Thalia Yaffey Stern Broudy Collected Papers

Thalia A. Broudy grew up in Washington, D.C. She attended the University of Wisconsin and the University of Miami. She married Philip Stern in the late 1940s. When her husband was drafted in 1950 and stationed at the Brooke Army Hospital as a dentist, Thalia accompanied him to San Antonio, Texas. During those years she was introduced to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and she met with other members of the F.O.R. when she returned to Miami Beach. This began Thalia's peace activism. In the early 1950s she joined the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and headed its world disarmament committee. Other early involvements included working, along with a small group of Jewish activists, on Jack Orr's 1958 legislative campaign, and helping to establish Miami CORE in 1959. Thalia and her husband joined two other couples in a lawsuit over mandatory Bible reading in the Dade County schools. She was an important member of the Greater Miami Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, working against civil defense and nuclear testing, and helped to establish the Miami Peace Center. She and her activist friends conducted a Women Strike for Peace march in Miami. Broudy also became the Miami contact for the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA); it was there that the Quebec to Guantanamo Peace Walk orchestrated antiwar demonstrations, gave radical speeches, and confronted hard-line Cuban exiles. Miami supporters fed, housed and raised funds for the CNVA walkers; when the walkers purchased a boat to sail to Cuba, they docked it in the canal behind the Sterns' home.

Thalia was hired in the 1960s as the first white Kindergarten teacher at the Liberty City elementary school. Her specialty was in music. She was still working as a teacher when she was 77 years old.

The Sterns divorced in the early 1970s, and Thalia moved with her three daughters to Berkeley, California. She later married Bob Broudy, and has remained living in Berkeley ever since.

[information in part from A Jewish Feminine Mystique: Jewish Women in Postwar America]