November 5, 2020 45
To Nadler’s point, she wasn’t a
single- issue politician, and she didn’t
want to appeal to just one type of voter.
A lifelong leftist, she wanted to build a
coalition with “the young, the poor and
blue collar workers, the peace move-
ment, the disenfranchised minorities,
and concerned women,” as she once
put it. She disagreed strongly with fem-
inists who wanted to support all women
political candidates regardless of their
positions. Abzug’s support was contin-
gent on the candidates’ politics, as well
as on their competence and efficacy.
Her standards sometimes made her a
controversial figure within the women’s
movement, even as she became one of
its leaders.
Before Abzug was an elected offi-
cial, she was a socialist from the South
Bronx with a gift for oratory. She was
born Bella Savitzky in 1920, the year
American women won the right to vote.
Her parents were Russian- Jewish im-
migrants; her father owned a success-
ful butcher shop called the Live and
Let Live Meat Market, a name Abzug
later interpreted as a “personal protest
against the imperialist World War I.”
Abzug’s Jewish education provided a
sense of social justice: she learned the
principles of tikkun olam, “healing
the world,” and tzedakah, charitable
giving. She was raised Orthodox, a tra-
dition that separated men and women
in religious services. When her father
died of a heart attack, in 1934, she
broke custom by saying Kaddish from
a corner in her local synagogue (the
practice was reserved for sons). “The
men scowled at me but no one stopped
me,” she later recalled.
As a preteen, Abzug joined the so-
cialist Zionist youth organization
Hashomer Hatzair. (Part of the group’s
appeal was that it espoused gender
equality.) Fundraising for Israel on the
streets and in the subway, she studied
street lecturers who could “keep on
going for three- quarters of an hour,
gathering a crowd... and bringing it all
to a climax.” The skills she developed
served her well as an undergraduate
at Hunter College, where she, a com-
mitted pacifist, rallied students against
American involvement in World War II
and was elected student body president.
After graduating, she met Martin
Abzug, a twenty- six- year- old about to
ship off to Fort Dix. After what she de-
scribed as a “stormy courtship,” they
married in 1944. “We got along so well
in forty- two years of marriage because
we fought out all our differences for
two years before we got married,” she
later said.
Abzug enrolled at Columbia Law
School, which, unlike Harvard, ad-
mitted women. (She’d been accepted
by Cornell, but her mother convinced
her to attend the school that was only
a five- cent subway ride away.) There,
Abzug was one of nine women. One
professor only let women speak in class
on what he called “ladies day.” Martin
sometimes typed up her class notes late
into the night.
Abzug then saw law as the best way to
advance social justice. Her first job out
of school was at the firm Witt & Cam-
mer. When she showed up at a client’s
office, the men often assumed she was
the secretary and waited for the real
lawyer to come along. Abzug began
dressing formally for these meetings, in
a hat and gloves. That way, “they knew
I was there for business.” She eventu-
ally dispensed with the gloves, but the
hats remained, becoming something
of a synecdoche for Abzug in years to
come.
At first, Abzug prioritized civil lib-
erties above other political causes. She
was a member of the National Law-
yers Guild and defended those perse-
cuted by Joseph McCarthy. In 1948 she
took up the defense of Willie McGee,
a Black man from Mississippi who had
been accused of raping a white wom-
an—a capital offense. McGee asserted
that the affair had been consensual.
“Abzug recognized...that rape law
had moved far from its original intent
to protect women to become the lead-
ing mechanism to police the sexual
color line,” Zarnow writes. It was a
difficult and dangerous case. A female
lawyer was unheard of in the American
South, never mind a female lawyer who
would defend a Black man.
Abzug couldn’t find any lawyers to
help her represent McGee, nor could
she find a hotel in Jackson, Mississippi,
that would rent her a room. One night,
she ended up sleeping in a bus sta-
tion. The local paper, Abzug recalled,
suggested “they should burn Willie
McGee’s white woman lawyer along
with him in the electric chair.” Abzug
worked, Zarnow writes, on the case for
three years; the jury that sent McGee
to the electric chair deliberated for
only two and a half minutes. On one
of her trips to Mississippi, Abzug, eight
months pregnant, miscarried.
“Originally I felt that law was the
instrument for social change,” Abzug
later said. “But then I discovered that
it was very much dominated by the sta-
tus quo, that there were bigger issues
than my winning a case for a particu-
lar individual.” She continued to work
long hours as a lawyer while raisingtwo daughters, but she also got increas-
ingly involved in activism. Abzug was
an early member of Women Strike for
Peace (WSP), a nuclear disarmament
group that held marches and pickets
protesting US–Soviet militarism. She
marched at the group’s first demon-
stration in November 1961, then, grum-
bling that there was “much more to
be done,” spent the afternoon on the
phone, reaching out to organizers,
drafting legislation, and scheming to
bring WSP to Washington.
With WSP, Abzug first demonstrated
the combination of ambition and prag-
matism that she displayed in Con-
gress. When she joined, the group was
highly democratic; as Zarnow puts it,
“decisions were made by phone tree.”
Abzug, who had no time for consensus
decision- making and other radically
democratic practices, moved the group
toward a more bureaucratic—and, to
her mind, more effective—organiza-
tion, one that could make decisions
speedily and lobby persuasively. She
became WSP’s political director and
arranged meetings with politicians, in-
cluding Senator Robert Kennedy, who
sought her perspective after announc-
ing his candidacy for president. Though
not all of her peers thought that part
of the group’s mission was to fight for
gender equality, Abzug did: she “urged
her colleagues to see their disarma-
ment work as part of a continuous and
interrelated struggle for women’s civil
rights, economic independence, and
world peace,” Zarnow recounts. But as
WSP got more involved in electoral pol-
itics, Abzug discouraged the support of
female candidates, fearing they would
be unelectable. Instead, she wanted
women to pressure politicians and sup-
port the candidates that best reflected
WSP’s political priorities. This is how
she thought women could have politicalpower: by becoming a voting bloc that
politicians needed to appease.
After failing to secure a position in
city government—she had expected
to be rewarded for her help with John
Lindsay’s successful mayoral cam-
paign—she was less confident in this
strategy. Abzug was deep- sea diving
in Martinique when she decided to run
for congressional office herself. She
made up campaign buttons that read
“Abzug- lutely!” and took to the streets.
Abzug was a natural campaigner,
talkative and seemingly tireless (only
her aides saw her exhaustion). Out on
the street, where constituents greeted
her by name, she aimed to bring to-
gether young activists, immigrants, and
working- class voters, a coalition that
would connect the Old Left (labor)
with the New Left (activists for wom-
en’s rights, peace, and racial equality).
She was one of the first politicians to
actively court the gay vote, appearing
at the Continental Baths, a cabaret and
bathhouse, where she spoke to a gather-
ing of men wearing nothing but towels
held up by Abzug campaign buttons.
In her efforts to merge the traditional
Democratic base with activists and im-
migrants, Abzug presented a variation
on the strategy advanced by New Pol-
itics Democrats. Formed around the
protests at the 1968 Democratic Na-
tional Convention, New Politics rep-
resented the wing of the Democratic
Party that wanted to appeal to the New
Left. Abzug thought she could speak to
those intrigued by New Politics without
abandoning the Old Left, labor unions,
or the white working class.
This coalition sometimes proved
unworkable. Abzug opposed the 1968
teachers’ strike, which was in part a re-
jection of new, community- run school
boards. (She believed in community-
run school boards, and because
“community- run” in this instance
meant Black- run, she also hoped that
they would improve racial equality in
education. During her Senate cam-
paign in 1976, Al Shanker, who had led
the strike, criticized her for her position
and urged AFL- CIO members to vote
for Moynihan.) In 1970, at an antiwar
protest, white construction workers,
many of them veterans, got into heated
exchanges with protesting students. Al-
though she was an open antimilitarist,
Abzug continued to visit the construc-
tion unions to ask for their votes. She
was disappointed to lose the support of
union members.
Still, Abzug won the congressional
seat, defeating a fourteen- year incum-
bent and becoming one of the first Jew-
ish women ever elected to the House.
She took office in early 1971, along
with fourteen other women. Chisholm,
a fellow member of the House, swore
Abzug into office on the steps of the
Capitol.Both Fierstein and Zarnow empha-
size the sexism Abzug faced during
her time in Congress. She found herself
barred from many congressional facili-
ties, which were segregated by sex, and
shunned by some of the all- male com-
mittees, such as the informal antiwar
group she longed to join. Journalists
commented frequently on her weight
and appearance. In 1971 the all- male
Inner Circle Press Club mocked her in
a vicious skit that included an Abzug
impersonator, who wore padding on his
front and back and sang “We’ll burn aPOWER
Whitecaps. Two wind turbines
turning, the third towering, still.Do the gulls know what is going on.
What is goingon. What should be.
Elaborate fantasy
a defense against reality
or a part. Unfatheredvapour taking the place
of an Alp. A thought.
Universal suffrage.
Living. Justice.In the harbor
you would barely guess
how strong the wind beyond.Unless you’d been out.
Unless you’d sailed out
or been thrown
beyond the rocks to the sea.
The open sea.—Maureen N. McLane