Melba Windoffer, born September 24,1910, was a Seattle activist who was involved in several local radical groups. She is best known for her work with Radical Women, a socialist feminist organization that she helped establish in 1967 along with Clara Fraser, Susan Stern and Gloria Martin. Windoffer was also an active member and sometimes secretary of the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) and the Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party (CRSP). Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s she also found time to support other radical Seattle organizations such as Seize the Time for Oppressed People (S.T.O.P.), Seattle Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD), Divorce Reform Committee, Coalition for Protective Legislation and the Action Childcare Coalition.
In her later years Windoffer became very active in defending the rights of senior citizens. She was a member of the Gray Panthers of Seattle and the Puget Sound Area Council of the National Council of Senior Citizens, and she continuously wrote letters to politicians and opinion pieces to newspapers to voice her displeasure in what she saw as poor treatment of senior citizens in the United States
A resident of West Seattle, and Windoffer also was active in the Duwamish Peninsula Community Commission and its decades long struggle with the City of Seattle to clean up Longfellow Creek.
Windoffer died in Seattle in 1993.
From the guide to the Melba Windoffer papers, 1933-1990, 1960-1985, (University of Washington Libraries Special Collections)
