Melba Windoffer, born September 24,1910, was a Seattle activist who was involved in several local radical groups. She is best known for her work with Radical Women, a socialist feminist organization that she helped establish in 1967 along with Clara Fraser, Susan Stern and Gloria Martin. Windoffer was also an active member and sometimes secretary of the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) and the Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party (CRSP). Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s she also found time to support other radical Seattle organizations such as Seize the Time for Oppressed People (S.T.O.P.), Seattle Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD), Divorce Reform Committee, Coalition for Protective Legislation and the Action Childcare Coalition.
In her later years Windoffer became very active in defending the rights of senior citizens. She was a member of the Gray Panthers of Seattle and the Puget Sound Area Council of the National Council of Senior Citizens, and she continuously wrote letters to politicians and opinion pieces to newspapers to voice her displeasure in what she saw as poor treatment of senior citizens in the United States
A resident of West Seattle, and Windoffer also was active in the Duwamish Peninsula Community Commission and its decades long struggle with the City of Seattle to clean up Longfellow Creek.
Windoffer died in Seattle in 1993.
Arranged into 4 series:
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.
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Material stored offsite; advance notice required for use.
Literary rights have been transferred to the University of Washington Libraries.
Melba Winoffer papers. Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, Washington.
Source: Melba Windoffer, 1965, 1967, 1972 and Mary Walker, 1993.
Processed by Molly Hults; processing completed in 2007.
Original accessions 0554-001, 1798-001 and 1798-002 have been merged to create the current accession 1798-003. Additional materials previously accessioned as Radical Women of Seattle records (accessions 1180-001, 1492-001, 1774-001, 1774-002, and 1774-003) were determined to be more appropriately located with Windoffer's other files and were consequently merged into this accession during processing.
The Melba Windoffer files contained a considerable amount of duplicate materials, which were removed during processing. Additionally, newspaper clippings that did not directly pertain to Melba Windhoffer, her family, or the organizations of which she was a member, were removed. Personal materials such as Social Security information and returned checks also were also removed.
Papers concerning Clara Fraser were removed from this collection and integrated into the Clara Fraser Papers as Accession 3187-002. A significant collection of the Socialist Workers Party Discussion Bulletin was removed for separate cataloging. Also removed were printed materials that didn't relate to major organizations or subjects in which Windoffer took an interest.
The three most prominent organizations are listed first, with the rest of the organizations listed alphabetically thereafter.
The Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party (CRSP) was born out of the Los Angeles Conference on Revolutionary Regroupment in July of 1977. A group of revolutionary socialists from various socialist groups and sections of the United States assembled in L.A. to announce the formation of a new political tendency dedicated to the reconstitution of American Trotskyism. They considered themselves a part of the Fourth International, which is dedicated to the application of Marxist principles to contemporary social reality. Many of the members of CRSP were early Socialist Workers Party members that left the SWP over various issues.
The CRSP records include organizational papers such as their statement of purpose, phone lists, meeting minutes and financial reports. The records also include distributed information that promoted CRSP's message and events. There are both internal and external correspondence including letters to and from some of CRSP's more prominent members Edith and Milt Zaslow, Murry Weiss, Myra Tanner Weiss and Clara Fraser.
The Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) was established in 1966 by a group of former members of the Seattle branch of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The group broke from the SWP in May of 1966 over issues such as feminism, Socialist Regroupment, and the Chinese Revolution, as well as the belief that the SWP had become too conservative and bureaucratic.
The FSP is a socialist feminist organization that believes that capitalist rule needs to be replaced by a workers' democracy that will guarantee full economic, social, political, and legal equality to women, people of color, gays, and all who are exploited and oppressed.
The early years of the FSP were fraught with internal disagreements, most significantly about women's rights. The divorce of Richard and Clara Fraser, two of the prominent FSP leaders, disrupted the party and ultimately resulted in two factions within the FSP. The majority faction sided with Clara, and in November 1967 expelled Richard from the FSP. The minority faction, upset with his expulsion, left with Richard. After a struggle over which faction was to retain the name Freedom Socialist Party, the majority faction, with Clara Fraser as their leader, prevailed.
The Freedom Socialist Party papers include organizational materials, membership lists, internal and external correspondence , financial records, distributed information, position papers & writings, curriculum, and conference materials. Also included are internal documents such as memos and correspondence that provide information about various internal struggles within the group, as well as concerning the initial split with the Socialist Workers Party. Windoffer was close to Clara Fraser and retained copies of the documentation she provided in support of Fraser during her difficult divorce and child custody battle with Richard Fraser.
In 1973 the Freedom Socialist Party formally affiliated with Radical Women and some distributed information was published jointly. In these instances, the materials were processed with the Freedom Socialist Party files.
Radical Women (RW) was established in 1967 in Seattle by Clara Fraser, Gloria Martin, Melba Windoffer and Susan Stern as a socialist feminist organization. Radical Women is an all women organization dedicated to "exposing, resisting and eliminating the inequities of women's existence by providing women the leadership skills, social history, and working-class consciousness that they were denied in the male-dominated antiwar, antipoverty and civil-rights movements." RW was very active in anti-Vietnam War protests, labor issues, gay rights, women rights in the workplace, divorce reform, and other issues than affect oppressed peoples.
Over time, additional branches of Radical Women were established in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and New York, as well as other cities. Today Radical Women is an international organization with branches in El Salvador and Australia. In 1973, Radical Women became officially affiliated with the Freedom Socialist Party.
Melba Windoffer eventually left the group because she felt they discriminated against older women.
Collection contains organizational records including financial records, membership lists (and birthdays) and meeting minutes, correspondence, mailings, press releases, handbills announcing events, writings and position papers, and newspaper clippings that reference the organization from the late 1960s through 1980.The majority of the collection consists of materials from the Seattle branch of Radical Women. There is a limited amount of correspondence and distributed information from branches in Alaska, Los Angeles, New York, Portland and San Francisco. There are also agendas, speeches and writings from conferences held during the 1970s.
Alphabetically by subject.
According to the type of record.
There are other letters from Myra Tanner Weiss located in the Organizations series correspondence files, however, these letters are more personal in nature and sent directly to Windoffer.
2 subseries:
The Newspapers and magazine subseries is arranged alphabetically by title. The Pamphlets subseries is arranged alphabetically by publisher.
The radical literature series is a collection of newspapers, magazines and pamphlets published by socialist, communist, feminist, labor organizers, and other progressive movements. Most of the newspaper and magazine files only contain 1 to 3 issues of each title. The majority of the pamphlets were published by publishers interested in socialist causes such as New Park Publications, Pioneer Publishers and New Park Publications.