Archives West Finding Aid

The Melba Windoffer papers consist of organizational records, position papers and writings, letters, distributed information and other documentation pertaining to various Seattle feminist and/or socialist organizations with which she was affiliated, either as an active member or as a supporter. The collection also reflects her avid interest in radical causes and contains printed materials she collected on a wide variety of topics. The papers span the years 1933-1990, with the bulk concentrated in the years she was most active in socialist organizations and Windoffer's retirement years, 1960-1985.

The Organizations series documents the activities of various Seattle radical organizations between 1954 and the late-1980s. The majority of the series documents the three organizations in which Windoffer actively participated - the Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party (CRSP), the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) and Radical Women. These files include organizational records, financial reports, internal memorandum, distributed information, correspondence, position papers, press releases, clippings, and internal publications.

The remaining items in the series document the activities of a variety of other local organizations during the same time period, and which were committed to issues such as women's rights, cleaning up the Duwamish River, socialism, ending the war in Vietnam, ending discrimination, and advocacy for labor and union rights. These records contain position papers, hand bills for events, press releases and other distributed information available to the general public. Winoffer collected limited internal organizational materials of the Coalition for Protective Legislation, Duwamish Peninsula Community Commission (DPCC), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Staff Rights Organizing Committee (University of Washington)/United Workers Union-Independent.

The bulk of the Subject files series pertains to labor and and advocacy for the needs and rights of senior citizens. Melba Windoffer's husband was an active member of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, Local 19 and Winoffer shared her husband's interest in labor issues. In her later years, Windoffer's main interest was championing the rights of senior citizens. She was active in local senior citizen groups and lobbied state and federal governments on topics pertaining to the elderly. These files contain newspaper clippings, magazine articles pertaining to these issues, as well as writings by Winoffer, in the form of letters to the editor, general correspondence, and position papers. Additionally Winoffer visited Ireland on several occasions and kept memorabilia from the trips, correspondence with people she met, and her writing about her trips and the conflict in Northern Ireland. The remaining subject files contain mostly publically distributed information and magazine and newspaper clippings on a variety of topics such as minority groups and foreign countries.

The Personal papers series contains a limited amount of personal papers such as correspondence, photocopies of jokes and cartoons Winoffer presumably found humorous, drafts and final version of letters to the editor, evidence of disputes in the neighborhood, and a few writings left by her husband Lawrence E. Winoffer. Among the personal correspondence are letters from Myra Tanner Weiss.

The Radical Literature series consists of a wide variety of radical literature collected by Winoffer from 1933 to 1990. The majority of the newspaper and magazine collection was published in the United States, with items ranging from U.S. student radical newspapers to national socialist and labor organization publications. There are also a limited number of international journals published in Ireland, China, Romania, England and the former Soviet Union. The pamphlets contain radical writings that cover many subjects from the 1930s through the 1980s. Topics include socialism, communism, civil rights, labor issues, "Mideast crisis", Cuban revolution, feminism, poverty, Marxism, Trotskyism.