Pat Youngdahl (1927–2024)

Pat Youngdahl was a clinical psychologist who advocated for women’s rights and for racial equality, as well as for mental health services for children in Arkansas. When the famous feminist quartet of Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan, alongside others, formed the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 to push for women’s equal participation in American government, Youngdahl joined the group and led the creation of the Arkansas Women’s Political Caucus. Youngdahl served as chair of the caucus for eight years and was instrumental in turning the group’s goals into policy. She also served as the chair of the Democratic Party in Arkansas and was a delegate to Democratic nominating and midterm conventions.

Patricia Ruth (Pat) Lucy was born on September 8, 1927, at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the elder of two daughters of George Lucy and Alta Lucy. She spent her childhood in Parma, Missouri, a small town a few miles from Arkansas near the Mississippi River, graduating from high school at the age of sixteen. Her father was well-educated for a community in rural Missouri, as well as an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a liberal on such matters as race. She attended Stephens College, one of two women’s colleges in Columbia, Missouri, both a few blocks from the University of Missouri, where she met Jim Youngdahl, a liberal-arts student who was passionate about worker rights and unions. After college, he became an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

Pat Lucy transferred to the University of Chicago, studied Freudian psychoanalysis, received a degree in clinical psychology, and entered Washington University at St. Louis, where she received a master’s degree. After she graduated in 1948, she and Youngdahl were married. They would have two sons and two daughters. While raising the children, she worked part-time and continued her studies in psychology, receiving a doctorate in 1985 from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida.

Jim Youngdahl’s union work, organizing clothing workers in Arkansas, brought him into contact with Henry Woods, a personal-injury and union attorney in Little Rock (Pulaski County) who was a law partner of former governor Sid McMath. Woods persuaded Jim Youngdahl to get a law degree and practice union and personal-injury law with the McMath firm at Little Rock. The Youngdahls moved to Fayetteville (Washington County), where Jim studied at the University of Arkansas School of Law and Pat took a job in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arkansas (UA).

After Jim received his law degree and license, the couple moved to Little Rock, where he joined the McMath and Woods firm soon after the constitutional crisis surrounding the desegregation of Central High School erupted. Pat Youngdahl joined the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, which advocated the end of segregation, and, in 1959, joined the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC), which had organized in September 1958 to fight to reopen the city’s high schools after Governor Orval E. Faubus closed them (in what was called “the Lost Year”) to avoid integration at Central High School. The women elected moderate school board candidates at a special election in late summer, and the high schools reopened in August, ending the state’s defiance of court orders.

Youngdahl subsequently became part of the Panel of American Women, a group of women of different races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures that was formed in 1963 to facilitate discussions about understanding and bridging different cultures. The group carried on the work of the WEC and took it to local civic and professional groups around the state.

Youngdahl’s work in the 1970s revolved around the Women’s Political Caucus and particularly the Democratic Party. She was an Arkansas delegate to four Democratic national conventions, worked on the party platforms, and was briefly the state Democratic chair. As a delegate from Arkansas, she famously cast the only vote against Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, after her candidate, the liberal Arizona congressman Morris K. “Mo” Udall, and other candidates capitulated.

The caucus conducted seminars that educated women on filing for political offices, notably the Arkansas General Assembly, but the biggest goal of Women’s Political Caucus, nationally and in Arkansas, was ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was ultimately unsuccessful. When the ERA was to go before the Arkansas legislature for ratification in 1973, she spoke to civic clubs and lobbied legislators to ratify the ERA.

In 1968, she joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and was one of two psychologists who advocated that the state provide mental health counseling in school districts in central Arkansas. In 1967, UAMS announced that it and the adjoining state mental hospital would build a child study center with a federal grant. Youngdahl was director of the Child Study Center for four decades. She spearheaded some of the first research on children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Later in life, she focused her efforts on peace and served as president of the peace organization Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND). She often stood on street corners with signs advocating for shifting the federal government’s tax receipts from war to human welfare.

Youngdahl died on July 8, 2024.

For additional information:
Dumas, Ernest. “Feminist and Children’s Champion Pat Youngdahl Has Died.” Arkansas Times, July 16, 2024. Online at https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/07/16/civil-rights-champion-pat-youngdahl-dead-at-96 (accessed April 23, 2025).

“Pat Youngdahl Interview.” First Person Plural Project, March 14, 2015, https://pryorcenter.uark.edu/project.php?thisProject=21 (accessed April 23, 2025).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas