"One Tough Broad from the Bronx": An Oral History of Bella Abzug

By Ruth Rosen, Wellesley Centers for Women. Posted August 6, 2008.

Bella Abzug: An Oral History: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Joe McCarthy, Pissed off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way. -- By Suzanne Braun Levine and May Thom

The title says it all. Wherever people fought for social justice and human rights in mid-twentieth century America, Bella Abzug was there, organizing and strategizing, brash but brilliant, abrasive yet empathic.

Abzug knew herself well:

There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing. Whether I'm any of these things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am -- and this ought to be made very clear at the outset -- I am a very serious woman.

To capture the extraordinary life of this very "serious woman," Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, both former Ms. editors, have collected parts of her unfinished autobiography, along with interviews with family members, journalists, activists, politicians, and friends, and shaped these into a chronological narrative of her life.

The result is fascinating. Everyone who encountered Abzug seems to have a "Bella story." Sometimes people contradict each other, presenting different views of her formidable personality and her many political battles. More often, their collective memories offer a layered and textured portrait of one of the most powerful women to challenge and change American society during the last century.

Between her birth in 1920 and her death in 1998, Abzug fought for a series of progressive causes. She was among a handful of pioneering female attorneys who graduated from Columbia University in 1945, and she practiced civil rights and labor law for twenty-five years. She was also a consummate activist and organizer who successfully challenged laws and customs. She fought for the rights of union workers and African Americans, protested the use of the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War, waged endless battles to advance women's rights, and spent the last years of her life promoting environmentalism and human rights.

When she plunged into the women's movement during the late 1960s, Abzug infused feminism with her fierce, strategic, take-no-prisoners spirit. As Geraldine Ferraro reminds us,

She didn't knock lightly on the door. She didn't even push it open or batter it down. She took it off the hinges forever! So that those of us who came after could walk through!

To many activists, she seemed indefatigable and indomitable. In 1970, at the age of 50, she campaigned for a congressional seat with the slogan "This woman's place is in the House, the House of Representatives." On her very first day in office, she introduced a bill to end the war in Vietnam. The next day, she authored legislation for comprehensive childcare, which passed Congress, but was vetoed by President Richard Nixon. In the name of defending human rights, she quickly joined a small group of representatives who supported the new gay liberation movement.

Like many activists of her generation, Abzug was constantly watched by the FBI. Her radical past always threatened to sabotage her effectiveness as a leader, something Levine and Thom fail to address. Her husband had been a member of the Young Communist League, although according to journalist Doug Ireland, Abzug herself never joined the Party. A product of the popular front culture of the 1930s, she had remained a sympathetic "fellow traveler."

Her past surfaced when, as a member of Congress, she authored legislation to fund a National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977. Given her leadership skills, feminist activists wanted the Carter administration to appoint her as chair of the conference. First, however, she had to be vetted by the government. Midge Costanza, Jimmy Carter's public emissary to women and racial and ethnic minorities, recalls what happened: "The FBI called me and said, 'Are you serious? You want this background check done immediately? There's a whole room of files on Bella Abzug!'"

Despite her decades of radical activism, Bella Abzug ended up chairing the Houston Conference, an historic event whose "real significance," remembers journalist David Broder, "was to bury the idea that so-called women's issues are a sideshow to the center-ring concerns of politics." At stake was nothing less than the future direction and reputation of the American women's movement. "Bella and all of us were worried," recalls Gloria Steinem, "that this huge conference would break apart in the bright light of national publicity." With Abzug at the helm, however, the 20,000 women who attended the conference passed a progressive and visionary Plan of Action, which included, among its many controversial planks, the right of sexual preference, the rights of minorities and welfare mothers, reproductive freedom and the Equal Rights Act.

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Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.

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