46 The New York Review
bra and girdle, / But dammit there’s one
hurdle / When we take them off / We all
look like hell.” It was the first year the
Press Club allowed women to watch the
show from the floor, and Abzug was in
the audience. According to the New
York Post, she started to cry. “None of
the men were lampooned for the way
they look,” Abzug said later. “Every-
body else was satirized in terms of what
they stand for and what they believe in.
But I as a woman was considered fair
game to be ridiculed for what I look
like.”
Abzug could be arrogant. She was
hell to work with, according to the
testimonies collected by former Ms.
editors Suzanne Braun Levine and
Mary Thom in their oral history Bella
Abzug: How One Tough Broad from
the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and 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 (2007). She banged
the table when she got excited, yelled
at friends and collaborators (one of
whom claimed Abzug so distressed
her that she stopped menstruating for
months), and punched a longtime po-
litical adviser on the street. One of her
assistants reports that “Bella would
get equally as angry over some atroc-
ity in Vietnam as the fact that she got a
white- meat turkey sandwich when she
asked for dark.”
She was sensitive to criticism and
worried constantly about her weight.
She tried a number of diets and, in
preparation for her 1976 Senate cam-
paign, lost twenty- five pounds. The
writer Susan Brownmiller was once
invited to discuss the women’s move-
ment at Abzug’s apartment, where she
watched Abzug cram her body into a
girdle—something a feminist of the
younger generation would never wear.
“My God, look at how she’s trying to
stuff it like a sausage,” Brownmiller
thought at the time. This image from
a dressing- room captures the strain
Abzug felt as a woman in public: a pro-
gressive who never stopped trying to
look like a proper and attractive lady.
In Bella Bella, Fierstein played
Abzug mostly for laughs and admira-
tion, a tough and undaunted broad, at
times contemptuous of male stupidity.
“It’s hell being surrounded by people
so mired in their own beliefs that they
cannot admit that I am always right,”
her character said at one point in the
show. She declared that no female pres-
ident would have gone to war in Viet-
nam—“only the male ego” was capable
of such a thing.
Fierstein seemed to miss the seri-
ousness of Abzug’s insecurities about
her body. Late in the show, he pulled
out a pack of Twizzlers and cracked a
joke about having had “worse things
in my mouth.” Abzug’s stress- eating, a
source of humiliation for much of her
life, became here an unconvincing gag.
Although Fierstein clearly studied Ab-
zug’s speech and mannerisms carefully
and captured much of her well, mo-
ments like this one signaled his limits.
Perhaps one of those women Fierstein
first considered for the part of Abzug
would have been a better choice.Abzug’s encounters with sexism
pushed her toward feminism, and so
did the support she received from fe-
male constituents and supporters aftershe was elected. “She didn’t really call
herself a feminist until after she was in
Congress,” recalled the feminist writer
and activist Robin Morgan. “She was
in office and visible. She began to get
mail from women, saying speak out for
us. So she found herself the voice of
women.”
In 1971 there wasn’t consensus on
what being “the voice of women”
meant. The women’s liberation move-
ment generally, and its radical wing in
particular, was notoriously fractious,
with disagreements on everything from
the value of formal equality to the role
of men in the movement to the possibil-
ity of separatist communities. Abzug,
who belonged to an older radical tradi-
tion, couldn’t always countenance the
younger women’s political actions. She
agreed with many of their goals—passthe ERA, pass universal childcare, agi-
tate for equal pay—but not with all of
their tactics and priorities. In Congress,
she focused on equality of opportunity
and material support for women and
their families. Abzug campaigned for
universal childcare from her earliest
days in Congress and offered childcare
in her campaign offices, which had pre-
dominantly female staffs.
She was a pragmatist. Like Bernie
Sanders, who during his second run for
president realized that he needed to
speak more directly to the identity pol-
itics preoccupying some progressives,
Abzug pitched herself to the radical
feminists and their identitarian con-
cerns. During her run for the House,
she sought Brownmiller’s advice on
how to court the radical feminist vote.
Brownmiller discouraged her efforts.
“They will not support you,” she said,
in Abzug’s recollection. “You wear lip-
stick.” Brownmiller went on to explain
that the women she organized with
cared more about “their individual
rights, their abortion rights” than they
did about the Vietnam War. Abzug
promised to “give them a feminist in-
terpretation as to why they should be
opposed to the Vietnam War.” When
she spoke to the women’s groups, she
followed Brownmiller’s suggestion
to explicitly identify herself as older
(Abzug was fifty at the time) in order
to explain why she, for instance, wore
lipstick. She would address the younger
women’s concerns, if necessary. She
wanted to win.
Abzug also clashed with feminists
her own age. In 1971, while organizing
the National Women’s Political Caucus
(NWPC), a nonpartisan group designedto increase women’s representation
in governance, she fought with Betty
Friedan about the group’s positions on
poverty, antiracism, and military im-
perialism. Friedan believed “women’s
participation in political power will
change the politics of this whole na-
tion,” while Abzug worried that unless
the NWPC fought for other groups and
causes simultaneously, it would simply
“replace or supplement a white, male,
middle class elite with a white, female,
middle class elite.” They also diverged
on the issue of lesbianism: Friedan
once called lesbians a “lavender men-
ace” and tried to bar them from the
movement, while Abzug, despite some
initial discomfort when one of her
daughters came out as a lesbian, was an
early champion of gay rights. (Friedan
and Abzug butted heads elsewhere; at a
conference in Nairobi in 1985, they re-
portedly came close to throwing dinner
plates at each other.)
The conflict between Abzug and
Friedan signaled the changing defi-
nition of feminism as it became more
mainstream. While some wanted to
denude the term of its political radical-
ism and make it synonymous with all
forms of female “empowerment,” even
capitalist ones, Abzug believed femi-
nism implied a commitment to allevi-
ating suffering and promoting equality
among all people. This is how she ap-
proached her brief time as head of Car-
ter’s National Advisory Committee on
Women from 1978 to 1979. Rather than
focusing only on “women’s issues,”
such as abortion, she pressed Carter
on his foreign and economic policy.
The approach got her fired. According
to Brownie Ledbetter, an NWPC orga-
nizer and witness to the contentious
meeting between Carter and Abzug,
Carter told her, “I supported you on
ERA. I didn’t agree with you on abor-
tion, but I let you do your thing. What
do my inflation policy and my military
policy have to do with women?” To
Abzug, everything.
In thinking about women’s issues as
inextricably linked to economic issues
and foreign policy, Abzug was argu-
ably ahead of her time. Zarnow refers
to Abzug as an “intersectional” fem-
inist—one whose approach, as artic-
ulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé
Crenshaw in 1989, treats identity as
something constituted by multiple,
overlapping categorizations. In this
analysis, identity is something like a so-
cial location; it denotes where an indi-
vidual is situated within the structures
of domination and exploitation. A poor
Black woman thus is oppressed differ-
ently than a poor white woman. Com-
batting oppression means reckoning
with its specificity.
Abzug didn’t think about identity in
quite this way, but she did recognize
how different structures of domination
overlapped. She believed that anti-
poverty programs could do as much for
women and people of color as laws that
prohibited discrimination in hiring. She
recognized that feminism didn’t end at
the borders of the United States: it in-
volved caring about the lives of women
in other parts of the world, many of
whom were affected by US foreign pol-
icy. In 1995, at the Fourth World Con-
ference on Women in Beijing, Hillary
Clinton, borrowing a slogan popular-
ized by the Filipina group Gabriela, de-
clared that women’s rights were human
rights. Abzug, who was in the audience,
had understood this long before. QBella Abzug protesting the Vietnam War
on the steps of the Capitol after being
sworn into Congress, Washington, D.C.,
January 21, 1971Bettmann/GettyImagesFree shipping on all domestic orders over $75.
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