Abzug, Bella

ABZUG, BELLA (1920-1998). “Battling Bella,” a civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, reached prominence as a US Representative from New York, a peace activist, a women’s rights leader, a Zionist, and an environmentalist.

Born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants, Bella Savitzky grew up an extremely competitive youngster. Her father ran the Live and Let live Meat Market on Ninth Avenue and died when Bella was thirteen. The family’s Orthodox synagogue forbade women from saying Kaddish, a mourners’ tradition reserved for sons of the deceased, but Bella defiantly recited the prayer in the synagogue every morning for a year.

She graduated from Walton High School in the Bronx, served as class president, and went on to attend Hunter College and the Jewish Theological Seminary simultaneously. Initially drawn to Zionism, at Hunter she became student body president and a leading activist in the Left-led American Youth Congress and several other Popular Front organizations. She graduated from Columbia University with a law degree in 1944 and married Martin Abzug, a novelist and stockbroker whom she had met on a bus in Miami on the way to a Yehudi Menuhin concert. They had two children and remained married until his death in 1986.

Admitted to the New York Bar in 1945, Abzug joined Witt & Cammer, where she specialized in labor law. She soon began taking on civil rights cases and the victims of McCarthyism. Her defense of Willie McGee, convicted of raping a white woman in Laurel, Mississippi and sentenced to death by an all-white jury, took her to the southern state where women lawyers remained almost unthinkable in court rooms. Her appeal, heard by the state Supreme Court, was lost, and the state executed McGee in 1951.

She emerged in the early 1960s as a prominent left-of-center orator and organizer. An advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment, she co-founded Women Strike for Peace (WSP) with artist Dagmar Wilson. The WSP organized demonstrations around the country and pressed for the Soviet-US Nuclear Test Ban Treaty through publicizing the danger of atomic fallout as well as a catastrophic nuclear war.

Abzug conducted a vigorous Congressional campaign in 1960, defeating an incumbent in the Democratic primary from the West Side of Manhattan and going on to victory for the safe liberal seat. Two years later, she defeated talk show host Barry Farber. She continued to win re-election until 1976, when she ran for a Senatorial seat in a crowded field of candidates. She lost by one percent to the hawkish Daniel Patrick Moynihan, best known for the racially-coded “Moynihan Report,” and for his participation in the Nixon administration.

During her stint in Congress, Abzug became one of the first to advocate Gay Rights, introducing the Equality Act of 1974, with fellow Democrat and future mayor, Ed Koch. She chaired hearings on government secrecy, including the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights. Despite her famous fractiousness, her colleagues voted her the third most influential member of the House. Yet the media dwelled ceaselessly upon her appearance, most especially her colorful hats. In 1975 she gained appointment to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. She presided over the 1977 National Women’s Conference. She led President Jimmy Carter’s National Advisory Commission for Women until dismissed in 1979, for criticizing the president’s economic policies.

Out of Congress in the 1980s, Abzug became best known as a leftwing orator and organizer, especially appreciated during the Reagan years. She vigorously opposed new US wars, from Central America to the Middle East, and served as the prized speaker at massive peace demonstrations in Washington and New York. Meanwhile, as a perpetual traveler, she addressed women's conferences from China to Africa to Scandinavia. Ever the colorful figure with the quip, she became a unique public personality, appearing in films and television including “Saturday Night Live” and Woody Allen’s Manhattan, always playing herself. Beset with breast cancer, she died of complications from heart surgery. Several locations in Manhattan bear tributes to her, including Bella Abzug Park in the Hudson Yards district and a portion of Bank Street in Greenwich Village.

Abzug, Bella and Mel Ziegler, eds. Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.

Abzug, Bella and Leandra Zarnow. Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Levine, Suzanne Braun and Mary Thom. Bella Abzug: an Oral History. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.

Bella Abzug Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4078361/