A Woman of Many Hats
NOVEMBER 24, 2007 TAGS:
By Judy Bachrach
In 1970, when the tempestuous feminist, civil rights lawyer and anti-war activist Bella Abzug realized that despite all her hard work on behalf of the new mayor of New York, John Vliet Lindsay, he was not going to offer her a job in his administration, she went on vacation to sort things out.
Beside her, as always, was her loyal husband, Martin, patting her hand in Martinique. He had married her a quarter of a century earlier, while Abzug was still in law school. She had always attributed the solidity of their marriage to a simple formula: “Great sex.”
She also valued his advice.
“Why don’t you run yourself?” asked Martin.
To clear her head, Abzug decided to go deep-sea diving. “There’s no experience like it…. There’s no interference, there’s no conflict, you’re just down there with yourself -- intensely,” the authors Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom quote Abzug as saying in their new eponymous work, an oral history of the feminist leader and congresswoman. “You have complete openness and clarity. Some people say that’s how you feel before you die.”
It was, fittingly, in the deep seas that Abzug made her most fateful decision. “Well, God damn it, I think it’s overdue. I will run!”
She never became mayor of New York (although not for lack of trying). But the following year – at age 50 – she acted on her “overdue” decision. Running as a Democrat from Manhattan, she became one of just 12 American congresswomen at the time. And nothing in American politics – or the history of women -- was ever the same after that. As the former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro recalled in the Levine-Thom biography, “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.”
Needless to say, such battering tactics also had their downside; but they were the only methods Abzug seemed bent on using. Born in the Bronx to Russian Jewish immigrants, she was always a handful -- “Born yelling,” she used to say of herself. In the ’40s, she was accepted at Columbia University, where she received her law degree, an unusual choice for a woman in that era. By 1944 she was practicing labor law, or at least trying to.
“Yes, please sit down,” clients would tell her when she walked into their offices. Then minutes would pass, but nothing would happen.
“What are you waiting for?” Bella would ask.
“The lawyer,” was the inevitable response.
To give herself an air of authority, the young woman always put on a hat before meeting with clients. Those hats, growing ever larger as the years passed, stayed with her forever; they accompanied her at every step in her vociferous and increasingly remarkable career. “I got to like them,” she later reflected, “as I suppose most people have noticed.”
People noticed her, all right. In fact, when Abzug finally made good on her promise to run for public office, she became within short order a national figure: loved and reviled, admired and despised, sometimes in the same breath. In 1971, on her very first day as a congresswoman, Abzug introduced a motion demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. Just a few months later, she championed a bill promoting the use of “Ms.” in government documents. She pushed for the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment, which was drafted to guarantee gender equality, and in 1972 became the first member of Congress to demand the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Two years later, along with fellow congressman Ed Koch, she introduced the first federal gay-rights bill.
These actions, in a highly activist era, brought her a special degree of fame and very special friends. The actresses Candice Bergen, Shirley MacLaine and Marlo Thomas; the feminist leader Gloria Steinem; the singer Lesley Gore, who was her neighbor; Faye Wattleton, in the era when she was president of Planned Parenthood – they all became Bella’s cheerleaders and champions. Abzug in turn would advise them on their love lives (“What can you see in that pipsqueak?” she remarked three decades ago to the statuesque Wattleton, who was dating journalist Carl Bernstein).
But some of the very liberals Abzug knew, people who actually supported a number of her causes, hated the sight of her. Her old ally Ed Koch, who beat her in the New York mayoralty primary, decided “that Bella is a radical” who ran a “truck operation – I’m talking about her personally running over you…. She bulldozes people.” The consumer activist Ralph Nader observed in a report that any bill sponsored by Abzug would cost the legislation at least 20 to 30 votes.
Worse, after three terms in Congress, she decided to expand her horizons by running for the Senate – a legislative body then empty of women. Abzug’s commercials were memorable: “What’s wrong with this picture?” asked the announcer, and all the viewer could see was 100 male senators. Then came the slogan: “A stag Senate is a stag-nation.”
The campaign itself, however, was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Abzug seemed to have forgotten how to win. When asked by the media if – in the event she lost in the primary to her chief Democratic rival, Daniel Patrick Moynihan – she would support him in the general election, she refused. (Privately, she was even more adamant: “Absolutely not. I won’t support that son of a bitch,” she told a labor leader.)
Attacked in Brooklyn by a group of Orthodox Hassidic Jews in traditional dark hats and ringlets for being pro-gay rights – “How could you support perverts?” was how the questions were phrased – Abzug exploded. “What the hell is this? You want to talk about perverts? Look at all these men wearing hats and ear curls!”
Even her champions were devastated. “You just knew, there it went,” one of them later reflected. “We’d just lost Brooklyn.” And not just Brooklyn. Abzug was “a fishwife,” the establishment decided. The New York Times endorsed Moynihan, who won.
After that defeat, nothing really worked for Abzug. In 1977 she became the first woman to run for mayor of New York. And lost. A year later she lost again – this time in a special election to fill a vacant congressional seat. In 1986 she ran yet again for Congress, and lost yet again. It was during that campaign that her beloved husband died of a heart attack. They had been married 42 years.
Abzug continued working: In 1990, for instance, she co-founded the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, which encouraged the participation of women in United Nations conferences. But she was ailing. For years she had battled breast cancer. In 1998, her heart gave out and she died. She was 77.
Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.
In 1970, when the tempestuous feminist, civil rights lawyer and anti-war activist Bella Abzug realized that despite all her hard work on behalf of the new mayor of New York, John Vliet Lindsay, he was not going to offer her a job in his administration, she went on vacation to sort things out.Beside her, as always, was her loyal husband, Martin, patting her hand in Martinique. He had married her a quarter of a century earlier, while Abzug was still in law school. She had always attributed the solidity of their marriage to a simple formula: “Great sex.”
She also valued his advice.
“Why don’t you run yourself?” asked Martin.
To clear her head, Abzug decided to go deep-sea diving. “There’s no experience like it…. There’s no interference, there’s no conflict, you’re just down there with yourself -- intensely,” the authors Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom quote Abzug as saying in their new eponymous work, an oral history of the feminist leader and congresswoman. “You have complete openness and clarity. Some people say that’s how you feel before you die.”
It was, fittingly, in the deep seas that Abzug made her most fateful decision. “Well, God damn it, I think it’s overdue. I will run!”
She never became mayor of New York (although not for lack of trying). But the following year – at age 50 – she acted on her “overdue” decision. Running as a Democrat from Manhattan, she became one of just 12 American congresswomen at the time. And nothing in American politics – or the history of women -- was ever the same after that. As the former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro recalled in the Levine-Thom biography, “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.”
Needless to say, such battering tactics also had their downside; but they were the only methods Abzug seemed bent on using. Born in the Bronx to Russian Jewish immigrants, she was always a handful -- “Born yelling,” she used to say of herself. In the ’40s, she was accepted at Columbia University, where she received her law degree, an unusual choice for a woman in that era. By 1944 she was practicing labor law, or at least trying to.
“Yes, please sit down,” clients would tell her when she walked into their offices. Then minutes would pass, but nothing would happen.
“What are you waiting for?” Bella would ask.
“The lawyer,” was the inevitable response.
To give herself an air of authority, the young woman always put on a hat before meeting with clients. Those hats, growing ever larger as the years passed, stayed with her forever; they accompanied her at every step in her vociferous and increasingly remarkable career. “I got to like them,” she later reflected, “as I suppose most people have noticed.”
People noticed her, all right. In fact, when Abzug finally made good on her promise to run for public office, she became within short order a national figure: loved and reviled, admired and despised, sometimes in the same breath. In 1971, on her very first day as a congresswoman, Abzug introduced a motion demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. Just a few months later, she championed a bill promoting the use of “Ms.” in government documents. She pushed for the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment, which was drafted to guarantee gender equality, and in 1972 became the first member of Congress to demand the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Two years later, along with fellow congressman Ed Koch, she introduced the first federal gay-rights bill.These actions, in a highly activist era, brought her a special degree of fame and very special friends. The actresses Candice Bergen, Shirley MacLaine and Marlo Thomas; the feminist leader Gloria Steinem; the singer Lesley Gore, who was her neighbor; Faye Wattleton, in the era when she was president of Planned Parenthood – they all became Bella’s cheerleaders and champions. Abzug in turn would advise them on their love lives (“What can you see in that pipsqueak?” she remarked three decades ago to the statuesque Wattleton, who was dating journalist Carl Bernstein).
But some of the very liberals Abzug knew, people who actually supported a number of her causes, hated the sight of her. Her old ally Ed Koch, who beat her in the New York mayoralty primary, decided “that Bella is a radical” who ran a “truck operation – I’m talking about her personally running over you…. She bulldozes people.” The consumer activist Ralph Nader observed in a report that any bill sponsored by Abzug would cost the legislation at least 20 to 30 votes.
Worse, after three terms in Congress, she decided to expand her horizons by running for the Senate – a legislative body then empty of women. Abzug’s commercials were memorable: “What’s wrong with this picture?” asked the announcer, and all the viewer could see was 100 male senators. Then came the slogan: “A stag Senate is a stag-nation.”
The campaign itself, however, was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Abzug seemed to have forgotten how to win. When asked by the media if – in the event she lost in the primary to her chief Democratic rival, Daniel Patrick Moynihan – she would support him in the general election, she refused. (Privately, she was even more adamant: “Absolutely not. I won’t support that son of a bitch,” she told a labor leader.)
Attacked in Brooklyn by a group of Orthodox Hassidic Jews in traditional dark hats and ringlets for being pro-gay rights – “How could you support perverts?” was how the questions were phrased – Abzug exploded. “What the hell is this? You want to talk about perverts? Look at all these men wearing hats and ear curls!”Even her champions were devastated. “You just knew, there it went,” one of them later reflected. “We’d just lost Brooklyn.” And not just Brooklyn. Abzug was “a fishwife,” the establishment decided. The New York Times endorsed Moynihan, who won.
After that defeat, nothing really worked for Abzug. In 1977 she became the first woman to run for mayor of New York. And lost. A year later she lost again – this time in a special election to fill a vacant congressional seat. In 1986 she ran yet again for Congress, and lost yet again. It was during that campaign that her beloved husband died of a heart attack. They had been married 42 years.
Abzug continued working: In 1990, for instance, she co-founded the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, which encouraged the participation of women in United Nations conferences. But she was ailing. For years she had battled breast cancer. In 1998, her heart gave out and she died. She was 77.
Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.
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