Molly Klopot
 Molly Klopot is literally a lifelong activist. Until three years ago (when she was 90), she was chair of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s New York Chapter. She initiated the very active NYC “gaggle” of the Raging Grannies, making national headlines when eighteen of them were arrested supporting the Arizona gaggle’s action asking military recruiters to accept them instead of their kids.
Molly’s immersion in the international Peace movement goes back to the beginning of the Cold War – she served in East Berlin with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, helping develop international meetings on women’s issues.
Before that, as a teen in Detroit during the Depression, she learned from her progressive family that, in unity, there is strength. The UAW sit-down strikes, Unemployed Councils, and mass demonstrations for food and jobs (four of her teen-age friends were murdered in the Ford Hunger March) shaped her life. She first worked in the newly-created Social Security Administration, where she and a friend organized the first State, County and Municipal Workers of America union. When war broke out she took a job as a “Rosie” in an assembly plant, and was elected the first women to be a union rep. To force Ford to hire black women (who had taken special qualifying courses), Molly organized informational picket lines – and it worked!
At Columbia University’s School of Social Work, she gave classes to union members on family problems, and as a practicing social worker she helped unmarried pregnant teens to gain the right to schooling within the public school system and to obtain City funding for a community childcare center. Molly’s deepest conviction is that being involved with the broader world, including people of all ages and abilities, and working for something bigger than yourself, will keep you forever vibrantly alive.
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Interview
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