West, Guida

Guida West and her children, Paul and Laurie, 1961 (copyright unknown)

Margarida "Guida" Pyles and her twin sister Yolanda Thereza were born November 9, 1927 in Sao Paulo, Brazil to Richard Milton and Etelvina Pacheco e Silva Pyles. Richard M. Pyles, an electrical engineer, descended from an Irish immigrant who emigrated from Mississippi to Americana, Brazil after the U.S. Civil War. Guida was graduated from Escola Graduada in 1944 and Colegio MacKenzie in Sao Paulo in 1945, then went to work as a bilingual secretary for General Motors de Brasil.

Finding that American institutions were eager for foreign students, Pyles applied and was accepted at sixteen U.S. colleges. She chose to attend Barnard College beginning in the fall of 1946 and completed an AB in mathematics in 1950. Unable to find a job in mathematics, she went to work in September 1950 as an executive bilingual secretary at the Brazilian Mission to the United Nations. When Hugo Gouthier, her boss at the U.N., changed jobs, she continued as his private secretary from 1953 until the Fall of 1958 while also pursuing graduate study in sociology at Columbia University. An important influence on her later work was a seminar with Paul Lazarsfeld concerning the impact of McCarthyism on racism in southern schools. She completed her M.A. in 1959.

Guida Pyles married John Maurice West, a chemical engineer, on February 3, 1951. After she suffered several miscarriages, the Wests adopted a daughter, Laura, in the spring of 1960. West later gave birth to a son, Paul.

Though a contemporary curriculum vita lists her occupation as "fulltime caregiver to two children" for the years 1960-70, West became intensely involved in the civil rights and welfare rights movements during these years. West described her motivation in an interview:

"I suppose for me it began as a young child in Brazil. We had a servant who was the son of a slave. He had almost no opportunity for formal schooling, but he was a brilliant man. As I grew older, and my respect for his ability increased, it seemed a terrible thing to me that this sickness in our society could cause us to lose the talent of such a man." (from "Local Brotherhood Award Winner Is a 'Do-Gooder' In the Best Sense," by Louise Saul, The Recorder, Metuchen, NJ, 17 Feb 1966)

Some of her earliest efforts were related to fair housing, developing a "Covenant of Open Occupancy" for Metuchen. She was also a charter member and "pioneer" of the Metuchen-Edison Racial Relations Council, which awarded her its first Brotherhood Award in 1966. She also served on the Montclair Council for Community Action, Essex County Legal Services, the Task Force to Support the Kilmer Job Corps, and the Montclair Interracial Council.

In a speech to the local NAACP in 1966, West recalled the day she became a U.S. citizen in 1961: "…that morning--as a new American--it was difficult for me to repeat the last six words of the pledge-'with liberty and justice for all.' For in our group there stood persons of minority groups to whom I knew liberty and justice are in reality just beautiful words and part of the unfulfilled American dream."

Convinced that the struggle for human rights, which she called "the struggle of our generation," must begin in the church, West organized a Church and Society Committee in her own parish, the First Presbyterian Church in Metuchen in 1961. "As a Presbyterian, I was told to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," she explained in a 1999 speech. This work led to her appointment in 1965 to the Commission on Religion and Race of the Presbyterian Synod of New Jersey (SynCORR).

When the Wests moved in 1966, they tested the town's new "Covenant of Open Occupancy" and sold their house to an African-American family. This resulted in a "campaign of harassment" that included angry phone calls, and letters, a rift with John's parents, and the posting of a lawn sign saying, "Nigger Lovers, Niggers, Block-Busters Keep Out."

In the spring of 1967 West and Nel Van Dijk, both members of the Presbyterian Synod of New Jersey's Church and Society Committee, indicated that they would like to see the Committee address "the new welfare reform." The Committee responded by asking the two women to prepare a report on the issue. "Still No Room at the Inn: A Report on Public Assistance," completed in October of 1967, provided the basis of West's life's work. Though she began with "all the stereotypes" about people on public assistance, West later said she was "transformed by the study." The "immorality of the existence of poverty in such an affluent society as ours" turned her from a "do gooder" to understanding the issue as a matter of "self interest."

The summer 1967 riots in Newark added urgency to her work for racial and economic justice. As a Ford Foundation Urban Fellow, 1967-68, West served as chair and organizer for Seminars on the Urban Crisis for the Urban Training Institute of Essex County in 1969, The Right To Live Conference in 1969, the New Jersey Mobilization Against Hunger in 1971, and co-chair of the Public Welfare Seminar sponsored by the New Jersey Council of Churches in 1968.

As West's interest in welfare grew, she soon got involved in local welfare rights work, serving on Welfare Task Forces in her church, in Essex County, and for the Urban Training Institute. West helped to organize a New Jersey Friends of Welfare Rights Organization in Newark. The group met for the first time in February of 1970.

In a draft statement, possibly for a graduate school application, West wrote that involvement with civil rights and welfare rights as a volunteer prompted her to realize the inadequacy of her background "…even with my own personal continuous study." She wrote, "a volunteer does not carry the power or the influence that a professional does… I want to use my available working years the most efficiently and effectively possible." To that end, she entered a Ph.D. program in sociology at Rutgers University in the fall of 1970.

Fascinated by the unique structure, strategies, and goals of the welfare rights movement, West decided to make it the subject of her thesis research. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) worked to establish the concept of a minimum standard of living as a citizenship right and a human right, continuing and extending the civil rights movement's "right to live" concept to include economic justice. Welfare recipients could join local Welfare Rights Organizations (WRO) which were affiliated with state, regional, and the national group. Supporters could join Friends of Welfare Rights Organizations (FWRO) to provide financial and other support, but could not dictate policy or strategy. This "twin track" structure of WROs and FWROs became the focus of West's research.

West's decision to study the movement necessitated a change in role for her from that of " participant -observer" to "participant- observer " as of July 1971. She kept very detailed field notes; joined mailing lists; collected flyers, publications, and clippings; attended conferences and meetings; and interviewed more than fifty key participants in the welfare rights movement.

With the women's movement of the 1970s, West began to recognize obstacles she faced as a woman activist. Though she was driven by the principles of tolerance, caring, and responsibility ("my understanding of Christian principles") ingrained by her father, she realized that she had not been socialized for conflict or to be assertive. She found it personally difficult to let go of the traditional wife and mother role, and the work she chose resulted in the loss of friends, conflict with family members, and threats to her children. Yet, she explained, "the women I worked with became my sisters," like a new family, "I cared deeply what happened to them."

While working on her thesis, West served as consultant sociologist to the newly-established Welfare Priority Team of the United Church of Christ from 1971 until the NWRO disbanded in 1974.

West earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Rutgers in 1978. Her thesis, "The National Welfare Rights Movement: Social Protest of Welfare Women (1966-1976)," became her first book, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women, which was published by Praeger in 1981. West described her work as an exploration of the question, "How do you bring about change?"

In the author's preface, West reflects that the work taught her "a great deal about my own paternalistic behavior and attitudes as well as the institutional racism prevalent in our society."

In her "Commentary" for West's book, the NWRO's Johnnie Tillmon wrote: "Guida West's story of the National Welfare Rights movement tells it like it was and how it came to be…. It is important because it is the history of poor women - especially poor Black women and poor White women and poor Hispanic women - in the United States. This is a history that is not often, if ever written about. Anyone who cares to understand about being poor in this country will learn much about our struggle in these pages."

After completing her Ph.D., West held various posts at Rutgers University between 1974 and 1987, including Coordinator of Continuing Education for Women in the Extension Division (1974-80), Assistant Professor of Sociology (1978-87), and Special Projects Administrator in the Institute for Research on Women (1987-89). She developed and supervised The New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum and Teaching (the first statewide, state-funded gender and multi-cultural scholarship and curriculum project in the U.S.), obtained grant funding to establish the Training Institute for Sex Desegregation of the Public Schools in 1975, and developed and implemented policy/action conferences on Displaced Homemakers and Adolescent Pregnancy prevention. She also helped to found the Rutgers Women's Center, the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women, the Rutgers Women's Studies Program, and the Begin Again (B.A.) Program for Women.

In 1983, West initiated a research project to study the "patterns of change in the political behavior and ideology" of a sample of national welfare rights leaders from their early years through the heyday of the welfare rights movement and into the early 1980s. The end result was intended to be a book, originally titled "Welfare Rights Leaders in a Becalmed Movement" and later, "Protest Leadership Outcomes: Welfare Rights Leaders a Decade Later." Though the book was never completed, West presented the research (including extensive interviews with NWRO leaders) in a number of conference papers beginning in 1984.

After being denied tenure at Rutgers, West went to work in 1989 as Director of Policy, Advocacy and Research for the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, Inc. (FPWA). In this capacity she gave testimony, and represented FPWA on various committees and boards associated with welfare and economic justice.

West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg compiled an anthology of essays, Women and Social Protest, about women's involvement in social change. Published by Oxford University Press in 1990, the book included articles by sociologists, political scientists, historians, and experts in women's studies. West authored a chapter titled "Women in the Welfare Rights Movement."

Beginning in 1990 she co-founded and co-directed the Welfare Reform Network (WRN) of New York City "to mobilize advocates and clients to influence welfare and poverty issues." The early 1990s brought Republican "Contract With America" efforts to change welfare, combined with Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign pledge to "reform welfare as we know it." In 1995, as federal legislation began to take shape, West was instrumental in forming the Women's Committee of One Hundred (WC100), a coalition of welfare recipients, social welfare professionals, activists, poverty lawyers, and others. WC100, which saw the reform effort as an attack on women's sexual and economic autonomy, worked to influence public opinion and counteract the prevailing narrative about welfare.

After her retirement from FPWA in December of 1994, West continued as a consultant to FPWA on poverty, income security, and welfare reform. She remained an involved activist for economic justice until advancing age and failing eyesight curtailed her activities.

From the guide to the Guida West Papers MS 555., 1946-2006, (Sophia Smith Collection)