering members repeatedly interrupted Schroeder’s 30-minute talk.

Schroeder, a longtime NOW member, was the only potential or declared candidate invited.

Smeal explained: “Pat Schroeder has a very special relationship to the National Organization for Women . . . we weren’t going to make her one among many parading and saying: ‘I’ll do this, I’ll promise that’ . . . . We thought it would be very insulting, and also hypocritical.”

In her address, Schroeder told the delegates what they wanted to hear:

--”If I were President, we wouldn’t have a Bork. We would have a Barbara Jordan (former Democratic representative from Texas).”

--”Maybe women would be safer if we had a few more battered women’s shelters and fewer missiles.”

Earlier, Schroeder told a news conference that she did not vote for Reagan’s tax reform bill because of its marriage penalty. “You do better if you raise thoroughbred horses than if you raise children,” she said.

Schroeder, 46, who is married to Washington attorney James Schroeder and is the mother of a son, Scott, 21, and a daughter, Jamie, 17, said: “We’re still pretending that the American family looks like it did in 1890. . . . The real American family looks like mine, one or two struggling parents juggling 14 balls.”