“‘I couldn’t stand the screaming,’ historian Amy Swerdlow remembers about Bella Abzug. ‘She was just so aggressive — assertive doesn’t do it — aggressive and carrying on.’ That from Gloria Steinem. Journalist Doug Ireland recalls ‘those volcanic eruptions of Abzugian temper.’ ‘She got so angry that she punched me,’ colleague Ronnie Eldridge reports…This is how the feminist congresswoman’s friends, the ones who stayed loyal to her all her life, remember her….
“She served, flamboyantly, for three terms, focused mainly on women’s issues and world peace. (Although how you fight for peace while punching and yelling remains an interesting question)…Bella Abzug screamed and yelled and hit people. She was appalled when both her daughters grew up to be lesbians.”
In the book review below, feminist Carolyn See reviews a biography of late feminist icon Bella Abzug. Turns out that Abzug had something of a violent streak. Imagine that.
Woman’s Work
By Carolyn See,
Washington Post
December 7, 2007
BELLA ABZUG
An Oral History
By Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 320 pp. $25
“I couldn’t stand the screaming,” historian Amy Swerdlow remembers about Bella Abzug. “She was just so aggressive — assertive doesn’t do it — aggressive and carrying on.” That from Gloria Steinem. Journalist Doug Ireland recalls “those volcanic eruptions of Abzugian temper.” “She got so angry that she punched me,” colleague Ronnie Eldridge reports, “on Fifth Avenue in front of De Pina’s. That was the only time she ever really hit me.” This is how the feminist congresswoman’s friends, the ones who stayed loyal to her all her life, remember her.
Abzug was born in the Bronx of Russian Jewish immigrants who told Bella and her sister they could do anything they wanted when they grew up, and Bella took this seriously. She raised money for the Zionist state-to-be when she was just a little kid, trolling the subways with a Mason jar. When her father died, she went to the synagogue every day for a year to sing kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Except that only guys are supposed to do that, and she was a girl, and only 12. She went on to Hunter College, where she excelled, and then to Columbia Law School — one of the first women to be admitted there, and she was Jewish to boot.
From the very beginning of her adult life, she had trouble working for anybody and soon set up her own office. She experienced insults about her appearance (she was chunky, and put on more weight as she got older), about her abrasive voice and her abusive personality, but it seemed to roll right off her most of the time. “I’m Bella’s oldest friend,” Mim Kelber, her speechwriter, remembers. “She liked herself too much, but I think you need that. She was very self-confident.” Except that later on, when she was a successful member of the House of Representatives, she broke down in tears at a political “roast,” when a man dressed up like her with a fat, padded fanny, and another man, impersonating her long-suffering husband, came out in a frilly apron.
She began her career working as a lawyer for progressive causes that often were doomed to fail. She represented a black man who was accused of raping a white woman in Mississippi. (He said they were having a consensual affair.) The jury deliberated for a full 2 1/2 minutes and, of course, he was eventually executed. After a few disheartening events like this, Abzug got a clue. She wanted to change the world and thought she could. She ran for the House from a section of Manhattan. She served, flamboyantly, for three terms, focused mainly on women’s issues and world peace. (Although how you fight for peace while punching and yelling remains an interesting question.) Then she decided — despite good advice — to run for the Democratic senatorial nomination against Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She made some wiseass, ill-considered remarks and lost the primary to him. She also lost a mayoral primary election and then another House election. It looked like a disastrous losing streak, but maybe it wasn’t. She just kept going higher and wider, operating as a celebrity-feminist-organizer, always sporting her trademark hat, traveling all over the world addressing women’s conventions, addressing the United Nations. She was ubiquitous.
It’s become a tiresome platitude now that women of a certain age repeat: Their daughters and their granddaughters have not the faintest notion of what it was like before the feminist movement began in the early ’60s — how women couldn’t get credit to buy anything, couldn’t teach at colleges or universities, couldn’t get abortions unless they had the money to leave the country or the courage to put their lives in the hands of back-street butchers. (And please, no e-mails on this. I’m against abortion on principle, but I’m not a woman of childbearing years.) Young girls in those days were advised repeatedly in women’s magazines to become “good listeners,” i.e., to keep their mouths shut and, of course, their legs crossed. But if they kept them crossed too determinedly, then they were labeled as “man haters,” and that was bad, too. (more…)
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