Papers of Yolanda Bako, 1970-1995

Yolanda Bako was born in 1946 and grew up in the Bronx, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants who ran a bar and grill. She graduated from Evander Childs High School and worked as a secretary at various firms in New York City during the 1960s. She later served as public affairs coordinator and business coordinator at the Guggenheim Museum while taking courses part time. Bako became increasingly active in the movement against domestic violence and served as coordinator of the Center for the Elimination of Violence in the Family, a co-founder of the first shelter for battered women in New York City, and as a rape prevention and education specialist at the Crime Victims Service Center, Center for the Study of Social Intervention at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University. Beginning in 1974, she became a regular speaker at schools, colleges, hospitals, and women's groups, as well as testifying before the New York State legislature and the United States Congress. Bako was a founding member of the Mayor's Task Force on Rape, and coordinator of the Rape Prevention Committee of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, which sponsored the 1976 Women's Walk Against Rape. She was also on the New York Steering Committee of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and served as executive director of Volunteers Against Violence Technical Assistance Program (part of the American Friends Service Committee). She was the author of How to Start a Country-wide Task Force on Family Violence, and also wrote on class issues in the battered women's movement. In 1981 she moved to Woodstock, New York, to work for the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Bako also was part of a global network, in touch with the National Women's Aid Federation in London, traveling to St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. John, and Puerto Rico in 1982, working with Charlotte Bunch and Kathleen Barry on international trafficking in women as part of the agenda of Forum '85, the nongovernmental women's conference held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985, and attending the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, September 1995. In the 1980s Bako worked as a mental health therapy aide at the Bronx State Psychiatric Hospital.