Yolanda Bako

Yolanda Bako was born in the Bronx; both of her parents were born in Hungary.^[1] Her father was a bouncer at a bar.^[2] She graduated from Evander Childs High School. "When I think of the universe, the Bronx is at its center," she commented about her origins, in 1978.^[3]

Bako worked as secretary and at the Guggenheim Museum as a young woman.^[4][5] She became coordinator of the Center for the Elimination of Violence in the Family,^[6] and in 1977 co-founded Women's Survival Space in Brooklyn,^[7] the city's first state-funded shelter for battered women.^[1][8] She was a rape prevention educator at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and a founding member of the Mayor's Task Force on Rape.^[9] She was active in the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women,^[10] and with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.^[11] She coordinated the 1976 Women's Walk Against Rape in Central Park, telling the New York Times, "We have the right to use the world at night."^[12]

In 1978, she testified at Congressional hearings on domestic violence and sexual assault.^[13][14] She was the author of How to start a county-wide task force on family violence (1980), a booklet for the American Friends Service Committee.^[15] In the 1980s she worked at the Bronx State Psychiatric Hospital as a mental health therapy aide, and in 1995 she attended the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.^[16] In 2017, Bako spoke at "a reunion of second-wave feminists" held by the Veteran Feminists of America in New York.^[17][16]

Over six feet tall,^[14] Bako was a striking presence in feminist activism in the 1970s New York.^[3] Her papers are in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard.^[18]