Molly Yard, who died yesterday at 93, was the scrappy one-time president of the National Organization of Women who led the charge against the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, among other crusades.

An outspoken, energetic liberal and self-proclaimed disciple of Eleanor Roosevelt, she brought to office the additional gravitas of age – she was thought to be 75 at her election in 1987 but refused to be more specific as a protest against “ageism.” During Yard’s term in office, cut short by the 1991 stroke that effectively ended her career, NOW’s membership nearly doubled, to 270,000 members.

They were years of confrontation, and the pugnacious Yard was well-suited to them. Yard called for President Reagan’s impeachment over the Iran-Contra affair, and labeled Mr. Bork a “Neanderthal.” In another Supreme Court battle, she said that confirming David Souter would mean “ending freedom for women in this country,” an enslavement that failed to materialize.

If her rhetoric was often scarlet, it came from the heart. She was, as she liked to say, a “born feminist,” and radical protest ran in her family.

Mary Alexander Yard – known to all as Molly – was born in Shanghai, probably on July 6, 1912, the daughter of a Methodist missionary, James Yard. He was well-known for giving lectures to American audiences, urging them to abandon racial prejudice and treat the Chinese as equals or risk alienating a sleeping giant. He was relieved of his position at the West China Union University after proposing that missions be turned over to indigenous leaders. The family moved back to Chicago, where, at the height of the Depression, Molly’s father was dismissed as director of religious activities at Northwestern for socialist leanings.

Yard liked to tell the story that, when she was born, her father was presented with a brass bowl by his Chinese friends as consolation that he had only daughters. They apparently misread the family’s attitude. The Yards sent all three daughters to college, in part on the insistence of Molly’s mother, whose educational aspirations had been frustrated by her own father.

Yet some bitterness remained. “I grew up with that whole devaluation of myself because I was female,” she once said. “It’s outrageous, and it stays with you all your life.”

At Swarthmore, Yard had a reputation of political involvement, but by dint of good looks managed “to escape even the slightest hint of disheveled radicalism,” according to the college yearbook. On campus, she led the fight to close down the Greek system after a Jewish friend was denied a place in a sorority.

After working briefly as a social worker in Philadelphia, Yard became chair woman of the leftist American Student Union. When the ASU criticized the New Deal for failing to provide more jobs for graduating students, Eleanor Roosevelt met with her, and the two became friends. Yard said she was Roosevelt’s “spiritual disciple,” and in later years, referred to the first lady as “E.R.” When President Reagan marked Roosevelt’s centenary with a Rose Garden ceremony in 1984,Yard was outside in a T-shirt supporting the Equal Rights Amendment.

In the 1940s, Yard became involved with Democratic politics and remained a player for the next half century. In the 1980s, she led the fight for “gender balance,” the insistence that half of all party appointments be female. Her loyalty to the Democratic Party was not absolute, however. Also in the late 1980s, in a moment of frustration, Yard tried to spark a movement for a national women’s party. It went nowhere.

After marrying Sylvester Garett, a Stanford law professor, in 1950, Yard moved to California, where she campaigned for Helen Gahagan Douglas against Richard Nixon in the race for U.S. Senate. She had three children, although she later admitted she was “not a genius” as a mother and “had very good housekeepers.”

Having moved back to Pennsylvania, where her husband became a leading steel-industry labor mediator, Yard continued to campaign for Democrats. She ran for the state Legislature in 1964, her one foray into electoral politics. During the 1960s, she became heavily involved in civil rights, and then in the Pittsburgh NOW chapter, where she became a close ally of Eleanor Smeal.

When Ms. Smeal became president of NOW in 1977,Yard spearheaded the organization’s campaign to extend the deadline for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The two worked together for the next decade, Ms. Smeal as president and Yard, eventually, as political director. Yard then succeeded Ms. Smeal as president. Some NOW delegates at the time worried that Yard would merely be an elderly caretaker of Ms. Smeal’s legacy. Their worries disappeared soon after her election, when Yard was arrested outside the Vatican’s embassy for a publicity stunt. “The Last Supper was about betrayal,” she told the press. “The last lunch” – a package she placed outside the embassy door – “is about the betrayal of women’s rights.” It was the kind of in-your-face activism the movement thrived on, and membership blossomed.

In 1990, she threatened a potato boycott if Idaho’s governor failed to veto a restrictive abortion bill. The bill was vetoed.

“She was one of the major reasons the movement kept hanging in there,” Ms. Smeal told The New York Sun. “Her lasting legacy is her drive for equal rights.” Ms. Smeal also credited Yard with leading the fight to reinstate Title IX, the regulations stipulating that public moneys must fund women’s and men’s university sports equally.

In 1991,Yard suffered a stroke, from which she never fully recovered, and turned the NOW presidency over to Patricia Ireland. Her later years were marked by sadness after her daughter committed suicide in 1992 and her husband died in 1996. She continued to maintain an office at the Feminist Majority Foundation until the late 1990s.

She is survived by two sons and five grandchildren.