Bella Abzug: An Oral History

HAT’S OFF Abzug launches her New York mayoral campaign, 1977.

Photograph: Bettye Lane

One Saturday morning in the early ’70s, Congresswoman Bella Abzug called D.C. from New York with a simple request for her colleague and arch-nemesis Ed Koch: “Ed, I forgot my hat. Can you bring me my hat?” It might sound like pettiness elevated to psychological warfare, but any superhero requires signifying apparel, even on weekends. As Koch recalls, “I carried it on the goddamn plane in a box.”

Abzug, who had run her 1970 campaign on the slogan “A woman’s place is in the House,” never had a hard time asking for what she wanted, and as this excellent collection of reminiscences attests, she often got it. The progressive grand dame and first woman to run for mayor of New York bulldozed her way into the pantheon of romantic Democratic lost causes who fleetingly seem like they’re one ignition spark away from hot-wiring America’s political circuitry. Dressing like the head of a Bronx bird-watching society, firing up the women’s movement with the cigar-chomping growl of a brawling urban pol, Abzug had a rare gift for public sparring, and duked it out with Norman Mailer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Betty Friedan, to name a few. She was the rare presidential appointee to be fired from her post: Carter axed her from his National Advisory Committee for Women, a right-leaning move that one Abzug ally compares to Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment. But even as her greatest electoral goals (the Senate in ’76, Gracie Mansion in ’77) eluded her, she amassed an enduring fan club that now includes Hillary Clinton and Kofi Annan, two of the more than 100 people quoted in this book.

Oral histories are best when they cover hotly contested cultural ground (Please Kill Me), ideally occupied by a lot of crazy people (Edie: American Girl). In Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom’s fluid, sharply edited book, the do-gooder milieu and retirement-toast tone of the quotes might’ve resulted in merely a heartening drone. But Abzug was a force of nature, and the stories about her are consistently feisty, even when Phil Donahue has the mike.

Fortuitously born in 1920, the year women got the vote, Abzug achieved main-event status in every major cause of the postwar era. As a young labor lawyer in the ’40s, she refused to learn how to type for fear of getting stuck in a secretarial pool, and soon found herself handling cases no one would touch. She risked her life by traveling to Mississippi two decades before the Civil Rights movement to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman (the stress, she said, led to a miscarriage). A founder of the trailblazing Women Strike for Peace in 1961, she chaired the watershed National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977 and spent her golden years working on global environmental and human-rights issues until her death in 1998.

If her brashness coaxed comparisons to volcanic activity, she also possessed a winsome elegance in her youth that led film producers to approach her on a Manhattan street during the filming of The Apartment and ask her to stand-in for her future friend Shirley MacLaine (she declined). Taking her daughter Liz and Kerry Kennedy to see a concert by Madonna, she noted, “I wore a black bra under a white see-through blouse way before [she] did.”

Such overpowering charisma inspired intense loyalty (“I was her puppet,” says activist Claire Reed) and fear (“She scared the shit out of me,” says her lifelong friend Gloria Steinem). Confronted by a heckler at a rally, she ordered her driver: “Hit that bastard in the mouth for me.” When fists did fly on the campaign trail, they were usually Abzug’s. And as the years rolled by, the hits kept right on coming: At a 1985 U.N. conference on Third World women, she came within a hair’s breadth of throwing a plate of chicken bones during a dinner debate with Friedan.

A twinge of Mommie Dearest–style terror pokes through even the most loving testimonials. Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer recalls being an enthusiastic 12-year-old working on Abzug’s 1972 congressional campaign, when he was forced to choose between his heroine and his parents, who were supporting her opponent. “You don’t have any family anymore,” Abzug informed him. “It’s just me.” Stringer says he went home and told his mother, “I hate you.”

Abzug’s goals (environmental sanity, no nukes, ending a culture where “women speak softly and carry lipstick”) are still in the offing. But her bare-knuckled victories, within feminism and beyond it, contradict the idea that infighting contributed to post-’60s radicalism’s decline. For her, it was part of the fun.