Peg Yorkin, a noted feminist organizer and philanthropist, died Sunday at her home in Malibu. She was 96.
She had dementia, her daughter, Nicole Yorkin, told the Washington Post.
Peg Yorkin, the longtime chair, and co-founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) worked to promote and encourage women to fight for women’s equality and empowerment, highlighting the importance of access to safe and affordable reproductive health care.
Throughout her years of activism, Yorkin partnered with several activists, including the former president of the National Organization for Women, Eleanor Smeal. The two worked together on a 12-year campaign to bring the abortion pill mifepristone to the United States.
In 1954, Yorkin married producer Bud Yorkin, who later partnered with “All in the Family’s” Norman Lear. As her husband maintained his career in Hollywood, Yorkin became involved in the L.A. Shakespeare Festival and L.A. Public Theatre, and focused on their children, David and Nicole. She told the Los Angeles Times, “I was kind of a wife of the ’50s.”
But as second-wave feminism rose throughout the 1960s, Yorkin eventually turned towards politics and served as a California delegate to the National Women’s Conference of 1977, where she campaigned for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
In 1984, Bud and Peg Yorkin divorced, and that same year Yorkin produced the 20th anniversary gala for the National Organization for Women. In 1987, Yorkin and Smeal founded the FMF with Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli and Katherine Spillar. Four years later, she donated $10 million to the group, which became the largest donation a feminist organization had ever received.
The aforementioned donation was used for the drug mifepristone, also known as RU-486, which terminates pregnancies by blocking the hormone progesterone. Yorkin and Smeal, then lobbied lawmakers and the Clinton administration, in an effort to gain their support for the drug, as well as its use for treating progesterone-related cancers. Nine years after her initial donation, in 2000, the pill was approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Nancy Pelosi described Yorkin as “a giant of the feminist movement” in a statement to the Washington Post saying, “Her astute political mind helped power a wave of women running — and winning — up and down the ballot.”
Born in New York City on April 16, 1927, Yorkin trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Yorkin studied with Martha Graham and Sanford Meisner, and eventually worked in small theater and television roles. She then moved to Los Angeles in 1950 with her first husband, Newton Arnold.
Yorkin is survived by her children, Nicole, a TV writer-producer, and David, also a writer-producer, and four grandchildren.
