The Political Life of Bella Abzug, 1976–1998 : Electoral Failures and the Vagaries of Identity Politics 9780739187258, 9780739187241

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The Political Life of Bella Abzug, 1976–1998

The Political Life of Bella Abzug, 1976–1998 Electoral Failures and the Vagaries of Identity Politics Alan H. Levy

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-0-7391-8724-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-8725-8 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

1

Madame Mayor A Very Expensive Memo: Houston and Its Discontents This Jinxed Hotel Again No Good, No Good At All Conundrums on the Periphery Gender Gap Keeping Faith All the Way to Nairobi Presumptuous Irrelevance in Geneva Later Years: Martin’s Passing and More Identity Politics International Patronage Epilogue and Legacy

5 41 65 79 125 159 191 217 231 267 313

Selected Bibliography

343

Index

349

About the Author

357

v

Introduction

In her first fifty-six years, Bella S. Abzug’s achievements were remarkable. Born into an immigrant family of Russian Jews in 1920, she rose out of lowly economic means, thriving in New York City’s public schools. Through her parents and extended family, passions for religion, for learning, for music, and for lively political discourse were inextricably part of her spirit. At the mere age of thirteen, she suffered the death of her father. When her father passed away, the elders in her synagogue resisted her being allowed to say Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the deceased. Under Orthodox traditions, women were not supposed to do this. Young Bella Savitsky chose to ignore the elders and did it anyway. If certain established ways did not make sense to her, she would always be willing to fight to do what she felt was right. As a teenager, she was a political activist in school and eagerly took to New York’s streets and subways with issues like peace and Zionism. Before Pearl Harbor, she had been an isolationist. During the war she was never disloyal, but she was a trifle ambivalent in her commitment to the nation’s cause. Not having to worry about military conscription, she could focus her energies on law school studies at Columbia University. In 1945, Abzug passed the bar examination and embarked upon a career as a labor attorney. Not always taken seriously by clients, she wished to encourage a respect not always afforded professional women in the day, so she drew upon an old British tradition and began to wear hats and gloves. Donning such apparel did succeed in prompting some of the deference she desired. The wearing of hats thus became a life-long habit. Although, as she noted, “I’ve since taken off the gloves.” As a labor attorney, Abzug would always be passionate about the rights of people falsely accused of crimes or fired from their employment because of political allegations and suspicions. She willingly served the causes of many, 1

2

Introduction

both famous and unknown. Representing Willie McGee, an African American from Laurel, Mississippi, accused of raping a white woman, Abzug incurred the resentments and wrath of Jim Crow Southerners who despised her presence down there. Pursuing justice in this case, she risked injury, perhaps even her life. The anxiety and stress of it all likely caused her to suffer a miscarriage. Still, she would not remit. In the early 1950s, singer Pete Seeger and actor Elliot Sullivan were also her clients, as were many others who found themselves under scrutiny for alleged communist affiliations. The FBI and the CIA began keeping voluminous files on her, but nothing appeared to deter or intimidate her. In the early 1950s, wishing to raise two daughters in relatively safe environs, Abzug and her husband Martin moved to Mt. Vernon, New York. Even there political passions continued to drive her. While still practicing law, she became involved in many fairness issues regarding the home and propertypurchasing rights of African Americans in Westchester County. She also grew deeply involved in Women Strike for Peace, an organization integrally involved in nuclear disarmament and peace issues. In the mid-1960s Abzug and her family moved to Greenwich Village, and her activism in the Peace Movement continued. This work naturally linked to growing efforts against American involvement in Vietnam. Working hard against Lyndon Johnson and the war, Abzug grew to be a significant figure in New York City’s liberal/left politics. She helped effectively organize campaigns for many peace activists and was quite important in the successful 1969 Mayoral campaign of John Lindsay. In 1970 she decided to run a campaign of her own for House of Representatives. Here she pulled off a rarity, opposing and ousting an incumbent in a Democratic Party primary. From there she won the election, embarking onto what would be a three-term tenure in the House. In the House of Representatives, Bella Abzug would prove to be a raucous, abrasive opponent of President Richard Nixon and the Republicans as well as a thoroughly respected master of House procedures and of the myriad of legislative details with which every productive House member must contend. Many loved her; many hated her; virtually all respected her. A most effective member of Congress, Abzug was made a Democratic Deputy Whip after only two terms. In Congress, she achieved a prominence that made her as famous as any Representative in her day. Her political passions took her to peace issues, to labor rights, to feminism, and to a myriad of little topics that concerned many of her West Side Manhattan constituents. She took on hundreds of issues with a mastery of detail and procedure that deeply impressed all who witnessed it, including her most ardent opponents. In 1976, Abzug could have run for another term in the House, and without question she would have easily won. She decided to seek a bigger prize, however, and ran for the US Senate. New York’s incumbent Senator that

Introduction

3

year was Conservative James Buckley. In 1970 Buckley had won because the Republicans and Democrats had each nominated moderately liberal candidates, thus dividing the left side of the political spectrum, leaving Buckley a minority victor. In 1976, Abzug believed Buckley was vulnerable, but she was hardly alone here. Indeed when she sought the Democratic Senate nomination, four other significant candidates ran as well. The ensuing campaign was long and bitter. In the end Abzug lost by one percentage point to the winner, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Had Abzug won, there is little doubt she would have later run for President. Losing so closely to Moynihan was painful. The campaign left her and her supporters wondering a myriad of “What if’s?” These “What if’s?” quickly turned into “What now’s?” With such a close electoral loss, Abzug’s political ambitions did anything but fade. She had a seemingly limitless well of energy and ability, and she had done so much in just fifty-six years. Both to her and to her many friends and colleagues, it was utterly inconceivable that her Senate defeat was anything but a temporary setback. There was still so much to be accomplished. As with the volume I wrote on the earlier years of Bella Abzug’s political life, I am grateful to many for their various forms of support in my research. Ms. Tara Craig and the rest of the staff of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University in the city of New York were immensely helpful. My colleagues at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania patiently listened to my many discourses, read various chapters, and provided valuable thoughts and suggestions. Again, I thank you all most kindly.

Chapter One

Madame Mayor

Bella Abzug lost the 1976 New York Senate primary to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As the race had been so heated and the margin so close, the fallout was depressing. After the loss, Abzug did extend a general offer of assistance to Moynihan in his campaign against the conservative incumbent Senator James Buckley. Moynihan acknowledged her “gracious” gesture and then went on with his campaign without her. 1 The alternative sorts of liberalism that Moynihan (and Jimmy Carter) represented in 1976 wanted no truck with the established, 1960s-vintage politics that Abzug clearly symbolized. Meanwhile, Abzug’s supporters and friends were despondent. Her career in Congress appeared over, at least in the near future. On December 10, 1976, some 450 people gathered for a Washington luncheon of the Women’s Political Caucus to say good-bye to the soon-to-be former Congresswoman. While there had been few Congressional staffs subject to so much abuse, Abzug’s Congressional aides, secretaries, and advisors felt a great sense of loss. So did a few of her Republican colleagues. The savvy New Jersey Republican Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick mused at the luncheon, “I feel as if I lost a strong right arm—perhaps in my position I should say ‘left arm.’” She and Abzug did not always agree on policy, but they were always both respectful colleagues and warm friends. Among the many who gathered that December day, there were lots of lumps in the throat, as well as more than a few tears. Never cynical or defeatist, Abzug stood up and exhorted them all: “As much as some of us enjoy farewells, we enjoy victories too. And that day will come. Keep your voices up, keep your faith up, keep your spirits up, and we’ll all be heard.” Drawing applause throughout her speech, the roar was greatest when she promised that her absence from politics would be temporary. “Like Jimmy Carter,” she quipped, albeit with a certain insensitivity, “I expect to be born again.” 2 5

6

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Many traditional liberals from the Vietnam and Civil Rights era felt a sense of righteous triumph with the defeat of Gerald Ford and the election of a Democrat to the White House in 1976. Even though she lost her Senate bid, Abzug easily retained such righteousness. (And like many Northeast liberals, she held a certain high-handed disdain for any religious elements in and among Midwestern and Southern Protestants, no matter how important and supportive they may have been that year to Jimmy Carter and the Democrats.) Upbeat with her loyal followers, Abzug also had some rather harsh words for a few New York Congressional colleagues who had not supported her Senate bid. To the easily reelected Jerome Ambro of Long Island she sneered with an obvious threat: “Nobody has intruded into your district— yet!” She also screamed laconically at Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel, “You’re corrupt!” 3 Abzug was not showing any sadness over the primary loss, and she remained, at least in her mind, very much at the center of Democratic liberalism. With President Carter’s victory, liberals held a sense of vindication over the Republican victories in the previous two Presidential elections. The 1976 election proved to liberals that the nation’s apparent move to the right in the Richard Nixon years had been a mistake. In their minds, Watergate and the President’s resignation had demonstrated the worthlessness of the right. Now they felt the nation was back on some sort of “proper” course. To many liberals of the era, Nixon’s and conservatism’s earlier successes had thus been born of the prejudice and ignorance among various blocks of voters. To these Americans many on the political left had shown, and continued to show, little respect. Other interpretations of recent history did not hold much credence with such liberals. Now that the Republicans had been defeated, it then seemed an appropriate time for liberal reassertions in regard to any number of issues. The fact that Carter had put together a coalition of voters of which the traditional Northeast liberals had been merely a part (and, as the 1976 primaries had unfolded, a late addition at that) was not a matter from which many of these traditional liberals appeared to draw any significant lessons. They remained a highly self-righteous and self-entitled lot, often holding that those who disagreed with them either misunderstood the relevant issues or were somehow intellectually flawed. The flippant manner with which various Northeastern Democrats then regarded such a matter as President Carter’s religious convictions revealed a fissure among Democrats, one that the imperiousness of the secular Northeastern liberals would do anything but mend. Indeed it was an aspect of Carter they held in fairly open contempt. In the long run such divisions, and the surrounding haughtiness, would divide the moderate left, with the divisions then serving their right wing opposition. That fate would not become fully apparent for another four years. For the moment, the matter simply festered. Traditional liberals cast humorous jabs about those who did not conform to their own ironically rigid sensibilities. The new White House

Madame Mayor

7

insiders noted it, did little, and continued to try to serve geographically broader constituencies with varying degrees of success. With Abzug’s conspicuous loss in November, there ensued some idle talk around New York and Washington in regard to her future, especially with a Democrat now in the White House. She had done Carter a service at the Democratic convention when she effectively silenced some feminist delegates who were ready to voice some criticisms of the Governor and the issue of abortion. With Jimmy Carter’s victory, some speculated about her being offered a Cabinet post. Abzug herself contacted her old friend Tip O’Neill and asked him to make inquiries about her being named Secretary of Transportation. Others opined Abzug could be named to head the Federal Trade Commission. Some also thought she would be an appropriate choice for a Democratic President to nominate as the first woman on the Supreme Court, a matter to which many then eagerly looked forward. Feminists’ hopeful Court speculations on behalf of Abzug may have been a bit self-entitled and grandiose, as Abzug, albeit an attorney, had zero bench experience. Beyond that, feminists were hardly central to Carter’s victory over Ford, so the Court speculations about Abzug were dreams. As it turned out, Carter was able to name no one to the Court anyway. (He would indeed be the only President of the twentieth century to have no Supreme Court appointments.) 4 In regard to ingratiating herself to the appointment-conscious people in the new Carter administration, Abzug’s wise-crack about being “born again” was hardly diplomatic. During the 1976 New York primary campaign, while opposing Carter and working for Morris Udal, she had also called him “a closet Moonie.” She was apparently as disdainfully ignorant of American Protestantism as many in Congress had first been in regard to her Orthodox Judaism. At this juncture, her haughtiness was anything but politically advised. Several Carter associates, including Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and Press Secretary Jody Powell, were always wary of Abzug, and First Lady Rosalynn Carter was uncomfortable with what she regarded as Abzug’s exceptionally coarse manner. While Abzug had hardly done anything to endear herself to Carter’s inner circle, the new President nonetheless held a high opinion of her. He greatly respected her intellect and rather liked her rambunctious, aggressive manner. President Carter actually had a half-hour meeting with Abzug on February 14, 1977, but there would be no Valentine’s Day gift. No appointment came in the new administration. (In his appointments Carter did not shun capable women. He did, for example, name a friend and former Congressional colleague of Abzug’s, Patsy Mink of Hawaii, to the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.) In late March, Carter named Abzug to head a National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (1977). That appointment was short lived and of no real political consequence, however. A federal appointment from Carter would

8

Chapter 1

come later, and the results would not be positive. Meanwhile, Abzug’s political future would be left strictly in her own hands. 5 The year after a presidential election always appears to be a dead time in regard to the nation’s political elections. A few spots in the country are exceptions, however. New Jersey and Virginia elect governors in these oddnumbered, political off-years, and New York City elects its Mayor. In early 1977, speculations began to flourish about the city where Bella Abzug was going to run for Mayor. On February 1, the New York Times underscored the rumors, as they announced that Abzug was thinking about entering the Mayor’s race. She appeared on several TV talk programs, notably on The Merv Griffin Show, where she discussed the problems of the city as a failure of leadership, leaving little doubt that she felt she could take the reins and do better. She talked of how various show-business stars like Barbra Streisand were urging her to run. She even appeared on NBC television’s then-popular and hip new show, Saturday Night Live (SNL), and spoke with Gilda Radner’s comic character “Emily Litella.” (Emily steadily referred to Bella as “Stella,” and when Abzug firmly corrected her that “it’s Bella, Bella!” Emily approvingly acknowledged how well “Stella spoke Italian.”) A staged preinterview comment on the show had implied that Abzug “was going to throw her hat into the ring” that night, but the mention of this set “Emily” off on one of her patented loony critiques, in this case of politicians’ horrible practice of “throwing their ‘cats.’” In a well-postured fit of exasperation, Abzug then made no Mayoral announcement. Instead, she grabbed the microphone, smiled, and huffed “Emily’s” patented line: “Never mind!” The political significance of it all was obvious. The SNL appearance with Radner was actually better than any straightforward “throw your hat in the ring” announcement, especially with New York’s youth. Elsewhere Abzug continued to repeat the sentiment that “New York is alive and well, but it’s dying for lack of leadership.” 6 With the Mayoral speculations, talk was also growing of how matters like city management, economic development, and the myriad of often maddening details with which a big city mayor must contend would not be to Bella Abzug’s liking, “Mrs. Abzug has no real appetite for the crisis-bound officiousness of the Mayor’s job,” opined Francis Clines of the New York Times. Many thought she was indeed better suited to the role of legislator than administrator. Smugly certain of the alleged incongruities here, some even speculated that the talk about a Mayoral campaign was simply Abzug’s way of keeping her name in the news in hopes of still landing a major post in the new Carter administration. 7 That speculation was off the mark. By the end of 1976, Abzug was in deadly earnest about running for Mayor. In late December of 1976, she had a meeting with various members of her political circle at her Bank Street home in Greenwich Village to discuss the idea of a campaign for Mayor.

Madame Mayor

9

At the meeting, one of her chief administrative assistants, Doris Friedman, spoke against the idea, citing the belief that there were too many powerful interests in the city and state that could work effectively against her. Abzug responded by flying into one of her famous tirades that, as usual, took on a highly narcissistic tone: “How dare you speak to me like that!” she screamed. Some could have logically then asked whether the situation called for people to speak to the issue at hand or to Bella Abzug. As everyone in the house then knew full well that the issue was to be discussed purely in terms of what Bella Abzug wanted to hear, all rational dialogue concerning the prospects for a successful Mayoral campaign was instantly squelched. Some of the gathered may have agreed with Friedman, but they now knew what was expected to be said, and they all joined in a clubbed chorus that spoke to Abzug as she desired—that she should definitely run. Some press elements reported that members of her family (none specified) wished she did not run for fears of health issues. Her daughter Liz did say of the Mayor’s office: “It’s such a terrible job.” 8 It was a situation a bit like the juncture in the previous year’s Senate campaign: She asserted she would not support Moynihan if he won the primary. Then she refused to pocket her anger, admit that she had made a mistake, and promise to support the primary’s winner. At various times when critical decisions were on hand, Abzug would not listen terribly well to reasonable ideas that did not reflect back to her what she wanted to be told. As with so much of Abzug’s work, those close to her had to accept that along with extraordinary content would come equally extraordinary levels of aggression and ego. Loyalists had to console themselves either with the hope that the personality elements would eventually die away or, perhaps more dysfunctionally, with the rationalization that the quality of her work made it all worthwhile anyway. One of her supporters, subsequently a Congressman himself, Jerrold Nadler, did try to persuade her against a Mayoral bid. He employed some basic statistics. In early 1977, polls showed, he told her, that as a Mayoral candidate she had a support level of 34 percent. Early into a campaign, any candidate can then contend such a level shows a base upon which a winning tally can be built. With respect to Abzug and the 1977 Mayor’s race, however, an accompanying statistic was troubling. From Nadler’s standpoint, it was indeed troubling to the point that he felt a win was virtually impossible. Along with the 34 percent polling mark, Nadler pointed to the fact that her name recognition stood at 98 percent. (Along similar lines, in January, 1977, a Gallup poll indeed listed her as one of the twenty “most admired” women in America.) The pertinent point was that virtually no one did not know who Bella Abzug was, especially in New York. Her previous year’s wordless campaign button with nothing but a silhouette of a woman with a large hat had proven that. With respect to winning an election, such notoriety meant

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that virtually all of the 66 percent who said they would vote for another Mayoral candidate already held a decided opinion against Abzug. To win the Mayor’s race, then, the data indicated she would not only have to hold onto that 34 percent, which was difficult enough, she would need to convince a significant number (at least one-third) of the established non-supporters not merely to vote for her but to reverse a fully established negative opinion of her. This may not have been impossible, but, as Nadler knew, it was very difficult. In New York, Abzug had virtually no neutral block of voters to cultivate, only a small block of supporters upon which to rely with the rest at varying levels against her. Like others, Nadler also tried to convince her that her aggressive personality was such that voters would perceive her better suited for almost any other office besides that of Mayor (or Governor). He advised her to wait and run for State Attorney General in 1978. Again, she would not hear of it. Nadler actually endorsed her for Mayor, but his statistical analysis would prove cogent. Many of Abzug’s supporters could cavalierly dismiss all such opposition as merely sexist. Even if true, which was hardly the case, the votes of such allegedly prejudiced people counted just the same. 9 Like every thoughtful New Yorker, Abzug knew the city was in desperate straits. This was foremost on her mind, and it was not just a matter of an egodriven notion that now was the time to make a power grab. New York City needed help, desperately. The city’s finances were in terrible shape. In 1975, the city’s credit appeared on the verge of collapse. Decades of spending, the often-met demands of unions for high salaries in an expensive city, the costs of huge municipal transportation systems, hospitals, schools, and a free university were breaking New York’s finances. The flight of many middle-class and wealthy taxpayers to safer and less tax burdensome suburbs badly hurt municipal revenues. Welfare costs had grown steadily, as had the pressing needs, especially given the high crime rates, for costly police and fire protection. The high price of many areas of infrastructure growth and maintenance all extended the city’s crushing costs and debts. For years, bond issues had always enabled extensions of municipal debt and allowed for “business as usual,” but in 1975 the city’s major bankers had begun to balk at the notion of continuing to underwrite New York City’s bonds. The ensuing financial crisis led to all sorts of finger pointing as to who was to blame—the unions, the current (Mayor Abraham Beame’s) and previous (John Lindsay’s) administrations and their free spending, the falling tax base, the rising costs. There were plenty of targets, and even more debts. In late October, 1975, a greatly heightened sense of shock came over New York when President Gerald Ford made a speech in which he declared himself against any federal assistance to spare News York from potential bankruptcy. The New York Daily News summarized the President’s speech with an October 30 headline that became legendary: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” 10

Madame Mayor

11

President Ford never actually uttered those words, but his opposition to any aid to the city, along with the sensationalistic distortion in the press, heightened the drama of New York’s financial crisis that, even without the Daily News’s magnification, had plenty of desperation anyway. Through 1976, the city continued to limp along financially, with everyone with any fiscal awareness knowing that a major fiscal crisis could emerge at any time. Like any New Yorker, Abzug was well aware of the city’s financial problems. Like any politician, she saw in the crisis an opportunity, one whose extreme nature overrode any political musings or statistical evidence that any friend could offer her about the long odds of winning or the nonsuitability of the office for someone of her personality and sensibilities. With respect to any notion that the office of Mayor was not a good fit, the extraordinary nature of the city’s financial situation gave her further bases to believe just the opposite. Even if she was an unusual candidate for the office of Mayor, the city’s desperate state of affairs called for such a person. Abzug drew further resolve from the mere 1 percent loss to Moynihan in 1976, as she considered her likely opponent—the politically vulnerable incumbent Mayor Abraham Beame. As usual, her confidence was high. “I could beat Beame,” she told the New York Times. “It would be close, but I could beat him.” The Times wrote of the risks of another loss, even another razor close one, “might snuff out [both] her charisma and such future possibilities as [another] run for the Senate.” As always, Abzug would hear no such “what if you lose” thoughts, and, revealing of her confidence, she was speculating far more about what her Mayoral administration would be like than about what the upcoming campaign would entail. 11 In her mind, she could bring together a policy of financial responsibility with commitments to ongoing liberal reforms regarding low-cost housing, rent control, day care, feminist issues, and union rights. She felt she could handle all such details along with all the other maddening details that encompass the office of Mayor. It was a tall order, but no one doubted Abzug’s intellectual capacities here. For some it was indeed exciting—that she could put the city back on firm financial grounding and do it in the context of a liberal social agenda, all brought forth with her famously strident tonality. While Abzug was considering how she could defeat Abe Beame, she may not have fully anticipated the likelihood of other candidates, forgetting the dictum that matters are never simple in New York politics. Back in 1970, Abzug herself had proven that to the confident Congressional incumbent Leonard Farbstein. The five-way Democratic Senate primary of 1976 showed it as well, this time not to Abzug’s liking. The Mayor’s race of 1977 would indeed attract many, especially in the Democratic Party, where the primary winner would certainly have the overwhelming advantage in the November election. It would certainly not be, as Abzug first thought, just Abzug verus Beame; far from it.

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By the beginning of spring in 1977, before any major individual had officially declared his or her candidacy, Abzug’s name was figuring centrally in all the political prognostications. When Mayor Beame celebrated his seventy-first birthday in March, he made several public appearances where he encountered numerous “Bella Abzug for Mayor” buttons among his alleged well-wishers. Abzug was still saying she was merely “thinking about” running. But among the major political minds of the city, her candidacy was fully presumed, and she did nothing to curb the speculation. In March she blatantly proclaimed, “I’m not sure I’m going to run for mayor, but I’m leading in the polls.” Given her reference to polling, the “not sure” seemed anything but convincing. In May the Times acknowledged Abzug’s status as “the front-runner in the first heat” as they sardonically referred to the “mayoral near-candidate Bella Abzug.” There was actually a savvy component in her remaining undeclared as long as she did, for by remaining so, any television appearances Abzug made did not necessitate any “equal time” that election laws would have otherwise required to be given to opposing candidates. 12 As with much of the early part of her candidacy for the Senate, Abzug continued to give great emphasis to the issue of gender in many of her public appearances and speeches. 13 Here she was preaching to a well-ensconced choir of supporters. Of course, that was her political base. In the 1976 primary, her harping on gender via the issue of the Senate being all male had given her feminist pleas a definable target. In 1977, however, any notions of a need for a female Mayor did not appear to impart the same sort of energy. State Senator Carol Bellamy successfully ran for the Presidency of the New York City Council that year, and she openly stated that it was silly to pursue gender identity as a strategy. “It’s patronizing,” she noted, “to say, ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman.’” Even here, reflecting on the infamously divisive nature of Bella Abzug’s image, Bellamy conceded to the New York Times that there could be “a virulent anti-Bella Abzug voter who will be conscience-stricken in the booth after voting male for mayor and so will pull the Bellamy lever next in a fit of Portnoy anguish.” This was not enough to alter Bellamy’s sense of non-gender strategy, but it was certainly a measure of the degree to which Abzug’s personality transcended issues, including those of gender. 14 It was one thing to consider the abstract point of having a woman in the Mayor’s seat. For many New Yorkers, the question of Bella Abzug in the Mayor’s office was an altogether different matter. At no time that year did she, or anyone, often raise the idea that a woman, by virtue of her gender, would be able to do any aspect of the Mayor’s job better, worse, or even differently. Furthermore, any feminist notion to the effect that a woman would administer such a post as Mayor in a more “cooperative” manner was hardly a claim that would have resounded terribly well in reference to Bella

Madame Mayor

13

Abzug. Any attempts to account for a dismissal of the significance of gender with respect to the Mayor’s chair as a matter of sexism would overlook the fact that such a labeling/analysis would dictate that the same superficial nonimpact would have come forth the previous year in regard to the “all-male Senate.” Yet this was not the case in 1977. It seemed that with respect to the office of Mayor, especially in times of financial peril, people generally regarded gender as peripheral. It may have arisen with regard to a relative newcomer, but Abzug, age fifty-seven that summer, was completely known. Throughout that year, New York City’s perils would be growing apace. Unfortunately for Abzug, as genuinely traumatic events unfolded that summer, her fearsome reputation turned into less a liability than a quaint irrelevance. Other candidates began to pile in, and the issue of gender was hardly anywhere to be found except among those already predisposed in that regard. On June 1, Abzug made her candidacy official. By then, many others had either announced their candidacy or indicated they were about to do so. In addition to Abzug, Mayor Beame was officially seeking another term. Attorney Percy Sutton was expected to make a strong showing. Sutton was the best-known elected official from the city’s African American community. Since 1966 he had served as Manhattan Borough President and had always been a prominent civil-rights activist, having been one of the original Freedom Riders as well as the legal representative for the late Malcolm X. The most prominent elected official of New York’s Puerto Rican community, Herman Badillo was also angling for the Mayor’s office. Badillo was a Congressman and had previously been the Bronx Borough President. Sutton and Badillo each had strong political bases that could take them into contention. There were rumors afoot that Badillo was especially angry at Abzug. He had endorsed her each time she ran for Congress, as had Sutton. (What angered Badillo was that he had allegedly endorsed Abzug’s Senate bid in 1976 with the understanding that she would in turn leave the 1977 Mayoral election to him.) With the urgings and blessings of New York’s Governor, Hugh Carey, New York’s young Secretary of State, Mario Cuomo, was also running. Meanwhile, in the Republican Party, a State Senator named Roy Goodman was running, as was Abzug’s old Congressional opponent from 1970, Barry Farber. 15 A group of less prominent individuals who did not figure to make too much of an impact were running as well. This included Edward Costikyan, a prominent attorney and former Chairman of the New York State Task Force on New York City Jurisdiction and Structure; Joel Harnett, a publisher who was quite active in publicizing the city’s financial problems; and Richard Ravitch, chairman, and financial savior of the New York State Urban Development Corporation. 16 Among these seemingly lesser figures was Manhattan Congressman Edward Koch. Some commentators have cast Koch as a virtual unknown, at a

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level of obscurity similar to that of Costikyan, Harnett, and Ravitch. At the outset of the Mayoral primary, Koch was actually better known than them. But in June 1977, with the Democratic Mayoral primary set for September, he certainly did not figure to challenge such better known figures as Sutton and Badillo, with their solid ethnic/racial blocks of voter support, let alone be able to bring himself close to the general standing and notoriety of Mayor Beame or Bella Abzug. Nonetheless, Koch did appear to carry some weight. In the late spring, the New York Times canvassed the 23rd Election District, a neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side near 20th Street and 1st Avenue. The Times found a surprising smattering of support for Koch, as well as a few explicit statements of rejection of both Mayor Beame and Bella Abzug. On May 15, Koch and Abzug each spoke at the meeting of the “New Democratic Coalition,” seeking their endorsement. The coalition was a clearly left-leaning faction of the Democratic Party, so Abzug had a strong base there. Still, it took her four ballots to get the needed 60 percent of the vote to procure an official endorsement. Her chief rival was Koch, whose presence made the four ballots necessary. In the final vote Abzug received 61.9 percent to Koch’s 32.2 percent. Koch lost, but there was no doubt that he was hardly an unknown figure in the city’s major political circles. There was also no doubt, as Jerrold Nadler’s data had indicated, of a stubborn element of resistance to Bella Abzug among the voters. 17 Unlike the previous year’s Democratic Senate Primary, New York City’s September 8 Mayoral ballot would not necessarily determine a winner via a simple plurality. Under party rules, unless one candidate polled over 40 percent, a highly unlikely prospect with such a large field, the top two vote getters were to go into a primary runoff election on September 19. (Back in 1969, a conservative Democrat, Mario Procaccino, had secured the Democratic Mayoral nomination with but one-third of the vote, several liberals having split the majority. Procaccino lost to Lindsay. Subsequently, New York City Democrats secured state approval of changes for a runoff system, very much like the French Presidential election process.) Abzug would certainly have loved to have had that sort of arrangement in the 1976 primary against Moynihan. In 1977, the key was to finish first or second, and as of June 1, Beame and Abzug clearly appeared the top contenders. The chief questions among the political watchers were being phrased in terms of whether any of the other candidates would be able to punch their way through the pack and make it into the runoff by edging out one of the two leaders. In late May and June the race seemed, the Sunday Times smugly summarized, simply a matter of each of the “other” candidates “trying to become, in effect, the alternative to Mrs. Abzug and Mr. Beame.” The entirety of “Beame’s Scenario,” they wrote, was “How to Beat Bella. . . . Most New York politicians believe the polls and hold the opinion that—unless something unforeseen happens during the summer campaigning—Bella Ab-

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zug will lead the first round of voting and sweep into the runoff.” On July 3, Republican hopeful Roy Goodman crowed similarly: “It’ll be Bella and myself in the final.” Beame’s campaign manager, Tim Hanan, also saw the contest as one between his candidate and Abzug. 18 Matters would change dramatically. With the rules of the elections established by the State Legislature in Albany, the Mayoral primary had originally been set for June. Governor Hugh Carey chose to veto that plan. He wanted a later date, plainly to help his favored candidate, Mario Cuomo, who needed time to build up notoriety and support. Some said Carey’s motive here was rooted not only in a desire to give Cuomo more time but also in a fear that too early a primary date would unduly serve the already well-known Bella Abzug, with whom he did not want to face the prospect of working in a Governor/Mayor relationship. Through Carey’s finagling, the Legislature agreed upon the two September dates. 19 No one could have foreseen the events that would ensue between June and September, but the Governor’s machinations proved very important, for as New Yorkers were preparing to watch their Mayoral race unfold, the city, already on edge because of crime and extreme financial woes, went through several convulsions. The convulsions were “unforeseen” to say the least. They upset many political balances and sensibilities, and Abzug’s candidacy would be one of the victims. In the early summer, New Yorkers were assessing the various nuanced differences on the day’s issues between the Democratic contenders. Although the fiscal crisis colored each issue, the candidates were also contending over what to do about a rapidly deteriorating school system, over ideas concerning the construction of affordable municipally supported housing, homeless shelters, rent control, the alarming spread of drug usage, expensive municipal pensions, concerns about union power, rising crime rates, thick and expensive bureaucracies, and public safety. Amidst the issues, Koch, noted the Times, was evincing a character “of mild mein” while speaking most harshly of the existing administration’s financial failings. He openly called Beame “incompetent,” while maintaining an outwardly mild attack posture. The slightly formal but still indignant tone here appeared to sit rather well with many discontented voters. Koch was expressing his justifiable umbrage yet showing that he would not lose his composure if at the helm. Meanwhile, Abzug was trying to position herself on the many social and economic issues. She was displaying her usual impressive command over them, and she had another of her arrays of show-business stars supporting her. A large gala occurred in Madison Square Garden in May. A “Boogie for Bella” took place in August, followed by another celebrity gala in September. Much of the same appeal of prior campaigns was on hand, and her forcefulness on any number of city issues was in evidence. Nonetheless, she found herself spending an unexpectedly large amount of time fending off

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skeptics. These skeptics were not so much people put off by her personality, which was always something many native New Yorkers never found so terribly unusual. Instead, many were raising speculations that she was merely using the Mayor’s race as a way to keep her name in the news, and that even if she won, she would turn around and merely exploit the Mayor’s office for further visibility while spending most of her time seeking national-level office in either 1978 or 1980. While Abzug was fending off such questions, Mayor Beame was justifying the various stances he had taken about fiscal problems, basically saying that while many matters were grave, they were not his fault. All the other candidates were busy merely trying to assert their various positions and, even more, their simple visibility. 20 Amidst the usual politics of substance and sniping, on the stormy evening of July 13, several lightening strikes suddenly occurred at sub-stations of the New York electric power company, Consolidated Edison (Con Ed). These combined with some alternative equipment failures and administrative slipups to put almost all of New York City into a complete electrical blackout (a few sections of Southern Queens were not affected). The city had most recently experienced a massive power failure in November of 1965. There then ensued no major social upheaval, save for a noticeable rise in the birthrate the following August. This time the jovial, “where were you when the lights went out” spirit of 1965 was nowhere to be found. It was as though people had taken mental notes from 1965, speculating what they could do if another blackout occurred. Various urban riots of the intervening years had given people plenty of “rehearsal time” as well. In the summer of 1977 all hell broke loose. Throughout the city, especially in poorer sections, vandalism and looting were rampant. The Crown Heights and Bushwick sections of Brooklyn were probably the hardest hit. There, virtually every store was attacked and looted, and fires broke out all over the city, especially in Brooklyn, that burned into the following morning. Mayor Beame called it “a night of terror.” Arrests and injuries each numbered in the thousands. The eminent Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then living in Vermont, observed the activities surrounding the blackout. Less than a year later he spoke at Harvard University’s graduation and commented on the riots as a symbol of a failed spirit in the nation’s culture. In stark contrast to the expectations of those who thought he would use the occasion to praise American liberty versus the repression of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged that America was a free society, but held the key issue to be not whether a society was free but what it does with the freedoms it has. The summer of 1977 in New York, he argued, was a clear and grave indication of “the tilt of freedom towards evil.” 21 Given his stature, Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address garnered publicity, but he was hardly alone in his thinking that something was terribly wrong with a community that falls apart so atrociously upon the removal of various social restraints. The fallout in New York

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from the blackout riots would be enormous, and it proved to have a decided impact on the Mayor’s race. The issue of what went wrong within Con Ed itself was hotly debated. The company tried to hide behind the claim that the whole matter was an “act of God.” No one needed the inverted wisdom of Ben Franklin—“The Lord does not help those who do not help themselves”—to grasp the point that the power company should have been fully prepared for the effects of such inevitable “acts of God” as lightening strikes and that the preparations they had made for such problems had utterly failed. Columnist Art Buchwald joked ruefully: “Con Edison’s proof that God is real.” Abzug was among many who wondered whether Con Edison could be sued. The State Public Service Commission said that it could not. To that Abzug noted to some demonstrators at Con Ed’s headquarters on Irving Place: “No matter what the power situation is, there’s never a shortage of chutzpah at Con Edison.” 22 Beyond the gallows humor and the extreme recriminations against Con Edison, the reactions to the blackout and the mayhem in the streets affected all the Mayoral candidates. The public was greatly shaken, and so was Abzug. Even before the blackout riots, the city was already on edge about crime. July 1977 marked the one-year anniversary of the first of what had proven to be a litany of scary serial murders by David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, the 44Caliber Killer. In addition to these ongoing, unsolved murders, in 1976 New York City had recorded an incredible seventy-five felonies per hour, and there were several terrorist bombings in the city as well. Some local comics may have lamented that the city could not quite achieve “76 in ‘76,” but the ever-sharpening emotions surrounding “Son of Sam” superseded all such humor, and as the shootings grew in number (there would be eight in total) the city was virtually paralyzed in its fears. With the blackout, these same fearful New Yorkers were now facing whole neighborhoods going up in flames. Whenever there had been urban riots in New York or in other major cities, especially from 1965 to 1968, reactions of journalists, TV commentators, academic analysts, and politicians had essentially divided into two camps. One group, generally regarded to be on the liberal side, saw the troubles as an indicator of deeper social and economic problems like racism and poverty that needed to be addressed. Another group, usually cast as more right wing, focused directly on the fact that, no matter their socio-economic circumstances, rioters were breaking existing laws and needed to be stopped and prosecuted. The latter was generally impatient with the contextual solutions of liberals, and in the immediate aftermath of the blackout riots, that impatience was very much in evidence. Politicians who had any sort of legacy that linked them to the thinking of a liberalism that sought to “understand” rioters more than enforce the law upon them quickly grasped a prevailing mood in the city that was not at all willing to indulge any charitable

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approaches to the city’s troubles. Rioters were not to be regarded with such verbiage as “people with no alternatives and no voices who are desperately trying to send a message to those who do not see their plight.” Rather, New Yorkers saw people who were, with the rankest and most selfish cynicism, using the power failure as an opportunity to make mayhem and steal all they could. Academics and journalists could debate such matters all they wanted. Many politicians could discourse in such arguments with just as much (or little) intellectual capacity, but in an election year they had to do more than merely win points in a debating society or articulate some abstract sense of right and wrong. To get elected, they had to react to the issues in the context of what they perceived to be the dominant sensibilities among the voters. Without any doubt, the sensibilities of the voters in New York wanted the rioting to stop, the law breakers to be brought to justice, and for such a situation never to occur again. One prominent New York City Councilwoman, Ruth Messinger, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America and a strong Bella Abzug supporter, clung to the left/liberal line that the rioting was indicative of a greater problem of the city’s financial crises and of its neglect of poverty. “Unemployment breeds hunger, resentment, and hopelessness,” she pled. “Low wages, heavy inflation, and loss of services convince people that government is not meeting their basic needs. Our society has been stretched too thin. It took the blackout to expose this to full and public painful view.” Distancing himself from the “Drop Dead” unhelpfulness of his Republican predecessor, President Carter underscored the essentially liberal point that “deteriorating urban areas have been neglected for too long.” The fact was, however, that the majority of New Yorkers did not share such sympathetic castings of the rioters as victims, especially in the riots’ immediate aftermath. Allegations of “neglect” were of no interest to them. Indeed, many such expressions drew great anger. They, the put-upon average New Yorkers, were the real victims! Bruce Llewellyn, the noted African American owner of a major grocery store chain in New York (Fedco Foods), lost millions in the riots. He lamented that the looting of July turned New Yorkers’ minds into “poisonous mush.” It may have been mush, but that “mush” was what the Mayoral candidates had to face, and many began to realize that the one who handled the mush best may very well be the city’s next mayor. 23 The other issues of the day from high rents, to gay rights, feminism, homeless shelters, drug usage, education, municipal pensions, and labor unions, all paled before the matter of public safety. The others were now important only insofar as they connected to the theme of law and order. The labor unions were now proving to be of little consequence to candidates. Law and order issues completely outflanked any imprimatur of official union support in the voting behavior of each organization’s rank and file. Further, the many unions’ official statements of support spread through the many candidates,

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thus collectively making little difference. Abzug had the support of some of the district locals of the hospital workers, who did give her $10,000 and the services of three hundred campaign workers. Other union contributions for her totaled another $8,000. She also had the official endorsement of the Marine engineers and the motion picture operators. The rest of the major unions supported others. Albert Shanker’s teachers were officially uncommitted. Although Shanker was vehement in his opposition to Koch, a matter in which Mr. Koch took a certain pride. It all fed what would prove to be a well-cultivated image of being the candidate most opposed to traditional political insiders. Back in June, conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak had written a hopeful column, pointing to how the candidacy of “Cuomo could mean salvation for this beleaguered city, a safe harbor between the Scylla of Mayor Abraham Beame . . . and the Charybdis of exRep. Bella Abzug.” By mid-July, many such sentiments had grown, but they appeared to be helping Koch more than anyone else. 24 Candidate Percy Sutton was very much a victim of the political squeeze that ensued from the blackout, or more specifically the “blackout backlash,” as journalists had quickly dubbed the new mood. With an impeccable record fighting the many legacies of Jim Crow, both in New York and nationally, one that held sway in any political clique in Harlem, Sutton had still been able to evince a posture and accommodating political style that built bridges with many otherwise fearful white communities. In that spirit he had even first placed his 1977 Mayoral campaign headquarters not in his native Harlem but out in Queens. That summer’s post-blackout race-based identity politics began quickly to erode Sutton’s humanistic outreach efforts. This had actually started even before the blackout, and afterward it grew apace. Various black communities’ resentments at the presence and allegedly usurious pricing practices of local businesses, especially Korean grocers, had been a long-smoldering topic. These Koreans were targets in many of the blackout riots. Many community leaders wanted Sutton to take a stand in favor of expelling such businesspeople from black neighborhoods. At first he was reluctant, but he felt the pressure and ultimately shifted his views. He also moved his headquarters into Harlem. Ever more, he turned to African American leaders for support, noticeably securing endorsing appearances from boxer Muhammad Ali, who then made pointed speeches about how he was getting away from non-African American handlers himself. As Sutton’s political identity grew more consciously race based, other communities increasingly shrugged and ignored him, as did the city’s main newspapers. With the blackout, Sutton’s identity with the African American community further fenced him in as someone clearly on the “other side” as far as the increasingly truculent “punish the rioters” mainstream was concerned. One of his main responses here was merely to rage against Caucasians in the press for ignoring him. This only accentuated matters. In 1973 Sutton had been

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very helpful to Abraham Beame winning the African American vote. Now Sutton and his colleagues were criticizing the Jewish community for betraying him. Seldom can anyone win such a finger-pointing duel, and Sutton was no exception. Outside of African American neighborhoods, his candidacy largely faded. 25 For Bella Abzug, the blackout presented variations on the same sorts of pressures. Her political base was decidedly liberal, and there lay (or used to) sensibilities which sought to “understand” more than “punish” urban rioters. On the other hand, her famous, no-nonsense bristling and thundering, if cagily directed, could have conceivably captured the imaginations of a lot of angry post-blackout New Yorkers. Immediately after the power outage, one wag on her campaign staff came up with a political leaflet entitled: “Vote Bella: She’s the Greatest Energy Source in America.” That may have been too lighthearted for the moment, but Abzug immediately went after Con Ed, screaming about that “rapacious monopoly” and the possibility of a law suit against them. This idea may have won some support, but Abzug also hinted at the idea of the government taking over Con Ed and running it as a public trust. This did not seem to sit terribly well with voters. 26 Amidst the city’s financial troubles and calls for budget cuts focused on any number of institutions and services, Abzug continued to emphasize that the many elements of the city’s unique missions should not be tossed aside. In one June speech she had intoned: They say let’s get rid of free tuition [at the City University] and the municipal hospital system, shut down child care centers, senior centers, libraries, and fire stations. They say let’s fire teachers, guidance counselors, and security guards, and let’s get rid of rent control. Let’s slash subway and bus service and crush more people into the trains, and maybe we’ll even make them pay more for that memorable service. That’s not my vision, and I know it’s not yours. 27

She gave the speech at a working-class camp retreat in the Pocono Mountains. Such retreats were themselves phenomena of the New York Left that began back in the 1920s. By 1977 they appeared to be passing from the political scene. So enmeshed with the legacies of those liberal and left traditions, and believing there was still so much more progress to be made along such political lines, Abzug appeared to be then the best hope in the campaign for a set of older political ideals to which fewer and fewer voters were willing to grant much serious space. In the wake of the blackout, traditional liberalism appeared to have no relevance, and Abzug’s standing with the voters began to encounter difficulties. George McGovern’s endorsement of her candidacy that June underscored the sense of another day’s liberalism now long gone. 28 The simple matters of inflation and city debt were dwarfing so many ideals, and with the traumas of crime, Son of Sam, and the blackout, Abzug

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and the other Mayoral candidates had to face a very new public mood. Typical of her courage, less than forty-eight hours after the power went out, Abzug ventured directly into the heart of the burned out Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn. Here one of her traditionally liberal positions became an issue. Unlike many New York politicians, she had always defended the rights of public employees (like New York City policemen) to form unions and, like any union, to go on strike if necessary. At the time, under the “Taylor Law,” New York State prevented municipal workers from striking, and Abzug had always been a conspicuous opponent of “Taylor.” In the months before the blackout, the issue of a new policemen’s labor contract was on hand, as they had then been working without a contract for a year. 29 With such labor issues on the minds of many victimized community residents, Abzug then found herself being asked pointed questions about the police. People were obviously in no mood to imagine anything along lines of policemen being more concerned about securing better contracts, wages, and retirement packages than about protecting the people of the city whose already high taxes were paying their salaries and benefits. In many neighborhoods people were asking (screaming): Where were the police when they were needed? The Constitutionality of their right to strike was certainly not on the mind of any Brooklyn resident at that point. That July, police ranks had been stretched to the limit, and some New York police had indeed failed to report for duty the night of the blackout, exaggerating many New Yorkers’ linkage of unionism and work avoidance. Abzug’s anti–Taylor Law views thus came to the fore. When out in Brooklyn, Abzug was explicitly asked, “What would you have done if the police had been on strike during the blackout?” She turned to the incensed Brooklyn’er and responded, “Mobilize the community organizations and get them into the streets.” Specifics could have been raised here about what community organizations she had in mind, and what, beyond a euphemistic level, did she actually mean by “mobilize.” Presumably, she had in mind the idea of neighborhoods rallying outdoors to protect one another’s homes, stores, and property. Here one community resident offered her an especially compelling counterpoint: “The community was organized,” he shouted. “They were out looting.” This situation demonstrated the fact that, in the wake of the blackout, the tenets of liberalism were appearing to be but empty platitudes, completely outflanked by new realities. One joke of the day had it that with the riots and the general crime of New York in the late 1970s, “Sixties liberals got mugged by reality.” While no one ever had the chutzpah to mug Bella Abzug, she was nonetheless affected. “Liberalism’s retreat,” as one writer noted, “was throwing Abzug off stride.” Her calls for community mobilization suddenly appeared empty. Her calls for a government takeover of Con Edison merely seemed another liberal

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attempt to expand already-thick, expensive bureaucracies, and her continued support of free City University tuition, municipal hospitals, day care and senior centers, rent control, teachers and police unionization, and no increases in bus and subway fares all smacked of liberalism’s irresponsible business as usual. Her support of police and firefighters’ right to strike would be a sore point throughout that hot summer. At a luncheon at Mamma Leone’s famous restaurant on 44th Street near Times Square she was conspicuously grilled about her backing the right to strike. The attacks appeared to put her on the defensive. Reporters dubbed it the “Mamma Leone Massacre.” Given her usually aggressive poses, her new defensive posture was striking, and it marked quite a change in the tone of her campaign. 30 In a social and economic environment that was making it so clear to so many that the city’s old economic ways were at an end, Abzug’s classical New York City liberalism seemed blindly misguided. Her various liberal positions had no more ideological edginess, only her personality did, and that was hardly a base for an election victory under such circumstances as those in which New York found itself in 1977. As she continued to support union rights, including those of the police, Abzug appeared politically old-fashioned and out of touch. What may also have been a cruel irony for Abzug was the point that, with the fat contracts that many unions had secured with support from people like her, many laborers had been able to move to the suburbs and now could not vote for her. (Conspicuously, if unconstitutionally, Ed Koch favored rules requiring union workers under city contracts to live in the city.) Columnist Russell Baker derisively snickered here that, if elected, Bella Abzug can be expected to “wear large hats, put air-conditioning in the subway and not become cross with policemen when they go on strike.” 31 The fact that Baker could make such catty references showed how much the sensibilities of many post-blackout New Yorkers had shifted in regard to such traditionally liberal notions of identity “hat” politics, of municipal spending on public transportation, and of the police and unionism. Sensing her diminished political touch, Abzug lost her temper even more often than usual, and that was not helping in regard to how voters were conceiving their new mayor. While Ed Koch was calling Mayor Beame “incompetent,” Abzug was merely calling him a “schmuck.” One seemed coldly analytical and dead on point; the other’s words appeared to be merely loud, immature name calling. Abzug seemed juvenile and combative, while Koch appeared thoroughly competent and appropriately indignant. Given the city’s many crises, the latter’s posture seemed to be the ticket to seriousminded voters. 32 Abzug’s standing in the polls began to slip, and, like Percy Sutton, she seemed to implode in various bursts of anger and incivility. Actress Shirley MacLaine was an active Abzug supporter, and she was actually able to institute a “brainy” idea into the campaign that she could help counteract the

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effects of the stifling heat (on many more days than normal that summer the temperature topped 100 degrees) and pressures of the campaign that were allegedly affecting Abzug’s temper. She proposed to keep Abzug on a macrobiotic diet of yogurt and nuts. The two foods, she held, would supposedly work as a sedative. (With what dieticians, physicians, or psychologists MacLaine may have verified any of her macrobiotic claims no one ever divulged. Many suspect the answer was: none.) Abzug actually went along with the regimen. The magazine Us even ran a story about Abzug’s diet: “Abzug Is Losing Pounds While Gaining Votes.” The fact that someone with MacLaine’s perspectives and solutions could wield actual influence on a serious campaign for no less than the office of Mayor of New York was an indication of how some of the loopier elements of the alleged political left of the 1970s could at times gain a footing amidst serious political matters. And this in the campaign of a woman who always sternly trumpeted about herself, above all things: “I am a very serious person.” If the essentially frivolous Us magazine’s interest in an article stemmed from the nuts and yogurt, perhaps Abzug should have taken note of the trivialization at play. Looking at the history of the decade, historians and commentators of liberal and more radical persuasions have preferred to minimize or ignore such loopy elements of the self-styled leftist culture of the day. Of course, historians of more conservative outlooks love to highlight them. Whatever the broader balance, it did seem absurdly banal that a candidate who contended she was utterly serious and the best suited to straighten out New York’s many problems was willing to obey the dictates of a professional actress who was contending that a diet of nuts and yogurt could play a significant role in managing the tone of her campaign. The brilliant Rochester-based analyst Christopher Lasch, claimed in ways by both the right and the left, was just then beginning his writing about such phenomenon as silly theatrics compromising the substance of real politics. He dubbed it a narcissistic “banality of pseudo-self-awareness.” In addition to the inherent absurdity of such pseudo-solutions in a serious political campaign, Ms. MacLaine’s “diet” simply did not work. No one noticed any change in Abzug’s temperament, and in that summer she actually gained weight. Some said she gained ten pounds; others had it as high as twenty-two. In either case it was hardly good for her health. She could not even fit into the dress she intended to wear for the photographs taken to accompany the Us magazine article. Campaign Press Secretary Harold Holzer noted ruefully: “She ate about four hundred pounds of nuts during that campaign.” The diet and its impact, desired and otherwise, had no effect on Abzug’s tonality or on the voters’ perceptions, and Abzug’s voter support continued to sag. In September she went back to a sensible diet and lost some weight. The magazine Good Housekeeping would put Abzug on its cover in September, praising the “Brand New Bella” and her weight loss and better

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appearance. The primary was over by then, however, so the magazine piece had no political impact. 33 In August, still apparently regarding her as a front-runner, the New York Times wrote: “The knowledge that a vote for Bella could mean seeing her angry face and listening to that powerful voice every day for the next four years could well be the hidden issue of the campaign.” Abzug’s angry manner did not seem to speak to the voters now gripped by fears of financial implosion and rampant crime. Her personality and manner now appeared to imply that she would continue to be but a force on behalf of the liberal and trendy groups like unions and feminists, identified with the political left of older, more economically secure days. Reflecting the desperation among her supporters here, her own campaign people put out a full-page newspaper advertisement, saying: “There’s More to Bella Than Meets the Ear.” The obvious defensiveness in the message was not lost on the public, and her standing continued to diminish. 34 In conscious contrast to the image of a belligerent personality, Abzug had tried to cast herself for Mayor as a good, responsible manager. But even here, no matter her personality or any of Shirley MacLaine’s nuts and yogurt, Abzug seemed weak on the issues that were clearly the major ones of the day. Her image of forcefulness continued to occupy the minds of many voters, for better or worse. But others actually noted a certain vagueness to have come over her campaigning. This point struck one writer with the Village Voice who was sympathetic with her campaign. To the Voice, Abzug now appeared more content to bask in the glow of being a celebrity/personality than to be alive and sharp with regard to the truly pressing issues of that hot summer. 35 They noted how she oddly answered questions about neighborhood strengths with a disconnected attack on unspecified “special interests.” Such language rang with the same hollowness of early 1970s flower children whining about “the system.” On other issues she also appeared disquietingly vague, lacking any hint of both the thunder and the precision that people had long expected and respected from her. Her campaign had raised the idea of rolling back the city’s transit fares. Yet when pressed on details, she waffled, talking about how lower fares were “a target,” “something we have to strive for,” and “a long term aim” that was part of “a strategy.” On another occasion, after she had originally affirmed in the prepared text of a June speech that “one of my first acts as Mayor will be the choice of a suitable site [for a new City Convention Center] and the creation of an effective financing plan to get that job underway,” she later delivered the speech to members of the securities industry with the words “first acts” changed to mere “high priorities.” 36 Municipal pensions were a major issue in regard to the city’s perilous financial state. On June 1, Abzug held that the “overly expensive pensions systems” needed to be renegotiated. Various union leaders reacted strongly.

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She soon wrote back in the Public Employee Press that her idea had been “badly worded.” She went on to affirm that she was “fully aware that all pension rights become legally vested and cannot be reduced once they are approved as part of a contract,” adding her approval of the situation as “workers need this kind of security so they can plan their futures.” Her lawyerly (and correct) affirmation of the legally vested nature of pension rights made some ask, then, as she was obviously aware of the legalities at stake, why she ever raised the idea of renegotiating them. It smacked not merely of grandstanding, but of legally baseless and intellectually weak grandstanding. Her old forcefulness now seemed devoid of the old effectiveness and mental precision. Voters could conclude here that such misguided aggressiveness would be, at best, a waste of time and could get her and the city into legal difficulties. 37 Formerly, Abzug’s forcefulness in Congress had been a style coupled with a substance that had cagily garnered much federal money for the city, a matter her campaign would repeatedly emphasize. With such funds needed now more than ever, it was strange that she was now voicing an oddly chastening message when it came to federal money: “Before we can really expect—demand—our share from the federal government,” she noted, “we have to help ourselves. We must economize, end bureaucratic corruption and ripoffs of federally funded programs . . . [emphasis hers].” 38 With the city’s finances in such a terrible state, a mayoral candidate would have likely done well who could put forward an argument, as Abzug did when working for John Lindsay in 1969, to the effect that “we have been paying into the federal government so much for so long and now deserve a legitimate level of help back” and that “I am the person with the know-how to achieve this.” Rather than asserting such confident ideas, Abzug now seemed cautious, a style that struck people as odd, both in view of her personality and, even more, in view of the city’s situation. Back in June, when Abzug officially announced her candidacy she had done so with a classically New York–style sense of aggressive entitlement. Addressing the city’s financial woes and the conviction that the federal government should help the city in its time of need, she thundered: “When I say ‘help,’ I don’t mean that we should go banging on the White House door with a tin cup in hand and a sob in our voice.” 39 So much of the famous fieriness had apparently turned inward and grown more personal. Even worse, perhaps, the command of issues appeared ever more strained. In 1971, when anti-war demonstrators had been penned up by federal authorities in Washington without proper legal procedures and in unhealthy conditions, a gutsy Abzug had been highly outspoken about the Constitutionally outrageous violations of civil liberties. Some traditional liberals wondered, then, where she was when the Times and various television news programs publicized the horrible conditions in which many of the arrested

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“blackout” rioters and looters were being held. Here Abzug chose to fall into line with the other major candidates, saying nothing about prison conditions, and holding onto a “get tough” posture with respect to criminals in general. She may have thought this would stand well with many voters, but it hardly distinguished her, let alone show any of the old gutsiness for which she was so famous. While harmonizing with the get-tough views, she merely joined with the pack of major candidates with an undistinguished message of “me too.” It was here that Ed Koch marked the political turf for himself most effectively, by calling not just for toughness but by repeatedly expressing his support for the use of the death penalty in selected cases. Abzug had never supported capital punishment, so on any get-tough posture she was easily outflanked. “The looting that followed the July power blackout,” wrote columnist Tom Wicker, “the hysteria generated by the ‘Son of Sam’ murder case and its wild press and television coverage . . . all of this apparently has much of the citizenry more than normally frightened about crime and violence, hence in a mood to applaud a lot of loose talk about law and order.” In other situations, Abzug had shown the courage of her convictions. Now the ground was shifting all around her, and she seemed anything but nimble in response. When the Daily News endorsed Koch, Abzug was oddly conspicuous when she declined to offer any comment. As Percy Sutton’s campaign imploded, he lashed out at the media. Such behavior is often a sign of weakness. Instead of “[focusing on] fundamental issues,” Abzug similarly fumed, the papers had been focusing on “some sensational personality comments.” She was off stride. 40 In her new, uninspiring generalities and in her frustrations with the media, Abzug had become ever more a standard politician, appearing to be talking out of both sides of her mouth. There were still plenty of people who had long-since written her off as too abrasive. There was no winning them over. Now it was her supporters who were not seeing the individuality and the fire they had always liked. In answer to any feminist charge as to why she should be singled out for being no different from male politicians, there was the point that she used to be different. She had always said that women in power would do things differently. Given the new pressures of the summer of 1977, such feminist views appeared antiquated anyway. In the House of Representatives she had evolved from edgy, early 1970s feminism into a well-respected mainstream Capitol Hill player. In the Mayor’s race the new issues of the summer placed her less in touch with the new mainstream. She appeared old-school. Sensing a fall in standing, Abzug could find no new high ground. Instead she merely sniped at her opponents. In a September 1 candidates’ debate, she used much of her time attacking Koch and Cuomo. She quipped at Cuomo that he became a candidate only “when the governor [Hugh Carey] called up the newspapers.” It was a reference to the change of

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primary date, by then an old charge. In addition, Cuomo shot right back at her: “She’s lying, and she’s good at it.” Gentlemanliness was not the order of the day, and Cuomo scored with his attack. To Koch, among other charges, Abzug tossed out the odd fact that he had supported Wayne Hays, an Ohio Congressman who had been a powerful figure on the House Administration Committee, but who in 1976 had gotten caught maintaining a staff member, Elizabeth Ray, as his mistress. With Cuomo, she looked immature. With regard to Koch, à la Wayne Hays/Elizabeth Ray, the feminists, already fully disposed to vote for her, may have enjoyed the jabs, but the attacks smacked of desperation. Feminists did not need to be persuaded, and other voters were left wondering, with all the problems that the city was facing, why Abzug was focusing on a year-old Washington, DC, gossip topic about someone’s mistress. With the law and order issues of the summer, Abzug had lost her edge. When she tried to reclaim the offensive, she relinquished the high road. In the last debate, two days before the primary, she sourly claimed that Ed Koch’s advocacy of the death penalty was “a false issue.” It may have been a merely hyperbolic pose on Koch’s part, but it so resonated with voters that criticizing it was unwise. In that long, hot summer in New York, unreconstructed 1960s liberalism seemed totally out of touch. 41 By trying to counter the image of herself as someone who would not be merely conflictive but be able to run the city’s business on a day to day basis, Abzug had labored to show herself as someone who would be a good with the details. Among many voters, the image of divisiveness remained, but among others she had both given up the fringy marginality that her personality usually brought to any situation and lost the sense of command of detail that she had usually possessed. Given her obvious force of personality that virtually everyone had known, the Village Voice could not have been more incisive when they encapsulated the odd turf onto which Abzug’s movement had landed by describing her campaign as “cautious.” Until 1977, “cautious” would have been the last word anyone would have ever coupled with the fiery Bella Abzug. But there it was, and upon inspection it appeared to fit all too well. Having already endorsed Koch, the New York Post went out of its way to expand upon its opposition to Abzug. They quoted the Executive Director of New York’s Citizens’ Union, Steven Shostakovsky, who also supported Koch and who made a point of stressing that “the city’s diverse groups and her [Abzug’s] temperament could be an obstacle to obtaining increased state and federal aid.” Then he added, “her program lacked specifics.” 42 With the fashion of tough postures about crime becoming the principal theme of the Mayoral race, one matter rose in early August which lent the possibility of a changed tonality. Less than a month after the blackout and all the violence and recriminations, the serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berko-

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witz was finally apprehended. Many thought this would calm some of the popular angers and fears of the summer and end up helping candidates like Abzug and Beame, who had been hurt by the city’s new mood. This did not occur. The capture of Son of Sam brought not so much a calm as a reinforced law-and-order resolve that crime should not be tolerated and should be fought by any means necessary. Questions now remained about issues pertaining to the riots, and Son of Sam discussions did not cease. They merely turned to matters of his trial and punishment, with much of the population appearing to be more concerned about no legal loopholes or trickery coming to his assistance. “Let me have five minutes with him” were the words of the father of Stacy Moskowitz, “Sam’s” final murder victim. It seemed no one could disagree with the sentiment. “Kill Him!” was a prominent note of graffiti about New York that month, and no one needed any explanation as to the reference. Ed Koch’s conspicuous and cagy posturing in favor of the death penalty garnered him yet more voter favor here. 43 In addition to the blackout backlash turning the tide of politics against many now saddled with the legacies of socially liberal conditions, Abzug also felt, via Koch, the effects of a major holdover from the 1976 campaign against Pat Moynihan. Moynihan had successfully used Abzug’s regular opposition to high levels of defense spending to label her as insufficiently supportive of Israel. With her love for the state of Israel, this had angered her deeply. In the 1977 campaign she discovered that the effects of Moynihan’s mud-slinging still lingered. “We would walk around Forest Hills, where a lot of elderly Jewish people live,” recalled supporter Martha Baker, her friend from Women Strike for Peace. “She would greet them, and they’d ask her to talk in Hebrew to see if she really could, because they did not believe it. That’s how ugly it was.” Abzug’s command of Hebrew was fine, but the mood was indeed quite ugly, and much of the ugliness came via the opponent who was, in effect, the Daniel Moynihan of her political life in 1977, Ed Koch. “Koch,” recalled Baker, “put out a letter that was sent to every major Jewish organization saying that she didn’t support Israel.” Abzug tried to be conspicuous with such stands as one which declared that, if she was elected, the city would not do business with corporations that complied with the Arab boycott of Israel. Nonetheless, the oral “Hebrew exams” from people in Forest Hills showed that damage had been done. She further tried to show she would be tough on crime, promising city policemen that she would rehire 1,700 laid-off cops by declaring the police a “top priority,” a bureaucratic declaration which would allow her to use federal dollars to meet the rehiring costs. She further promised to declare an “unconditional war” on habitual criminals. This came across with an element of defensiveness. The Daily News snorted here: “Bella pitches woo at cops,” noting amidst the promises that she still opposes the death penalty. Koch had hit the resonating point.

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Harping on his support of the death penalty, he seemed to make at least one of his chief opponents scramble defensively. 44 Koch had used the summer’s conditions to cut a broader path for his candidacy. He quickly gained notoriety, gaining much sympathetic coverage from the New York Post, a paper whose new owner, Rupert Murdoch, had an affinity for the bumptious, emotional mood of the blackout backlash. 45 Koch strove to cast himself as someone who may have a moderately liberal record on some general social issues but who could and would get tough with unions, straighten out the city’s finances, be unremittingly severe in regard to all forms of criminality, and, largely for effect, favor the death penalty in certain situations. Governor Carey may have hoped that pushing the primary back to September would serve the needs of his favorite, Mario Cuomo, and given him time to build up support against more known figures like Abzug. The extra time proved to serve Koch better than anyone. Koch made a point of going after Abzug again and again on the “support for Israel” question. He used the Moynihan legacy and emphasized how Abzug “exaggerates her commitment to Israel [and] exaggerates her connection to Jews.” This stung. The two had been at odds over various matters, such as with the exposure of photographs demonstrating Syrian atrocities against Israeli soldiers in October 1973, a matter in which Koch felt Abzug had double-crossed him amidst a selfish effort to garner publicity. In the 1976 Senate primary Koch had come out against her, telling a reporter he felt the state would be better off with someone else representing New York in the Senate. Immediately afterward, Abzug screamed at him right on the floor of the House of Representatives, calling him “a divisive bastard.” Since that altercation, the two had not spoken, and the papers noted the ongoing hostility. 46 In the 1976 campaign, the Israel issue had certainly contributed to the loss of Abzug’s lead in the polls, and as her support slipped once again in 1977. Rivals raising the matter of Israel made her quite angry, the very thing her opponents wanted. It was painful for her to encounter the suspicions among people in Queens who wondered whether or not she could speak Hebrew. Losing her famous temper hurt her in 1976, and the same thing happened in 1977. She handled the Hebrew tests in Forest Hills, but on several occasions she yelled at people while “pressing the flesh” in various neighborhoods. Her temper was getting the better of her usually shrewd judgment. Feminist activist and writer Robin Morgan recalled Abzug campaigning one day in Brooklyn. A group of Hasidic Jews confronted her about her defenses of gay rights. Hasidics were always aggressively conservative, if not outright reactionary, on social issues. Here they verbally attacked Abzug, referring to gays as perverts. After a few relatively calm rejoinders she lashed out at them. “What the hell is this?” she admonished, regarding their appearance: “You want to talk about perverts? Look at all these men wearing fur hats and

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ear curls.” It was as though she was countering the contemptible charges of being anti-Israel with an expressed sense of entitlement—that she had a unique right to criticize such a group of Jews. (Certainly if a Republican Gentile had made such a remark, Abzug would have been among the first to raise charges of anti-Semitism.) Maybe it was the combative thirteen-yearold girl lashing back at the Orthodox male elders at her temple who told her she was not allowed to say Kaddish for her late father. Maybe it was simple fatigue. Maybe it was all the yogurt and nuts. Whatever the causes, Abzug was slipping. “She had called the Hasids perverts for wearing ear curls,” Morgan lamented. “You just knew, there it went. We’d just lost Brooklyn.” 47 Meanwhile, Ed Koch was able to carve a popular rhetorical niche for himself in his firm responses to the blackout and the ensuing insurrections. He also held good credentials with the city’s Jewish community, and his lady friend, Bess Myerson, put in helpful appearances for him as well. Myerson had some political significance in her own right. She wrote a local newspaper column and had been in New York politics for decades. She had been Miss New York of 1945 and, from there, Miss America, the first Jewish contestant to win the title. For many Jewish voters over the age of forty, Myerson was an icon. Throughout the year, rumors had also had it that her relationship with Koch was a sham, manufactured to cover up Koch’s alleged homosexuality, but nothing was ever proven or disproven here. Anti-Koch posters and graffiti all about New York that summer and autumn (all disavowed by the Cuomo campaign) had it: “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” It was a dirty business all around. When Moynihan ran against Abzug, his attacks regarding Abzug’s true allegiance to Jewish causes had been effective. But on that year’s primary day, Abzug still stood as the Jewish candidate in the Senate race. Against Moynihan, furthermore, she had done well in African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. With Sutton and Badillo in the race, neither of these neighborhoods appeared to be solid sources of support. Meanwhile, any identity-driven Jewish voter had choices. 48 Within the context of his “I’ll get tough” posture, Koch played an effective identity-politics game among Jewish voters. In many Jewish neighborhoods, the new mood toward violence and criminality appeared to discredit many traditional liberal tenets. Koch cagily made the most of the situation among various constituencies. His stand on the death penalty was but one part of this, as was his determined claim that he would bring the city’s financial troubles under control. Koch had also shifted away from supporting school busing as a means to integrate the city’s public schools. He stood with many in middle class Forest Hills, the same neighborhood where elderly Jewish citizens questioned Abzug’s Hebrew, in opposition to the development of city-sponsored low-income housing projects there. He was willing to criticize some unions and the salaries and benefits of teachers, school principals, and police. He criticized some entitlement programs of municipal work-

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ers. In prior times any candidate, including Koch, would have known not to touch any such sacred areas as these. But he had a blanker slate than most in regard to prior positions. Being behind in the polls, he had no reason not to take chances, and he had the skill and political acumen to recognize the new political tenor of the city and cast his gambles within the context of his perceptions. Some critics called it mere pandering, but to many New Yorkers, this supposedly unknown Ed Koch came to appear to be the guy who was speaking out in ways they had long wanted to hear. Vis à vis the police, city school teachers, and housing projects, he was now seen as someone who would take on the special interests and, above all, be tough on criminals. Rupert Murdoch’s rhetorically aggressive New York Post joined in the chorus here and greatly reified many of the new post-liberal New York sensibilities about ensconced power, waste, fraud, and criminality. Talking a new tough language, while disassociating itself from many of the past vestiges of conservatism, like anti-Semitism and racism, that some equated with older conservative New York papers, the Post endorsed Koch. So did the Daily News. “Bella Abzug,” the latter sniffed, “would be colorful—and ruinous.” Meanwhile, the Times endorsed Cuomo. The Post’s support of Koch also came in an abnormally partisan manner. Rupert Murdoch and his editors knew that their paper’s covers would be seen not just by their readers but by as many, if not far more, who merely glanced at the front pages as they passed a newsstand without even making a purchase. Murdoch thus placed the endorsement not merely at the top of the editorial section, he made it their page-one headline: “THE POST ENDORSES ED KOCH.” When the Daily News endorsed Koch, Murdoch had the Post headline the fact of that paper’s support. He was willing to risk someone at a newsstand glancing at the Post’s front page and being prompted to buy the Daily News. It was that partisan. (Later the Post printed an additional opinion column by William F. Buckley also endorsing Koch.) Traditional journalistic ethics certainly frowned upon such blatant, front-page partisanship, but the paper’s new owner and staff had no desire to conform to journalistic traditions. The financial troubles and the extraordinary violence of that summer added a sense of legitimacy to such breaks with any sort of genteel traditions. It further meshed with a classically New York chauvinism-driven sense of the city always finding a way to renew and break with traditions as circumstances demanded. The new face of Ed Koch embodied this Gotham conceit, while established candidates like Beame and Abzug represented a now-discredited past. If traditionalists snorted at such behavior as the Post’s breaks with journalistic propriety, many more readers enjoyed the style, and it all underscored the sense of Ed Koch being the fresh face and the right man in such extraordinary times that required a break from the old. 49 In late August a rally took place in Central Park to demonstrate support for women’s rights and for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment,

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which then had but two more years to secure the necessary thirty-eight states for ratification. Abzug was a featured speaker at the rally, and support for her Mayoral candidacy was a most visible dimension of the gathering. Aside from Abzug, Gloria Steinem, City Council Presidential candidate Carol Bellamy, Betty Friedan, and other leading feminists were all on hand supporting both the ERA and Abzug. Koch asked to speak at the occasion, but he was turned down, even though he had been a supporter of every major feminist issue, including the ERA. “We just didn’t think it would be fair to have him and Bella Abzug up there,” noted Noreen Connell, President of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. “We don’t think he would have been well received even with his favorable support of women’s rights issues.” There was politeness, as well as more than a little disingenuousness in the rationale. In any case, it did not matter. Koch was hardly hurt by the snub. For Abzug the occasion merely amounted to an opportunity to preach to the choir. There were likely few to no New Yorkers at the rally who were not already planning to vote for her. The primary was less than two weeks away. Feminism and gender was now her principal base in any sort of identity politics. The gay community was her only other area of support, and her statements of support for gay rights may have solidified some of her major points of opposition. Other identity votes were going elsewhere. Italians were strong for Cuomo, including Italian women who had been fans of Abzug the previous year against Moynihan. Hispanics were voting for Badillo. African Americans were for Sutton. To the extent that there was a Jewish identitybased vote, it was split. With the law and order issues that had dominated the city with Son of Sam and the blackout backlash, Abzug appeared to have fallen from favor with regard to the chief substantive matters of the day. Koch appeared to be the one with fresh ideas. Abzug’s stands on the chief financial questions were unremarkable. As feminism was her chief voter base, along with the remnants of unreconstructed late 1960s liberalism, it all did not appear to amount to too much. 50 In August, Rolling Stone magazine, having just moved its headquarters to New York, had decided to devote a special issue to their new editorial home. They asked Bella Abzug to do a cover story with them, giving a kindly tour of her favorite spots in the city. Such a lengthy vignette could have given her candidacy a needed humane dimension, as the frenetic pace of the summer’s traumas and the campaign had greatly obscured it. Beyond, the visibility of the magazine was, or would have been, great publicity at a critical time. On the literal, and proverbial “cover of the Rolling Stone” would have sat the visage of Bella Abzug, there at every newsstand for passing New Yorkers to peruse, a nice counter to the visibility that the Post had given Koch. Revealing of the sizable investment that the magazine had in the ideas for their first “NY” issue, RS went well beyond merely taking a cover photograph of Abzug. They commissioned none less than the artist Andy Warhol to do a

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painting of her. The special issue was set to come out in late August, hence it would be all over the city’s newsstands in the final weeks leading up to the primary of September 8. Then on August 16, Elvis Presley suddenly died. Naturally, Rolling Stone jumped on the occasion and chose to redo everything, devoting their new issue and cover to the late Elvis, shelving Abzug and the planned “New York” issue until the following month. Abzug then made the cover of Rolling Stone but only after the primary was over. It was just one of those bad breaks that any politician has to endure. Her voter base was diminishing, and events appeared to conspire to prevent any reversals. 51 Later that August, the partisan New York Post succeeded in a little direct embarrassing of Bella Abzug as well. On August 25, Abzug had called for a three-month amnesty for all New Yorkers who had unpaid parking ticket fines. Several papers, including the Post, devoted space to her advocacy here. Five days later the Post came out with a story that implied Abzug’s call for amnesty to be disingenuous and self-serving. Abzug, they pointed out, had twenty-two unpaid parking tickets, with fines totaling $1,075. Abzug had not driven an automobile since moving out of her Westchester home in Mt. Vernon. The car which accumulated the fines was a campaign car from her 1976 Senate bid against Moynihan. The fines were her legal responsibility, however, and she duly paid them. Upon doing so she “congratulated” the Post for uncovering the matter. Her graciousness here came with a certain nervousness, as she knew that any display of temper (in which critics would have further delighted) would have been a disaster. The Post got a “gotcha” point. 52 Tabloid journalists can play such games; candidates can seldom get away with them, and Abzug was no exception. She dared not lash back, she just had to take it. Barring any Mayoral candidate garnering 40 percent of the vote, which no one expected, Ed Koch needed only to come in second place in the primary. The extremism of the mood that summer catapulted him right in with the leaders. Meanwhile, despite all the criticisms of the Mayor, but with all the visibility he had garnered amidst his handling of the city’s various crises, Abe Beame continued to hold some support. Assuming he ever had any visibility, Percy Sutton had faded except among African American voters. Herman Badillo was widely respected, but his candidacy never amounted to much outside Hispanic neighborhoods. (Costikyan, Harnett, and Ravitch never attained the slightest significance. Ravitch went nowhere. Costikyan withdrew from the race in May and endorsed Koch. Harnett stayed in the race and drew 1 percent.) Although they generated no major support, the candidacies of Sutton and Badillo did affect Abzug, taking away most of the Hispanic and African American support that had been strong for her in 1976. 53 As Governor Carey had hoped, Cuomo did gain visibility with the extra time allotted to the primary. Meanwhile, Abzug seemed never to be able to

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refocus on a set of positions or any rhetorical stances from which her candidacy could once again gather traction. She campaigned tirelessly, actually coming down with a touch of laryngitis in late August. 54 None of the specifics she raised appeared to catch on with significant segments of the public. Playing to her base, via feminist rhetoric or with defenses of municipal workers or unions, only underscored the sense of her representing a brand of traditional liberal politics that appeared passé. As liberal traditionalism took such a beating in the extraordinary circumstances of the summer of 1977, Abzug’s record and even her whole persona had come to appear old, a preciously angry assertiveness that long augmented a set of fully institutionalized positions that had now come to be regarded as too enmeshed with many well-heeled interest groups that the city could, and should, no longer afford or indulge. In the late spring and early summer, reporters may have been speculating about how much Abzug’s well-known personality could be a detriment to her campaign. Implicit in such speculations was an assumption that she was one of the leading candidates. By September, Abzug’s anger and the powerful voice did to some degree prove to be liabilities, but the matters were hardly central issues. Columnist Peter Hamill of the Daily News, hardly a fan, mentioned that whether she acted in her infamously strident manner or in the more low-key “new Bella” manner she had started in 1976, “the voters did not go for it.” The questions of her tonality had become mere extra elements that were further diminishing an also-ran candidacy. Having started the campaign with the pollsters giving her 34 percent of the vote, on primary day, Abzug polled a mere 17 percent. That was good for a close fourth place, just behind Beame’s 18 percent, Cuomo’s 19 percent, and Koch’s just under 20 percent. (Sutton drew 14 percent, and Badillo polled 11 percent.) The vote totals were: Koch 180,260, Cuomo 170,573, Beame 163,616, Abzug 150,761, Sutton 131,185, and Badillo 99,994. (Koch would make Badillo Deputy Mayor.) The margins were tiny, as is usual in any packed field of candidates, but with such a finish, Bella Abzug was out of the picture. 55 When Abzug lost to Moynihan 1976, there was anguish over the narrowness of the defeat and the votes taken away by the liberal competition from Paul O’Dwyer and Ramsey Clark. This time there could be fewer such “What ifs.” The percentage differences were small, but the three top votegetters of Koch, Cuomo, and Beame (in that order, hence Beame was out too) had combined for 57 percent. They each generally represented less traditionally liberal views than Abzug, so, unlike 1976, Abzug supporters could not logically raise complaints about support-splitting competition. This significance of the “57 percent” of Koch, Cuomo, and Beame was not merely an inference drawn by journalists or historians, it was something that Abzug’s campaign manager, Terry O’Connor, pointed out to the Times. Within some of the traditionally liberal and identity-politics folds, the competition had

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made an impact that magnified a clear loss for Abzug. In the heavily Hispanic South Bronx, for example, Abzug had previously defeated Moynihan 1,454 to 571. This time she lost to Badillo by a full six-fold margin: 4,974 to 818. In the heavily African American South Jamaica section of Queens she lost badly to Sutton: 10,132 to 1,387. In 1976 she had defeated Moynihan there 2,936 to 812. The districts in the city that Abzug decisively won were in her old Congressional district from the Midtown Manhattan’s West Side down through Greenwich Village. This was enough to take Manhattan, but in the other four boroughs she was not strong. (Koch actually won none of the boroughs. Beame won Brooklyn, Badillo the Bronx, with Cuomo taking Queens and Staten Island, but Koch was strong everywhere. 56) Former New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who had supported Cuomo, shrugged at Abzug’s primary loss, as well as her winning the West Side, commenting: “They have a lot of people over there who are screamers and yellers, too. That’s all right,” he opined, “but confine it to there.” To Wagner, New Yorkers needed a Mayor who would be the “kind of person . . . to pull the town together.” To him, Abzug was the very antithesis of this. “She didn’t seem to be a person who pulls people together, except a certain group that are attracted to her.” Beyond, Wagner felt, “she didn’t exhibit any knowledge of city government.” This, he said, rendered her “a type that doesn’t attract me at all.” Thinking of many women who had later entered politics, Wagner contended: “There are so many women now in the political field who are just as bright, just as dedicated, but so much more nice and like a woman . . . so much more attractive, and I don’t just mean in the physical sense. They’re much more attractive as people who can get things through, who are not constantly haranguing.” Of Abzug, Wagner concluded, “I enjoy her company. I think she’s amusing and interesting to talk to, but not as a public figure.” It is certainly easy to see elements of gender prejudice, with words like “attractive,” “nice,” and “like a woman” sprinkled amidst Wagner’s many assertions. Yet Abzug’s haranguing ways did her a disservice, as well as create more accept-the-abuse slavish mentality among feminist loyalists. It left her with a dedicated base, but most others maintained ever-more decidedly sharp opinions about her. Governor Carey was apparently convinced, along lines similar to Wagner’s thinking, that if Abzug was elected, her manner would indeed alienate many, including the investment bankers whose support was going to be necessary to save the City from insolvency. That was why he had strongly encouraged Cuomo’s candidacy and moved the primary back to September to give Cuomo time to establish himself. 57 The world will never know whether Carey or Wagner got it right or were using their perception of “manners” to denigrate Abzug out of prejudice, for Abzug never got a chance to tackle the city’s problems as Mayor. The obvious rejoinders—that she could have handled the job brilliantly, much as she had in Congress, and that a man of similarly harsh ways would have met with

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far less resistance—each cycle back to endless assertions and counterpoints. Did not a woman have to be so forceful to break down the barriers; does a woman or a man, by being so forceful, merely generate more barriers; did various successful women who have come after Abzug each succeed to some degree because of Abzug’s path breaking ways, or did they do so regardless or even in spite of them? Historians will never settle such questions, for, at a certain point, in any of the answers, there lie only opinions, no matter how much some expressing the opinions may need to believe their opinions to be facts. In September of 1977, Ed Koch was the victor. He went on to defeat Cuomo in the runoff and took the election that November, defeating Republican Roy Goodman and once again beating Cuomo who, after losing the runoff, agreed to campaign as the Liberal Party’s nominee. As Mayor, Koch would be credited with rescuing the city from the brink of financial disaster and be a generally popular and well-regarded city leader, elected to three terms. Just as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s going onto a distinguished Senate career lent less anguish to the hindsight in which many engaged over Abzug’s failed Senate bid, Koch’s successes as Mayor also prompted few laments about Abzug’s losing effort. Some keenly felt disappointment was certainly present among the faithful, but it was a little less widespread than was so among New York’s liberals in 1976. Shirley MacLaine, actress Louise Lasser, and Gloria Steinem collectively wept in Abzug’s headquarters in the Grand Ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel. MacLaine recalled even seeing a tear on Abzug’s cheek. The same day as the Mayoral Primary, actor Zero Mostel passed away. Mostel had been an ardent Abzug supporter and her first major financial contributor. He had also been among the McCarthyera blacklisted whom Abzug had helped defend. In so many ways that day in September, remnants of older eras appeared to be passing from the scene. The same day as the news of the Mayoral election loss came in, a gathering of feminist activists was taking place out in San Jose, California. There, reporters noted that the increasing likelihood of the Equal Rights Amendment not gaining the needed thirty-eight states by the 1979 deadline was having a dampening effect on the mood among the gathered. It was almost as dampening, they noted, as the news of Bella Abzug’s loss in New York. Outside of such select circles, the laments were few; many marks of traditional liberalism appeared to vanishing. 58 Predictably, Gloria Steinem held forth about Abzug’s loss indicating that the city had lurched to the right. But this perspective required a somewhat regal (“I am the political left”) self-centeredness that held little sonority with the mass of voters, although it may have been popular among the predominantly wealthy, white feminists accustomed to cultivated images of themselves as the absolute definition of everything avant-garde. To many political observers, as well as to many New Yorkers in general, it was the traditional

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left, including such well-ensconced groups as unionists and feminists, that had grown into such bureaucratically mainstream positions inside New York politics that it had virtually no enduring qualities of insurgency. And what insurgent qualities that unionists and feminists still possessed in 1977 had lurched to New York’s political periphery. Even in the context of such a narrow view that the sexism-driven rejection of a female candidate indicated the city had lurched to the right, other results spoke to the contrary. Carol Bellamy had defeated Paul O’Dwyer for the Democratic nomination for City Council President, and several women won surprising victories in primary contests for judgeships, including two in Brooklyn, which had never before elected even a single female judge. In former times such feminist reactions as Steinem’s had been given some degree of serious indulgence, if only out of McCarthy-era fears that any non-indulgence risked being labeled a sexist. “Sexist” had displaced “communist” in the McCarthyism of this era; the underlying themes of fear and “no proof required” were strikingly similar. Such anti-intellectual feminist labelers appeared out of touch, and because they were out of touch, they drew no lessons other than that which underscored what they already believed. Apropos of Abzug’s failed bid, the liberal New York Times editorialized nothing about any sexism. They noted instead of how the voters had “rejected the strident manner and familiar liberalism of Bella Abzug.” Heeding only what they wanted to hear, many feminists rejected this, deeming it further evidence of opposition from such an allegedly less-than-fully liberal news organ as the Times. Outside of some effete circles, the feminist debate here appeared to concern very few. Feminists were Abzug’s political base, but even in New York City, that was not enough to win an election. Chagrined by the decisive loss, Abzug still had keen political ambitions. Reflecting Abzug’s now iconic status among feminists, Shirley MacLaine proclaimed, “As long as Bella’s somewhere, we’ll be all right. But,” she added, “the question now is where will she be.” She was, Gloria Steinem lamented, “like an orchestra conductor without an orchestra.” Few others appeared to be terribly concerned. New Yorkers’ immediate political concerns now turned to the Koch/Cuomo runoff. To the extent that any political people thought about Abzug, they were wondering now where indeed she could now turn and whether she could reestablish any wider political grounding. 59 NOTES 1. New York Times, September 16, 1976, pp. 1, 35 2. Ibid., December 11, 1976, pp. 1, 12. 3. “In Search of Bella Abzug,” Ibid., August 21, 1977, p. 58. 4. Washington Post, January 18, 1977, p. 10; January 31, p. 9; June 8, p. 9. 5. The New Republic, vol. 175, July 31, 1976, p. 10; Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City. (New

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York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 71; New York Times, December 11, 1976, pp. 1, 12; February 15, 1977, p. 17; March 29, p. 38; June 5, section C, pp. 1, 8. 6. New York Times, February 1, 1977, p. 33; Feb. 17, p. 36; Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, p. 71; snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76vupdate.phtml. 7. New York Times, February 8, 1977, p. 30; Feb. 17, p. 36; July 31, section E, p. 16. 8. Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, p. 70; New York Magazine, June 20, 1977, nymag.com/ news/politics/49892. 9. Interview with Jerrold Nadler, October 14, 2005, Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, eds., Bella Abzug (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux), p. 183; New York Times, January 14, 1977, p. 18. 10. New York Daily News, October 30, 1975, p. 1. 11. New York Times, February 17, 1977, p. 36. 12. Ibid., March 21, 1977, p. 53; March 22, p. 53; May 5, section C, p. 2; May 10, p. 26; Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, p. 71. 13. New York Times, March 21, 1977, p. 53; March 23, p. 58; March 29, p. 38; March 31, p. 22. 14. Ibid., August 27, 1977, p. 34. 15. Ibid., July 9, 1977, p. 11; Abzug Papers, Box 64, folder 2, Box 152, folder 1, Box 1067, folder 11, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. 16. New York Times, May 10, 1977, p. 26; May 12, p. 31; May 13, p. 1; May 22, p. 2; June 2, p. 1. 17. Ibid., May 16, 1977, p. 1; June 8, section B, pp. 1, 12. 18. Ibid., May 22, 1977, pp. 1–2; June 26, p. 179; July 4, p. 14; August 2, p. 19. 19. Ibid., March 2, 1977, p. 16; May 22, p. 2; September 10, pp. 15, 20; interview with Maggi Peyton, May 10, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 184–85. 20. New York Times, June 5, 1977, section E, p. 2; Abzug Papers, Box 1066, folder 3, Box 1067, folders 4, 11, Box 1069, folder 1. 21. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978 [translated from the Russian by Irina Ilovayskaya Alberti], 1st Edition, (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). 22. New York Post, August 4, 1977, p. 31; Abzug Papers, Box 1067, folder 6. 23. Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, pp. 228–30. 24. New York Post, August 2, 1977, p. 14; August 22, p. 31; Washington Post, June 13, 1977, p. 10; August 6, 1977; Abzug Papers, Box 1067, folder 1. 25. Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, pp. 232–34; see also “The Trashing of le Mans: The New Civil War Begins,” New York Magazine, August 8, 1977. 26. New York Times, August 2, 1977. p. 19; Abzug Papers, Box 1067, folder 6, Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, p. 282, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 186. 27. Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, pp. 134–35; quoted in Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 186–87. 28. Abzug Papers, Box 1067, folder 8. 29. New York Times, July 14, 1977, p. 22; August 11, p. 16. 30. Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, p. 285; New York Daily News, September 4, 1977, p. 83. 31. New York Times, July 22, 1977 p. 16; September 3, p. 10. 32. Ibid., August 18, 1977, p. 58. 33. Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 185–6; Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, p. 285; New York Magazine, June 20, 1977, nymag.com/ news/politics/49892; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), pp. 71–99; Good Housekeeping, October, 1977; Washington Post, September 4, 1977, p. 10. 34. “In Search of Bella Abzug,” New York Times, August 21, 1977, p. 55. 35. Geoffrey Stokes, “What Makes Bella Run Cautious?” The Village Voice, vol. XXII, no. 34, August 22, 1977, p. 11. 36. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 37. Ibid., p. 12. 38. Ibid; New York Daily News, August 29, 1977, p. 28.

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39. New York Times, June 1, 1977, pp. 1, 8. 40. Geoffrey Stokes, “What Makes Bella Run Cautious?” pp. 11–12; Denis Hamill, “‘Hi, I’m for Capital Punishment. Are You?’” pp. 1, 11; New York Post, August 24, 1977, p. 2; New York Times, September 4, 1977, p. 123; Sept. 7, section D, pp. 1, 15. 41. New York Times, September 2, 1977, p. 20; New York Daily News, September 2, 1977, p. 5; Sept. 8, p. 21. 42. Village Voice, August 22, 1977, p. 11; New York Post, August 19, 1977, p. 7. 43. New York Times, August 9, 1977, p. 1; New York Post, August 9, p. 1; August 11, p. 8; August 22, p. 2; New York Daily News, August 9, 1977, p. 1. 44. Interview with Martha Baker, October 7, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 182–83; New York Daily News, August 25, 1977, p. 5; August 18, p. 19. 45. Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, pp. 275–76. 46. Interview with Martha Baker, October 7, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 182–83; New York Post, August 18, 1977, p. 6; see also Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, pp. 282–83. 47. Interview with Robin Morgan, January 30, 2003, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 185. 48. New York Times, July 31, 1977, section E, p. 16; August 7, section E, p. 16; New York Post, September 6, 1977, p. 1; Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, pp. 269–76. 49. New York Post, August 19, 1977, p. 1; August 24, pp. 1, 2; September 3, p. 23; New York Daily News, August 24, p. 43. 50. New York Times, August 28, 1977, p. 38; September 1, p. 41; New York Post, August 18, 1977, p. 20. 51. New York Post, August 17, 1977, p. 1; Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, pp. 284–85. 52. New York Post, August 25, 1977, p. 2; August 30, p. 2; August 31, p. 2; New York Daily News, August 26, 1977, p. 5. 53. New York Daily News, September 2, 1977, p. 5. 54. Ibid., August 21, 1977, p. 35; Abzug Papers, Box 1069, folder 1. 55. New York Times, September 10, 1977, p. 15; New York Post, September 9, 1977, pp. 1, 2; New York Daily News, September 9, 1977, p. 40. 56. New York Times, September 10, 1977, p. 15; New York Daily News, September 9, 1977, p. 18. 57. Robert F. Wagner, Reminiscences, June, 1979, CUOHROC, pp. 1146, 1156–87; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 184; New York Daily News, August 16, 1977, p. 26. 58. New York Times, September 11, 1977, p. 176; New York Post, September 9, 1977, pp. 2, 24, 29; New York Daily News, September 9, 1977, pp. 2, 16; interview with Shirley MacLaine, January 30, 2003, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 185–86. 59. New York Times, September 10, 1977, p. 8; New York Post, September 9, 1977, p. 29; New York Daily News, September 9, 1977, p. 4; Mahler, The Bronx is Burning, p. 302; Interviews with Gloria Steinem, January 30, 2003, and August 26, 2009, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 188.

Chapter Two

A Very Expensive Memo Houston and Its Discontents

Chagrined by consecutive losses in two very difficult campaigns, Abzug still held onto keen political ambitions. As her close associate Doug Ireland reminded, She was a very ambitious woman, don’t forget. This was no shrinking violet, our Bella. She wanted to play with the big boys. She was as good as they were. She was smarter than a lot of them. She had contempt for most of them. She saw herself as more than their equal, and she wanted to play on the bigger stage. And no one would have questioned this kind of ambition in a man. 1

There seems little doubt indeed that the factor of gender played a role in how many people perceived a person like Abzug with her extraordinary traits regarding intellect, personality, and drive. But any singular attaching of a straightforward notion of gender prejudice to her election failures was a bit too simple, for other issues and ironies were at play in the matter of the elections she lost, as well as in her general image with the political public. While Ireland felt her to have been “smarter than a lot of them,” Abzug may not have cast matters to herself quite so modestly. She held, and rather enjoyed, a low opinion of various colleagues. Back in 1974, a little known and short-lived magazine, New Times, published an iconoclastic piece in which, after surveying nearly one hundred reporters, staffers, and other Capitol Hill insiders, they named the “Ten Dumbest Members of Congress.” The article brought out some hilarious and undeniably stupid misdeeds by various Senators and Congressmen, perhaps the best example coming forth as a result of the article. The man named “the dumbest” was a forgettable oneterm Senator from Virginia named William Scott, nicknamed by some: 41

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“Dread Scott.” When the New Times article appeared, the magazine had a tiny visibility and circulation. Nonetheless, in the wake of the article, William Scott called a press conference to deny (to many who did not even know of the article or the magazine) that he was the dumbest member of Congress! New Times never again enjoyed such external verification of their journalistic accuracy. Abzug loved such stories, as well as the New Times piece. She actually kept that month’s edition of the magazine in her files. 2 Such an article about the stupidity on Capitol Hill certainly confirmed many of Abzug’s feelings about much of the political life about her. Abzug and Ireland would have certainly agreed as to the quantity and quality of “the big boys” she held in contempt. Additionally, while various male politicians of similar skill, ego, and ambition would have likely received less chiding for their aggressiveness, some of the people of Abzug’s political era also evinced ruthless, unquenchable thirsts to play at and dominate the center of the political stage. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were hardly people with whom Abzug would have cared to be associated. And while their ideological castings certainly varied widely, each’s unrelenting, at times crude and brutal, ways with colleagues and staff, as well as with enemies (perceived or real), is impossible to deny. It was not just the point that a man who behaved like Abzug could have had a different reception among the voters. There was also the point that there were few (though not zero) male politicians who displayed such force of personality. Aside from Johnson and Nixon, there was no major politician of the 1960s and 1970s, save perhaps Bobby Kennedy, who when crossed could summon such brutish anger as Bella Abzug. This aspect of her nature, varying in its levels as it did, would never cease as a controversial point about her legacy, and that was no mere matter of gender. Various feminists, including Abzug, had been making arguments, with respect to politics, business, law, and many other arenas of institutional life, that women would bring a more humane character and tonality to a particular labor or profession. Abzug was hardly a useful example with respect to any such assertions. Many could and did make the argument that such a pioneering figure had had to be as forceful as she was for others to have subsequent successes. Others could argue just as cogently that the successes of women in politics during and after Abzug came not because but regardless or even in spite of her ultra-aggressiveness and anger. Abzug obviously had every right to be as tough as she cared to be, regardless of whether it was a matter of clear, conscious choice or an extension of personality traits that were beyond her control. Nonetheless, her infamously harsh ways were now long preceding her. They would continue to color perceptions among those who supported her with a decided element of fear, as well as among those in the general public whose votes and support she needed.

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Abzug’s younger daughter, Liz, reflected on some of the caustic features that came to surround her mother’s tireless ambition and office seeking: “My mother used to say that when you run for elective office, ‘You have to know who you are, and you have to have a good bit of luck and be at the right time.’ Well, I believe into the depths of my soul that she really did understand herself quite well.” Even accepting such a premise as to her mother’s self-awareness, one that certainly places Bella Abzug above a lot of politicians of that or any day, Liz Abzug then added a most penetrating point: “Whether she wanted to deal with all the elements of herself, I don’t think she did. And that was where the problem came.” The result was, Liz Abzug noted: “She was running repeatedly, one race after another without any pause. I understand where she was coming from. But it kept her from being in touch deeply enough to correct the mistakes in the campaigns—where she was paranoid sometimes, or where she was brutal to people.” Beyond the fact of how she treated others, Abzug believed her mother then “did herself a disservice by not taking more of a pause between some of those races,” and further believed she needed to “take a little bit of a minute to breathe and think about it.” Of note here is the point that such “a minute to breathe” is exactly what Bella Abzug took when vacationing in the Caribbean before she made the decision to embark on her first campaign for Congress in 1970. She won that one. No such times for reflection preceded the races for the Senate or Mayor. To Liz Abzug, her mother being in the political mix in such a tiring, unrelenting fashion “didn’t help her strategically. It didn’t help her correct the mistakes you make being a candidate under pressure. . . . Running for office,” Liz Abzug noted, “is the most inhuman thing anyone can do to oneself. Yet she goes and runs all these races one after another. She couldn’t pull back and get perspective. She was so intent on being part of the mix, and being part of the debate, and being there at the table.” 3 Significant is Liz Abzug’s perception of her mother’s desires; it appeared to be more, if not all about, being in the debate and at the table. Particular issues seemed to be less important than the gratification of being within elite circles of power. Plenty of politicians suffered from that imbalance, and few, perhaps none, lacked any ego-driven desires for the gratification that comes with the accruing of authority. The irony here lay in the Abzug’s regular posturing that women could and would handle power issues differently and better. Yet in regard to the desire for power, she was not unlike some of the chief political leaders of her own era, including some of the major ones she detested. After the Mayoral primary, Abzug certainly gave herself no rest, not even for a moment. Several items were immediately on the horizon for her, and she dove right into them, unrelentingly, and indeed with outbursts of brutality and a certain intolerance toward any opposing view. Most people who were of like mind politically, and who came to know her, were accustomed

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to such outbursts, and they all knew better than to disagree on any major point of politics. “We used to joke,” noted one of her campaign workers, “about how she had compassion for everybody except her staff.” 4 Still, the outbursts could be hard to endure. Aid Kathy Bonk said she once missed her menstrual period for two months after Abzug had shouted at her. That may have been a bit unusual, but it all was part of the terrain that was “Bella,” and everyone in the nation’s major feminist political circles of the 1970s fully, sometimes fearfully, accepted it. 5 Within the niches of her political loyalists, Abzug had gained the status of a virtual deity. Sometimes the faithful were sheep in a kindly shepherd’s flock; at other times they were sinners in the hands of an angry god. But throughout, there could be only one source of revealed truth. As an utter dominance developed, as is the case with any other such overbearing political figures, the question invariably emerges as to how well or poorly the leader handles such status. Often he or she can grow overly accustomed to the idolatry, regard it as an entitlement, and, at least secretly if not overtly, come to enjoy the resulting dictatorial authority. The ironies within this can, of course, be embarrassing or even damaging to such a person who also represents any “liberal” side of the political spectrum. An openness to a diversity of thought can often be discarded with the dismissive sniff that such views are not worth hearing. A few loyalists can depart, and the nature of the illiberal ways of the famous persona can become a target and rallying point for any opposition. This can leave the sanctified leader not so much buoyed as encased by the walls of support, walls that keep out others whose ideas can be helpful and whose support may be necessary for political success. One’s political purview can then implode and come to encompass only the areas where the ideological loyalists dominate. If such a person plans to gain power via illegal means it can be wise, as Lenin knew, to restrict one’s purview to a small, tight band of loyalists. For those like Bella Abzug who seek power in a democracy via the ballot box, there are risks with such a restricted political base. Over the five months after the Mayoral race, Abzug was indeed right back in the thick of some significant national political issues. She would preside over a national conference where she would dominate and maintain the supremacy of her political allies. She would also run for office in yet another election, where she began with great confidence and found herself losing again. The increasingly identity-driven circles of feminist politics would be her chief political base. They would support her, and, to her great consternation, various perceptions about her and her supporters would effectively rally her opposition. In both the Senate race of 1976 and the 1977 Mayoral campaign, New York’s large feminist community had been Abzug’s bedrock of support. There was likely not even one single self-identifying feminist in the entire

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state that had not voted for her (and if they had not voted for her, they would certainly have never dared to admit not doing so). Abzug’s long-standing leadership status with respect to feminist issues was unassailable. Her many positions and accomplishments here had involved a lot of symbolism. She sponsored, for example, a Congressional move to declare April 26 as “Women’s Equality Day.” Such work when she was a member of Congress would yield important manifestations for her in 1977. Along with Congresswoman Patsy Mink of Hawaii, Abzug had introduced a bill in 1975 to hold a national women’s conference. Apropos of Abigail Adams’ 1776 plea to her husband, “don’t forget the ladies,” Abzug, Mink, and others hoped to couple a national women’s conference onto the nation’s upcoming bicentennial celebrations of 1976. While some questioned what the practical purpose of such a conference could be, it was difficult for too many to vote against it, as any in opposition could find themselves hit with labels of being inadequately supportive of women’s causes. Starting in the 1970s, many Democrats feared that label as much as others a generation earlier had feared being called a communist or fellow traveler. Further impetus for a national women’s conference had come from the United Nations, which at its 1975 Mexico City gathering had proclaimed an “International Women’s Year.” That year President Gerald Ford had issued Executive Order 11832 creating a National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year “to promote equality between men and women.” This prompted several events held in 1975 and 1976. As the bill Abzug and Mink had introduced in 1975 passed Congress, President Ford signed it, resulting in Public Law 94-167. This not only gave formal federal approval to the idea of a national conference, it allocated $5 million to finance both a national meeting and various state meetings leading up to the national convention. 6 In the spring and summer of 1977, fifty-six meetings took place around the nation, one in each state and in six U.S. territories. Over 150,000 women, and some men, gathered at these sites and elected just over 2000 delegates. With federal financing, they were to attend a national conference in Houston, Texas from November 18 to 21. In addition to the official delegates, another 20,000 people came to Houston, plus a large contingent of television and newspaper journalists. The person in charge of the entire convention, appointed by President Carter, was Bella Abzug. 7 First Lady Rosalynn Carter would be one of the honored guests at the convention. She had misgivings about her husband putting Bella Abzug atop the convention. Mrs. Carter’s misgivings did not carry the day among White House staffers, however. One of President Carter’s advisors, Midge Costanza, pushed hard for Abzug, and she succeeded in winning over some doubters as well as the President. In contrast to various successors, President Carter tried to keep personal influences out of his official decision making. Even though she could not affect her husband’s decision here, Mrs. Carter’s

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misgivings about Abzug were not merely her own. Indeed she was not even extreme among many who held misgivings. The First Lady’s concerns focused on matters of her perceptions of Abzug’s reputation for rudeness. 8 Mrs. Carter and others also held misgivings that Abzug would not be terribly inclusive in regard to varied viewpoints on major political issues apt to arise at the convention. President Carter appointed Abzug, nonetheless, and he appointed many of similar outlook to the National Commission that Abzug headed. Eleanor Smeal, head of the National Organization for Women, remembered that the President’s appointments to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year were “hard-core feminists” and “more moderate commissioners,” but no apparent conservatives were among them. Smeal pointedly recalled how many members, “when push came to shove, . . . would go with us” or could be depended on for “always siding with Bella’s philosophy.” 9 This sense of a politically “stacked deck” would cause controversies, as would the perception that Bella Abzug was exercising excessive levels of control. Despite the feminists’ desires to pose themselves as being representative of all American women, people of decidedly different viewpoints felt they represented an equal if not greater number of American women. They would pose challenges to Abzug and her colleagues. Ideological inclusiveness would not be the order of the day. Well in advance of the convention, Abzug and the rest the Commission wrote and passed a set of resolutions that would make up the official proposals upon which the convention’s delegates would vote. Various women active in political affairs felt a decided lack of openness in the activities here. They raised questions, but they knew that any voicing of complaints would have no practical effect. They went ahead and stated their criticisms, of course, but they also got busy at various state levels to work for the appointment of delegates with whom they felt in greater political accord. As a result, acrimony arose at various state-level meetings in the preparations for the convention. Conservatives clearly felt they had smelled a rat. They felt that the “liberal” or “radical” feminist side appeared to them bent on highjacking the agenda of the convention. One conservative leader, Phyllis Schlafly, a most effective opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, called the whole Convention enterprise a mere “media event [and] a charade.” Opponents like Schlafly saw Abzug and her colleagues’ resolutions, entitled the National Plan of Action, reflecting not a “women’s agenda” but a “feminist” one. They also saw a lot of gerrymandering in the selections of voting delegates so the eventual Convention delegates would prove a mere rubber stamp to the recommendations of Bella Abzug and the elite committee that was overseeing the whole operation. What disturbed Schlafly and others was indeed something some feminists practically conceded. “Bella wanted the whole National Plan of Action to pass without any amendments,” recalled her Convention colleague Carmen Delgado Votaw, “she felt that anything that

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amended the plan was a threat.” 10 When one is so sure that one knows best that one can feel justified in muzzling the free speech of an opposition, some may, on principle, step forward and object even if they disagree with the views of those being disenfranchised. Among their feminist supporters, Abzug and her associates apparently worried little about such possibilities. They believed they could control the debate and stop any opposition, even those who may rise merely in the name of allowing for the expression of a diversity of views. Sensing anything but an open attitude among the so-called liberals, conservatives began organizing to try to see to it that, at least in a few states, alternative voices would be heard. As feminists then perceived such conservative organizing, they claimed to smell a rat too and began further to organize their own people. The “liberals” and “radicals” saw and railed against perceived conspiracies, “Phyllis Schlafly’s little bunch,” Brownie Ledbetter (an Arkansas organizer) called them. 11 “They were going to pelt us with oranges,” Carmen Delgado Votaw insisted. Votaw subsequently admitted, “there were no oranges,” but she remembered how conservatives tried “to obstruct [their convention opponents] from getting out of [their chairs] . . . to vote.” 12 Gloria Steinem of Ms. and Eleanor Smeal, head of NOW, each voiced feelings of disturbance over the involvement of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Steinem remembered images of “buses of women . . . with a man at the head of each who seated them together and told them how to vote.” “We got word that they’re stacking the state conferences,” Smeal remembered. “They took over Indiana. In Hawaii and Nevada, thousands of people were turned out by the Mormon Church. . . . So we had to go state by state and organize for a feminist slate.” Perhaps desiring to cultivate a self-image of a grizzled war veteran who gave no quarter to the enemy, Smeal earnestly noted: “I’ll tell you, that was a tough period.” With a similar sense of entitlement, Steinem held that “some delegations had to be protested [emphasis hers].” Here Gloria Steinem added the claim that one delegation “from a Southern state [never identified] had been stacked and taken over by the Ku Klux Klan.” 13 Meanwhile, conservatives continued to complain about being excluded from the framing of the convention’s agenda and proposals. Here they pointed with alarm to the feminists’ conscious organizing and their promotion of such issues as lesbian rights and abortion. In such a climate, vintage 1977, when a liberal side was moaning fearfully about the alleged presence of the Mormon Church and the Ku Klux Klan and conservatives were simultaneously voicing fears in regard to prepackaging of proposals on matters like lesbianism and abortion, any cooperatively forged middle ground was a most doubtful, if not impossible outcome. From the conservatives’ standpoint, as well, the presence of Bella Abzug as the convention leader rein-

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forced all feelings of fear and anger over a “stacked deck” and an uncompromising, illiberal tonality. Abzug even used Klan references. Regarding the conservative efforts at securing delegates, she asserted: “In some states there were disruption attempts by the ultra-right, like the Ku Klux Klan, who still want to keep their women home washing the sheets. . . . In Mississippi, . . . to the shame of the nation, an all-white delegation was selected.” 14 Rapidly vanishing were such notions as Abzug’s—the nation’s political discourse and decision making will be more genteel and cooperative if women hold a greater presence in politics. When two sides divide at such philosophically fundamental levels over a set of issues in which each feels themselves to be right and believes the other also to be in conspiracy against them, the cycles of organizing, accusations, recriminations, and ill will (and potential illegalities) will usually do nothing but spiral. One liberal Texas delegate, Martha Smiley, revealed some of the distrust and failed communication at the convention when she solemnly scoffed: 15 The most unsettling part of it [the convention] was the realization that there were women outside of this conference hall who [were] protesting our being inside, talking about issues like child care, health care, education, working rights, equality, and battered women. How could anyone, much less another woman, feel that is an inappropriate conversation?

Pertinent here is the point that few, if any on the “outside” were, as Smiley described, against any discussions of such issues as health care, education, work place issues, etc. They were against the restricting of any such discussions from so many who may not have shared the same views as Smiley’s. Apparently some of the alleged liberals on the inside could not conceive that others may have felt just as strongly about the humanity of the issues at stake yet hold different viewpoints. To some of the “insiders” in Houston, viewpoint was central. The conservative “outsiders” were further subjected to such McCarthyistic slurs as a means of justifying the liberals’ limitations upon free expression and attendance. Some conservatives felt victimized. They saw such leaders as Bella Abzug indulging themselves and rationalizing their high-handedness and self-endowed superiority. It is indeed striking to consider how Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug would have reacted if a Republican administration had allowed a hand-picked group of conservative women to control the agenda of a federally sponsored national meeting of women and to organize an effective level of control over the states’ delegate selections. If conservatives excluded liberals, the excluded would have forcefully raised the outrage of their input and their free speech being arbitrarily limited. How would they have reacted, moreover, if conservatives then dismissed the protests, with a

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high-handed casting to the effect of: how could any woman be against us discussing matters like health care, domestic violence, education. . . ? A certain disingenuousness was palpable as far as some shut-out conservatives were concerned, and leaders like Bella Abzug appeared to care not one bit. The feminists honestly believed they represented “women,” and, with a tone of utter certainty, they were not giving much of a hearing to any women who opposed them, as they declared their critics not representing American women. In regard to the notion that the other side was conspiring, each end of the political spectrum here was actually correct in certain respects. Conservatives did organize themselves, especially in opposition to any pro-abortion stands and to lesbian rights. They voted as units where they could. On the other side, Eleanor Smeal herself remembered how effectively Abzug and her feminist colleagues controlled matters. Smeal was frank about what her side was able to do. In regard to the feminist side of the ledger dominating the convention, she did not speak of any spontaneous upsurge of any sort of “people’s will.” She thought and operated solely in terms of back-room manipulations. With a frankly self-congratulating sense, she recalled: “We did out-organize them during the state meetings. So, in Houston, the audience was overwhelmingly ours.” Noting that “the right wing got about 19 percent of the delegates overall,” Smeal recalled, “but if you look at where they were from, they mostly represented the states that met before we organized. Truthfully,” Smeal recounted with pride, “they shouldn’t even have had 19 percent, because they didn’t have the organized groups.” Apparently to Smeal, having any sort of intellectually valid ideas or any notion of people deserving to be respected and heard, on such bases as philosophical merit or Constitutional principle, were not matters worth considering. The convention was purely a matter of maximizing the significance of her views and minimizing the opposition via whatever backroom political means necessary. Arkansas feminist Brownie Ledbetter happily spoke of trickery used in her native state’s organization: “We had plenty of local opposition, but we decided we could control the outsiders by cutting off the filing date to participate. The deadline came and went and about ten minutes later, the [conservatives’] buses came roaring in. We said, ‘Sorry. Filing deadline.’” 16 In 1971, Abzug was furious at Congressmen who had thwarted her “Resolution of Inquiry” against the Nixon administration. Now she was the Richard Nixon of the day with various colleagues serving her needs through various parliamentary tricks. Abzug’s role in all this was indeed anything but passive. Such leaders as Eleanor Smeal were constantly aware of Bella Abzug’s approval or disapproval. Ms. magazine’s editor, Joanne Edgar, was involved in the formation of the New York delegation. She also recalled Abzug’s personal involvement when she and other New York feminists labored into the night preparing to

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head off a group of right wing women that Edgar and others wanted to keep from gaining too much prominence when the state’s delegation was to be formed the next day. Amidst the preparations, Edgar noted, “it was not only the staff volunteers who stayed up all night, . . . Bella kept us laughing all night long.” 17 Spirits were high. Justified by claims of suffering, perhaps enabled by habits rooted in backgrounds of wealth, all senses of entitlement were boundless. All notions of fairness, inclusiveness, and gender-driven cooperativeness took quite a beating. On the surface, for individuals who engaged in various sorts of political chicanery to complain about the organizing efforts of the other side would seem hypocritical. But the mere notion of hypocrisy does not get to the heart of the senses of righteousness and beleaguerment that were a play. Feminists felt themselves to be oppressed. (Whether these generally wealthy white Americans were oppressed, when compared with 99.9 percent of all the poorer people who ever populated the earth, is a debatable matter.) With the Houston convention they felt they had an opportunity to air their agenda, although to what practical legal/legislative ends were never clear. Whatever tactics they employed were then carried out with a strong sense of ends justifying the means. Bella Abzug had faced people with this very sort of self-righteousness back in the 1950s when she defended people accused of being communists. In the early 1970s, as a member of Congress, she had stood up to such a mentality when Robert Moses was trying to bulldoze New York neighborhoods in the name of his personal vision of progress. Now it was she who was claiming to embody progress and was making all the pious pronouncements and accusations. Moses once sniffed, “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” In regard to the Houston convention, Abzug appeared to embrace that very idea. The ironies in the situation would not end there. But in the short run, the political fallout appeared to be positive for Abzug and her friends. The long run would prove more complicated. Abzug and her colleagues were not quite as in control of that situation as they would have liked to be, but the Houston convention gave them a sense of how a political world should operate. While various feminists mocked the perceived herd mentality of the conservatives, their demands on their own minions were equally severe. Bella Abzug was a perfect leader for feminists disposed to such tactics. She had a cadre of supporters who appeared to operate and evaluate one another on the basis of how well one toed the party line. In the context of many tactical and strategic questions among the feminists of the day, a virtual mantra was: “What would Bella do?” The mere perception of Abzug’s views became a standard, and when there was a specifically articulated agenda on hand, the priority of conforming would be that much more obvious. As Eleanor Smeal often mentioned, when demonstrating the ideological acceptability of this or

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that person, the question was whether she “always sided with Bella” or “got along with Bella.” When she addressed the convention, former First Lady Betty Ford tried to be inclusive: “We may have different interests, but we shouldn’t be dismayed by the clash of opinion and ideas.” The gathered delegates nodded in approval, but the marginalizing of conservatives had already occurred. Many of the nods thus came with a decided smirk. Abzug and the political insiders of the convention were in no more a mood to tolerate conservatives than were many of the conservative minority willing to tolerate such stands as those of feminists involving abortion and the rights of lesbians. 18 From staff, Abzug had seldom tolerated input that she did not want to hear. When she was running for Mayor or the Senate, she nonetheless had to contend with opposing views. It seemed that in the context of feminist matters, she felt entitled to treat the convention much like a staff matter, especially after putting up with all she did during the 1976 and 1977 campaigns. Hers was the party line, and the Houston gathering was to be an extension of that perspective. Any expressions of opposing perspectives only served to deepen her sense of superiority, as she felt from any mildly dissenting aide whose input she did not care to hear. The “exhausting” work she and her colleagues felt they endured at the convention largely involved contending with and getting around dissenting views. Was this proof what critics had said she would have been like had she been elected Mayor or Senator? Or, within the context of feminism, as in areas of the Peace Movement, was her sense of being wholly right overweening both to her and to her obedient subordinates? Had she advocated for greater inclusiveness in regard to conservative voices, Abzug would have had opposition from her own camp, but she could have controlled that. Indeed in Houston she did break with colleagues on one occasion. A minority of pro-life delegates were being hushed at the convention amidst discussion of the pro-abortion resolution. Abzug at least insisted that this minority be allowed to speak. She knew they did not have the votes among the delegates to get what they wanted. Otherwise, she was at least allowing an intolerant party-line atmosphere to flourish. She was enjoying and fostering much of it. 19 The Houston convention showed much fanfare, a fair amount of confusion, and appeared to hold enormous psychic value to many of the participants. Selected representatives did gather from every state and six territories. A combination of over-booked hotels and the late departure of participants from previous conferences led to a prolonged delay in participants’ receiving accommodations, but these problems were minor compared with some of the fights that would come over some of the convention proposals. How-to skills workshops, film festivals, soccer games, and special exhibits were also held in conjunction with the conference, all in one way or another celebrating the

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lives of women in America. A relay team of over three thousand female runners, in the tradition of the Olympic Games, carried a torch to Houston all the way from Seneca Falls, New York, where purportedly the last great women’s convention had occurred in 1848. Some famous athletes like Billie Jean King and Wilma Rudolph ran some of the relay legs. Amidst a cheering crowd, Abzug semi-jogged the final few yards in Houston. There had certainly been other significant women’s rights gatherings since Seneca Falls, including one in 1898 chaired by Susan B. Anthony. In Houston, Abzug would use Anthony’s gavel from that very convention. Despite such evidence, the sense of this being the very first such meeting in over a century and a quarter conveyed a sense of drama that was enjoyable to believe and politically dangerous to dispute on any factual grounds. A theretofore lesser-known poet, Maya Angelou composed a new Declaration of Sentiments, stylistically paralleling those articulated in Seneca Falls. Thousands signed the Declaration. The presence of such notables as First Lady Rosalyn Carter and former First Ladies Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson lent greater levels of prestige, although their participation was more ornamental than substantive. 20 While much of the ideological diversity which Betty Ford wanted had been minimized, an ethnic and racial diversity significantly marked the convention, to a far greater degree indeed than most national party conventions had ever shown. Outwardly a source of pride, this composition caused the convention leadership some disquietude, as some of the minority groups felt overlooked and taken for granted. They formed caucuses which made some demands upon the leadership for input and visibility. Theirs were potentially dissenting voices that would have caused some embarrassment to Abzug and the other leaders. It was one thing to seek to minimize or silence political conservatives. The inherent ironies within their handling of the presence of conservatives did not appear to pose terribly much political fallout, at least among Democrats, especially as the next Presidential election was three years away. But while many of the feminists in Houston did not worry a lot about appearing resistant to the diversity of ideas, they did not want their efforts to be seen as focused on the needs of just wealthy white people. There had already been many critiques of feminism along those very lines. The design of the leadership was to have the pre-written plan adopted by the convention without amendments, “but,” Eleanor Smeal begrudgingly noted, “the nature of a huge conference like [Houston] is that there will be caucuses, there will be meetings. Because, whether we liked it or not, they had to do something. And some of the caucuses, especially the women-of-color caucuses, demanded changes.” Smeal’s words “whether we liked it or not” further revealed the frankly controlling sensibilities of the leadership. In regard to issues raised by minorities, the sense of gender-based entitlement was outflanked. The leadership did not particularly like it, but to some degree

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they relented. The original resolutions about minority women appeared, as Puerto Rican delegate Carmen Delgado Votaw remembered, “too generic and too short.” After long meetings, more substantive wordings were forged. With great self-congratulations, Votaw reflected, “when it [ultimately] came to the outpouring of ‘We Shall Overcome’ from the convention floor, we knew all those hours were worth that.” The results were largely psychic, however. Beyond the singing and good feelings, tangible legislative results would not be forthcoming. 21 Amidst the sensory excitement and the delegate controversies, the essential function of the convention was to vote on a set of resolutions, with the hope being to influence federal legislation and political thought and behavior. Most of the resolutions met with little to no opposition. They involved such topics as minority rights, education, health care, infant and child day care. Contrary to the posture of consternation that such a delegate as Martha Smiley expressed, conservatives were hardly against the discussion and the expressed solutions to such issues. A resolution calling for gender equality in matters of financial/bank credit actually passed unanimously. The resolution in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment passed as well. There was opposition here, as there was, for varying reasons, throughout the nation. At the convention, contrary to Gloria Steinem’s expressed fears about unidimensional Mormons, however, one member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Jean Westwood, chair of the Democratic National Committee in 1972, expressed her support for the ERA as a Mormon woman. 22 (Gloria Steinem may have likely forgotten to ask Bella Abzug about her 1976 support of Presidential candidate Morris Udal. He was of the Mormon faith as well.) Beyond the debates over the ERA, which was already fully at issue in the general political debates of the nation, the convention’s, and most of the media’s attention focused on three other resolutions. One resolution called for a recognition of lesbian rights. Another involved support of abortion rights. The third called for the creation of a cabinet-level “department of women.” The debates both on abortion rights and over lesbianism were intense and emotional. Both the topics themselves and the heat of the debates drew much of the attention of the national and local media covering the events. The Houston convention marked one of the first major times a federally sponsored gathering discussed any issues involving sexual orientation. It was certainly not new, but in 1977 the topic of homosexuality was still quite taboo in much of mainstream America. While thoroughly conventional in her own personal life, Abzug had always been supportive of the political rights of homosexuals, even though she was adamant about not wanting to discuss details of any actual activities. (As she once snapped to a Hunter College classmate and political activist, “I don’t want to hear what they do!”) 23

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Within the women’s movement itself, the issue of lesbian rights had been controversial. A self-proclaimed feminist group called “the Susan B. Anthony Caucus” claimed to speak for working-class women. They argued that raising the issue would compromise the effectiveness of efforts regarding practical economic matters in which they were more interested. Various people, including such a renowned and respected leader as Betty Friedan, had always wanted the women’s movement to steer clear of gay and lesbian matters, also believing they were divisive, overly self-indulgent, and a politicization of what was an essentially private matter between consenting adults. Proponents of lesbian rights often insisted on lumping together all arguments against such a resolution as simply matters of fear and prejudice. The majority at the convention were certain that it was time proudly to bring the issue into the light. They knew they had the votes to pass the resolution, so their mood was aggressive. There was no sense of any need to be cautious or concerned about the reception such an issue would have in the mainstream of the nation. “Any rebellious woman,” wrote Gloria Steinem, “will be called a lesbian until the word lesbian becomes as honorable a word as any other.” It appeared to be the time to open the word and the issue. Such a personality as Abzug at the dais reinforced this purposefulness. The sense of urgency here was palpable. New York Times reporter Anne Taylor Fleming felt this as she noted, “It was obvious to everyone that the lesbian issue had become the emotional focal point of the conference.” 24 The proponents’ willingness to trumpet the issue may have also extended from a narcissism that refused to recognize, or even respect (and McCarthyistically brand as “homophobic”) any desires to be heard from those who believed the issue best left as a private matter. This was a debate that could not be resolved, then or since. It was certainly hard for feminists who supported an open advocacy of lesbian rights to charge someone like Betty Friedan with homophobia, and Eleanor Smeal conceded that the workingclass Susan B. Anthony Caucus was not actually opposed to homosexuals. At the Houston convention Friedan chose to step forward and advocate that the lesbian-rights resolution be adopted. “We must help women who are lesbians in their own civil rights.” 25 The supporting votes were already there, and Friedan’s statement assured passage, much to the delight of her often-times rival Bella Abzug. With the issue of homosexuality then so risqué among many Americans, the media greatly highlighted the lesbian issue. Not only was “the emotional focal point of the conference,” as Anne Taylor Fleming had sensed from the floor, it was also the most striking among the general public who observed it via television news. Convention delegates discounted the concerns of those who worried about the political fallout from such a stand. This seemed the perfect time to overcome such prejudices not to compromise with them. Gloria Steinem and others believed the resolution would mark the beginning

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of a cultural shift in the nation’s attitudes. How a mere convention gathering could generate such a shift in regard to an issue like abortion reveals something of the headiness in which many of the gathered were luxuriating. This lesbian issue was a debate that could not be resolved, as there were only bare opinions in the mix. As political events would unfold early the next year for Abzug, the visibility of the lesbian issue, magnified by the media coverage in Houston, would have a direct impact on her political fate. At the time no one in Houston could foresee any such things. There was too much exuberance in the moment. On the one hand there was the headiness of finally giving the topic open support; on the other lay the question of how stirred-up fears could help any political opposition. No one could resolve the dilemma here. Just as strongly as it debated the lesbian issue, if not more so, the Houston convention took up an abortion rights proposal. With the issue of lesbianism, there was little (not zero) opposition among the delegates to any lifestyle issue per se. The question of the political wisdom of raising the homosexual issue occupied more attention, albeit still among a minority of delegates. With abortion, in contrast, the resolution had few such variations. It was purely, and harshly, one of morally clashing perspectives. At Houston, as before and ever since, there could be no middle ground between those who favored abortion rights and those who felt that life began at conception, hence that abortion was killing. (The assertion that “you can’t legislate morality,” while always holding an adolescent sway with some, never made much sense, as most legislation does impose morality. Whether or not they fully grasp it, for example, any who favor the maintenance of laws against murder, rape, arson, assault, . . . do so, obviously, out of a notion that the acts are each immoral. Hence criminalizing them constitutes a legislation of morality.) As in the billions of political, public, classroom, and private debates over the subject, discussions in Houston over the abortion proposal were heated, with no consensus ever reached. When some anti-abortion people tried to speak, many of the majority delegates tried to cut them off. Abzug did step into the fray here. She moved away from the chair’s platform and strode toward the speakers’ microphone, insisting “These people have the right to be heard.” They were heard. The wisdom of Voltaire was not completely absent, as it appeared to have been at many of the state gatherings when delegates were selected. Abzug knew the resolution was going to pass, anyway, and, at least here, she did not want to foster any avoidable images of illiberal intolerance. Anti-abortion advocates knew, as well, that they did not have the support to block the measure. They had the votes of only about twenty percent of the delegates, and, true to the controlled mathematics of the moment, the “Resolution on Reproductive Freedom” passed by a five-toone margin. 26 Although Abzug appeared to protect speech rights at one juncture at the conference, her rather heavy-handed control over the proceedings was some-

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thing that troubled people, and not only the disgruntled conservatives. Janis Kelly, by her own self-description a “former gay organizer” and a reporter with the women’s news journal Off Our Backs, commented on various moderators to the effect that “it was apparent that she was being directed by Bella” or “Bella attempted to direct her.” Kelly also noted openly that “the heavy-handedness of the chair . . . was particularly marked with respect to the conservative delegates.” The New York Times’s Anne Taylor Fleming further acknowledged that “there was grumbling about Bella, the presiding officer; she was too strong, too gruff, too manipulative; [it was] grumbling from women who admired her slightly more than they distrusted her.” 27 The resistance of the conservatives naturally grew with this perception too. Conservatives were upset with what they perceived as a steady stream of liberal speeches, and even more with the votes in the convention where they knew they had been outmaneuvered and outnumbered. Feelings grew quite raw, and the perception of Abzug’s heavy-handed running of the whole affair contributed to the outrage from the right. In addition to the stings felt by the feminists’ successful machinations, conservatives voiced general disgust. Republican Congressman Robert K. Dornan of California named Abzug in particular as the ring leader, and he hyperbolically criticized her leading “the approving of sexual perversion and the murder of young people in their mothers’ wombs.” 28 Led by anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist Phyllis Schlafly, along with Indiana State Senator Joan Gubbins, a group of women and men, made an additional move. They had criticized various convention stands and the delegate gerrymandering, and they had voted “no” on various proposals. With their opposing views on matters like the Equal Rights Amendment, lesbianism, and abortion, they also secured a separate site at the Houston Astro Arena and held their own convention. The conservative women and men called themselves “pro-life, pro-family” and stood in conspicuous opposition to the other convention, claiming they more fully represented the mainstream views of American women. Some conservative Texas officials gave them support. In accord with these conservatives, a local county Republican party official noted to the media that the other conference was bringing “a gaggle of outcasts, misfits, and rejects” to Houston. Banners on display at this alternative convention said such things as: “Women’s Lib: Follow Jesus Christ & Your Husband & Your Pastor,” “God is a Family Man,” “Keep Lesbians Out of Our Schools,” and “Lesbians: Read the Bible While You’re Still Able.” A leaflet declared that the “ERA will legalize homosexual ‘marriages’ and permit such ‘couples’ to adopt children.” 29 Among such social conservatives in 1977, the issue of homosexuality hit the rawest nerves, and many of the ensuing vituperations were expectorated at Bella Abzug. A Texas State Representative, Clay Smothers, was vehemently critical of the lesbian initiative. Wanting explicitly to prohibit homo-

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sexuality on Texas’s state college campuses (and to rescind the state’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment), Smothers exclaimed, “I have had enough civil rights to choke a goat . . . I ask for victory over the perverts of this country. . . . I want the right to segregate myself and my family from all these misfits and perverts.” Smothers’ disdain for “civil rights” and his use of the word “segregate” were especially striking, as he was African American. Smothers went on to urge President Carter not to “ever again take $5 million of my money and give it to Bella Abzug.” Schlafly and her colleagues requested and received a resolution from conservative Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe, pointedly proclaiming the very week of the conference to be “Family Week in Texas.” They also placed advertisements in Houston papers attacking lesbian rights. The alternative women’s meeting had no federal imprimatur or funding, but it did receive a level of attention from the large media contingent already in Houston. They pointedly criticized Abzug for running the convention in an arbitrary manner. 30 Abzug and the convention leadership were angry about the alternative convention, and they were even angrier about the fact that the television and print media gave the other side a fair level of coverage. This did not fit in with the “control” modality of the meeting. Given the way they had “outorganized” the delegate selection processes and stacked the ranks in their convention, such a sense of entitlement in regard to media coverage was hardly surprising. Still, the first amendment implications were a bit disturbing, especially since some of the gathered desired to wield political power. Whether the media’s choices of what to cover really influenced anyone remained to be seen. The behavior of the various delegations and the resolutions of the meetings would ultimately be judged in the hearts and minds of the interested public. It was one thing to secure the imprimatur and money of the federal government and to believe a set of resolutions could then engender political change. But no matter the internal good feelings, the fancy perquisites, the tax payers–supported meals, hotels, and airfare, the real political battles lay elsewhere. By conspicuously walking out on the Houston convention, claiming they more fully represented American women, Phyllis Schlafly and her associates were able to trumpet an alternative voice in opposition to what they perceived to be a rigid party line among established feminists like Bella Abzug, Eleanor Smeal, and Gloria Steinem. Schlafly called the whole convention enterprise “a costly mistake at taxpayers’ expense,” with a set of proposals “that is not what American women want.” She complained that the convention was a mere rubber stamp of proposals that Abzug and her colleagues had written months in advance. 31 Schlafly was wrong in one sense. Abzug did not get everything she wanted. The last of the convention’s twenty-six proposals called for the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Women. That proposal was voted

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down. Some had argued about a potential ghetto effect—that if such a department was created, any issues pertaining to women in other departmental domains could be bureaucratically ignored and immediately and cynically cast off as the purview of the new department. This would give license to an ambivalence about women’s issues in many bureaucratic sectors, both in the government and beyond. Some also raised the point that various ethnic and racial minorities would soon demand their identity-based departments too, with the results involving pressure for a dozen or more such new bureaucracies. Others worried about the burgeoning of bureaucracy in general, especially as the question of what such a department could actually do beyond levels of publicity and information was unclear. Above all, even to many of the assembled loyalists at Houston, the proposal for a Women’s Department smacked of a shaking down of the federal government for patronage. Bella Abzug was anything but an obscure figure in the cogitations here. Anne Taylor Fleming of the New York Times noted her sense from the floor of the convention that women “vote[d] down the proposition establishing a Cabinet-level women’s department because, they said, it was Bella’s proposition for Bella.” 32 Other correspondents at the convention raised the same point. Abzug appeared to be unashamedly using the convention to garner a fatsalaried cabinet post for herself, something she needed and desired now that, after two major election bids, she was still out of work and away from the seats of political power. Plenty of people, on both the political left and right, were more than a little uncomfortable with the bullying manner in which Abzug had run the convention and many of the pre-convention proceedings. Her placing such a call for a cabinet post for herself smacked of entitlement in the extreme. Had she come to expect compliance out of her minions to such a degree that she presumed they would not just vote her this motion, but do so enthusiastically? At various times in her career, when various charges of ego and bullying came to the fore, she and her supporters raised the point that a man in such a position would not receive such criticism. Yet whenever a Lyndon Johnson or a Richard Nixon did such things (naming everyone and everything around him some variation of “LBJ” or seeking to dress up the White House guards in European style royal uniforms) the press and the public at large let them have it. Abzug’s gender was not the issue here; in all cases it smacked of Wagnerianism without creativity, just another politician whose inflated ego was seeping onto the public arena, with the matter arising in a manner so obvious that it was a bit laughable, ever more so as the egomaniac at hand, man or woman, was usually the last to see it. Even in defeating of the “Women’s Department” motion, a cynical element also motivated some of the feminists who snuffed out the proposal. Eleanor Smeal explained that her NOW group came to oppose it, “because,” she affirmed, “even then [three years before the next Presidential election],

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the specter of Ronald Reagan being elected was on the horizon. We feared that [Phyllis] Schlafly” could end up holding such a post. 33 Outwardly, so much rhetoric from NOW and other such organizations incessantly extolled the need for women to assume positions of leadership in government, business, education, and elsewhere. Yet when some perceived the “wrong kind” of woman loomed, the notion of gender, per se, would be quickly abandoned, and later brought back when once again convenient. This remained a point of tension, and, in some circles, it added to the images of arbitrariness and disingenuousness that blunted the effectiveness of some feminist political efforts. Likely, even if Abzug’s Houston convention had passed the resolution, the idea of a new cabinet “Department of Women” would have never passed Congress, assuming the Carter White House would have sent forth such a proposal in the first place. The two women’s conventions ended in late November, and the delegates and media returned to their locales. Whether there was any lasting impact, or whether there was just a lot of federally funded talk, remains a matter of debate. Lindsy van Gelder, a writer for Ms. and Allure melodramatically asserted that Houston transformed us all. We learned that we could excel at serious parliamentary procedure, and still indulge in singing “Happy Birthday” to speaker Margaret Mead, to knit and nurse babies during debates, to laugh with Bella as she banged the gavel to adjourn and wished us “Good night, my loves.” 34

People’s notions of being “transformed” can reveal a level of self-absorption that renders such claims comically paradoxical, as in such cases when the allegedly “transformed” person has simply remained as wealthy and become even more self-imbued than ever. Proof may also be problematic in regard to the question of how well any of the people at the Convention actually learned parliamentary procedures as they largely witnessed from a vast floor area the machinations of their leader and a dutiful voting at their leader’s calls. One could do better merely reading the Congressional Record or the minutes of a school board meeting. There may have also been problems and little liberation with the sense of everyone learning “to laugh with Bella” in apparent unison. This begged ever more the question as to what tolerance could ever come in regard to those who may have found less humor and a disturbing, unrealistic self-luxuriation inherent in the notion that any expressions of love and affection somehow “transformed” and elevated women above any who had ever convened before them. It may have been enjoyable to fancy that the convened women discoursed in new and superior manners. Indeed, with classically vague anthropological sweep, Margaret Mead explicitly lauded the Houston convention along such lines:

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Such mind-boggling, sweeping generalizations would hardly pass muster among any thoughtful students of human behavior in any number of levels and disciplines. But among the gathered no one would dare question even the obvious intellectual imprecision, let alone take exception. How, furthermore, did this gender-differentiated notion of superior ways of “living” reconcile with the harsh silencings and marginalizations of virtually all political opposition at the convention? No one would have dared address this either. It would be hard to prove one gender, by virtue of gender or anything else, knows more about dying or living than the other, or that the Houston convention somehow marked any sort of cultural breakthrough with regard to the behavioral conventions supposedly in existence since the Paleolithic age. But such grand sweep and belief in mega-transformation was part of the atmosphere at Houston that fancied the assembled to be standing at some sort of grand precipice. When people are so self-imbued as to be changing the course of history, such little things as the rights of people who disagree were then easily disregarded along with any concern for other related hypocrisies. The gathering of conservatives elsewhere in Houston was not about to give feminism a fair hearing, so the intolerance of intellectual diversity and respect for fairness and free speech became a common political denominator in the city that week. Meanwhile, the city’s hotels, restaurants, and other service industries raked in a fair penny from both sides. At a practical level, there remained the question of what specifically the convention accomplished in regard to actual legislative, political, or cultural breakthroughs. At some point, all expressions about networking and psychic impact have to be measured against the question of what eventually is accomplished in politics or in other institutional settings. Otherwise such conventions serve no one but the conventioneers and their service providers. The Houston convention proposals led to no particular legislative breakthroughs. There were many reminiscences which referred to “the spirit of Houston,” and how “we came together.” Devoid of tangible value, such euphemisms reinforced conservative views that the whole enterprise involved mere selfindulgence and luxuriation, a bit of political patronage, money allotted from a Democratic administration to a group of largely wealthy white political supporters. Feminist reporter Janis Kelly had conceded that the activities and earnest proposals of the Houston convention all “sound[ed] impressive until you consider that it was done to produce a set of resolutions to be presented to the President for his edification and enjoyment, [hence, nothing more than] a very expensive memo.” 36 In other contexts, Republicans had certain-

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ly held many such gatherings, and liberal Democrats often criticized them and their wastefulness. In Houston, the roles of indulgers and critics had simply reversed. “The girls are going to Houston for boozing and carousing,” snorted one anti-ERA congressman. When Abzug heard that remark, she snapped: “I’ve attended many meetings, but I have never heard any woman ask for a call boy.” It was a good one-liner, and Abzug was usually skilled at that sort of repartee. In a not altogether different sense, though, there was a lot of partying, much of which, when occurring at any traditional male-dominated convention, would have lead to stern criticisms from people like Abzug. Additionally, Abzug was not that much in control of the convention that she could claim, absolutely, that any other such self-indulgent activity as she referred did not occur. As for herself, Abzug certainly did luxuriate in Houston at the taxpayers’ expense. With absolute delight and entitlement, and without a hint of embarrassment, for example, one of her old friends from Women Strike for Peace, Barbara Bick, recalled Abzug’s government-paid Houston accommodations: “Bella had a two-story suite, and it was all in white. . . . There was a big white baby grand piano and a gigantic Texas-sized bed.” Lyndon Johnson would have been proud of such an expensive spectacle. There was certainly no evidence of “call boys” or girls at Abzug’s suite. Still, another feminist colleague, Liz Carpenter, did hire a “most wonderful masseur.” Carpenter actually had the man give Abzug a massage one night in Abzug’s big Houston suite, and it was a real massage. Unfortunately, the big masseur proved too rigorous and brutal (as Abzug was with many colleagues?). Amidst uproarious laughter from those gathered in the room, Abzug was quickly screaming in pain, and she soon sent the young man packing. 37 Abzug was the epicenter of the convention, as well as of all American feminism. Some loved her. Others despised her. Few were ever neutral. Even foreign visitors noted the power of her presence, for better or worse. One Israeli woman, Tamar Eldar-Avidar, attended the Houston convention just prior to the official beginning of her duties as attaché for women’s affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. At her official Washington introduction she joked to reporters that her previous week in Houston “was a cocktail of [the forceful Egyptian] President Sadat and Bella Abzug, and it was a little hard to swallow.” 38 After all the convention’s social activities and after the passage of the various convention proposals, the recommendations were all sent forth to the White House and to the official leadership of both parties of Congress. The proposals carried no actual weight, other than that which politicians or the media may have subjectively assigned them. Little can be said to have changed politically from the convention. Positive responses from participants continued to focus on personal, psychological levels. There was a Congressional move to extend the ERA’s ratification deadline from 1979 to 1982. At

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the time, that appeared to be a concrete result, but the extension had no lasting impact, as, even with the added time, the ERA never secured passage in the necessary thirty-eight states. Elsewhere, no actual legislation passed Congress in the wake of the convention’s recommendations. While many of the convention participants certainly felt good, Abzug’s aborted massage notwithstanding, the question of broader impact would simply have to play itself out in politics. It was one thing to be able to control the majority of delegates at a convention, but the general voting population could not be so put in harness. They would decide for themselves in the voting booths. Abzug would promote a bill to try to give balance to the inequities between women and men receiving Social Security. A far greater preponderance of men than women had earned paychecks over the previous decades. A major result here, felt especially by women who’d been divorced, was that men received far greater amounts of money from the Social Security Administration. Abzug proposed, as did Texan Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, that women be given credit based on housework, with a typical housekeeper in 1972 estimated to have made $6,400 a year, or at least be given credit for having earned the federal minimum wage for their years of housework and child care. Questions arose that were difficult to answer: How could claims be authenticated and administered? Given the tens of millions of women potentially affected here, could imperil the solvency of Social Security? With such points raised, the proposal failed. 39 As the Houston convention had taken place in late 1977, there would not be any national elections for a long time. There would be one election soon thereafter, however. It would come in early February of 1978, and it would involve the convention’s most prominent figure. Would the so-called “Spirit of Houston” be of any assistance in propelling Abzug back into the corridors of power where she so dearly wanted to be? Or would Houston actually damage her electoral prospects and further limit her political purview? NOTES 1. Interview with Doug Ireland, April 27, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p.190. 2. New Times, May 17, 1974; Abzug Papers, Box 9, folder 3, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.. 3. Interview with Liz Abzug, July 28, 2004, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 190. 4. Interview with Maggi Peyton, May 10, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 192–93. 5. Interview with Kathy Bonk, email, June 14, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 197. 6. With respect to general events coverage of the National Women’s Conference of 1977: Houston Chronicle, November 13, 19, 22, 1977; Anne R. Kenney, “The Papers of International Women’s Year, 1977,” American Archivist 42 (July 1979); Prudence MacKintosh, “The Good Old Girls,” Texas Monthly, January 1978; New York Times, November 27, 1977; The Spirit of Houston, The First National Women’s Conference (Washington: National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, 1978); see also: www.jofreeman.com/photos/

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IWY1977.html; www.pbs.org/independentlens/sistersof77/conference.html; uic.edu/orgs/ cwluherstory/jofreeman/photos/IWY1977.html; www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ NN/pwngq.html. 7. Ibid. 8. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27, November 5, 2005; Interview with Midge Costanza, August 6, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 201. 9. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 201–2 10. Phyllis Schlafly, Sisters of ‘77, film by Cynthia Salzman Mondell and Allen Mondell, a Media Projects production (www.mediaprojects.org), PBS telecast, 2004, www.pbs.org/ independentlens/sistersof77/conference.html. 11. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27, November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 198. 12. Interview with Carmen Delgado Votaw, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp.198–99. 13. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005; interview with Gloria Steinem, January 30, 2003, August 26, 2006; interview with Carmen Delgado Votaw, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 197, 198, 207, 211. 14. Washington Post, October 27, 1977, p. 6; November 13, p. 8. 15. Interview with Martha Smiley, Sisters of ‘77; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 206. 16. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005; interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27, November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 198, 199, 205. 17. Interview with Joanne Edgar, email, September 26, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 199–200. 18. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005; Betty Ford, Address to the First Plenary Session, in Spirit of Houston Report, pp. 220–21, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 200, 203–5. 19. Spirit of Houston Report, pp. 149, 152, 163, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 209–11. 20. Houston Chronicle, November 13, 19, 22, 1977; Anne R. Kenney, “The Papers of International Women’s Year, 1977,” American Archivist vol. 42 (July 1979); Prudence MacKintosh, “The Good Old Girls,” Texas Monthly, January 1978; New York Times, November 27, 1977; The Spirit of Houston, The First National Women’s Conference (Washington: National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, 1978); see also: www. jofreeman.com/photos/IWY1977.html; www.pbs.org/independentlens/sistersof77/conference. html; uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/photos/IWY1977.html; www.tshaonline.org/ handbook/online/articles/NN/pwngq.html; Barbara Jordan, Sisters of ‘77, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 204. 21. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 207. 22. Jean Westwood, Spirit of Houston Report, p. 149, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 209. 23. Interview with Amy Swerdlow, March 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 158. 24. Gloria Steinem, Sisters of ‘77; Anne Taylor Fleming, “That Week in Houston,” New York Times, December 25, 1977, p. 33; see also, Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 83. 25. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005; Interview with Betty Friedan, November 29, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 211–12; Fleming, “That Week in Houston,” p. 33. 26. Spirit of Houston Report, p. 163; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 210. 27. Janis Kelly, “National Women’s Conference,” Off Our Backs, January 31, 1978, vol. 8, issue 1, p. 2; Fleming, “That Week in Houston,” p. 13. 28. Robert K. Dornan, Sisters of ‘77; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 203. 29. Janis Kelly, “Roar on the Right,” Off Our Backs, January 31, 1978, vol. 8, issue 1, p. 3; Fleming, “That Week in Houston,” p. 13. 30. Houston Chronicle, November 13, 19, 22, 1977; Anne R. Kenney, “The Papers of International Women’s Year, 1977,” American Archivist 42 (July 1979); MacKintosh, “The Good Old Girls;” New York Times, November 27, 1977; The Spirit of Houston, The First National Women’s Conference (Washington: National Commission on the Observance of

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International Women’s Year, 1978); Kelly, “Roar on the Right,” p. 3; see also: www. jofreeman.com/photos/IWY1977.html; www.pbs.org/independentlens/sisterof77/conference. html; uic.edu/orgs/cqluherstory/jofreeman/photos/IW1977.html; www.tshaonline.org/hand book/online/articles/NN/pwngg.html. 31. Phyllis Schlafly, Sisters of ‘77; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 206. 32. Fleming, “That Week in Houston,” p. 13. 33. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 212. 34. Lindsy Van Gelder, Spirit of Houston Report, pp. 163; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 213. 35. Margaret Mead, Address to the Fourth Plenary Session, November 19, 1977, Spirit of Houston Report, p. 230; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 207. 36. Kelly, “National Women’s Conference,” p. 2. 37. Interview with Marguerite Rawait, Reminiscences, one date unknown, one dated September 25, 1980, session 16, p. 974, CUOHROC; interview with Barbara Bick, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 202, 210–11; Washington Post, November 23, 1977, p. 9. 38. Washington Post, November 23, 1977. 39. Ibid., January 10, 1978; March 12, 1978.

Chapter Three

This Jinxed Hotel Again

Soon after the Houston convention, in January of 1978, President Carter made an official visit to Saudi Arabia. During the trip many journalists noted how First Lady Rosalyn Carter appeared utterly and, to some, rudely marginalized by the Saudi government’s various protocols. She seemed an afterthought in all the official activities of the President’s visit. Upon President Carter’s arrival, for example, there was not even a place reserved for the First Lady on the welcoming platform at the airport. This reinforced various people’s awareness of how some of the world’s cultures treated women. (Later in the trip, when the first family visited Cairo, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat would prove contrastingly gracious.) While often extolling the virtues of appreciating different cultures, feminists and other liberals were quick to criticize here, and in the wake of the Houston convention, Bella Abzug seemed a logical person to be asked to comment, which she did, quipping: “It looks like they need a Houston conference in Saudi Arabia.” 1 The notion that a Houston-style convention could be held in such a nation as Saudi Arabia required quite a mental stretch, as well as some level of ego projection. Most American foreign policy advisors would at the very least have been wary about the idea of America attaching a feminist agenda to any of its foreign policy goals or about any general pressuring of the Saudis in regard to their treatment of women. To some it may have been the morally righteous thing to do; to others it may have smacked of ineffective, selfindulgent grandstanding by wealthy white Americans. Like Rosalyn Carter, the vocal Bella Abzug was undergoing a certain marginalization here. Her thoughts on the actual economic, diplomatic, and military issues with which the President was contending were now of no importance to anyone. Out of political power in all non-feminist circles, Abzug’s perceived expertise had been relegated to a sui generis level that was of significance only to people 65

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who had the time and money to consider and luxuriate in it. Abzug wanted to do more than speak from the margins about one issue. Abzug was now out of work. For income, she still had plenty of speaking engagement fees to fall back on. From her three terms in Congress she had a small pension ($488 a month), but with her husband continuing to work on Wall Street, the family, while never wealthy, was never in any serious financial straits. 2 But there remained for Abzug the desire not merely for more income but to be part of the political elite. Indeed, even while preparing for and leading the Houston convention in November, Abzug was hard at work angling for the Democratic nomination for the Congressional seat on the wealthy East Side of Manhattan, popularly known as the “Silk Stocking District.” This was the seat vacated by New York’s newly elected Mayor Ed Koch. In the September Mayoral primary runoff between Koch and Mario Cuomo, Abzug had been fairly quiet, although she had made an appearance for Cuomo and endorsed him. There was a persistent rumor that Abzug had agreed to keep a low profile in exchange for Koch’s endorsement for his old House seat should he be elected. Whether or not any such deal was ever cut, Koch did endorse Abzug for Congress, as did other rivals like Mario Cuomo, Abraham Beame, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and New York City Council President Carol Bellamy; so did the New York Times. 3 All the city’s papers considered Abzug to be the clear front-runner for the Congressional seat. Only a few months before in the Mayor’s race, of course, she had been leading in June and lost in September. Nevertheless, as the special Congressional election of February, 1978 approached, the Abzug camp felt quite confident. “We thought this was an easy race,” recalled Harold Holzer, press secretary of her ‘76 Senate campaign. But few things are ever easy in New York politics, and this time, in both the nominating processes and the general election, the grind would be excruciating. At the outset, despite the endorsements of such heavyweights as Abzug had, other political figures were showing interest in running. Just before Christmas, the New York Times noted eight others besides Abzug who were seeking Koch’s 18th District seat. The Daily News giggled, “Manhattan’s Silk Stocking has nine runs in it.” One candidate, Robin Duke, distributed copies of a five-page folder of herself, complete with flattering photographs. Another, Martin Begun, Dean of New York University’s Medical School, spent $1,000 for poster promotions of his candidacy on the city’s East Side buses. Cursorily glancing at the name, many voters thought the advertisements were there simply to promote the public image and standing of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Despite their efforts and spending, neither Duke nor Begun would go far. Others would, however. 4 In such an event as a special election when a House seat is vacated, states set their own nomination rules, and in New York the major political parties do not nominate via direct, popular-vote primaries. Each party’s district com-

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mittee was to meet and select a nominee. On January 20, the Republicans convened and, without much fuss, nominated S. William Green. On Sunday, January 15, 1978, the 970-member Democratic Party district committee gathered at Washington Irving High School. Of the eight candidates who had voiced interest in the seat besides Abzug, one proved to be of significance, and it was not Robin Duke, Martin Begun, or Menachem Begin. His name was Carter Burden. Shirley Carter Burden was a wealthy East Side Manhattanite, the greatgreat-great grandson, indeed, of Cornelius Vanderbilt (and on his mother’s side, he was a grand-nephew of the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.). A graduate of Columbia Law like his party rival Bella Abzug, Mr. Burden had been a legal assistant to Senator Robert Kennedy and since 1969 had served, without much distinction, on the New York City Council. He supported Abzug for Mayor in 1977. He had also been the principal owner of New York Magazine and of the Village Voice. He lived in an eleven-room apartment on 5th Avenue at 83rd Street, just across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (valued in 1990 at $4.9 million) and owned a collection of thirty thousand first-edition and rare volumes appraised at $11 million. (In his primary bid against Abzug and the other candidates, he would spend $1,136,112, then a national record for a Congressional primary.) With his money, liberal credentials, political standing and connections, Burden was “a silk stocking” among the silk stockings and had significant support among many of the East Side Manhattan Democrats assembled that afternoon and evening in January. As expected, with many candidates, speeches, motions, debates, five ballots, and confused proceedings, the meeting took all afternoon and went well into the evening, finally concluding, with most unsettled results, at 10:30 P.M. 5 In the complicated Democratic Party proceedings, candidates accumulated points. The successive ballots were worth different levels of points depending upon the number of opponents at the time of each vote: the fewer the number of competitors, the greater the point value of each ballot. In each round, as the number of surviving candidates narrowed, point values grew. The voting occurred with a different color of ballot card. That way, if any recounting needed to occur, the fact of how many votes each candidate received on each point-varying ballot could be ascertained by the identifying color. It was incredibly complicated. Still, there was a rationale at work in the process, and the issue of ballot card colors would prove to be vitally important. Over the course of the day and evening, 843 delegates voted five times, with a total of 126,929.04 voting points accumulated among the nine candidates. 6 As the ballots and discussions proceeded, six lesser candidates fell away. By the time of the fifth and presumably final ballot, three candidates were left—Abzug, Burden, and Abzug’s old friend Allard Lowenstein. As another balloting was set to go, Lowenstein suddenly withdrew. With the number of

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candidates then going from three to two, the color of the ballot was to be switched from green to blue. City Councilman and meeting chair, Frederick Samuel made this quite clear. On this “blue” ballot, with the shift of point values, Carter Burden ended the day with 63,826.38 points. Abzug had 63,102.66. It appeared that Abzug had lost another election. Of the hundreds of ballots cast, however, eleven of the final “blue ballot” group were ruled invalid. Three ballots were simply blank, one had been cast for an ineligible candidate, and one was completely illegible. The other six “invalid” ballots had each been cast for Abzug, and if those votes had been allowed to count, she would have had 829 more points, and that would have been enough for her to defeat Burden. The ballots were disallowed because they were submitted on green cards, not on the blue cards required when the number of candidates suddenly went from three to two. One could almost hear a Bronx accent within the Daily News’s editorial writers as they whined in their coverage here: “Talk about technicalities!” To let that “result stand,” they editorialized, “would be disgraceful.” Bella Abzug was equally livid: “We got screwed,” she yelled, making, as the New York Post fearfully noted, “no pretense at moderating her temper.” “I won this election. It’s my election. How dare they deprive the people of their vote! This is a deprivation of the people’s rights. You’re not going to disenfranchise them. You’re not going to disenfranchise me.” 7 According to Harold Holzer, Abzug’s former press secretary, some of the Abzug voters were “women who were probably one hundred years old and ready to pass out” after such a long, nine-hour meeting of painstakingly tedious protocols and procedures. These women may have pre-marked their ballots and departed, thus not switching to the different colored card required with Lowenstein’s last-second drop out. On the vote before the twocandidate “blue” ballot, when Lowenstein was still in the race, Abzug had polled 40 percent, Burden 29 percent, and Lowenstein 15 percent. So Abzug’s apparent technicality-based loss to Burden was that much harder for her to take since she was obviously ahead. An additional matter in the mix was the fact that when Lowenstein dropped out, he endorsed no one. Upon withdrawal, most of the lesser candidates had endorsed someone, although it usually did not matter. Lowenstein’s silence here prompted speculations that he had an eye on the upcoming summer primary, when the same Congressional seat would be at stake in regard to the year’s regular November elections. Was Lowenstein intentionally not endorsing Abzug because he felt that Carter Burden would clearly be a weaker opponent for him later that year? Many wondered so, and Lowenstein made no effort to scotch such rumors. Asked whether he would run in the upcoming regular primary, he shrugged “I don’t rule it out, and I don’t rule it in.” The sense of betrayal from an old friend further irritated Abzug’s already enraged temper. “I was ladylike about this thing until last night,” she snarled on Monday morning, “but I’m

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not going to be any longer.” Many may have disputed her pre-Sunday selfcharacterization, but all agreed that her famous dander was now up. Asked whether it was all worth the effort, she affirmed with a smile: “Nothing is easy. Even when I gave birth to my children, I had Caesareans.” 8 Whatever the explanations for the voting card snafu, it appeared that Mr. Carter Burden had won his party’s nomination. He was irritatingly condescending in his comments: “There is a need for reconciliation instead of recrimination.” Abzug was hardly persuaded, and she had a quick decision to make about challenging the results. The endorsement of New York’s Liberal Party was a strong possibility, so she could have conceded, run with another party affiliation, and hope her name recognition would carry the day. The idea of running against Republican Bill Green, with Carter Burden in the race as well, may have brought to mind the ‘76 run against Moynihan with both O’Dwyer and Clark siphoning votes off of her liberal base. Convinced she had legitimately won the Democratic nomination, she decided to contest the ballot eligibility ruling in court. “No law committee of the county is going to deprive me of an election. I don’t care if we have to go to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Here a few may have noted her fuming, not about any blunting of the people’s will, but only about a depriving of “me.” Beyond any untoward sense of self-entitlement, one newspaper commentator cynically noted how the whole incoherent process would now require “a dozen judges to struggle through ascending stages of bafflement. . . . Her [Abzug’s] novel,” he shrieked melodramatically, simply “cannot end this way.” It would not end, nor would it take a dozen judges, but it would take four. 9 In the first legal stage the next morning, Abzug and her retinue went before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Hilda Schwartz. There, they won a “show cause” order. Abzug’s attorney, Saul Rudes successfully argued that the Democratic Party meeting’s leaders, not the voters, were responsible for the green/blue color card snafu. An honest voting intent had been present and, therefore, deserved to be respected. With obvious reference to the silliness of the blue/green distinction, Abzug intoned here: “The law is color blind.” With the “show cause” order in force, the New York County Democratic Committee and the Board of Elections now had to show how they could justify not nominating Abzug. Theirs was now the burden of proof. 10 Two days later everyone was back in court. All six voters who used a green ballot card were on hand. Five need not have taken the trouble to come. Carter Burden’s attorney, Edward Costykan, who had run against Abzug for Mayor the previous year, conceded that five of the six “green” ballots did constitute valid votes for Abzug. The card color matter was not going to stand as a criterion for disqualification; that was clear. But Burden’s side had other cards to play. The five conceded votes would have given Abzug a new total of 63,793.49 points, still 32.89 short of Burden’s total. Abzug still needed that final sixth green ballot. It was that close, one ballot! That sixth

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ballot was cast by a gentleman named Joseph Lyman, and his activities at the Sunday gathering gave Burden’s side an argument. Costykan raised the point that Lyman had departed prematurely, left the ballot with his wife, Muriel. Her casting of the ballot violated the Democratic committee’s proxy rules. The rationale here was that ballot casters should be present to hear the various arguments raised at the meeting, no matter how mundane, in order to cast a fully informed vote. Lyman, himself, came to court, however, and testified that he was present, at least in the building, and that he had not left the meeting. He claimed he had put the ballot in an envelope and handed it to his wife when he went out to find a restroom. He had trouble locating the room and did not return for thirty minutes, with his wife turning in the ballot when it was called. Two witnesses claimed to have been sitting next to Mr. and Mrs. Lyman and corroborated that Mr. Lyman was indeed at Washington Irving High School for the duration of the meeting. Covering the court hearing, one reporter smirked how “the whole fate of this tutelary goddess of the women’s liberation movement might have come to rest on the credibility of a couple . . . who sounded oddly like Edith and Archie Bunker.” It was quite a bout of legal parsing, and as the one vote was critical, neither party would yield. In the end, the Lymans’ credibility held. The judge, Max Bloom, awarded Abzug all six of the “green” ballots. As it happened, Judge Bloom’s late wife had been the deputy head of the state’s Liberal Party which would support Abzug. Bloom did not feel it necessary to recuse himself, however. He ruled against Burden, and, much to the good judge’s angry and embarrassed protest, the courtroom then broke into cheers. Now it appeared that Abzug’s “novel” (or at least one chapter) would have a happy ending. But even amidst such tedious legal wrangling, New York politics are seldom so easy. 11 Abzug appeared to have won, but now it was Burden’s turn to consider going to court. He had room to argue about Mr. Lyman. He could have also argued that Judge Bloom had had a conflict of interest. Given Bloom’s ruling, it was now up to Burden to prove that Lyman was not present when he said he had been. Independent of such issues, and of the courts, per se, Burden’s first ploy was to ask for a recount. Under the rules of the state Democratic Party, this could occur only if the competing parties agreed. Unsurprisingly, Abzug would not cooperate, so Burden had to turn back to the courts. On January 20, he won an order for a retabulation from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arnold Fraiman, who had no apparent stake in the outcome. The recount adjusted the points a bit. There had been no shenanigans, just a “simple error on the tape” of one of the adding machines. Bella Abzug was still on top. The new point margin had Abzug at 65,905.99, and Burden, 65,830.19. Judge Fraiman certified the count, but he pointedly amended to his ruling an order that the state not yet print any ballots for the House election of February 14, as Burden had filed for another hearing on

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Monday, January 23. The 75.8-point difference between Abzug and Burden again amounted to the value of but one ballot, and Burden’s people had a few more gambits in mind. 12 At the ensuing Monday hearing, Burden did not argue anything about Mr. Lyman or about Judge Bloom. He asserted there had been mathematical errors in the count. Having done some checking on several other Abzug supporters, Burden also held that another of the Democratic blue-ballot voters, a Mr. Leonard Rubin, was not a registered Democrat but a member of the Liberal Party, indeed an officially designated Liberal District Leader no less. Rubin was, indeed, in the Liberal Party. Yet he had gone to the Democratic meeting and voted on the “blue” ballot for Abzug, with his ballot at that point in the evening worth 141.67 points. If his ballot was disallowed, it would be enough to offset Abzug’s margin. Burden asserted that a Liberal Party member’s ballot should not count in the Democratic vote. One Abzug supporter, Henry Stern, protested emotionally: “He [Rubin] is just a sweet guy who likes politics, so one night he would go to a Liberal meeting and the next to a Democratic meeting.” There was not much legal foundation in the notion of sweetness, for the questions of credentials and rules about party affiliations obviously apply to mean people as well as to sweet souls. The fact that such arguments were being raised indicated that Abzug’s side felt themselves on thin ice, more than a bit nervous, and ready to try anything. More substantive than Stern’s sweet little plea was the point that Rubin had been duly selected as the representative of the Lexington Democratic Club. Abzug’s attorney thus asserted that this group of Democrats would be, and should not be, disenfranchised by any overruling of Rubin’s vote. 13 Judge Alvin Klein, without personal conflicts, heard all the arguments. Would this be, wondered the Daily News, the “Ides of January for Bella?” Klein could have disallowed Rubin’s vote and turned the nomination over to Burden. Recognizing Rubin’s problematic affiliation but also believing the Lexington Club should not be disenfranchised, he could have called for the Lexington body to select someone else and, under his judicial jurisdiction, have that person cast another ballot. On January 24, Klein ruled first that the assertions of mathematical errors were untimely. Then he rejected the challenge with regard to the vote of Leonard Rubin. Result: Abzug won the Democratic Party nomination by one vote. 14 Carter Burden had grounds for further appeals. He had made vows, in the event of losing at this juncture, that he would then challenge Abzug in June, for renomination for the regular November election. Abzug held forth that Burden should not continue to protest because it could only damage his dignity. Her disingenuous condescension raised a few eyebrows. One observer likened her advice to “the Archangel Michael suggesting it is demeaning to sail through the air with a flaming sword.” Nevertheless, Burden graciously chose to drop the issue entirely and support Abzug. “I’ve decided not to

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appeal—this has gone on long enough.” Abzug’s advice had hardly moved him. Burden likely figured he would look bad in the appeal processes, be seen as helping the Republican candidate with an ongoing fight, and hurt his own standing with regard to any future political endeavors, including the regular Congressional election later that autumn which he held to be a “wide open possibility.” So he conceded. Abzug gave him a big hug. With each’s spouse accompanying and smiling, they all appeared together on the courthouse steps in a show of party solidarity and no hard feelings. “We’ve always been good friends,” Abzug proclaimed. Abzug supporters held parties. The New York Times hailed “The Return of Bella Abzug.” With registered Democrats greatly outnumbering Republicans in the district, her reelection to Congress now seemed certain. Remembering the Mayor and Senate races, Martin Abzug sighed, “All I can say is it’s about time she had a break.” That very afternoon, she was out stumping at the East Side subway stops and shaking hands. The nomination process was finally over. Now there was the little matter of the actual election in February. 15 The Republican Party had nominated a man named Sedgwick William Green. Bill Green was a moderate Republican, a Harvard Law graduate, with experience as a trial attorney. His family owned New York’s Grand Union grocery store chain. He had served two terms in the New York State Assembly, and under Richard Nixon he served as New York City Director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He seemed thoroughly qualified, but with Democratic registrants outnumbering Republicans by estimates running as high as three to one, his candidacy indeed appeared to be a long shot, especially against such a well-known figure. The Democratic preponderance in the district had been so pronounced that in 1972 even George McGovern had out-polled Richard Nixon there. All eighteen of New York City’s sitting members of Congress endorsed Abzug. So did her party primary supporters Koch, Cuomo, Beame, Moynihan, and the New York Times. Upon the party nomination, none less than President Carter endorsed her as well. Vice President Walter Mondale personally delivered the statement of White House support with a conspicuous public appearance in New York on January 31. 16 After the close losses in 1976 and 1977, Abzug’s people felt they could, at last, rest confidently in the thought that, finally, they had one “in the bag.” She was going back to Washington, so they thought. When endorsing Abzug for Congress in this special Congressional election, the New York Times made a point of mentioning that they had previously “found her boisterous political style unsuitable for the job of Mayor” and that her “flamboyance and sometimes rough ways can be irritating.” 17 If any voters in the 18th District needed to be reminded of such matters, the Times’s gratuitous swipes were not helping, its endorsement notwithstanding. Bill

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Green knew that such personal issues were matters he had to exploit. Green voiced criticisms of Jimmy Carter’s tax proposals, claiming that New Yorkers needed a voice in Washington that would oppose the President. “Send Washington a message” was one of his slogans. He spoke of such matters as Carter’s new tax code provisions disallowing theater tickets to be used as business deductions. This, Green claimed, would hurt New York’s theaters. Green also claimed he had always supported the construction of the West Side Highway, while Abzug had opposed it. 18 All such stances and details as these were trifles, however, and Green knew it. He was a nobody who appeared to have zero chance, given both the party registration balance in the district and the fact that he was running against someone with a monumental level of notoriety. He had to make a splash, and “going negative” was the way to do it. It made sense then for Green to do little but run “against Bella” and all the imagery her well-known personality had created, especially at this point with all the publicity about issues like abortion and lesbianism that had just blared through the media in its coverage of the Houston convention she had chaired. This he would do. Green’s people pushed the point that Abzug was merely using the race for a Congressional seat as a stepping stone to further her larger ambitions. They emphasized that she did not live in the 18th District. There was nothing illegal about this. She only had to reside in the state, but her Bank Street home in Greenwich Village was indeed two blocks outside the district line. Green actually used the word “carpetbagger” here, trying to play on elite East Side Manhattan’s sense of superiority versus the more disputatious and decadent West Side. More than that, Green harped upon the point that Abzug was simply too abrasive a person to be effective in Congress. A popular California Congressman, Paul McCloskey, appeared on Green’s behalf, emphasizing as well that Abzug’s “abrasive” style was counterproductive and would be especially harmful to New York City’s need for Congressional support in critical financial matters. 19 Much of Abzug’s three-term record on Capitol Hill spoke to the contrary, but Green did not care about that. He knew he had to exploit and attack a widely held image. It was his only possible campaign ploy. At the Houston convention, many feminists had felt smug and entitled, as they gerrymandered the delegate selection and hooted at speakers who attempted to stand against the convention’s positions on such matters as lesbian rights and abortion. Now in the marketplace of the general voter, there was a perhaps equally smug sense of counter-entitlement from those who opined, with such behavior as they saw from Houston, and with New York’s 1977 blackout backlash still resonating, that many aspects of traditional liberalism had run amok amidst narcissistic self-preoccupations and illiberal hypocrisies of intolerance. (If anyone needed a reminder of the 1977 blackout, some ongoing lawsuits against Con Edison were receiving press cover-

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age at the very time of the special election.) Some of the ad hominem attacks from the Right here may have been but masks for homophobia and other prejudices, but any such aroused voters counted just the same on election day. With an opponent like Bella Abzug, it was a dirty but obvious strategy for Green to exploit any socially controversial imagery. Two of his chief campaign advisors, Donald K. Allen and Norman (Buddy) Bishop, organized a phone bank. They identified “disgruntled” Democrats in the district and called thousands, pushing invective about Abzug and her links to feminism and lesbian rights. Two years later, the Washington Post described Buddy Bishop as someone with “an antipathy for liberal Democrats” and as “the man who still relishes his hand in helping . . . Bill Green defeat . . . Bella Abzug.” 20 For many well-heeled New Yorkers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in early 1978, the growth and flamboyance of the city’s gay and lesbian community had been quite shocking. Lurid stories of the hedonistic gatherings in the West Village and elsewhere were all about the city. And in an age before such maladies as AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases were yet known or had had any chastening impacts, the perceived decadent, cancerous promiscuity had a distressingly unbridled “in your face” quality. The very day that Carter Burden conceded the Democrats’ Congressional nomination to Abzug, Mayor Koch issued an executive order prohibiting city agencies from discrimination against homosexuals. The Daily News printed hysterical pieces by anti-Equal Rights Amendment advocates that claimed that, if passed, the amendment would encourage lesbianism. General reactions to the rising visibility of homosexuality in New York all connected to some of the same blackout-backlash sensibilities that had hurt Abzug’s Mayoral candidacy the previous summer. Green thus endeavored to tap into many middleclass hostilities and fears, and any criticisms of him here as either socially too conservative or even mean-spirited would only press his point more strongly upon the segment of voters he wanted to enlist in the first place. 21 “There was an underground campaign that Green was doing,” recalled Harold Holzer. “I should have saved the literature: ‘Bella Abzug: Queen of the Lesbos.’ Just vicious stuff—that she was going to have gay people rule society.” Abzug had, of course, been quite conspicuous in her open support of gay and lesbian rights. Green’s tactics were variations on her being called a communist because of her defense of many accused amidst the red scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In her conspicuous defense of homosexuality, she had begun to draw ridicule with some of her trendy, au courant phrasing. She was among the first to use such terminologies as “sexual orientation” and “people of different affectional preferences.” Some may have regarded this as denoting a heightened sensitivity. Others saw it as a mere nomenclature-based posturing of ersatz moral superiority. One cynical columnist commented upon such phrasing as part of “the litany most unfortunately evoca-

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tive of the catalogues of courses at the New School of Social Research,” an institution which indeed thought itself laboring at the absolute cutting edge of social change, but whose purported innovations others found to be merely matters involving the tossing around of new, fancy but empty terminology, something the contemporaneous historian and social theorist Christopher Lasch saw as the banalities of pseudo-awareness in the theatrics of politics. 22 Whether the attitudes and language of people like Abzug were innovative and liberal, or mere self-absorbed, intellectually empty clichés, Green and his supporters recognized the discomfort such issues as homosexuality was bringing to many voters in 1977–1978. Abzug’s nomination fight with Burden had underscored all the popular imagery of her abrasive personality. Green was determined to highlight that in the most socially extreme ways he could. He denied knowledge of any homophobic literature, but in early February all over the East Side came fliers linking Abzug to lesbianism, to homosexual rights, as well as to the Communist Party, to abortion on demand, and to condoning “violent methods in political and social matters.” 23 The campaign smears Green chose to employ against Abzug were certainly vicious, clearly homophobic, but quite effective too. Low voter turnout is always a problem in special elections, and this proved of no help to Abzug that February. With his lesbian-link smears, Green animated much of what precious strength he had. Meanwhile a lot of Abzug supporters were showing some fatigue from the Carter Burden court skirmishes, and, with the victory over Burden and the Democratic nomination in hand, some were now taking the general election for granted. What specifically Abzug could have done to “get the vote out” remains idle speculation, but it was definitely no time to coast. After the successful bouts with Burden, however, many in the Abzug camp were presuming victory. In the week before the election, New York City was also hard hit by several severe snow storms, one paralyzing the city with eighteen inches in one day. At this point, neither candidate could do much. A few days of that pre-election week, Abzug was away from New York City anyway. She had gone to Washington, DC. She posed with President Carter and met with Tip O’Neill. Apparently as confident of victory as anyone in her camp, Abzug wanted to discuss committee assignments with the House Speaker. Ever accommodating and perhaps equally confident, O’Neill did delay some of the committee assignment work of the House Steering Committee, as Abzug had told him she needed more time to make up her mind. She was clearly counting the proverbial chickens. The political fates can be unkind to people who do that. 24 When a candidate is able, as Green seemed, to hit voters at a psychologically primal level, an eerie sense of deeper forces at work can be hard to ignore. While exuding confidence, Abzug’s own staff may have cavalierly dismissed the lesbian bashing as immaterial and smacking of a homophobia-

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driven desperation that would backfire on a pathetic candidate who had no real chance anyway. (Why else would Harold Holzer have simply tossed away the damning campaign materials?) Still, in at least one respect Abzug’s campaign managers appeared to buy into some part of a superstitious notion of eerie forces potentially at work, and it may have proven to have been a superstition that came back to haunt them. In both the 1976 and 1977 elections, Abzug’s campaign managers had chosen to convene in Manhattan’s Summit Hotel on election night, wait for the official voting returns, and, presumably, celebrate. Given the two previous nights of bitter disappointment at the Summit, they indulged the idea of “bad karma” and intentionally selected a different hotel, or so they thought. The new, “different” hotel for which they had phoned in their election-night reservations was none other than the Summit: same building, still a hotel, now merely under a new name. No one had bothered to check. When Abzug arrived in the early evening of February 14 to meet her supporters and await the count, she screamed: “How dare you put me in this jinxed hotel again.” 25 The “jinx” would prove true. Green’s lesbian-scare tactics had worked quite well for him, as had Abzug’s and her followers’ blasé confidence. On Valentine’s evening, February 14, the first returns came in positively for Abzug. People at her hotel and at her campaign office on Lexington Avenue began to celebrate. With the solid returns, several New York television stations actually declared her the winner. Then other areas especially in the northern part of the district began to report and the spread narrowed. In the end, 59,972 votes were cast. Green polled 30,240; Abzug tallied 28,970, a difference of a mere 1270 votes. Proportionally, it was 50.4 percent to 48.3 percent, with two minor candidates taking 754 other votes. Confident of victory, and with bad winter weather (four more inches of snow fell that day), lots of Democrats had simply stayed home. The total voter turnout was but 27 percent of the district’s registrants. Another squeaker, another loss. Martin was with her that evening, of course, as were Midge Costanza, Mary Anne Krupsak, and Shirley MacLaine. Abzug was described as “not crying, [but] dazed.” She came downstairs and addressed her supporters and the press. Perhaps unconsciously underscoring that a major shift had occurred in her life, she was not wearing a hat. The image of this, wrote columnist Ellen Goodman, “was like seeing a photograph of Moshe Dyan without a patch over his eye. . . . She was sitting in the picture bareheaded, astonishingly diminished.” Abzug gathered herself here and shouted she wanted a recount. “This isn’t over. Nothing’s over. I am a political person, and I always will be. I don’t rule out anything.” 26 The slightly rambling nature of the comment showed she was indeed shocked. How could she have been otherwise? When the final returns rolled in and the outcome was clear, a recount would prove unnecessary. Campaign tactics may have violated all decorum,

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but the vote tally was legitimate. Abzug would not visit or telephone Green and offer either a concession or any congratulations. Knowing Green’s lesbian bashing and other smear tactics, she snapped to reporters: “He has nothing to be congratulated for.” With the smears clearly in mind she snarled: “Dirty tricks beat me.” Green, she fumed, “used scurrilous literature to attack personality rather than discuss issues.” She went on to accuse Green of spending more than the $100,000 she claimed he had declared. (He had out-financed her and used his money effectively with a lot of television and radio commercials.) Green held, however, that he had never declared $100,000 and openly stated that the figure was indeed closer to $150,000. Abzug also accused Green of receiving “some Rockefeller money.” The only point ever proven here was that banker David Rockefeller had made a $500 contribution to Green’s campaign. Abzug was angry and was reaching for any rhetorical hook she could employ as an accusation. Given Green’s tactics, her anger was certainly understandable. Green gleefully rubbed it in. Early the next morning, with victory in hand, he conspicuously posed for photographers in front of an Upper East Side movie theater displaying as its current attraction the Marsha Mason/Richard Dreyfuss film The Goodbye Girl. 27 To say the least, Green’s tactics had been incredibly lowly. Nonetheless, he was the victor. Bella Abzug had now lost three major elections in less than eighteen months. NOTES 1. New York Daily News, January 4, 1978, p. 2; New York Post, January 4, 1978, p. 6. 2. New York Times, November 6, 1977, p. NJ22; Washington Post, July 23, 1984. 3. New York Daily News, September 10, 1977, p. 3; New York Post, January 11, 1978, p. 11; February 16, p. 2; New York Times, January 14, 1978, p. 20; February 8, p. A18; Washington Post, September 18, 1977, p. 10. 4. Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 188–89; New York Times, December 19, 1977, pp. 33, 38; January 14, 1978, p. 20; New York Daily News, January 8, 1978, p. 5; New York Post, January 5, 1978, p. 3; January 11, p. 7, January 12, p. 2. 5. New York Times, January 22, 1978, p. E5; New York Post, January 11, 1978, p. 11; January 17, p. 33; New York Daily News, January 16, 1978, pp. 2, 28; Washington Post, November 8, 1980; “Carter Burden, Progressive Patrician, 54, Dies, New York Times, January 24, 1996; Charles Kidd, Debrett Goes to Hollywood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), passim.; www.observer.com/node/46315#; www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/society_ books_worm_NF1FdGWD8MWMJacMHZmPAN. 6. New York Daily News, January 16, 1978, p. 2; New York Magazine, June 20, 1977, nymag.com/news/politics/49892/. 7. New York Daily News, January 16, 1978, pp. 2, 28; January 17, pp. 5, 31; New York Post, January 16, 1978, pp. 2, 12; January 17, p. 3; January 18, p. 24. 8. Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 188–89; New York Post, January 16, 1978, pp. 2, 12; January 17, pp. 3, 33, 64. 9. New York Post, January 17, 1978, pp. 3, 33, 64; New York Daily News, January 17, 1978, p. 5.

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10. New York Daily News, January 17, 1978, p. 5; New York Post, January 16, 1978, pp. 2, 12; January 17, pp. 3, 33, 64; January 18, p. 24. 11. New York Daily News, January 19, 1978, p. 5; New York Post, January 18, 1978, p. 24; January 19, pp. 3, 25; Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 188–89. 12. New York Post, January 21, 1978, p. 5; New York Daily News, January 22, 1978, p. 5. 13. New York Post, January 21, 1978, p. 5; New York Daily News, January 20, 1978, p. 8; January 21, p. 7. 14. New York Daily News, January 24, 1978, p. 8; New York Post, January 23, 1978, p. 14; January 24, p. 31. 15. Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 188–89; New York Times, January 14, 1978, p. 20; January 22, p. E5; January 29, p. E5; New York Daily News, January 20, 1978, p. 8; January 21, p. 7; January 22, p. 8; January 23, p. 8; January 24, p. 8; January 25, pp. 1, 2; New York Post, January 24, 1978, p. 31; January 25, p. 18. 16. “S. William Green,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005); New York Times, January 22, 1978, p. E5; January 29, p. E5; February 1, p. A19; February 8, p. A18; New York Daily News, January 8, 1978, p. 5; January 26, p. 7; January 31, p. 15; February 1, p. 17; February 9, p. 34; New York Post, January 25, 1978, p. 18; February 15, pp. 2, 29. 17. New York Times, January 14, 1978, p. 20; February 8, p. A18. 18. New York Daily News, February 9, 1978, p. 34; New York Post, February 13, 1978, p. 2. 19. New York Times, February 16, 1978, p. B10; New York Post, February 13, 1978, p. 2; February 16, p. 2. 20. New York Post, January 31, 1978, p. 15; Washington Post, April 1, 1978; September 25, 1980; Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 188–89. 21. New York Post, January 24, 1978, p. 5; New York Daily News, February 12, 1978, p. 4. 22. Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 188–89; New York Post, January 5, 1978, p. 29; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979), p. 71. 23. New York Post, February 13, 1978, p. 11; February 15, pp. 2, 12. 24. New York Daily News, February 3, 1978, pp. 3, 50; February 7, p. 1; February 8, p. 1; February 9, p. 1; February 16, pp. 4, 45; New York Post, January 20, 1978, p. 1; January 27, p. 1. 25. Interview with Harold Holzer, September 21, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 189–89. 26. New York Daily News, February 15, 1978, pp. 1–3; February 16, pp. 1, 5; Washington Post, February 21, 1978; New York Post, February 15, 1978, pp. 1–3, 12. 27. New York Daily News, February 15, 1978, pp. 1–3; February 16, pp. 1, 5; New York Post, February 15, 1978, p. 3.

Chapter Four

No Good, No Good At All

The day after Abzug lost to Bill Green in the February 1978 special Congressional election, another star of a slightly earlier era had a surprising comeuppance too. The boxer Muhammad Ali fought and lost to a lightly regarded upstart named Leon Spinks. Ali’s fans were as shocked by that loss as Abzug’s supporters had been the night before. In New York, Abzug and Ali were dubbed “the week’s two big losers.” 1 Muhammad Ali’s heyday was clearly in the past. The sports world’s pundits knew it. Nevertheless, he would attempt a comeback. Abzug’s many supporters were now wondering her political fate. Could she come back, or was it now too late? Abzug’s loss to Green prompted some papers to write retrospectives of her public career, very much as though it was now an appropriate time to delineate some sort of political obituary. The New York Times earnestly headlined: “Evening shadows grow on a political life.” 2 Abzug bristled adamantly that her political career was by no means over. “Nothing wipes me out,” she yelled to reporters. “I’m not wiped out; just let the press get that clear. No obituaries! I’m fifty-seven years old, alive and well and still kicking. . . . I’m going to be here a long time.” 3 Abzug’s display of spirit here certainly brought smiles to many of her supporters. Nevertheless an assumption emerged among both friends and opponents that after three consecutive high-profile election losses, no matter that each was painfully close and replete with legitimate “what ifs,” her future with respect to any sort of elected office was over. As the Times solemnly noted: “Still to be confronted [in reference to Abzug and her supporters] was her third electoral loss in a row and the idea that she had died politically.” Even her husband appeared to concede as much to the New York Post, “She loves politics. It’s her life,” he said. “She wants to do things for people. She’s not in this for the money. I guess now she’ll have to do it from 79

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the outside. . . . She’ll have to find a way to live and adapt. You can do plenty from the outside.” 4 If Abzug was going to be effective “from the outside” the question was from what political angles would or could she exert influence. In her understandably vituperative reactions to the Bill Green campaign, she criticized a lot more than Mr. Green and his sordid tactics. Among other things, she scolded reporters, earnestly asserting that if a male candidate was subjected to such smears as Green had flung at her, the press would have given the outrageousness much more coverage. (On the other hand, if they had detailed a lot of the ugly charges, she and others may have readily complained that the detailed coverage was giving “the dirt” much wider visibility than it deserved.) Abzug also complained that the emphases placed upon her having just lost runs for the Senate and for Mayor would not have received the same (and apparently to her) damaging repetitions were a male candidate in the same position. 5 A major and not too distant example spoke to the contrary, however, and it was hardly someone with whom Abzug cared to be compared—Richard Nixon. Nixon narrowly lost his Presidential bid in 1960. Two years later he came up short in a hotly contested race for Governor in California. When he subsequently began his comeback in a long run for the 1968 Presidential election, article after article about Nixon referred to his established and highly visible losing streak. Whether or not Abzug was then a trifle short on the facts, the visage of her complaining to and about the press here had added irony in that it struck some to be not at all unlike the very same Mr. Nixon of 1962, when he angrily held forth to the press after his loss in California. (“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”) One waggish New York reporter indeed asked Abzug at this very point: “Are you saying: ‘You won’t have Bella to kick around anymore.’?” To her it was Bill Green’s tactics that recalled her Nixon at his worst. So to be told that her behavior reminded people of Nixon cut her to the quick. To the reporter’s taunting question she fumed, “If people can kick, I’ll kick back.” 6 How proudly defiant or merely defensive that response came across was a judgment for each witness and reader. Given the context of her having lost several elections and being on the outs politically, any such debates over the characterization appeared academic. Abzug was understandably angry. Many may have felt sympathy, but the parallel with her longtime bête noire Nixon had some legitimacy. Each figure had often tried to forge a different persona to counter what they saw as a damaging image. In 1968 there was the so-called “New Nixon,” and in 1976–1977 New Yorkers were told of the “New Bella.” When the “new” images did not always yield success, there was a tendency to blame the media for not underscoring the desired new image and emphasizing the “old” to be still very much in evidence. Each would then get angry at the press,

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with the anger paradoxically highlighting the very old image each mistakenly felt he or she had eclipsed. While the losing Nixon simply vented at the press, Abzug was able to couch many of her complaints by pointing to the issue of gender. “A male dominated press,” she admonished, “has not allowed a fair reporting of women like myself.” 7 It appeared, indeed, that the rhetoric of the women’s movement would once again be the political base to which she would turn, not just consciously but instinctively. By 1978, analyses of peoples’ successes and failures via the modality of gender had become a virtual mantra in many institutional circles, including electoral politics. Whether or not there was anything to the notion that the press treated Abzug differently, the charges had a tautological dimension. Save some idiotic reporters openly admitting, “yes, we did it because the candidate was black, female, Jewish, . . .” how could such an assertion ever be conclusively proven or disproved? To the true believer, of course, any denials would only confirm the accusation. Any who denied would also be readily charged with some form of sexism, in much the same way that those who had explicitly denied charges from Joe McCarthy found themselves suspected of being communists. To some the charges of gender bias smacked of someone lapsing into an excuse-refrain, a catchall banality that blamed everyone else and absolved the alleged victim of any responsibility for what happened. The debate over the legitimacy of the argument here could never be resolved. It was a matter of belief, or denial. For Abzug, such beliefs clearly lent a good excoriating vocabulary to use against elements of the media. Equally clearly, they resonated well within her feminist political base. To others, the perspective amounted to an already much overused and somewhat irritating line. At the end of 1977, Esquire Magazine had bitingly named Abzug among the people it considered “America’s most boring dinner partners,” and in an intentionally pointed defense of their so-naming her, Esquire noted with the jab: “being a woman is no excuse.” In one respect, this charge was actually unfair, as Abzug could always be good lively company, especially over dinner, but the bored reactions to her fatiguingly incessant, well-rehearsed feminist rants were growing more common. “Bella’s basic problem,” sniffed one New York columnist after her loss to Bill Green, was that “she was becoming Old Hat.” Her hard-bitten Bronx manners had steamrollered many gentler points of opposition, but New York’s equally street-gritty journalists would not be intimidated, and they would make their accusations too. 8 The writer who accused Abzug of now being “Old Hat” was the irascible Jimmy Breslin. He and Abzug had often been at odds, and this hardly helped. Several years later Breslin even fumed: “I’m mad at her. I’ll never talk to her again. I don’t like her because she says bad things about me. She said I was anti-Semitic. I’d like to shoot her.” 9 Breslin’s outlook was of no importance to Abzug, but the sense of her repetitive harping about gender matters could

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have been a signal for a need to maintain a broader political base. She could lose a Breslin and not give it a moment’s thought (indeed, she was happy), but she could not afford to lose blocks of voters and expect to go any further in electoral politics. When Abzug had been in Congress and when she ran for larger offices, she offset perceptions of political narrowness with the full, impressive command she showed over a wide breadth of issues. At this juncture in her political life, an important question was whether she could find venues through which she could display her considerable intellectual capacities, or whether she would permit the narrower genres of feminism to encase her. In the immediate aftermath of the painful loss to Bill Green, the shibboleths of feminism may have been a comfort. In the context of such debates over the legitimacy of notions of gender victimization, one of Abzug’s closest allies, Gloria Steinem, offered a perspective about Abzug’s defeat that may have revealed the degree to which at least some feminists’ links to political realities had grown more than a trifle strained and self-absorbed. In reaction to Abzug’s shocking loss to Green, Steinem sternly intoned: “We can no longer depend on the electoral system. The street is the only place for our movement.” The idea that the electoral process may reveal to a political camp some flaws in a chosen candidate’s political style or ideology did not appear to make any sort of impact on Steinem. She was a true believer, and if the electoral process did not yield what she wanted, then the process, not the ideology or the person was to be questioned. To supporters such utter devotion may have been ennobling. To detractors it may have humorously smacked of closed-mindedness and wealth-driven self-entitlement. In either case, the notion that it now made sense for feminists like Steinem and Abzug to take to the streets suggested a certain surrealism. Some may have wondered whether the “street” Steinem had in mind here was Rodeo Drive, Fifth Avenue, or, if the season was right, the main beach drive at the Hamptons. Otherwise, the notion that such a movement as American feminism of the late 1970s could become some sort of “into the streets” proletariat insurgency was at least amusing as well as pathetic. The idea of taking to the streets, à la St. Petersburg 1917, was another mantra through which wealthy, insulated feminist leaders could entertain themselves. What genuinely revolutionary elements had ever existed within the mainstream of the American women’s movement had never held much influence and had usually been given little credence by such people in leadership positions as Eleanor Smeal, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, or Bella Abzug. Lobbying legislators, working to get people elected, encouraging voter participation, using the power of numbers in a democracy—these were always Abzug’s tactics, and they had often been effective. How Abzug may have felt, at this juncture in her career, about the idea of departing radically from the strategy of women seeking elected office and taking to the streets, she never said. It was far-fetched to say the

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least, not unlike self-styled radicals of the Vietnam and Civil Rights era hoping for some sort of Russian Revolution–type transformation coming to America in 1968. In that era, such fantasizing was part of the “clownish” behavior Richard Hofstadter had seen characterizing what he dubbed “an age of rubbish.” 10 Not even a decade later, it was no less ridiculous. The pipe dreams of the late 1960s were not that distant a memory in 1978, and all through the 1970s such radical posturings were always a hovering presence among various elements of the purportedly liberal side of the political aisle, especially when any such group gathered among themselves and some peoples’ egos (and more than occasional uses of drugs and alcohol) ran amok. In the liberal circles of the era, it was simply “cool” to posture oneself a radical, and mouthing platitudes about going to the streets highlighted such a pose. J. Edgar Hoover and his confreres may have feared a few such people, especially those in the Weather Underground, but few serious analysts ever believed, then or in hindsight, that street-level movements could ever amass much significant political capital in late twentieth-century America, much less to the point of bringing about revolutionary change through insurgency, less yet if their political base was strictly feminist. Among feminists such ideas of insurgency certainly felt good, however, and it would have been extremely ill mannered for any feminist to criticize such a stance as Gloria Steinem’s, although if Emma Goldman had been alive she would never have been so chastened by any established notions of good manners, especially among wealthy white women. Now that she was not running for office, Bella Abzug felt no impetus to seek good relations with anyone other than her closest allies. When an ally like Gloria Steinem then made such a precious remark as taking to the streets, Abzug made no public comment of disagreement. After three electoral losses, many of the traditionally liberal political constituencies from whom she had regularly sought support appeared to have turned away from her. Meanwhile, ties to feminism remained solid as ever. When running for the Congress, for Mayor, or for the Senate, Abzug had always taken pains to show how she certainly represented much more than just feminist causes, and she clearly possessed the political and intellectual substance to make convincing cases. Feminism was her base and her area of greatest political comfort, however, and after another painful loss, any politician would turn to a comfort zone, and that is what Abzug chose to do. “She believes the women’s movement is the only viable movement current in the country,” noted her husband. 11 Other contemporaneous concerns of the day’s political left among environmentalists, labor activists, disarmament advocates, and various racial and ethnic groups may have objected to the exclusivity that Martin Abzug claimed his spouse held about feminism’s unique viability. The point, however, was she had a huge emotional and political investment in the women’s movement, and every significant woman

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involved in the movement would affirm the huge debt that all feminists owed Bella Abzug. Ties bound in both directions, and amidst that mutual dependency lay sets of assumptions that could never be questioned from within. To feminists in 1978, feminism was not of the political left, it was the political left. And Bella Abzug was not only at its epicenter, she was its epicenter. When she was in Congress, Abzug would often react to any failure to get her own way by calling uncooperative colleagues things like “cowards” and “hypocrites.” This, noted the New York Times, had “delighted supporters and outraged detractors, and sometimes the other way around.” 12 When angry, she often seemed on the edge of making herself more important than the issues with which she was dealing. Her aggressive ways had always made her the darling of all feminists. Now she may have been putting herself in position of being politically little else but that. It was certainly a comfort zone, but it could be an overly confining tender prison. Feminists on the inside could gain psychic rewards, but within more broadly liberal Democratic circles the exclusivity could prove divisive, and that would likely help only the political right. Political obituaries were being penned because of Abzug’s consecutive losses. She did not care for such views one bit, believing she would someday regain elected office. As she turned more exclusively toward her feminist base, any thoughts to the effect that here she was actually helping fulfill the view that she no longer had viable electoral prospects was also something she would not care to hear. Meanwhile, feminist organizations were generating plenty of issues to fill the calendar of any political activist. Feminism was also providing a different set of answers in regard to Abzug’s electoral failures. As historical interpretations, the answers may have had the same tenability as Steinem’s “radical” solution about women abandoning electoral procedures and taking to the streets. Among some feminists, nonetheless, the perspective of gender was already generating an in-house sense of Abzug’s political history that no one would dare contest from within. In January of 1977, for example, Alice Henry of the feminist publication Off Our Backs wrote, as presumed fact, an account of Abzug’s loss to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1976 Senate race: She lost the Democratic primary to Daniel Moynihan . . . due to the concerted efforts of male ‘liberals’ such as Paul O’Dwyer, who was supported by the party machine, and Ramsey Clark, [the] white knight of lefty liberals. Clark refused to drop out of the race and support Bella even though his campaign was folding. Comments of Democrats indicated that they thought that Bella would not be as likely to defeat James Buckley, the arch-conservative incumbent. The race was billed as a close one although Moynihan subsequently won by a wide margin; Bella would have won too. 13

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There were numerous problems with these views. Any notion that O’Dwyer “was [being] supported by the party machine” was hardly accurate. O’Dwyer had the support of some of the old party regulars in New York City, where he was President of the City Council, but he had little to no “party machine” support elsewhere in the state. What Alice Henry meant by referring to Ramsey Clark as a “white knight,” and what significance it carried, she never clarified. Nonetheless, it was a useful image to arouse the gender hostility she sought through such empty labeling. It was true that many New York Democrats were worried that Abzug would run less well against Buckley than would other party contenders like Moynihan. Indeed, that was probably an accurate judgment. Still, like Moynihan, Abzug would have likely defeated Buckley in 1976. What was absolutely true, and determinative about the 1976 race were matters that Henry completely ignored: Moynihan had been able, without any “concerted efforts of [other] male liberals,” to cast Abzug as insufficiently supportive of Israel. This had had a big impact upon Jewish voters, as well as angering Abzug to no end, all to the destruction of the cultivated image of a “New Bella.” Abzug had then made the gravest of errors late in the campaign when she angrily declared that she would not support Moynihan if he won the primary. Among other things, that blunder helped cost her the critical editorial support of the New York Times. Such fallout from Abzug’s ill-considered declaration also motivated such lesser candidates as Clark and O’Dwyer not to fold their campaigns but to hold onto hopes for a last-minute surge of liberal support, as many were moving away from Abzug at the point of her angry declaration of non-support of Moynihan. Such hopes proved not materialize for either Clark or O’Dwyer, but there was never any evidence of any sort of conspiracy or “concerted effort” afoot among male candidates to defeat Abzug then or at any point in the campaign. Indeed, after Moynihan won the nomination, O’Dwyer made explicit efforts to push Abzug’s candidacy against Moynihan, as he strongly urged her to run as a third party candidate via the state’s Liberal Party. If O’Dwyer had been in any type of concert with Moynihan, he would have obviously never pushed such an idea after the primary, unless, of course, the believers in conspiracy wanted to argue that O’Dwyer and his cabal were so thorough in their conspiring that they pushed the idea of Abzug running as a Liberal in order to muddy the resulting historical record that would otherwise permit a clearer charge of “concerted effort.” Such a view would be a stretch even among those disposed to believe in gender-based conspiracies. While such views were factually off base, they were becoming au courant among feminists. Of critical importance was that when any views of this sort were expressed within the feminist fold, it would have at least been seen as bad manners for anyone to take issue. Any questioning could have also invited charges of some form of uncooperative non-conformity or even of sexism. It was the same pall under which Joe McCarthy’s own factually

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flawed crusades had held back much rational thinking and criticism as to his accuracy and legitimacy. W. B. Yates famous words applied in both instances: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Beliefs in conspiracy, be they notions of a communist conspiracy or a male-dominated press being unfair to a female candidate, appeared to answer all the questions. They allowed the self-proclaimed victims to cast their opposition to be in total control of events. Any such charges of conspiracy and persecution were not to be disputed. Denials only confirmed them. In such well-heeled autocephalous circles such thinking easily festers, and it was in such a safe, but perhaps self-suffocating, realm that Abzug found repose after each of her political losses. From that base she had twice gathered herself and attempted comebacks. Now people wondered if she could do it again. Given the ways that Bill Green had lesbian-bashed his way to victory, it was impossible for Abzug and her supporters not to see anti-feminism all about them. From there it was hard for some not to ascribe some sort of conspiracy or hegemony of anti-feminist sensibilities at work, and then even harder for others within any feminist group to dispute any such thinking, however flawed it may have been. Other views and analyses about Abzug’s loss were unwelcome as well. Here, as with the Senate and Mayoral campaign failures, there was always keen resentment whenever anyone raised the issue of Abzug’s personality. Whenever it arose, feminists were quick to eschew it. Bill Green’s abusive homophobic tactics were a huge source of anger, so in the immediate aftermath of the election any blame placed on Abzug was unthinkable. It amounted to blaming the victim of an attack. In regard to the loss to Green, nonetheless, various non-feminist reporters who conjectured explanations about the outcome did turn to the issue of personality. Conservative pundits simply gloated over it, of course, but the New York Times wrote of “personality” as the “key factor” in Abzug’s defeat. Justifying their view, they wrote of the fact that another woman, New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, had to that point been quite successful in the same political arena as Abzug. She and Abzug were close on all the issues, but Bellamy’s tonality and personality were altogether different. Additionally, in the week that Abzug lost to Green, the Times noted Patricia Orelinda Nieto-Ortiz earned an appointment from Mayor Koch to head New York City’s Human Rights Commission. A clear implication here was that a new generation of women and men were emerging, active and committed to principles of human rights, concerned about the disadvantaged, yet not laden with the personality issues and other baggage of such established, now older figures as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. 14 The cause of women gaining political visibility and authority was bigger than any individual. Repeatedly, analysts of Abzug’s losses raised the word “abrasiveness,” with the clear point being that, independent of any such ideological stances

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as feminism, Abzug’s nature could be depended upon to put off a critically sufficient number of voters each time she ran. “The raucous voice of invective and abuse does not appeal to the majority of our electorate,” wrote one voter. Of course, to Abzug’s supporters the raising of such ideas as “abrasiveness” was itself unacceptably abrasive. “It is deplorable,” wrote another New Yorker, “that a stupid prejudice, based on decibels rather than deeds, should have led to the defeat” of Bella Abzug. Of course, the latter writer implicitly admitted that the “decibels” were indeed there for all to endure. 15 There would be no resolutions in such arguments. One person’s delight would always be another’s irritation. When it came to the subject of Bella Abzug, there were only sharply drawn opinions; few were ever neutral. For years many feminists had been asserting that a man with such a personality as Abzug’s would not have it so held against him. As with other such counterfactual arguments, proof one way or the other was problematic. Even accepting the idea that Abzug’s tonality was hurtful, many feminists had argued that Abzug’s personality was necessary given the doors that had so blocked women from political successes. “She did not break down the doors, she broke them off at the hinges” was a refrain that always engendered many smiles. Some regarded this outlook not as mere viewpoint but as fact, and with a premise that again invited charges of sexism upon anyone who disputed it. The fact was, however, that successful women before and during Abzug’s time like Frances Perkins, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick, and Nancy Kassebaum had not needed a “Bella” personality to achieve what they did. At the beginning of Abzug’s run for the Senate, a biography of Frances Perkins came out that made explicit her opposition to politics via the force of personality (the biography also noted Perkins’s opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment). Making use of these facts, one applauding conservative book reviewer then noted, with an obvious eye on contemporaneous New York politics, that “It is not likely that this quiet, private woman would be found marching shoulder to shoulder, if she were alive today, with Gloria Steinem or Bella Abzug.” 16 What Frances Perkins would have done had she been alive in 1978 was, of course, a matter of conjecture, but the fact was that some found comfort in the idea that examples of excellence and achievement lay among women in politics which ran counter to the ways of Bella Abzug. In some liberal circles, the idea that Abzug’s personality was a necessary component in her achievements could be and was being disputed, and various people were now willing to raise the point, or at least raise arguments to the effect that other politically effective women did not share Abzug’s traits or that Abzug’s personality had political drawbacks as well as benefits. Given that each of the three consecutive electoral losses had been so painfully close, there were also counter-views that personality was not the issue, as Abzug could have won in each instance but for a few freakishly peripheral

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factors like electrical failures, snowstorms, and Elvis Presley’s death, as well as the fact that had a run-off system, as used in the Mayoral primary, been the rule in the 1976 Senate campaign, she would have won there too. Still, the issue of abrasiveness was present, and many, often predisposed, recognized its legitimacy. Likely, Abzug could not change, and, as likely, some of her effectiveness, not just with feminists’ concerns but in the context of her own political and legal work, stemmed from factors of personality, along with her hard work and brilliance. No matter how one wanted to interpret it, the personality issue was present, but as long as Abzug remained politically encamped within a feminist context there would be absolutely no impetus to address it, and every reason to maintain and even celebrate it. Was this an elevating liberation or a suffusing self-encirclement? “She’s played a great role in [the women’s movement] from the beginning,” noted Martin, “and she isn’t about to quiet down; it’s not her nature. And why the hell should she?” Quoting Mr. Abzug’s rhetorical question, Sidney Zion of the New York Post answered sardonically, “Maybe to win an election.” 17 That very year in New York State politics, controversies re-erupted over the often debated West Side Highway in Manhattan. The political controversy arose in the summer of 1978 because Governor Hugh Carey, who favored construction, had none other than his own Lieutenant Governor, Mary Anne Krupsak standing in conspicuous opposition. (Mayor Koch stood with Governor Carey.) When she was a member of Congress, Bella Abzug had been a major force of opposition to the “West Way.” Trying to score political points, Governor Carey chided Krupsak for “aligning herself very closely to former Congresswoman Bella Abzug.” Abzug and her political style and personality had already become that much of a touchstone. Krupsak was seeking to unseat Carey, challenging him that summer in the Democratic Gubernatorial primary. Because of the highway issue as well as the principle of gender solidarity, Abzug wanted to help Krupsak. The Lieutenant Governor reacted, however, by explicitly de-emphasizing Abzug’s role in the campaign. Abzug was incensed. This may have revealed a bit of uncontrolled ego. It definitely revealed how one younger woman in a high political office regarded the legacy of Bella Abzug. Krupsak was not rejecting any form of feminism, she was just avoiding what she saw as a politically unhelpful image. Whether Krupsak was right or wrong in her judgment about Bella Abzug, she lost her primary bid against Carey. 18 When various pundits speculated about what Abzug would now do, the feminist camp was not only a safe zone, it not only “spun” any pertinent history in a pleasing way, it also provided numerous issues and fora for activities. After the election, Abzug took on many speaking engagements and appearances on behalf of the ongoing battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, specifically for the extension of its deadline. 19 As before, gay and

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lesbian issues also occupied much of her time. In November of 1978 she spoke before a committee of the New York City Council that was deliberating a bill that sought to outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in housing, employment, and public accommodations. Few communities had such laws at this point, not even New York, and Abzug always had the courage to speak out. “Can you imagine,” she admonished, “a landlord refusing to rent an apartment to Gertrude Stein? ‘Or the Board of Education denying a teaching job to Socrates or Plato?” As usual, her words were powerful, and to some, they were shocking. The committee would vote the bill down six to three. In the context of her advocacy here, some speculated about Abzug running for City Council. Few doubted she could win. Given her ambitions, however, it was much too small a bier. 20 Within Abzug’s private life, troubles also arose at this point. In the summer of 1978, Martin Abzug suffered a heart attack, and a series of coronary problems ensued. She spent much time taking care of him. She could have run for the Democratic Congressional nomination to oppose Republican Bill Green in the November election. Perhaps she dearly wanted to, but such personal issues as her husband’s health took up much of her time. She may have also felt it was too soon to reenter electoral politics anyway. Abzug stayed out of the race, and Green won reelection to Congress. (His Democratic opponent was Carter Burden. 21) Both in the context of the ongoing fight for the ERA and in the general political agenda of mainstream American feminism, the issue/theme that hovered over the year for Abzug concerned the ongoing business from the Houston convention. President Carter had authorized the convention, and from those proceedings an official report was to emanate. With an edge of sardonic laughter, feminist writer Janis Kelly, who had attended the Houston convention, had referred to this report, given the flurry of convention site fees, hotel and airline bills, meals, etc., as “a very expensive memo.” 22 While some could dismiss such a terse summary as a bit cynical, there was something to it. A bit of self-indulgence and self-myth-making lay imbedded in the processes of an allegedly major convention having significance simply because certain people said it did. Virtually all the contents of the upcoming “memo” had also been written in advance of the convention and involved issues that people in Washington and elsewhere had been discussing for years. Euphemisms had abounded among the Houston enthusiasts: It was “a smashing success,” proclaimed Eleanor Smeal; “Houston transformed us all,” heralded Lindsy van Gelder. Liz Carpenter sternly intoned that, as a result of the Houston meeting, “Every political figure [now] has to make a decision whether he [or she?] is going to be for us or against us.” 23 How had that been any less the case before Houston, or how had the Houston meeting magically changed so much of the political landscape was never explained. One broader lesson from Houston could have been, in view of the counter-

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convention of Phyllis Schlafly and her allies, that such women as Smeal, Gelder, Carpenter, and Abzug needed to recognize that, in any claims of representing all women, they needed to tread softly and try to be more inclusive. They chose to draw the opposite lessons—they were right, and the “Spirit of Houston” somehow proved that they should now go forth with complete moral certainty. For any Democrat to take exception to such a righteous focus was to invite attack via ridicule and McCarthyism. Beyond any debatable notions of rhetorical tactics and ideological balance, the question remained as to what actual legislative contents arose from all the Houston activity. What was not just expensive self-gratification but which now involved actual substance of political and not of mere socialpsychological form? The answer would be one which, in effect, merely put these legitimate questions off to another day—the convention would yield a report. Hence it followed: what then would the report do? For the time being, it was in the political interests both of the Houston convention’s chief leaders and President Carter’s administration to give credence to all this activity. Among Democrats in 1976, Carter had not been the candidate of mainstream liberalism. He felt a need to placate political elements within the traditionally “liberal” wings of the party, and funding a convention like Houston was one of many ways to do so. It was an easy bit of patronage. With the convention over in late November, and with Abzug and the other convention leaders then compiling their report, Carter’s White House added to the political posturing at work. They did not summarily receive the convention report in the mail. On March 22, 1978, they staged an elaborate presentation ceremony in the White House East Room. The event, the fanfare, the reception, and the surrounding congratulations and conversations were all pleasant, but they also added an insistence to the question of what will then come of the report’s recommendations. The crucial question remained: what would the administration take before Congress, and what, if anything, would pass into actual law? Conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, both at the time of the Houston convention and thereafter, had been arguing that the resolutions of the convention and the contents of the official convention report did not come forth through open, democratic processes, nor did they represent the real interests of most American women. The choice of the Carter administration to heed the assertions of one group versus another was then a political one, and it was certainly an easy one to take. Overwhelmingly, the conservatives voted Republican. Carter and his administration naturally sided with the leaders of the convention they had fully sponsored in the first place. Moreover, as a Democrat not fully accepted as part of the party’s left wing, Carter and his advisors had no qualms about making friendly gestures to such groups as feminists, given the alternative political forces at work at that moment. Once such simple political decisions were made, the question of what would then hap-

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pen to the proposals in Congress raised the possibility of leaving all the interested feminists in a position of having nothing to do but trust the good intentions of the White House. Could they simply accept this—trust the President to do his best, and go on to other matters? It seemed an uncomfortable situation. For people like Abzug who always wanted to be in the political mix, the notion of going to a White House party, handing over a report, and then simply waiting for Presidential and Congressional outcomes blunted desires, both pragmatic and ego-driven, to feel needed and to be part of the process. People like Abzug and Gloria Steinem each appeared to hold a sense that without them, the goals of feminism could not be reached. They strenuously advocated for a presence. One of Carter’s advisors, Margaret “Midge” Costanza affirmed the existence of such pressures. After the presentation of the Houston report, she affirmed, “the next battle was, would Carter name a commission for women, or would he just say, ‘Give me the report. Let’s work with Congress and see what we can do.’” Carter could have done the latter. There had been a convention, now a report. What more was needed? The creation of a Presidential commission was not like the creation of the cabinet post for women for which Abzug had wanted the Houston convention to call. The latter could fall into Republican hands, the very thing that had led feminists like Eleanor Smeal to vote against the “Department of Women” proposal. With a special commission, on the other hand, there was no doubt that no one like Phyllis Schlafly would be appointed. The Democrats would be in total control. As there would be no naming of the “wrong kind” of women, Bella Abzug and all her colleagues wanted a Presidential commission. Abzug pressured Costanza about this a great deal. 24 While Carter could have said “no” to the idea of a commission, he had to think of his relations with the traditionally liberal wing of his party. As long as there is no great political fallout over costs, a politician can ease anxieties and placate constituencies by turning to the creation of more processes, if only to put off a point of actual political reckoning. At some juncture, the executive branch and its many commissions, does have to turn to Congress if it desires legislation to be enacted. If it is in the interests of all inside parties to encumber themselves with more such processes as those involving appointed commissions, then, as long as not too much bad publicity ensues over matters like finance, more bureaucratization readily occurs. Republicans had gotten away with such processes for years, especially in the area of national defense, often at scandalously high costs to the taxpayers. Rather than just accept the report, with or without a ceremony, and move the contents of the report onto purely legislative levels, President Carter elected to generate more bureaucracy. He would issue Executive Order 12057, enabling the appointment of a commission to advise on the implementation of the resolutions in the report that emanated from the Houston

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convention. Given her work in Houston and her exalted standing among feminists, Bella Abzug was an obvious choice to head the commission. First Lady Rosalynn Carter counseled strongly against the appointment of Abzug. But three key advisors in the Carter inner circle, Anne Wexler, Stuart Eizenstat, and press secretary Jody Powell, went to Mrs. Carter and to the President to urge that Abzug be appointed. Wexler pointed out Abzug’s leadership role at the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York when she headed off potentially disruptive feminist protests of several party platform positions. Shrugging, however clumsily, that “her presence and her name were not an unmixed blessing, politically,” Powell affirmed, “I kind of thought she deserved it.” President Carter would agree. 25 Abzug would actually be one of two co-chairs. The other would be Carmen Delgado Votaw, a civil rights activist from Puerto Rico, prominent in her work on behalf of the rights of Hispanic Americans. Brownie Ledbetter, an Abzug ally and a delegate at the Houston convention, presumed that President Carter did not want to appoint either a commission or two chairs. Inventing an ennobling sense of resistance to be overcome, Ledbetter claimed that “as a result of Houston, we got the committee formed.” Eager to see a picture of opposition wherever possible, Ledbetter also claimed that Abzug only co-chaired the commission with Delgado Votaw because “they wouldn’t let Bella be chair alone.” Presumably, the ominous and imprecise “they” to which Ledbetter referred involved the President and his top staffers. In any case, it was not true. Abzug herself later stated that it was she who had suggested to the President that there be co-chairs. 26 Beyond the matter of chairs, the notion that the President had to be forced to create the commission also had no merit. Senses of cause and effect in the minds of some of the interested parties were loaded with unclear suppositions. To believe one has had to overcome resistance gives credence to assertions of oppression in the first place. This may be psychologically gratifying, as well as an important posture to maintain for purposes of constructed political imagery. Such self indulgences run the risk, however, of allowing those who are not really oppressed to ally themselves superficially with others who are, thus exploiting and obscuring much bona fide oppression and subverting the allocation of resources otherwise better devoted to issues of genuine need. Further, when vague notions about the “spirit” of a convention are cast as being responsible for the creation of a commission, the pragmatic question as to the point of a convention simply gets transferred into the question of what then is the point of the subsequent commission. The circularity and vagueness in the thinking here was not a mere academic problem. Political problems would also ensue. The members of the commission, including Abzug, would not be paid salaries, but they would have a staff and operating expenses paid by the government, with a budget of $300,000. 27 Then and since, people could ask

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whether such a commission was necessary. There was a servicing of the political faithful throughout the bureaucratic processes. The Houston convention’s delegations had been gerrymandered. The resolutions had been largely written in advance. The final report was presented with pomp and circumstance. The political pressures for such rewards came via an implicit threat that the interested political factions could turn away from the chief executive and toward some possible rival. Like any President, Jimmy Carter had political factions about him. He had won the party’s nomination for President casting himself as an outsider, and he ran a great deal of his campaign on that anti-Washington basis. The mainstreams of Democratic liberalism of the mid-1970s hardly regarded him as one of theirs. To that end, one of Carter’s hopes was that he could actually help some of the chief elements of Northeastern liberalism get beyond what, to him, appeared to be their geographic, psychological, and intellectual constrictions and reconnect with broader elements of the American public. Many of these elements had appeared to turn away from the Democrats in the 1968 election, even more so in 1972. The Republicans’ wounds from Nixon and Watergate did not completely obscure liberalism’s problems of haughty condescension. In that context, Carter’s original links to the mainstream feminism of Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug were no stronger than were those of many other elements of middle-America. He honestly hoped he could do something about it. The likelihood that Abzug, Steinem, and others may not have felt they needed such help only underscored the problem to be addressed for the sake of the Democrats’ future success. While Carter and his followers hoped to save splintering Democratic coalitions, many elements of traditional Northeastern Democratic liberalism did anything but share any sense of a need to be rescued from anything. Ever since the causes of Civil Rights and Vietnam, they believed themselves to have represented the true cutting edge of righteous change. The fact that Nixon and the Republicans had won in 1968 and 1972 appeared to have had little to no chastening impact. They felt Bobby Kennedy would have won had he lived, and Eugene McCarthy lost the Democratic nomination because of unreformed state party practices that blunted the popular will. The middleAmerica “silent majority” that Nixon’s speech writers had apotheosized, was something late-1960s liberals never regarded with much seriousness. Nixon’s huge victory over McGovern came to be overshadowed in liberals’ minds by the disgraces of Watergate. After Watergate and Nixon’s fall, much of traditionalism American liberalism ended up feeling completely confirmed that the essentially flawed ways of their opposition had been proven. The subsequent rise of new forces on the political right in the 1970s, especially those that were tied to many traditional forms of religion, merely met with terse and arrogant sniffs and giggles. Nixon, Middle America, protestant evangelicalism—they all appeared manifestly inferior to the mainstream of

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Northeastern liberalism. The fact that Carter had been the Democrat most able to capitalize upon the anti-Washington insider, post-Watergate mood did not in any significant way sway traditional Democratic liberals from their entrenched righteousness, and Carter’s own unashamed religious zeal was another source of haughty humor among Eastern liberals and comedians of the day. To liberals, Carter was certainly better than Nixon and Ford, but they appeared to see him as another, albeit more palatable obstacle to be endured as the country’s best leaders and ideologies would soon fully reestablish themselves. Among traditionally liberal groups of the time, a decided level of factionalizing in the 1970s did nothing to prompt any serious efforts to recognize any dangers from the right and reforge any sorts of unity. Previously united civil rights activists now debated the fairness of affirmative action, the utility of school busing, and the legalities of cases like Bakke and Webber. Individual ethnic, racial, and gender groups now sometimes viewed one another as points of opposition. And a declining economy drove many groups and individuals into more narrow self-preserving outlooks. Each faction often saw itself in a righteous light and regarded most points of opposition not as entities with which to engage in compromise but only to resist. No sense of danger from the political right prompted any serious pressure for any reuniting: Religious zealots and pro-lifers were just wrong-headed, and Ronald Reagan was a mentally superficial right-wing (grade-B) actor who could simply not be taken seriously. The leadership of American feminism was one of many political groups in the Carter years to be imbued with such a sense of themselves as representing the absolute last word of liberalism to which the rest of the political world should look for guidance, both politically and morally. It was very much in this spirit that Abzug and her colleagues gathered when President Carter allowed them to form a commission to advise him with respect to the proposals of the Houston convention. They were there to advise him, and he purportedly needed their advice. The commission was then not something they felt fortunate to receive, they felt entitled to it. It was the President who was fortunate that they were willing to provide him with needed service. Some of the sense of superiority, like the euphemisms that came out of Houston, came forth in one commission member’s self-description. “There were over forty of us,” recalled Brownie Ledbetter, “an enormously diverse group.” 28 There was actually little diversity. They were largely white and wealthy. Ideologically, moreover, there was the complete opposite of diversity. They were virtually all Democrats and feminists, no pro-life advocates with respect to such an issue as abortion, or any other mix of views on any other major topics. To Republicans and other outsiders in Congress and elsewhere, the ideological narrowness here could have been challenged, but as it was a Presidential commission, the fact of it representing but the liberal

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Democratic side of the political ledger was something that could be accepted as a matter of political spoils. Troubles could come when the White House had to make policy calculations that encompassed a political mix beyond the ranks of Democratic Party regulars. Then the sense of the commission believing it represented all women and their sense that the President should be grateful to have their voices advising him could enliven some major gaps of sensibility. At that point, political opponents would do a lot more than chide and chortle. At the center of the ideologically narrow commission was, of course, Bella Abzug and her co-chair Carmen Delgado Votaw. The sense, and the fear, of the ideology and tone that Abzug represented raised political questions. It prompted conservative journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak to write a column full of woe, telling of how Abzug, within just twenty-four hours of being named to Carter’s commission, had co-sponsored and taken part in a “mass tribute” to the famous atomic bomb spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (Abzug always believed in their innocence, and favored a reopening of the case.) Other activists that Evans and Novak declared to have been present at the Rosenberg tribute included anti-Vietnam figure David Dellenger and national chairman of the Communist Party, Harry Winston. The red-baiting was clear, and, noting that the First Lady and the President’s daughter-in-law had expressed reservations about Abzug’s appointment, Evans and Novak held forth about how all such matters underscore how “the Carter team remains surprisingly naive and uninformed about national politics.” They cavalierly dismissed Women’s Commission, and Abzug’s appointment, as “unimportant.” They snorted similarly at such existing women’s issues as “the fading chances of the Equal Rights Amendment.” But the revealed political tactics surrounding the commission, they concluded, did “affect many other issues as President Carter seeks his political recovery.” It was all rather vague speculation. Further, it came to light that Abzug was actually not present at the Union Square rally for the Rosenbergs, although the allegation of her co-sponsorship was true. Evans and Novak later admitted their error. They did not admit to any elements of McCarthyism, however, and they maintained their skepticism about the political wisdom of the Carter White House. 29 As the life of the Women’s Commission evolved, questions about that White House “wisdom” would continue to be in evidence. Under Abzug, the commission met at various times, using office space in the building of the Labor Department on Constitution Avenue. They subdivided with various committee assignments. Committees would sometimes meet over lunch in the State Department building. Abzug would sit with each of the committees, and she led the overall commission when it convened. One member, Sey Chassler, editor of the women’s magazine Redbook, noted Abzug being in complete command here. Reflecting, thankfully, on the fact

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that she “didn’t have an axe to grind with [Abzug],” Chassler recognized “that’s the way [Abzug] wanted it,” adding, “but it was typical of her,” wanting no dissent. Chassler grimly noted the underlying threat at hand when she sensed “you could really get hurt . . . if you were in a power struggle with her.” Back in her Peace Movement days, Abzug would have been among the first to speak out against such a dominating style from an executive like Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson. Here the level was much tinier, but the potentially brutal tactics of absolute command were unmistakable. Like her much-abused Congressional staff, Abzug commanded loyalty, out of respect, certainly, but also out of fear. In recognition of such a mixture in Abzug’s leadership, Chassler appeared to gulp in her acknowledgment: “she could be very, very persuasive. . . .” 30 Any notion that anyone else could ever be in command of the work of the commission was unthinkable. Within the commission, while the sense of Abzug’s command was completely clear, the actual guidelines for the commission’s operation within the executive branch were never clear. In January of 1979, when troubles between the White House and Abzug were at their worst, President Carter oddly remarked that the commission’s “functions have never been clearly expressed to me.” 31 It was a striking admission, as though it was ultimately someone else’s duty to define them. Carter certainly could and should have delegated the responsibility for such delineations and definitions, but it revealed how, from the outset, a certain vagueness of thought went into the whole enterprise of the commission. The motives were clearly political. Within its bureaucratic context, the commission marked a kind of detour with regard to the ways that the Houston Conference’s Report would or could ultimately take form as Congressional legislation. What to do, when to do it, in what order—these would all have to be Presidential decisions. Given the commission he had created, the presumed ideal here was that at some point he would meet with them for advice. Together they would work out ideas about selections, language, priorities, order, and timing. Commission members thus anticipated they would have such meetings, and with Abzug in charge, they prepared, getting their ideas about strategy fully clear. While the issues of the Women’s Commission were rattling around among a few Washington insiders, President Carter was embroiled in numerous other matters, of course. At the very time of the ceremony around the official report of the Houston Conference, Carter had been having discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that would ultimately lead to the Middle East peace accords between Israel and Egypt in September of 1978. Egypt’s President Sadat had made his famous trip to Jerusalem in the previous November, at about the time of the Houston conference, as it happened. Sadat’s diplomatic breakthrough started processes which Carter would develop, ultimately bringing the Egyptian and Israeli leaders together under the famous Camp David Accords. When advisor Midge Costanza

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came to Carter to discuss the idea of creating a Women’s Commission or Committee, the President pointed out that he had, that very day, been under great pressure dealing with the notoriously tough Prime Minister Begin. Relaying that she had been under a day of pressuring phone calls from Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, Costanza joked with the President, “All you had was Menachem Begin. I had Bella and Gloria.” (Reflecting the good humor of which the President was always capable, but also grasping the relative importance of the situations, Carter calmly responded: “I’ll trade you.”) 32 Abzug and Steinem did provide pressures, but for Carter the relative context was certainly obvious. In addition to the ticklish Middle Eastern peace issues, the President was also contending with relentless economic difficulties that involved an intractable combination of rising unemployment and inflation—“stagflation” as it was called. The possible solutions to unemployment could aggravate inflation; remedies for inflation could risk higher unemployment. There was no clear solution. Any vacillating middle ground would not only not solve economic matters, they could accentuate a growing and problematic image the President had about looking weak and indecisive. By the beginning of 1979, as the administration was approaching its halfway mark, the President’s staff was increasingly concerned about this image, and, with an eye on the election on 1980, they wanted to do something about it. 33 In regard to feminist issues, President Carter always supported the ERA. He had already put before Congress various legislative proposals that pertained to many other women’s issues as well. There was the call for an extension of the ERA, a Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act, a Pregnancy Disability Act, Civil Service Reform, and a Better Jobs and Income Act. 34 Each was in line with both the priorities of Bella Abzug and the expressions of the Houston Convention. In regard to broader economic issues, however, the Carter administration made the choice in late 1978 that inflation was the greater of the two “stagflation” evils. Accordingly, he delayed tax cuts and sought various cutbacks in many government social programs, as the dollars spent would otherwise add to the federal deficit and accentuate inflation. He postponed the idea of pursuing the idea of some sort of national health insurance. At the same time, however, in order to be able to push effectively in various foreign ventures, such as those for peace in the Middle East, Carter made the decision to reverse some of the cuts he had been making in defense appropriations and spending. To some, this did not make complete sense. For Abzug and her colleagues, the pivotal issues involved the cuts in social programs and their perceived impact upon women. Carter’s choices here, like any economic matters of such importance, generated a great deal of debate. He fully expected this. Among the traditionally liberal groups that spoke up in opposition to cuts in social programs were

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some African-American organizations, several labor unions, and the women’s commission. What Carter did not expect, or care for, was public criticism that emanated from any offices within the executive branch. Virtually all internal memos and discussions which debated issues were acceptable, more so indeed with President Carter than was the case with most other Presidents. But going public with criticism was not something any President could accept from offices within the executive branch. People could leave executive branch posts and publish anything they wanted. Many did, but as long as people stayed in the government, their outward cooperation was expected. With all that was on his mind in regard to foreign and economic matters, Carter then felt blindsided by several matters. On November 19, the Washington Post quoted Bella Abzug as she commented on the Carter administration’s decision to cut various social programs as part of its anti-inflation efforts. “We’re not going to be asked to make a special sacrifice for the patriotism of anti-inflation,” she scoffed. Regarding various social programs, she proclaimed, “We’re entitled, and we’re going to demand them. We’re going to have trouble, but we’re not going to sit while our daily existence is threatened.” 35 The sense of some unique and “special sacrifice” may have been dubious. It assumed women could be seen as a specific economic class, which was readily debatable. Even accepting that assumption, many poor groups were going to suffer as much or more than “women,” per se, especially as such a gender designation included many economically comfortable and wealthy people. The sense of “entitlement” was also questionable, for governments can and must make choices, with all the voters in a democracy ultimately deciding upon the legitimacy of their elected officials’ chosen acts and priorities. Eagerly, Abzug had often asserted that not even military expenditures could or should ever be considered as “entitlements,” so why then could anything else? Contractually based expenditures, like pensions, may be the only exceptions. Beyond any such problems of internal reasoning, the essential point was that Abzug was speaking publically while holding a White House appointment. That would prove problematic. Amidst their complaints, Abzug and the commission members held a sense of being isolated and ignored. This was heightened at the very point that the commission did secure an appointment with the President. Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan gave them fifteen minutes of time at the end of November. At a quick gathering on the day before Thanksgiving, the commission decided to refuse the Presidential meeting, claiming it would be merely a photo-op and asserting they needed more time for substantive discussions. Washington Post reporter, Judy Mann, sympathetic to the commission and its ideals, was nonetheless certain that the refusal was “designed to embarrass” the President. Evidence of animus here lay in the fact that when Carter advisor Sarah Weddington offered to meet with the commission for an ex-

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tended period of time prior to the appointment with the President, the commission wrote her back saying the membership was too busy. Weddington had recently replaced Midge Costanza at the White House, and Abzug and others on the commission did not like her as much. 36 Abzug was away on a personal matter when the Commission actually met and finalized the decision to cancel the Presidential appointment, although according to the Washington Post, both Abzug and Delgado signed the letter calling for a cancellation of the meeting. Abzug would later claim to Hamilton Jordan that she opposed cancellation of the meeting, but she held that the commission members “were unanimously insistent” about the inadequacy of the mere fifteen minutes the White House had allotted them. 37 Abzug was indeed away in late November, but she never claimed she was away when the commission rebuffed Sarah Weddington. The November cancellation letter underscored Abzug and others’ concerns about cuts in domestic spending and increases in the military. Their words were pointed: “We are . . . distressed at your proposal to waste $2 billion on so-called civil defense programs and . . . to increase the military budget. . . .” One member of the commission, Brownie Ledbetter, held that Abzug was not pleased about the cancellation of the meeting with the President. She claimed Abzug shouted at her over the phone: “How could you let this happen, for God’s sake? He is the President of the United States!” 38 Whether or not Ledbetter’s memory distorted Abzug’s level of non-involvement in the cancellation, Abzug had to have grasped that problems were brewing. Usually shrewd in her political instincts, Abzug knew a strategic error when she saw one, if only after the fact. The question was what kind of price may be exacted. It did not make sense to cancel either the meeting with the President, or the offer of a meeting from Sarah Weddington. A meeting with a Presidential advisor could not hurt, and there was nothing to be gained and much to be lost in rejecting her. It is possible that Abzug bristled at the prospect of her in-charge ways being confronted were she and the commission in the same room with Weddington. Taken alone, nonetheless, the rebuff of Weddington would have had less significance were it not for the connected cancellation of the meeting with the President. There, the commission could have easily gone to the meeting, done the photo-ops, and in five seconds conveyed to the President that they felt the fifteen minute slot was insufficient and that another meeting needed to be scheduled in which they could discuss issues more fully and systematically. The President could have easily acknowledged that a subsequent meeting should be scheduled. It would have inconceivable for him to have said anything to the effect of: “No, fifteen minutes is all you deserve.” The more aggressive cancellation of the meeting may have gratified the egos of some of the commission members, but that should never have been a priority placed above the goal of serving the needs of the eco-

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nomically impoverished women of the nation, a constituency about whom the members always postured deep concerns. By taking an openly antagonistic stance to the President, the members of the commission appeared to be focusing upon themselves, and they were inflating the sense of the power they felt they wielded as an executive branch entity. Even if they could create divisions in the administration, the only beneficiary would likely be Republican opposition. Members of the commission were beginning to head down this path, and with the beginnings of the 1980 campaign just months away, this was by no means a distant issue. The White House staff scheduled a longer meeting between the commission and the President for January 12, 1979. Just prior to the meeting, the Women’s Commission issued a press release, where they presumed to comment further on how military spending and cuts in various social programs would affect women. Eleanor Smeal claimed that Abzug was away tending to her ill husband at the time of this critical press release, but the Carter staff felt certain that Abzug was in command of the commission and knew the contents of the press release. 39 Even presuming Smeal’s implication, the White House could obviously hold that if Abzug claimed the release was beyond her control, then she was not running the commission with any effectiveness, and no one ever accused Abzug of not being in effective control of any such commission on which she was serving, let alone co-chairing. In the areas where the commission criticized the President’s military spending, furthermore, they made reference to problems of “military extravagance” and called for a committee to investigate this. Such a theme of military waste was hardly an original insight. As far as Abzug was concerned, the military was always full of waste. It was a theme she had regularly emphasized since her days in the Peace Movement. Whether she was right or wrong here, the assertion reinforced the implausibility of the notion that she had nothing to do with any of the contents of the press release. She may have been away on the day it came out, but it could not have been conceived, fully written, and printed in the short time that she was away when the remaining members of the commission released it. She knew the contents; her November statement to the Washington Post echoed many of the same sentiments. Although the guidelines of the commission were always vague, there was certainly nothing in its charge that even hinted at the idea that the members were in any way encouraged to use the commission as a forum through which they could publically second-guess the President regarding economic and military matters. With respect to the notion that they were somehow uniquely qualified to raise the matter of military spending or of how women were affected by particular budget restrictions, there were any number of rejoinders. Other people, including the President, could think in such terms just as cogently as they. Further, while women were certainly affected, so was every person in the country, including all others claiming to represent a

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designated group of people, especially some racially, ethnically, geographically, and age-defined groups that were generally as or more disadvantaged than the mainstream of American feminists. It was certainly presumptuous to think that in issuing a press release, the commission members were providing the American public or the President with some insights that they had never before considered. In addition to the claims that military spending should not be increased, Abzug and the commission made the argument that more women than men lived at or below the poverty line. This, they felt, gave them the legitimate basis to comment. Were they, then, implying that the issue would not be important if the burdens of poverty were borne as much or more by men? If the answer here was that anything that did not disproportionately affect women would not fall within their claim of purview, then the argument from the President would be straightforward: poverty was not a women’s problem; it was a human problem. It affected many women, to be sure, but could it be legitimately construed as a women’s problem, per se? Abzug and her colleagues’ argument hinged on the assertion that women were unusually affected by various budgetary decisions. While different economists and statisticians could analyze this in various ways, even accepting the feminists’ position of women being unduly affected, the President could still claim the right to determine the administration’s view that a successful fighting of inflation would, in the long run, be the best for all people. Here the members of the commission could disagree with him, but they could not logically prove that he was wrong, and they certainly could not prove (although they could, perhaps foolishly, assert) that he did not understand. The issue of poverty was clearly important to Carter no matter which gender was affected. To Abzug and her colleagues, it was clearly important for them to voice their concerns based on their beliefs as to how women were affected. A cynic could argue here that these largely wealthy white women were merely using matters of poverty to promote their political visibility. No matter such arguments that could have been raised, the key issue to the White House concerned the fact that Abzug and the commission had gone public with their concerns. Carter and his Chief of Staff, Hamilton Jordan, were not the least bit pleased with these little excrescences from their Women’s Commission. In the autumn, the commission had been complaining that they were not having any access to the President, so their advisory functions were not taking place as they wished. In the summer of 1978, Midge Constanza had left the White House, citing problems working with various other staff people. This sharpened notions among the commission that, without Midge, they rightly felt a greater sense of avoidance, a lesser sense of someone caring for them, and that in the White House they were dealing with people who were hostile to

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women. Like all such political fears based on matters of group identity, such views can be self-fulling with denials only confirming them. Midge Costanza’s successor, Sarah Weddington, had good working relations with Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and the rest of the White House staff. She never felt any of the resistance that Constanza claimed. Costanza had been vocal about such feminist issues as the ERA and abortion rights. Some White House staff also said she was often ill-informed about key issues and ill-prepared for many meetings. Weddington was always prepared and informed. She held no radically different views from Costanza’s, but she did focus more on financial issues such as Social Security and federal pensions, women’s issues certainly, but without the same splash that Constanza had made. Women, per se, were no less represented in the Carter White House with Costanza’s resignation, and reporters noted that Weddington had a stronger reputation for thoroughness and organization than Costanza. But within the feminist circles in which Costanza and Abzug ran, there grew an indignant sense of being shut out of political loops, access to which they felt rightfully entitled. Constanza leaving, only getting fifteen minutes of time in November—nevermind that Weddington offered a meeting—the sense of gender-based marginalization was there, and once in place, it was both a hard matter to dislodge and a politically useful and psychologically gratifying point in which to revel. 40 With the commission’s refusal of the first November meeting and, even more, with the subsequent releases of public criticism of the President’s policies, there was ill will. The commission’s four-page memo to the press had a tone that some characterized as accusatory. Presidential aides claimed “it crossed the line between constructive criticism and provocation.” Abzug would disagree with this characterization, claiming “it was critical, but not accusatory,” adding that “we have a responsibility to tell the President when we disagree with him.” Few Presidents were ever as open to points of honest disagreement as Carter, but Abzug’s comment about her “responsibility” had a bit of presumptuousness, and it conveniently overlooked the key matter of the commission having gone public with their disagreements with the President. That was the reason Carter and his staff were upset. Had all the thoughts come to the White House via an internal memo, the reactions would have been quite different. The commission’s release was also written in the past tense, as if a meeting with the President had already occurred. It stated that the commission had “warned” the President about the need to investigate “military extravagance” and about how increased unemployment and cuts in social programs would affect women. 41 Neither Abzug nor anyone else could adequately respond to the point that she and her colleagues had never “warned” Carter. In view of the obvious posture at work, Abzug’s immediate defense of the commission’s words as critical but not accusatory had a certain disingenuousness.

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Abzug’s defense also came with no disclaimers to the effect that she had been away when the press release occurred. So such arguments about Abzug’s absence that came from people like Eleanor Smeal had minimal significance, and Abzug had to know that if she did not accept responsibility she would be faced with charges of not effectively controlling the commission she co-chaired. Like a good lawyer, Abzug was emphasizing what was good for her case and ignoring all hurtful evidence. Here, however, she was facing a very tough “jury.” Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, secured a copy of the commission’s press release as soon as it was printed on January 11. The commission used a printing office in the building of the Labor Department, and Powell had a contact there. It was slated to be released before the meeting with the President: “For Release: Friday, January 12, 3:00 P.M. President Carter Challenged on Social Priorities by National Advisory Committee for Women.” The fact that the commission put the word “challenged” in the subtitle spoke strongly as to the conflict they were unashamedly provoking. Powell immediately went to Hamilton Jordan, angrily asking: “Jesus Christ! Did you see this thing?” Jordan had not seen it. Then he read it, and now he was angry. The staff people were already angry about the embarrassing November cancellations and statements. Now they were boiling. Jordan, Powell, and another Carter advisor, Jerry Rafshoon, agreed to let their immediate anger subside, meet the next morning, and decide what information and recommendations to take to the President. The three met on Friday morning, along with other advisors Sarah Weddington, Anne Wexler, and Richard Moe, an assistant to Vice President Mondale. They reread the release and decided that, possible reactions from people and organizations in the women’s movement notwithstanding, Abzug should be let go. Some raised the hopeful point that Abzug did not represent all involved in various elements of the women’s movement anyway. More importantly, they agreed that to do nothing would enhance the problem of the growing perception of President as weak and indecisive. They never entertained the idea of meeting privately with Abzug and asking her to resign. 42 The six advisors then considered ways to fire Abzug. Should she be called in prior to the afternoon’s meeting? This could lead either to the meeting collapsing into nothing but angry discussions about the firing or to the meeting being cancelled yet a second time. Powell suggested cancelling the meeting in advance and firing Abzug privately. Others felt this would be unfair to all the others on the commission, many of whom traveled from distances for the meeting. (Abzug had flown in from New York on Thursday night.) They decided it best to recommend the President go ahead with the meeting, with the idea of firing Abzug afterwards. There remained the major point that the President still had to agree to all this.

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The staff had met at 8:30 A.M. Powell and Jordan then met with President Carter at 9:30. They showed him the press release and told him of their meeting and recommendations. The President appeared calm. He showed no reaction after reading the release, and he consented to the recommendation. 43 Carter may have had the idea that he could personally keep the option of not firing Abzug if the meeting went cooperatively. Like Powell and Jordan, he may have also held to the view that the women’s movement was bigger than Bella Abzug, hence that the members of the commission could feel the meeting to have been a worthwhile part of their duties and would readily go forth with a new co-chair. That would not prove to be a good calculation. At the January 12 afternoon meeting with President Carter, recalled Eleanor Smeal, “I felt there was tension in the room from the minute we walked in.” Smeal appeared still to be convincing herself with euphemisms about some sort of tangible political value that came via the legacy or momentum from “this very successful conference” in Houston. She presumed here that the convention’s alleged value ever held any meaning to anyone but those already predisposed to believe in it. Undaunted, Smeal remained convinced “we were going to push him [Carter] to do things.” 44 Her sense of how the President was somehow theirs to be pushed in new directions of political and moral enlightenment was a trifle delusional. Abzug was likely less deluded about the political possibilities of the situation. Nonetheless, she went forth without any expressions of contrition, with utter certainty as to the validity of her views, and with her best lawyerly manner to explain how the Carter administration needed to be taught how its economic policies, its social program cuts, and its military spending would affect women. The assumption here of seeing women as some sort of economic class was something that could certainly have been debated politically or academically. A politically different cross section of Democratic women could certainly have voiced different views, and through them one could prove no betrayal of class, just a disagreement of point of view with mainstream Democratic women. If one wanted to deal as fully as possible with the question of economically suffering women, or men, the analytical focus here could be more precise. It could be trained, for example, on the inner cities, on Appalachia, or on the Mississippi Delta (as well as on East Africa, Haiti, or India). To talk in sweeping terms of all women would tend to obscure the significance of such smaller, less visible groups, with the predominantly white and wealthy tending, amidst the tossing about of such generalities, to gain both the political attention and any potential largesse at hand. The makeup of Abzug’s Commission represented that. To Carter, there may have also been an irritating sense that anyone would assume he did not realize the full impact of what he was doing, whether that impact was upon women, upon African Americans, labor unions, or anyone else. He could have at least as easily felt that it was the Democratic feminists who did not understand that

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the corrosive effects of inflation would in the end affect wealthy and poor women, as well as everyone else, even more adversely. Meanwhile, the politically salient point remained: although African Americans, labor groups, and others were beginning to criticize Carter’s policies, the Women’s Commission’s public “warnings” were the only ones coming from within the executive branch. To the other feminists in the room, Abzug was “brilliant” in her arguments. “With great care, she explained what [Carter’s] policies had to do with women,” recalled one. Others present cast it differently. According to a member of Carter’s staff, “It was really a terrible session. She lit into him in front of nearly forty other people.” 45 Those disposed to see brilliance may have been deluding themselves as to any allegedly remarkable insights being raised—at long last the President is hearing from us; he has to be impressed. Some of the commission members may have recognized their own feelings of intimidation and were then awe-struck at Abzug’s performance, which, as always, showed no intimidation. Meanwhile, it appeared to dawn on no one on the commission that they were likely talking to Carter in economic terms he had fully thought through. It was apparently inconceivable to them that someone could think as “deeply” as they. An apparent line had been long crossed. It was not simply that the commission presumed to speak for women. That was problematic in itself, as many women of different ideologies could attest. It seemed to members of this group that no one else could speak for women. The members of the commission may have come to believe in both the uniqueness and the insightfulness of their collective reflections, and they may have reflexively assumed that the pall of inspiration and fear that Abzug was always able to cast and bludgeon over her minions was now cowing someone else, the President of the United States no less. The perspective may have been self-involved, but to them, seeing Abzug perform in the moment of the meeting signaled a triumph, not a problem. President Carter actually liked and respected Abzug. He had said as much to Midge Costanza. 46 Like Pat Moynihan or Ed Koch, however, he was never intimidated or unduly charmed. As he liked and respected Abzug, he expected the same in return. Always well mannered and attentive, Carter listened to what Abzug had to say, but he certainly felt he should be listened to as well. When it was his turn, he said little of the economic and military matters. In this way he may have been silently implying that he was indeed well aware of such thoughts. Perhaps, hearing no apologies, he knew fully that the firing was going to occur and wanted to address the issues of the commission’s troublesome actions, so they would not make the same mistakes again. Carter spoke frankly, referring directly to the commission’s inappropriate public criticisms of his anti-inflation and military policy decisions. While she had called Abzug’s arguments “brilliant,” Brownie Ledbetter described the President’s words here as “whining” as he noted to them: “I

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appointed you. You’re my commission. How could you do this to me? I supported you on the ERA. . . .” 47 Other commission members may not have fully agreed with such an extreme contrast of “brilliant” versus “whining,” but it was clear that the respectfulness and the allegiance of the commission members were more strictly tied to Abzug, with no ties from there going to the President. Up to the time of the January meeting, President Carter never articulated any points which gave any senses of focus or limitation to the Democratic feminists he had supported. From the Houston convention, to the reception of their report, to the creation of the Women’s Commission, he had never seen any political need to recognize other perspectives that many women and men may have raised about gender issues. It would not have been politically wise for him to have done so at any point throughout these months. The sense of entitlement among the members of the commission thus had few bounds from within their own ranks, and they had encountered none from the executive branch. When they finally encountered a dissatisfied President, they could apparently see little but “whining.” There was a petty arrogance at work, to be sure, but it was an arrogance that had never before been addressed or bureaucratically circumscribed. The demeaning characterizations of the President may have been psychologically satisfying to people like Brownie Ledbetter, but they would have little political tenability within the context of an ongoing Presidential commission. The commission members regarded the President as their adversary, someone they rightfully had to “warn” and “push” to do better things. There appeared no sense of the potential fallout that could emanate from such selfentitled thinking. Rather than feeling any contrition at all, Eleanor Smeal was in a state of utter consternation when she heard the President address them: “As we left [the meeting], I said, ‘My God, We’ve just been bawled out by the President of the United States.’” Smeal conceded that “he was talking in a normal tone of voice, but,” she was unable to focus on anything but how she “felt we had been read the riot act.” 48 Could it have been that some people may have actually needed the proverbial riot act read to them? To any true believer like Smeal, this was unthinkable. After all, they were right, and this mere “whining” man was taking them to task! As their advice was so unique and needed, where was the President’s gratitude? Where was the apology for not previously meeting with them, and for first offering them but fifteen minutes of his time? There was indeed a high level of insularity, coupled likely with certain levels of narcissism, among and between the various factions of the Democratic Party’s wealthy liberals. Feminists like Smeal and Ledbetter could not see much past their own collective identity politics. The idea that they had done something wrong was inconceivable. To them there was then only the shock over the fact that this President had spoken to them as he did. To the

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commission, there was only one person who was allowed to lay down the law to them, and it was not the mere President of the United States. Only Bella Abzug was allowed to talk to them like that! Carter and his staff had their own problems. They were thinking about public relations, and about the troublesome image the general public was developing of the President as indecisive, amidst an economy that was seemingly out of control. Had Abzug and her group showed any genuine contrition in the meeting about the press release, with words focusing on “how we need to do better . . .,” then President Carter may have been willing to forgive, abandon the plan to remove Abzug, and move on. When he heard no apology and felt nothing but a sense of being lectured and talked down to by people with apparently nothing but a sense of righteous entitlement and insular superiority, the possibility, however slight it may have been, of letting the commission continue without a major change was gone. The plan settled upon that morning to fire Abzug would not be altered. Carter was irritated. Little can irritate an executive more than the sense of being condescended to by people who think they have insights that others cannot possibly grasp, especially when the supposed insights were hardly anything of intellectual depth as well as matters that were already fully considered. From his rural Georgia upbringing, Carter certainly saw and knew poverty as well, and likely more deeply than most of the feminists in the room with him that snowy January afternoon. So when he was talked down to in a manner that presumed he did not understand the impingements his policies were having, by people far wealthier than many of those he had known and cared about in Georgia no less, the presumptuousness and haughty condescension he sensed must have been very irritating. The premise that those who disagree must not understand has been an arrogance-driven fault of many less-than-successful political figures. Abzug and her colleagues fell squarely into this ego trap. The sense of entitlement among Democratic feminists was part of the broader political terrain with which Carter was contending. The ostensibly liberal elements of the Democratic Party did not feel they needed to work effectively with Carter, especially if any ideological compromise was needed. He was just this odd little Southern outsider who happened to win in 1976. They felt it was he who needed to understand and work with them, and that when he did not, it was because he did not grasp either who they were or for what they stood. The political left felt it had been right about Vietnam and about civil rights. Yes, they lost to Nixon, but Watergate and his fall had vindicated them. Throughout the ensuing decade, there was never any set of events which either jarred Northeastern liberalism’s moral certainty or made them take the political middle or right too seriously. The fact that each righteous liberal Democratic element had come by the late ‘70s to have different sets of priorities only added to the frustrations and difficulties for such a President

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as Carter. Given the growing power of the political right, perceptive Democrats should have understood that they needed to join with the President and maintain party cohesiveness. Insufficient numbers of liberals took the Right seriously, however. Their arrogance-driven decisions and the ensuing divisiveness would only serve their opponents. Democratic liberals could not grasp this possibility. One reason they did not take the political right seriously involved the latter’s unashamed religious ties, and this was part of why they never took the religious Mr. Carter with full seriousness either. They felt that they alone were the people and ideas around whom others should rally, admire, and obey. Abzug had always been able to bludgeon such admiration and obedience out of her minions. Carter could certainly not acquiesce to such small constituencies and look anything but un-Presidential. And intellectually Abzug could not simply bowl him over the way she did so many others. As with Daniel Moynihan, Ed Koch, and Mario Cuomo, she was dealing with an equal, and with such substantive people her personality and management style were not fully up to the task, the perceptions of “brilliance” from such an idolizing supporter as Brownie Ledbetter notwithstanding. Abzug never considered the adage: “What got you here won’t get you there.” And now that her “here” was merely the pinnacle of the women’s movement, adjustments of style and substance may have been in order to get ahead at broader political levels. Her forging of the a “new Bella” during the New York Senate and Mayor’s races indicated some sensitivity in this regard, but, in the context of her leadership of a relatively insular women’s movement, that inkling had apparently vanished. Now she was surrounded by her largely intimidated, intellectually overwhelmed minions. She never really liked to be challenged. Most of the very intelligent people who supported her, like Mim Kelber, were perfectly content and preferred to let her do all the talking. Abzug’s ways encouraged this. When she was challenged, she was certainly very good in debate, but there were limits. She had come to prefer the force of personality. Beyond such political and personality matters among Abzug and the feminists, furthermore, there was the fact that President Carter believed his policies were right, and at some point all Presidents have to rely on their own judgments. As the commission’s meeting with the President ended on Friday, January 12, Abzug made appropriate remarks to the press. In an obvious cognizance of the mistake of the cancelled November meeting, she spoke of how the President had been generous with his time. She went on about how she thought the meeting “was quite good. We made some points with the President, and he has agreed to meet with us more frequently, and there will be a greater liaison with the White House, with the committee, and on the future of the platform of issues.”

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As Abzug was finishing her statement to the gathered reporters, she was handed a message that the President wanted to see her, along with commission co-chair Carmen Delgado Votaw. Hamilton Jordan told Delgado Votaw that the commission’s press release, combined with previous public statements, had made its situation vis à vis the President “untenable.” Talking then with Hamilton Jordan and Presidential Counsel Robert Lipschutz, Abzug protested that she was responsible for neither the press release nor the cancellation of the earlier meeting. In view of that, she was told that her commission leadership was inadequate. According to Abzug, Jordan’s words to her were: “You should have been there, . . . [and] if you have pressing personal problems you shouldn’t be chairman of the committee.” Given the way she “ran the show” in all such committees and commissions with which she had ever been involved, Abzug could not have expected White House officials like Hamilton Jordan to accept, let alone excuse, her on any sort of “it was out of my hands” explanation. With Carter’s approval, Jordan promptly told Abzug that she was to be off the President’s Commission. “Why am I being made a scapegoat?” she demanded. Abzug claimed Lipshutz then grew angry, called her a liar, and exclaimed: “The next thing I know you’ll be saying you were fired because you’re a Jew.” 49 Lipshutz was also Jewish. He was referencing the playing of the victim-card and how neither he nor the administration was going to take that very seriously. The press knew something was in the air. Immaturely, Carter aide Jerry Rafshoon had urged some friends in the press to wait around on Friday afternoon, telling them there was “a fun story” in the works. 50 This rather childish handling of the matter would hardly serve the President. It clearly denoted a certain relish with which some in the White House were dealing with the Abzug situation. There was a revenge factor at work, and the notion of the whole thing being a “fun story” reflected a self-involvement on some of the White House staff’s part. Other immature self-indulgences would be in evidence and would have the same effect. A week later, for example, White House reporters had a special get-together to say good-bye to CBS television correspondent Bob Schieffer, who was then leaving Washington to start a new network assignment in New York. Various reporters offered the usual sorts of jovial toasts and funny stories. Amidst the festivities, Jody Powell stood up and read what he claimed to be a telegram to Schieffer from Bella Abzug saying: “Dear Bob, I never could get along with that little fart either.—Bella” Some laughter ensued, but it was tinged with a palpable nervousness. It was hardly White House–level behavior, to say the least. 51 It was one thing to fire such a person as Bella Abzug. It was quite another to take open delight in it. Such instincts may have served the interests of a late night television host and a comedy writer, but not those of the President and his staff. The reason for the dismissal of Abzug was that she was hurting the

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public image of a Presidential advisor. Here Powell and Rafshoon did exactly the same thing. This was anything but a fun little game. As Abzug was leaving the White House after the dismissal, a reporter found her in a very sour mood, not unlike the way she felt a year before after losing the special Congressional election to Bill Green. Asked a generalized question as to how things were going, she just shook her head and muttered, “No good, no good at all.” Later in the day she was on the phone with Hamilton Jordan pleading her case, “For God’s sake, let me resign. Give me that bit of dignity.” Jordan could not do that even if he had wanted to (and he didn’t), for the media had already been informed of the “fun story.” If Jordan and the White House staff had anticipated such a plea from Abzug, there was a bit of immature “payback” being exacted here. Abzug and the commission had preempted their meeting with Carter with a press release, so Abzug requesting to be allowed to resign after the news of her firing had already been made public may have held an element of revenge. 52 Had that been the intention, it was a political blunder, for the ill will between the White House and Abzug was not a sui generis phenomenon. It had a broader political impact which Jordan and his team did not fully anticipate. Letting Abzug resign would not have been a bad idea, in much the same way that Abzug’s commission should not have cancelled the November meeting or gone public with their criticisms. The fact that no one on Carter’s staff ever considered letting Abzug resign showed a lack of collective insight. At various times, each side in the affair was generating more antagonisms than were either necessary or politically wise. With the firing of Abzug, the commission members’ telephone networks immediately went into action. With the pressure on, three-quarters of the commission resigned. Carter and his White House staff miscalculated the fallout here, and not just with regard to the little commission. Given both Bella Abzug’s controversial and abrasive nature and her string of electoral losses, they may have figured that her dismissal would not arouse much sympathy, hence the President could appear to have made a decisive move without much political fallout. Some reactions reinforced this sense. “The dismissal fits in,” acknowledged the New York Times, “with the new tougher and more ‘Presidential’ posture Mr. Carter’s advisors have been urging him to adopt in his third year in office. At all costs, they want him to avoid giving the impression of vacillation and indecisiveness.” Two days later the Times further editorialized off-handedly, “the manner of her dismissal seemed clumsy, but it is hard to get exercised over the discovery that Presidents dislike public criticism from their own appointees.” The Times may have seen little in the manner of dismissal, but others reacted to it. Many may have been predisposed to look for an excuse for outrage, but there was no reason to give them any such excuses. Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, eagerly pointed out that in the first two hours after the announcement of Abzug’s

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dismissal the White House received 170 phone calls about the firing with 87 percent favoring the President’s decision. As of 4:30 P.M. on the Monday after the Friday firing, the White House announced it had received 385 telegrams supporting Carter’s decision and 548 against, but among the telephone calls the balance was 268 for the President and only 39 against. 53 Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, considering the irritation he had often felt from Abzug, nodded: “I haven’t the slightest criticism of a president who would fire her by remote. If I were going to fire Bella, I’d do it the same way.” Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, a co-sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment no less, believed that Abzug’s dismissal would in the long run enhance Carter’s popularity. “Abzug,” Hatfield argued, “did not represent what most American women want.” At the time of Abzug’s dismissal, some liberals were more upset with Carter over the continuing beerguzzling boorishness and rumored Libyan connections of his brother Billy, and over the President inviting Richard Nixon to dinner at the White House that month. 54 In the always-shifting politics of popular perceptions, however, Abzug’s dismissal would contribute to a different set of reactions which would have a significant political impact, especially among traditionally liberal Democrats. While Abzug may have lost elections and held a negative image with many voters, among feminists she remained a type of deity. To them her previous electoral losses merely underscored their sense of the ongoing gender prejudices they were earnestly fighting. Getting fired by Carter only further martyred her (and themselves). If Abzug had been allowed to resign and made a gracious statement to the effect that it is for the best and that others will continue the important work of the commission, the martyrdom may have held less poignancy. Politically, the key point here was that as long as feminists remained a solid block within the Democratic Party, many mainstream Democratic liberals recognized their value to the party’s future. They would come to see Abzug’s dismissal as another White House error. It may have been frustrating for a Carter Democrat to witness a martyring of Bella Abzug. How could their calculations have been so wrong? Voters had thrice turned down both Abzug and her supporters when she sought elected office. Pleas about gender prejudice and the need for women to gain office did not seem to motivate a sufficient mass of voters on Abzug’s behalf in 1976, 1977, or 1978, during which time many other women were elected anyway. Yet when Carter dismissed her, without even a hint of ending the commission, many gender-based cries proved politically meaningful. In abstract terms there may have been an illogic here, yet it was a political reality that would have genuine impact. Political cliques and factions can often be more significant when on the political margins. Abzug and her commission broke with executive protocols by going public with criticisms, and no President has ever tolerated much of that. If Carter

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had been able to quietly reprimand or dismiss Abzug and her colleagues, reactions may have then been more muted. But the Carter staffers had cornered themselves. Through 1977 and 1978, they had made such ado out of so much of the sponsored work of the Democrats’ feminists—funding the grand Houston convention, holding a White House ceremony in receipt of the convention’s report, creating the special Commission on Women. Nothing had been low key, nor had any matter of self-absorbed political narrowness among the selected feminists ever been taken to task. While pertinent facts could have been cited about a lack of ideological diversity, nothing from the White House had ever curbed any of the enthusiastic self-images of Democratic feminists that they and their little commission represented all American women. Upon Abzug’s firing, nothing stopped them from asserting that the President’s move had then betrayed all American women. The outlook was part of the same mentality they had been allowed to cultivate all along. Abzug’s firing was a news item around the country. Elsewhere, the BBC and Der Spiegel also gave it coverage. The firing could not be low keyed, and, rationally or not, it would indeed be used as evidence that President Carter was unsupportive of women. Hoping to emphasize a parallel with Richard Nixon’s famous 1973 firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, Attorney General Elliott Richardson, and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, known as “the Saturday Night Massacre,” feminists tried to dub Carter’s firing of Abzug as “the Friday Night Massacre.” The parallel was hardly striking, and not merely because Abzug’s dismissal had occurred in the less dramatic afternoon. Abzug’s little post carried no weight compared to the jobs of Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus, and there were no Constitutional issues at stake with Abzug and the commission. Many feminists were out to make as much of the firing as they could, however. They were dreadfully indignant. Carter advisor Robert Lipshutz may have held that the issue of gender would not work as a means of politicizing Abzug’s firing, but no one heeded him. Indignant reactions flooded the media. “I was horrified by the way the resignation was handled,” declared Mary Helen Madden, executive director of the National Council of Catholic Women. It was “chauvinist cowardice,” wrote Ruby Reimer, an angry New Jersey voter. The firing was “symbolic of the way women’s issues are treated—as a joke,” remarked Nancy Neuman of the League of Women Voters. It was “an insult to all women,” claimed ERA activist Ellouise Schoettler of the Women’s Coalition. Such outrage may not have carried nearly as much rhetorical significance had Abzug been allowed to resign. Citing the allegedly more gentle removals, through resignation, of Carter’s Special Assistant for Health Affairs Peter Bourne and of his Office of Management and Budget Director Bert Lance, Mary Crisp, co-chair of the Republican National Committee chided that at the Carter White House, “they

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don’t treat men the way they do women.” Republicans loved to posture how the Democrats did not support their faithful, and given the insularity of such Democratic groups as feminists, the tactic would leave a mark. Mildred Jeffrey, president of the National Women’s Caucus, intoned more floridly, “Bella Abzug was used as a scapegoat to suppress our independence.” From all over the country there were scores of such reactions. Eleanor Smeal echoed many of these sentiments, emphasizing that the firing amounted to a slight to all women. “We represent half the population,” she argued. “To criticize us for dealing with the defense budget or the budget in general by saying that’s not the domain of women’s rights is just a parochial attitude.” 55 Even if many members of that “half” may not have been in agreement, and even if any official’s sense of the commission’s purview did not stem from any sort of parochialism, the sense of gender-based persecution was clearly gathering momentum against the President. Abzug herself emphasized the fact that the Commission on Women was confronting Carter about broader economic and military issues. The White House, she held, wanted the commission only to deal with “women’s work. . . . That’s what got us into trouble and that’s all that got us into trouble” she insisted, still not directly confronting the key issue of the commission going public with criticisms. “We’re supposed to stay in our corner, a very important corner for us, and talk about the equal rights amendment and abortion. What they don’t understand is that the economy is a women’s issue and foreign policy is a women’s issue.” Even if that was not the central issue to the issue of her firing, like any good attorney, Abzug was going to emphasize the evidence that best served her plea with “the jury.” In regard to questions of her personality as a basis for getting fired, she snapped: “Sure I say things straight out. But so do a lot of men. When a man is that way, they say he is a strong, forthright individual and leader. When a woman is that way she is ‘abrasive’ and ‘belligerent.’” 56 Whether such a sense of gender persecution here was inherently right or wrong could never be proven. It was a matter of belief. By the same token, another point was there to be believed, or discounted—that much of the public attention to the rudeness of the dismissal of a commission chair in the executive branch was stemming from the fact that the dismissed chair was a woman. A dismissed man could seldom hail his victimization with such drama. Few raised that point in 1979. As to the assertion that Abzug was treated more rudely because of her gender, the politically important matter here was whether the notion would resonate with any significant blocks of voters. In the immediate aftermath of the dismissal, it certainly seemed to. One reporter with the Washington Post, Judy Mann, conjectured that the dismissal of Abzug was part of the Carter staff’s desire to recast its position on women’s issues. Abzug had obviously been visible, altogether competent, but terribly belligerent and confrontational. As Mann interpreted views of

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White House staff, journalists, and women’s groups, she echoed the convictions of those who found advisor Midge Costanza to have been often “illprepared for meetings, not . . . savvy on issues.” Costanza also compounded “these shortcomings,” said Mann, “by blaming her staff and by an abrasiveness that offended people inside the White House and out.” Mann claimed “there was a sigh of relief among women’s groups when she [Costanza] was fired,” although that had received little publicity. This sense of relief was not present when the more substantive Abzug was let go. With the elevation of such women in the White House as Sarah Weddington and Anne Wexler, however, Mann conjectured that the President and his staff believed the fallout over Abzug’s dismissal would run its course and leave Carter communicating a “signal that the White House finally is going to take women’s issues seriously.” 57 Mann’s expectations did not come to fruition. In contrast to the minimal reactions to Costanza’s departure, and because of Abzug’s status and personality, her firing took on a life and momentum within feminist politics that overwhelmed any other gender issue that affected anyone in the White House. Among feminists in 1979 words like “suppress,” “independence,” and “stay in our corner” were striking. There may have been many women, and men, who disagreed, but at this point they either preferred to keep silent or were never much disposed towards Carter in the first place. In regard to their internal logic, Abzug’s and Eleanor Smeal’s rhetorical ploys about women being the victim of the President’s policies were not difficult to counter. The fact that half the population was female did not mean that any self-selected feminist organization or commission spoke for all. And just because some women were speaking up about the military or the budget, it did not mean that their alleged insights were so unique or in any way intellectually special. It certainly did not mean that any others had a duty to listen just because the speakers were women. And it did not mean that anyone was a sexist if he or she did not obediently take heed. To think otherwise was parochial, as was the notion that inflation, unemployment, and other economic and military matters were women’s issues. They were human issues. Abzug could claim that she had the right to label military and economic issues as women’s issues, but, as all issues affect women, the reasoning here indicated that Abzug’s little commission was uniquely qualified to speak on any issue it chose. All it had to do was declare the subject to be pertinent to women. African Americans, Native Americans, environmentalists, . . . any group could claim any issue affected them. A Jewish group could declare that all women’s issues were Jewish issues; the Women’s Commission could claim that all Jewish issues were women’s issues. . . . The logic was there, and given such implications, everyone can construe themselves in a position to be uniquely qualified to talk about anything, with an ad hominem, identity politics rejoinder at the ready against any critic. As the Carter administration

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had not defined the purview of the commission, they were victimized by their own bureaucratic inexactitude. At another level, they did not fully recognize the sense of political entitlement and truculence with which many American feminists of the late 1970s had imbued themselves. The White House thought Abzug’s manner was the irritating element. It was, but in another sense her aggressiveness was only an exaggerated form of the hyperbole that earmarked many other feminist activists of the day. Any such notions to the effect that Carter’s firing of Abzug signified that he treated women less than seriously had no real merit. But, as in the McCarthy age of vehement anti-communism, whose excrescences Abzug had long and courageously fought, many feminists had carved a rhetorical niche for themselves; here all they had to do was vaguely claim that a given matter “raises serious questions” as to an individual’s loyalty to the cause at hand. The cause was now not anti-communism but that of women, yet the anti-civil libertarian processes of guilt by accusation in responses to any perceived opposition were strikingly similar. In both cases, as well, the media of each day would readily jump on the accusations, often with great sensationalism. Anti-communists would raise the matter of an individual’s loyalty. With equal inexactitude, some feminists would now “question his views on women’s issues” and do so with utter certainty. Such patterns lasted for decades. In the year 2000, historian Ruth Rosen began her comprehensive book on the modern women’s movements with a lengthy time line of major events from 1948 to 2000. A key event of 1979 she cast thus (and in bold print): “President Jimmy Carter fires Bella Abzug from the Advisory Committee on Women because she insists that unemployment, the federal government, and inflation are all women’s issues.” 58 The key fact of Abzug and the commission going public with their criticisms was conveniently ignored. There was banality and imprecision in such victimological assertions, as well as a few uncomfortable implications in regard to Constitutional processes, but, as in the age of McCarthy, few would step forth and defend those victimized by any mud-slinging, lest they be uncomfortably accused themselves. Those accused could say little to convince any true believers, and the accused’s protests, either about the charges or about the political railroading that accompanied the accusations, usually did little but underscore the charges being leveled against them. Thirty years before, Abzug had fought for the First Amendment rights of those being irresponsibly accused of communist affiliations. She endured some such charges herself. Now she was welcoming the support of those who wanted to make whatever blind sweeping charges they cared to about Carter’s alleged lack of support for women. Just as the smug McCarthyists were not the least bit dissuaded by such prior examples as the Salem Witch Trials, few feminists saw any ironies or disquieting historical parallels to McCarthyism in the things they were “righteously” doing to Carter in the wake of Abzug’s dismissal. Temperance of

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thought in any purported defense of women was no virtue; excessive zeal, no matter the distortions, was no vice. Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater once framed such a couplet in regard to civil liberties. Feminists had personalized that outlook in regard to themselves. Political excesses due to imprecise thought, immaturity, or narcissism were no vice and were not to be corrected. Even if the criticisms of Carter held an incomplete logic, even if they broached McCarthyistic overtones, even if they revealed untoward selfabsorption, and even if they avoided the simple point that the President was well within the bounds of executive propriety to dismiss an appointed commission co-chair for going public with criticisms, the fallout and the vituperative language the dismissal engendered were all to the President’s political detriment. Carter’s task was not to win points in a political science class. His political goals focused on his renomination and reelection. Previously recognizing feminists’ issues to be a viable political matter among Democrats, Carter had thought it wise to give them a stage. In doing so, he did not fully realize that he had actually given a stage to Bella Abzug. With the troubles he felt with the Women’s Commission, he thought and hoped that feminists’ leadership roles were somewhat interchangeable. Here he and his staff were quite wrong. With the dismissal of Abzug, Carter quickly learned that he could not maintain good relations with the feminist elements of the Democratic Party. He continued the commission, of course, and he made a point of maintaining his support for the equal rights amendment. Nevertheless, the commonplace memory about Abzug’s dismissal continued to plague him. In February, the New York Times, which had editorialized no outrage over Abzug’s dismissal, noted that “White House aides acknowledge that Jimmy Carter’s relationship with women activists is a mess.” 59 Continuing the commission with others would do little to serve his political needs, and ending it would only hurt more. Any mention of the commission only drew further attention to what he had done to Abzug. Only thirteen of the original forty-member commission stayed on, most notable among them was future Texas Governor Ann Richards. Nearly three hundred other women soon volunteered to go on the commission, but any mere mention of a Women’s Commission in any context always brought to mind the matter of Abzug’s dismissal. 60 Carter and his staff hoped they could find someone of high visibility to chair the commission after Abzug and thus redirect the light of publicity. Temporarily, Marjorie Bell Chambers, president of the American Association of University Women, was named acting chair. She naturally gave positive comments to the press about President Carter and the commission, but even she had commented on the awkwardness of Abzug being summoned to her firing. Abzug would not be supportive of her in any case. Shortly after Chambers took over the commission, she appeared on a panel in Washington

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on January 30 to discuss women’s issues. Abzug was there too, and she used the occasion to make some gratuitous swipes about “credibility of the commission.” Abzug apparently saw no purpose in being gracious at this juncture. “A cloud exists over the committee” she fumed. 61 Either she did not care about any possible charges that she was placing herself above the causes of women to which she, Chambers, and the commission were each supposed to address, or she had become too self-involved even to consider such a matter of issues versus ego. Abzug certainly gave no thought to how the Republicans may have been the only winner from such squabbling. One thing was certain; she was not going to go quietly. She never did. Chambers could have raised the point that Abzug was hardly displaying cogent reasoning when she equated her dismissal as proof of the entire commission having dubious “credibility.” The argument would have had cogency, but any such charges of Abzug raising her own personal issues above those of the millions of women in America who were actually struggling economically would have likely caused a row and certainly fueled existing political fires. On this occasion at least, Chambers simply smiled and did not let the panel discussion become combative. That same week Abzug testified before the Senate Human Sources Committee, where she stated many of the same arguments about women’s economic plight about which she had lectured Carter. The White House advised Sarah Weddington not to make an appearance at the commission while Abzug was there. She would have looked like a defensive White House’s yes-person. Sarah Weddington was a highly articulate and intelligent individual, a clear model of excellence to any young feminist. But there was no point, and the White House knew it, in using her or anyone to diffuse the force of that moment in Washington that was Bella Abzug. 62 Abzug was still the political name in America when it came to women’s issues. At the Senate Human Resources Committee she thundered about how “it’s time to accept the fact that women are here to stay in every place” and that women are tired of “being told it’s none of our business what the federal budget is, that we should stick to the ERA and abortion.” Of course, no one had ever said that Abzug or anyone else could or should not comment about the federal budget. Carter, the White House, and others may or may not have accepted the questionable premise that women had to be viewed as an economic class. They had only said that budgetary matters may not be the purview of a particular executive branch commission, and that the commission members taking their views public showed bad form. At this juncture, the issue was not administrative logic, however. Abzug had won a political contest of rhetorical bludgeoning. Like those making accusations of witchery or of harboring communist sympathies, she had asserted over and over a variant of the charge of gender persecution—that women were being told that budgets were not for them to discuss. Some Senators and reporters in the

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packed hearing room where she performed may have believed her. Some may have disagreed, but they all recognized that it was better to give her the stage, lest any who were foolish enough to take exception to anything end up looking as badly as Carter. 63 Republicans watched quietly and loved every minute of it. The ongoing status of the Women’s Commission no longer made a difference, no matter how the White House tried. When First Lady Rosalynn Carter made public appearances, reporters would often ask her what she thought of her husband’s commitment to women’s issues in view of his firing of Bella Abzug. Mrs. Carter responded with her usual deftness, commenting on how she was very impressed with Marjorie Bell Chambers and the work she was doing. 64 Whether Chambers was or was not doing good work, it did not matter in regard to a section of the public and its perception of the President’s commitments to women. The reporters’ questions were more important than Mrs. Carter’s answers. Chambers simply had little public notoriety. Bella Abzug was the image that came to most people’s minds when the subject of women’s issues came forth. The President and his Chief of Staff decided they needed a bigger name atop the commission to counter the legacy of the fired Abzug. In the abstract this may not have been a bad idea, but they did not get very far with it. They offered the post to Muriel Humphrey, widow of the former Democratic Vice President. She turned it down. Eventually, in May, Carter named Lynda Robb, Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, as chair. Poignantly, the formal announcement came not from Carter but from Vice President Mondale. The image of the President naming her would have raised too many memories of the January afternoon dismissal. Robb’s presence made no real impact, however. She was LBJ’s daughter, and she was married to the Lt. Governor of Virginia. Otherwise, she had been a writer for The Ladies Home Journal; hardly a résumé to stack up to that of Bella Abzug. The Washington Post grasped the politics at work, as they headlined the appointment as a “safe” choice. From the outset, the commission held only what practical significance that Carter and his staff wanted, but with Abzug in charge, it had a visibility due to the power of her persona. Under Lynda Robb the commission held no significant public prestige. The new chair brought no force of personality to the table. 65 Even upon the May appointment of Robb, press coverage still gave reemphasis to the facts surrounding Abzug’s dismissal. Reporters also telephoned Abzug to illicit comments from her. She was clearly still central to the story. Abzug was maternally gracious about Robb, “I know Lynd, I’m very fond of her, and I wish her well.” But from there Abzug was her old self. She had declared that with her firing, the commission “won’t be the most credible way to achieve our goals now.” Others remained hopeful, however, including Robb, who conjectured that other women who had been more passive in

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regard to Abzug’s brand of feminism may now take more interest. Reporters relayed to Abzug the point that Robb had spoken of her desire to be “a bridge between some of the women who have been very active and some of those who haven’t been identified as being involved.” To this end, Sarah Weddington had been quoted as saying that Robb’s greater experience as a “homemaker” could add to the “reach” that she and the new commission could possibly have with many women who, until now, felt the women’s movement was not really theirs. When asked about this, Abzug (as the Washington Post put it) “exploded.” She lashed out: “That’s a lot of nonsense; 6,000 women wrote me when I was fired—women not getting equal pay, married women, poor widows, rural women—all talking about the need to have changes. They all said they realized that the president’s economic program affected them. They said they came to realize the Advisory Commission was fighting for their economic needs.” 66 Abzug would not let go of the issues, and the media would not ignore Abzug. Six thousand letters was not necessarily a compelling figure, but precise statistical measures were not the issue of the day. In a contest of personality, Abzug was good copy; Robb was bland. Whether Abzug’s sense of the value of an untapped wellspring of women’s consciousness could bear fruit in political affairs would have to wait for the next round of elections to be tested. Under Lynda Robb the commission fell into complete insignificance. As its political visibility faded, the White House even tried to change the official name of the group, “The National Advisory Committee for Women.” Commission, committee, this made no difference, and the move clearly smacked of more feeble, inept manipulation. Robb’s committee continued to meet. They held hearings in various cities, Denver, Raleigh, North Caolina, and Tampa, Florida, eventually framing a report containing 165 recommendations on a wide breadth of issues. They presented their report to Carter in December of 1980, after he had lost his reelection bid. The recommendations went nowhere. 67 Whatever the official titles, no matter the details and recommendations discussed, and no matter who else served or chaired, the President’s Advisory Committee on Women was simply known for the rest of its duration as that commission from which Carter had fired Bella. In the ensuing months, the not altogether amicable departures of other notables in the administration like Joseph Califano and Andrew Young also brought back the memories of Abzug’s firing. 68 For Carter, the hope to appear decisive never materialized. He did not come across as decisive when he fired Abzug or at most other times. He came across as an outwardly indecisive President whose staff was intently but ineptly trying merely to manipulate his image to appear decisive. Several one-term Presidents have acquired negative images that proved hard to shake, often unfairly so, and sadly contributive toward each’s downfall. William Howard Taft was obese and indolent; Gerald Ford, clumsy and

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doltish; Carter, indecisive and hesitant. Efforts to counter such images often failed. Indeed they often ended up underscoring the very images the particular President and staff desired to counter, with the frustrations compounding to no good ends, save possibly a few kinder judgments later among historians. Like Taft, and like John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover, Carter would be a one-term President who would do excellent work after leaving office. But for each of these one-term’ers, events seemed to conspire against them during their respective times in the White House. Each left office, soured in the belief he had not been treated fairly. For Carter, the ways that the liberal wings of the Democratic party did not support him were, along with aspects of media behavior, major parts of this belief. 69 The issues of Bella Abzug, the Women’s Commission, and their vituperative responses to Abzug’s dismissal served among the examples. As their former status of holding elected or appointed office fades, some politicians and their allies can focus unduly on a narrow set of issues. They can also fall into the trap of feeling a sense of accomplishment less by what they achieve and more by what they do to blunt the achievements of others. Having had expertise and positions on a wide array of issues when holding or running for office, Abzug’s once wide purview had devolved into a more exclusively feminist one. She was the leading feminist in the public eye, and her chairing of Carter’s Commission on Women seemed an appropriate Democratic Party appointment. When Abzug was fired and much of the commission left with her, various feminists sought to debunk the commission and actually chortled about how they had activated their political networks to tear it down. “In effect we killed it,” bragged Brownie Ledbetter. Similarly, when writers/editors Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom compiled an oral history of interviews about Bella Abzug, they made a point of including, in the very subtitle of their whole volume no less, the point that she had “pissed off Jimmy Carter.” 70 There may have been psychic joy in such stamps of identity and accomplishments as those for which Abzug’s allies applauded one another in early 1979 and since. That joy may have carried forth as a revealing sensibility among some feminists, with personal psychic gratification possibly, and even perversely, eclipsing hopes of accomplishing anything genuine for others more economically needy. Whatever the balance between selfishness and substance, such celebrations of “killing” and “pissing off” reveal that Abzug’s supporters were certainly aware that she was doing something that was not merely “brilliant.” Pragmatically, how such desires and sensibilities contributed to feminist causes, then or since, remains a question. If there was any gain beyond the purely psychic level, it is hard to ascertain. Meanwhile, with regard to the political landscape of America in the late 1970s, there would be one principal beneficiary from all the work in which feminists immersed themselves in conflict with Jimmy Carter. That benefici-

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ary would certainly not be President Carter, but neither would it be Bella Abzug or feminism. Abzug and the women’s movement would gain nothing. By the end of the decade, the turns of national politics left them ever more on the periphery. Carter would be out of power, so would the Democrats, and so would all of mainstream feminism. NOTES 1. New York Post, February 16, 1978, p. 2. 2. New York Times, February 15, 1978, p. A22; February 16, p. B10; New York Post, February 15, 1978, p. 29. 3. New York Daily News, February 16, 1978, p. 5. 4. New York Times, February 16, 1978, p. B10; New York Post, February 16, 1978, p. 2. 5. New York Post, February 15, 1978, p. 12. 6. New York Daily News, February 16, 1978, p. 5. 7. Ibid, February 16, 1978, p. 5. 8. Ibid, February 16, 1978, p. 4; Esquire Magazine, December 1977; Washington Post, November 29, 1977. 9. Miami Herald, January 13, 1985. 10. “The Spirit of the 70s: Six Historians Reflect on What Ails the American Spirit,” Newsweek, July 6, 1970, pp. 21–23. 11. New York Post, February 16, 1978, p. 2. 12. New York Times. February 19, 1978, p. E5. 13. Alice Henry, “Waiting for a Born-Again Bella,” Off Our Backs, Vol. 6, Issue 10, January 31, 1977, p. 18. 14. New York Times, February 16, 1978, pp. B10, C2; February 19, p. B5; New York Daily News, February 16, 1978, p. 4. 15. New York Times, February 24, 1978, pp. A26; March 4, p. 20. 16. Martin, George Whitney, Madam Secretary, Frances Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1976), passim.; Wall Street Journal. April 5. 1976, p. 12. 17. New York Post, February 16, 1978, p. 2. 18. New York Times, July 7, 1978, pp A1, 22; July 9, pp. 1, 24. 19. Ibid, April 18, 1978, p34; June 12, p. C15; July 7, p. A10. 20. Ibid, November 9, 1978, p. B3. 21. Ibid, December 1, 1978, p. B6. 22. Janis Kelly, “National Women’s Conference,” Off Our Backs, January 31, 1978, vol. 8, issue 1, p. 2. 23. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005; interview with Liz Carpenter, August 10, 2005; Lindsy Van Gelder, The Spirit of Houston Report (Washington, DC: National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, 1978), p. 205, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 213–14. 24. Interview with Midge Costanza. April 6, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 214. 25. Washington Post, July 16, 1977; January 17, 1979. 26. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 215–16; Bella Abzug and Mim Kelber, Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for American Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). 27. Time Magazine, January 29, 1979, p. 43. 28. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 215. 29. Washington Post, July 10, 1978; Abzug Papers, Box 154, folder 2, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.. 30. Interview with Sey Chassler, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 216. 31. Washington Post, January 18, 1979.

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32. Interview with Midge Costanza, April 6, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 214–15. 33. New York Times, January 16, 1979, p. A9. 34. Public Papers of Jimmy Carter, Recommendations to Congress, pp. 1642–44, books. google.com/books?id=i6IPy0Yi0ycC&pg=PA1642&lpg=PA1642&dq=Carterpercent27s+ National+Advisory+Committee+for+Women&source=bl&ots=-Mv3BJAbMJ&sig= CDLB5gHxwyo4VbJlPUZu8PGmAOg&hl=en&ei=FOUsTLLrL4L7lwfF7am4Cg&sa=X&oi= book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q&f=true. 35. Washington Post, November 19, 1978. 36. Ibid, January 17, 1979. 37. Ibid, January 14, 1979. 38. Ibid, November 23, 1978; Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 217. 39. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 219. 40. New York Times, January 16, 1979, p. A9; Washington Post, January 17, 1979. 41. New York Times, January 16, 1979, p. A9. 42. Washington Post, January 17, 1979. 43. Time Magazine, January 29, 1979, p. 43; Washington Post, January 16, 1979; January 17. 44. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 218. 45. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 219; New York Times, January 13, 1979, pp. 1, 7. 46. Interview with Midge Costanza, April 6, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 215. 47. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 218–19. 48. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 219; New York Times, January 13, 1979, pp. 1, 7. 49. Interview with Sey Chassler; interview with Carmen Delgado Votaw, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 220; Time Magazine, January 29, 1979, p. 43; Washington Post, January 14, 1979; January 16. 50. Washington Post, January 17, 1979. 51. Ibid, January 30, 1979. 52. New York Times, January 13, 1979, pp. 1, 7; Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 220–21. 53. New York Times, January 20, 1979, p. 22; January 16, p. A9; January 18, p. A20; Washington Post, January 16, 1979. 54. Washington Post, January 15, 1979; New York Times, January 18, 1979, p. A20. 55. New York Times, January 20, 1979, p. 22; January 24, p. A22; Time Magazine, January 29, 1979, p. 43; Washington Post, January 14, 1979; January 16; January 30. 56. Washington Post, January 16, 1979. 57. Ibid, January 17, 1979. 58. New York Times, April 11, 1979, p. A14; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. xxx. 59. New York Times, February 4, 1979, p. E3. 60. Wall Street Journal, April 20, 1979, p. 1; Washington Post, January 16, 1979. 61. New York Times, January 20, 1979, p. 22; January 21, p. E9; January 31, p. A8; Washington Post, January 31, 1979. 62. Washington Post, January 31, 1979; February 1, February 11. 63. Ibid, February 2, 1979. 64. New York Times, April 27, 1979, p. B4. 65. Ibid, May 9, 1979, p. A14. 66. Washington Post, January 31, 1979; May 12. 67. Ibid, May 12, 1979; New York Times, December 17, 1980, p. C21. 68. Ibid, August 26, 1979. 69. Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2005), p. 8.

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70. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 5, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 221 and book cover.

Chapter Five

Conundrums on the Periphery

Over the second half of his Presidency, Jimmy Carter would continue to struggle with a bad economy. That affected everybody, male and female. After he fired Abzug, she and virtually all other major feminists wrote him off. Politically that certainly did not help the President, but compared with other matters he was facing, the disaffection of the likes of Bella Abzug and her colleagues was not one of his major troubles. His main political trouble lay to his political right. Carter had chosen to make inflation his number-one economic priority, but his remedies proved not terribly effective. Later in 1979, amidst the troubles of a foundering economy, the infamous seizure of American hostages in Iran gripped the nation, with the ensuing pall continuing for over four hundred days. As Carter then struggled with foreign and domestic crises, he encountered more opposition. The political right gathered resources and momentum. With the hostage crisis and the poor economy, the popular sense of the President’s indecisiveness and ineffectiveness never abated, enhanced that year by such odd little items as his “fighting off” an attack from a wild rabbit while fishing in Georgia, and his failed attempt to complete the running of a marathon, which, as opposed to a five-kilometer run, he should have never entered in the first place. Every shred of the “bully-pulpit” power of his office seemed to crumble in his hands. Popular disenchantment, the Iran crisis, a sour economy, and the rising political right would be the big issues for Carter in 1979–1980. As he had to seek renomination before seeking reelection, opposition from elements within his own party would prove an obstacle. Through Carter’s executive travails in 1979 and into the following election year, the traditionally liberal wings of the Democratic Party formed an opposition. They coalesced around Senator Edward Kennedy, who took on a most difficult quest to wrest the party nomination from an incumbent. 125

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After being fired, Abzug and many of her allies would never support Carter. A new election lay in the immediate future, and their sense of entitlement was in full force. Upon her White House dismissal, Abzug had loudly proclaimed: “No candidate running for President in 1980 is going to get away with it [taking women’s support for granted] as easily as they’ve gotten away with it before. . . . This [her dismissal] is a serious breach. We’re now going to require action, not words.” In regard to whomever feminist organizations would support in 1980, Abzug predicted that “he may have to go out and get us the ERA.” 1 With such a vindictive and self-absorbed mood, the question of whomever feminists accused of taking feminism for granted involved charges that were not necessarily going to be considered with much care. Specific evidence would certainly not be subject to any careful weighing. Mere accusations would leave political scars. In the wake of her dismissal, Abzug and her colleagues evinced a tone of anger and set themselves up as a force to be solicited with the greatest of care. Helpful here was the fact that the media appeared to take them seriously. A key question was whether feminists actually possessed such political clout that their opinion could do much for or against a candidate. Most of the Democratic Party’s feminists turned to Senator Kennedy. There was no reconciliation with Carter. Even though Ann Richards did not leave Carter’s women’s commission, Abzug would later support her campaign when she ran for Governor of Texas. Carter was another matter. Some of the feminist support for Kennedy may have then been as much anti-Carter as pro-Kennedy. Abzug’s firing was very much part of that picture. With Senator Kennedy a certain and tragic irony also lurked that was very hard for some feminists to ignore. This concerned the matter of the Senator’s sexual philandering, which was still notorious in the late 1970s. President Carter’s personal life was impeccable, and some feminists had long taken principled stands against politicians who exhibited any sorts of sexual misconduct. Carter’s exemplary private life did not attract feminist support, but it could not repel it. With Kennedy the basis for feminist repulsion was obvious. In addition to many stories of misconduct, there was the undeniably hideous dimension of his womanizing’s linkage to the actual death of twenty-eightyear-old Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969. Among the nation’s leading feminists, Abzug would not let herself be bothered by such matters. At the Houston convention of 1977, when asked about any foolishness among the delegates, she had yelled back that she knew of no women who were using “call boys.” 2 She could readily assail mere images of men in general (and would gladly use such issues, if they were available, against any ideological opponent), but undeniable and repulsive facts about a specific individual did not appear to affect her when it came to Edward Kennedy. She had broken with Carter. That was where her

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personal feelings lay. Politics apparently overrode any other personal or moral senses with her. In opposition to Carter, Kennedy was Abzug’s best political option, and she wanted her colleagues to join her. Gloria Steinem was one she persuaded. Directly contradicting Abzug’s preferences for Kennedy was writer and editor Robin Morgan. She was a feminist who held decidedly different beliefs. She “lobbied intensely,” as she put it, to keep her friend Gloria Steinem from endorsing Kennedy in Ms. magazine and elsewhere: “This we cannot live with,” Morgan urged, “a dead woman’s body. At the very least, just don’t endorse.” Learning of Morgan’s apparently successful efforts, Abzug phoned Morgan and reamed her out for forty-five minutes: “How dare you make Gloria change her mind.” Apparently Morgan did not have the right to do that; only Abzug did. Steinem would subsequently fall back in line with Abzug and endorse Kennedy. 3 Such ironies among Abzug and other feminists had cropped up before. (Many “principled” stances of male politicians contained the same sorts of inconsistencies, but there had seldom been such casting among male leaders to the effect that their gender, when in power, would operate differently and better.) During the Mayoral primary runoff of 1977, Ed Koch favored women’s rights and abortion on demand while Mario Cuomo was conspicuously less supportive of abortion rights. Yet Abzug endorsed Cuomo, mainly because she so detested Koch. In the 1990s some very oddly contrasting reactions would arise among feminists over allegations of improprieties with regard to Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas as opposed to those raised about President William Clinton. In all cases, the apparent contradictions were often blithely ignored as political affiliations overrode. Abzug was gone by the time the political ramifications of Clinton’s behavioral problems fully manifested, but in 1979–1980 she certainly had no qualms about putting certain moral standards aside when it came to making such political moves as she did against Jimmy Carter and for Edward Kennedy. Abzug would treat virtually all political questions in which she was involved like the attorney she was. She would advocate based on the needs of the client/issue she had taken, and, like any lawyer, she would use or ignore various principles as the situation dictated. The questions of the “hypocrisy” to be criticized versus the “pragmatism” to be praised could, then and since, only be addressed with opinions. With the emotions about issues involving sexual harassment and philandering, few were ever neutral in the debates here. In the case of Abzug’s support for Kennedy in 1979–1980, what she may then have said to any feminist, or to anyone else from the Kopechne family is unknown. Likely, no aide or associate would have dared to ask her to consider such an issue. Many feminists supported Edward Kennedy. Abzug officially endorsed him in March of 1980. 4 Kennedy would make a substantive but unsuccessful

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run for the Democratic nomination against Carter. At the Democratic convention the delegate balance was 63 percent for Carter versus 34 percent for Kennedy. From a historical standpoint, it was a foolish effort. Way back in 1844, Henry Clay had dethroned President Tyler for the Whig Party Presidential nomination, but Tyler had not been elected President. He was filling out the term of the deceased William Henry Harrison. The last elected President to seek and fail to secure his party’s renomination had been—no one. A few had had to endure fights, Taft versus Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 most famously, but an intra-party unseating of an elected President through the nomination process has never happened. No politician can be expected to be able to predict the future with any exactitude, but the best politicians are those who know when to make accommodations, as opposed to enemies, in accordance with how they read possibilities within the barometers of history and political changes. Irreconcilably angry at Carter, Abzug made accommodations to support Kennedy, and she had compromised certain feminist ideals in doing so. She and her supporters may have felt it was a chance worth taking, but, regardless of any perceived hypocrisy, it would get them absolutely nowhere politically. Liberal Democrats, including Bella Abzug, had never accepted Carter, and as his Presidency evolved, they came to oppose him ever more. In doing so, they thought they were wholly right. Self-righteousness drove so much of the allegedly leftist politics of the late 1970s. Theirs was an affirmed belief in the legitimacy of their ways, one that had been born of the certainty as to the moral clarity in the advocacy against conservative resistance of civil rights for minorities and of withdrawing from Vietnam. This clarity muddied over the ensuing years. Issues like affirmative action now divided people formerly united over civil rights. Endeavors with possible military dimensions in the Middle East and elsewhere divided people previously in accord over issues of peace and isolation. Feminism had also brought forth many issues that showed divisions within their own ranks and which divided many people, including those who would call themselves liberals. Support for Edward Kennedy was one of many such matters here. Writing in these very years, the historian Christopher Lasch identified not leftist ideologies or even politics, per se, as the key ingredient which explained many such patterns of behavior. He saw some of the politics of this age largely as a vocabulary for deeper elements of “narcissism” among people bent upon securing their own place in a world of perceptibly diminishing expectations. The dogmatic, yet highly personalized nature of much of American feminism was to him a significant example of such sociopsychological dynamics. Lasch and others were hardly applauding here, and they presumed the ghosts of such feminists as Alice Paul, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman were not pleased either. Many people who read such thoughts were not always well disposed to hear them. (Freud always said that

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narcissistic personality disorders were impossible to address, let alone treat.) Indeed, President Carter used some of Lasch’s thoughts in an important address, attempting to lecture Americans about a “Crisis of Confidence” he felt to be affecting the nation. With his address, his popularity fell even further. 5 Yet another notable writer of the time, Midge Decter, was also a critic of what she felt was falsely passing for liberalism in America in the mid- and late 1970s. While such mainstream feminists as Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem saw much of the suffering of American women in a political and economic context, Decter felt, while certainly acknowledging the economic issues, she could probe more deeply into other areas. She focused on matters more spiritual and psychological in nature. Contrary to those who regarded the concepts of feminism as ideas which, in themselves, had prompted so much social change among women and men, Decter cited the widespread use of the birth control pill as the most profound and revolutionary change in the lives of women and men. This, she argued, was far more significant in liberating women from past constraints than any rhetoric that encouraged women to pursue careers. (The increasing pursuit of careers was very much a product of inflation, which had eroded the possibilities of most families being able to survive on single incomes. The language of feminism was then not so much a cause of the liberation as something that served more as a justification and as a verbal means of redress to some specific inequities that rising economic pressures could not let stand.) Decter argued, with much controversy, that “the pill” was highly significant, as it had made the act of sex “inconsequential” for women, while the previous possibilities of pregnancy had made it “consequential.” Her point was that, even if freed of worries of pregnancy, modern women, she emphasized, are not fundamentally happy with “inconsequential” relationships. Discounting the notion that the women’s movement had made it possible for women freely to pursue employment, Decter cast the new state of affairs for women as hardly liberating to the spirit. The liberation here was to her superficial and potentially debilitating: “The fact that having children is now an act of will rather than a natural occurrence has probably done more to make a spiritual crisis for women than anything.” Decter was not speaking against birth control, per se, and she readily recognized the straightforward financial needs that families had. She was arguing that the conflicts between the genders were fundamentally ones in which there could be no winners, and that feminist efforts to achieve “victories” for women would not only hurt men, they would deepen the spiritual crises in which women found themselves. “When all the dust settles, a certain number of particular and privileged women will have gained something,” she acknowledged in a likely reference to mainstream feminists like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem. For the vast majority of women she declared it a mistake “telling a woman

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she is a victim [of patriarchy, rather than] a human being caught up in a predicament” which no man or woman could have conspired to create. 6 Feminists like Abzug and Steinem were hardly in agreement with such people as Lasch and Decter. The ensuing arguments and counterpoints largely talked past one another. Abzug was perfectly capable of discoursing along such psychological and philosophical lines as Decter and Lasch established. But her fundamental focus was on the politics which she felt could both free women now held back from the attainments she knew they deserved to pursue, as well as provide her with a political base upon which to rebuild her own standing in electoral politics. Neither Lasch nor Decter would disagree with the ideals of achievement being open and available to anyone in any field. Decter also saw the political arena, in which people like Abzug were articulating their ideas, as an institution that held forth dangers to the lives of many people who saw fulfillment more narrowly in material attainments and in a political ideology that appeared to focus largely on mere material matters. A few may gain here, but Decter felt many more would not, and the unaddressed or superficially addressed spiritual issues would come back to haunt. Mainstream feminism was largely disdainful of, and at times extremely hostile to, the thinking of such critics as Lasch and Decter. Many feminist responses simply ignored them or summarily consigned them as conservative or even misogynist. They missed much of the point, and in some respects their sweeping dismissals reinforced the very notions of the narcissism and spiritual vacuity which Lasch and Decter felt to be dangerously at hand. An ongoing political reality was that the majority of voters, female and male, were not reading such works as those of Lasch or Decter nearly as much as they were reading or hearing of such people as Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem. Although each writer/critic may have perceptively grasped psychologically significant dynamics in the culture, their works were not as directly significant in regard to what was motivating many voters. Abzug’s key concerns involved what could build a mass of supporters that could grow to significant size and power so that they, and she, could impose leverage upon the political affairs of the Democratic Party, and from there upon the nation as a whole. Whether the criticisms from academic and intellectual circles affected her efforts, Abzug and her colleagues took little explicit note. In its national political work, Abzug and her colleagues ignored many of the deeper intellectual issues. Most politicians do. They engaged in bitter fights within the Democratic fold. The nature of much of the flap over Carter and his Commission on Women revealed many to cherish their own views without any accompanying sense of such compromising contexts as those which would normally accompany a White House appointment. When they joined with Edward Kennedy, they cast aside issues of his personal misconduct and ignored the lessons that history clearly revealed about the likely

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failure of an intra-party nomination challenge to an incumbent President. Many either failed to recognize the clear political dimensions in much of their work, or they left virtually all such thinking to leaders like Bella Abzug, indulging their fancies with faith in the notion that one wiser and more forceful minded was looking out for them. No matter how their actions may have defied political or personal logic, they somehow grew convinced that no one else thought as they and that they were providing a special sort of guidance to those around them who otherwise sat in darkness. When President Carter took feminists to task for the indiscretion of going public with criticisms, they could only see this as an attack, both upon them and upon their morally superior positions, by someone who clearly did not fully understand or appreciate them. From there the thought that an elected President has always succeeded when seeking renomination also had no significance. Feminists were supremely confident in the notion that they were all about the remaking of history. The idea that feminism grew, not necessarily because of the “new” and liberating ideas of the day, but as a set of reactions both to the corrosive effects of inflation upon the traditional family structure and to the impact of new means of birth control, was not an acceptable view. Feminism’s own ideas were accepted to be the primal causes of social change, at least according to the feminists who were casting recent history. Opinion was fact. Perhaps such outlooks further illustrated the very flaws of narcissism that Christopher Lasch had identified. Whatever the deeper motives, the political effort with Kennedy failed utterly. But, reinforcing the theme of narcissism, when it failed, the outcomes merely revealed to feminists just how strong their opposition was, and how much stronger the commitment needed to be then to fight the good fight. Turning to Edward Kennedy, and largely disdaining Carter even after he had secured the Democratic nomination, these alleged liberals and their party bickered further among themselves. Much the same had occurred in 1968 when Eugene McCarthy lost the Democratic nomination, and he and many of his supporters then did nothing to help party nominee Hubert Humphrey. No matter any personal and psychological gains here, the chief political effect of this action was that it helped elect Richard Nixon. Similarly, only one major politician benefitted from all the Democrats’ divisiveness of 1979–1980— Ronald Reagan. Whether a more fully united Democratic Party could have defeated Reagan is a matter of conjecture, but the Democrats’ divisions, including those led by feminists, did nothing but hurt their chances. In January 1979, just before Carter fired Abzug from the women’s commission, there was not a Democrat anywhere, including Abzug, who would not have gladly taken a Jimmy Carter over a Ronald Reagan in the White House for the next Presidential term. Carter may not have been completely on their side, but in 1979–1980 Abzug and her friends had unwittingly helped elect a President who stood for, and would gladly seek the counsel of women who

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stood for, so very much against which mainstream feminism had for so long and so earnestly fought. As Carter, Kennedy, and the Democrats imploded, and as the political right built more unity and momentum, Bella Abzug’s role in national politics grew ever more marginal, and this remained so. There were still plenty of stages on which to “perform.” That was never a problem. There was, as well, always the possibility of going back into electoral politics, but she chose to stay on the periphery. Abzug never challenged Bill Green for his Congressional seat in New York, for example. Indeed she would not run for office again until 1986, and then it was outside New York City. In July of 1980 she did turn sixty, but it was not an “old” sixty by any means. Her husband’s coronary health was still a worry, but it was not such that she had to stay close to home all the time, although the many speaking engagements and appearances she took on were such that she could drop them if there was ever a need to be home. She had always been a popular figure on the speakers’ circuit, especially at colleges and universities, but also at women’s organizations, Jewish clubs, and political groups. Starting in 1979, she became a highly visible speaker, taking tours that lasted several weeks, often making two or three appearance in a single day. After being fired by Carter, from February to April she appeared all over the country—Seattle, Tallahassee, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Boston. It was endless, and she was tireless. She was mad about what Carter had done, and such overwhelming friendly audiences as she met on campuses gave her some emotional compensation. In an environment of idolatry, she indulged herself in unprovable what-ifs that reinforced feminist assumptions. One of her themes held: “I think if I had been a man, I would be in the United States Senate today.” (One theme to which she did not turn was: If she had not openly declared that she would not support Moynihan if he won the 1976 New York Senate primary.) She also attacked Carter, claiming “he, like most male politicians, just really doesn’t have the concept of what women’s real problems are.” The thinking was tautological, but it appeared to be effective with her audiences. There was certainly no point in anyone disagreeing in such a celebratory context. The gender-centered modalities of complaint gave verbiage and license to the people to whom she urged to go forth and do more of the same. This was useful, for among her hopes here, in addition to collecting speaker’s fees, was that of building upon gender-identity as a basis for future political organizing and power, especially within the Democratic Party. 7 With her reactions to Carter’s economic efforts to combat inflation, Abzug further hardened her views on the unique positions in which women found themselves in the nation’s economy. Because so many women had entered the work force later in life than most men, and with the rising divorce rates, child care pressures, and ongoing inflation, the state of women’s in-

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comes, she felt, was being especially victimized. In addition to pressuring the President for a reinvigoration of spending in Federal social programs, Abzug felt the anomalies provided a political base that could be activated. Women, she felt, possessed great political power and potential, if only they could be awakened and act on their possibilities. In April of 1979, Abzug joined with two other former Congresswomen, Patsy Mink of Hawaii and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke of California to form an organization which they entitled “Women USA.” Trumpeting the political possibilities of the organization, Abzug held forth about how women are beginning now to understand the connections of their personal economic situations to matters of corporate power, defense budgets, oil prices, and inflation. In obvious reference to Carter, Abzug snarled about how women are “told we’re going to cut the budget and inflation is going to go away, and it does not go away. It gets worse. . . . The question is whether it is the corporations or the women and children who are going to be dealt with fairly in this country?” 8 It was good rhetoric, and it resounded nicely with an enthusiastic crowd gathered in support of the new organization at a May 1 noon rally in Washington. To any astute observers, however, the assertions bristled with questions. The sense of corporations standing in opposition to the needs of women and children, though an emotionally compelling image, demanded an acceptance of the assumption of seeing corporations in a malevolent light. Even in such a light, it cast the issue of gender as the compelling matter, more important than any such other factor as economic class. Apparently working-class men did not figure into Abzug’s cogitations, and traditional class conflict was not her political goal or desire. The question of women or poor people in general being the ones who were being victimized by the Carter-era economy was a matter over which economists and statisticians would debate to no single conclusion, and Abzug was neither an economist nor a statistician. She was a politician. She was interested in generating a greater gender consciousness to put to political use. The academic questions as to her intellectual precision and legitimacy were extraneous, and likely irritating, especially as it could imply that her rhetoric was simply exploiting the travails of poor women. The chief question was whether she could generate any political impact. Other women were pushing the same line of thinking in conscious support of Abzug’s efforts. Carol Burris, president of an organization called the Women’s Lobby, hailed the virtue of “making Women USA really visible,” as it was necessary to “make sure that Congress understands that all those budget issues that the President fired Bella over are real issues and that women care about them.” The fact was that Carter had not fired Abzug over budget issues. Burris’s statement revealed the degree to which one, and only one, interpretation of Carter’s dismissal of Abzug had been set in stone and

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was now a motivating piece of rhetoric. Any rejoinders that focused on the problematic fact that Abzug and her committee had gone public with criticisms were not to be considered; they were not of the party line. Beyond Burris, others also saw the formation of Women USA as “a byproduct of Abzug’s celebrated confrontation with President Carter.” 9 Carter may have been a victim of such feminist castings of history, but that was his political problem. The fact that some had now cast Abzug’s dismissal as a “celebrated confrontation” underscored the ways that various feminists wanted very much to use the issue for political purposes. The important question had nothing to do with who was factually correct about the history at hand. The issue was whether the framing of the relevant issues along gender lines, as opposed to class or any other such strictures, could combine with the rallying point about Abzug’s firing to draw women into political action. In the degree to which the motives for Women USA involved any sort of chivalric notions of redeeming Abzug’s honor in the wake of her dismissal, the responses of women may have been somewhat limited. Most who were outraged about the firing were already active feminists. With Women USA, key questions concerned whether budgetary issues could be successfully cast as women’s issues, whether the argument could bring forth new numbers of women into political activism, and whether those activists could make a difference in the nomination and election of particular candidates. Abzug understood the pressing need to pull more women into the political arena. Older feminist issues like the ERA and abortion certainly remained important, but by 1979 it was clear that those who would be activated by such matters had already entered the political fray in one form or another. Abzug believed, with the ongoing national “stagflation,” that a new emphasis upon broader economic concerns could draw more support. The key was women who had, up to then, not necessarily been part of any feminist organization but who were concerned, perhaps even angry about the ways that the economy and corporate power were affecting them. How previously established stands within feminist organizations about such matters as abortion and the ERA may have to undergo revisions if the hoped-for new numbers of activists came forth was a matter for possible consideration. Ideally, if the rising ranks of Women USA produced differences of opinion over previously central feminist positions, there would be accommodations. Often, however, there would be some high-handed imperiousness. There had been signs of this before. In regard to the most emotionally charged of the era’s issues—abortion— a group of feminists had started an organization back in 1972 which they called “Feminists for Life.” Like Bella Abzug, they were deeply concerned with the lack of choices that women often had especially as they faced economic and personal troubles. They saw a need for better forms of medical

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coverage and child care, for equality of opportunity in the professions regardless of gender, and for so many of the other points of the feminist agenda. They also argued, however, to the extreme consternation of other feminists, that the option of abortion was hurting women. Some were against it for the straightforward reasons of their own personal morality. Others argued as well that the choice of abortion insidiously gave many social service administrations in various levels of government a relatively cheap and easy solution with which to “help” women in economic difficulties who found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. It was the least expensive option for many women receiving public assistance. These were hardly arguments that most self-identifying feminists wanted to hear. Because the Feminists for Life were always dead-set against abortion, the organization was utterly vilified by much of mainstream feminism. The vilification continued well into the twenty-first century. At her libertarian best, Abzug would acknowledge the need to respect a diversity of viewpoints, even in regard to such a painfully important issue as abortion. But she and others were not always their most liberal selves in such situations. Disagreements over the issue of abortion were always heated. What was unconscionable were the efforts to limit the free speech by selfproclaimed feminists who happened to hold different views than the feminist norm in regard to any emotionally charged issue. The machinations in the Houston convention had shown some of this. When some feminists broke with a most central component of feminist orthodoxy, Abzug and her compatriots were hardly accommodating. In seeking a broad-based movement among women, Abzug had to contend, both in her own soul and in the sensibilities and behavior of her many colleagues, with illiberal tendencies that gave them a somewhat inflexible image with which they would struggle. Another set of conundrums cropped up for Abzug in 1979 when she and other feminists in New York became active in efforts to curb the seemingly runaway proliferation of all sorts of pornography. Prior to that point, many conservatives had decried the spread of “dirty” movies, magazines, and other materials as immoral. Conservatives had also seen it as part of the liberal, anything-goes style of the late 1960s and early 1970s, of which feminism and open gay and lesbian activism had been very much a part. In 1979, however, many feminists and feminist organizations began to speak up against pornography, claiming that it hurt and degraded women and encouraged violence. The links to violence were always hard to demonstrate. Nations like Sweden and Denmark, which had very permissive attitudes and laws about the “adult materials” that many would deem pornographic, had very low levels of crime and violence against women. Meanwhile nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which had long established severely restrictive measures against pornography, had (and have) rather high levels of crime and violence against women. The arguments could never be resolved along such lines of “causation.”

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Definitions, both in general and in legalistic terms, were always fuzzy throughout the pornography debates. Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum about pornography—“I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”—may have yielded a few chuckles, but it provided few resolutions. Still, the lack of both clear definitions and proof of causation with respect to violence never curbed the aggressiveness of those who wanted to limit pornography, including, ironically, such groups as feminists who had considered themselves of the era’s political left. The questions of definition and the debates over links to crimes and violence were crucial because the raising of the issue of pornography naturally prompted questions about the First Amendment implications at hand. What was pornography, and did it present “a clear and present danger” that necessitated political control? These would be the chief points of political complexity that the issue of pornography would raise. Some feminists appeared to have no problem with the idea of restricting speech they did not like. Others were less sure about the “slippery slope” that such truculence could avail. The then newly famous writer Erica Jong was one who was wary about censorship. Her 1973 novel Fear of Flying, had been one of the early darlings of fiction among many feminists. While Jong clearly implied that sexual liberation did not necessarily give women political and economic independence, the book’s frank openness about sexuality was to many its most resonating feature, and that could certainly be interpreted as pornographic. It definitely was viewed as such among many religious conservatives of the day and since. Grasping the potentially embarrassing contradictions here among her feminist friends, Jong stood against censorship. Here she also raised the intriguing point of a class dimension affecting the debate. She noted that as long as pornography had only occupied the attention of the upper classes of a given time (the Marquis de Sade’s or Voltaire’s, for example), there would be little sense of a need for restrictions. Now that common people were consuming pornography, outcries of danger arose. “One man’s porn is another man’s literature,” she chided, adding that somehow a truck driver was more of a threat to a wealthy, polite world than the Marquis de Sade. Jong noted warily that efforts at censorship can easily “spring back against anyone who wants to change society.” 10 A major question here was whether other feminists would listen. Most of the other leading New York feminists of the late 1970s did not share Erica Jong’s libertarianism. Susan Brownmiller was one major antipornography activist in New York at this time. She saw pornography as part of a pattern of violence against women, but the cause/effect relationship she claimed was something more asserted than proven. Brownmiller’s standing as a commentator on patterns of violence against women was strongly based on a book she wrote in 1975 on the issue of rape, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. In it she contended that the crime was much more than

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just an act of violence against women. (Male victims of rape did not appear to concern her.) She attempted to assert a bigger political implication—that rape, like lynching against blacks, was but a magnification of a broader pattern, in this case of male oppression of women. As she saw the problem to be then a much wider patriarchal issue than the deviance of the small minority of men (or women) prone to acts of violence, her desire to restrict anything she regarded as pornography was part of her outlook. As rape was illegal, anything she connected to it should be illegal as well. Within her perspective on rape, such logical questions as those then concerning the issue of male victims, or female perpetrators, were left unaddressed, with an underlying McCarthyist threat that any who criticized any aspect of her perspectives could be accused of being insensitive about the issue of rape. When Brownmiller was writing her book, she went to see Bella Abzug in the context of Abzug’s legal work back in the 1940s on the Willie McGee rape case in Mississippi. Along with McGee’s other attorneys, Abzug had always held that there had been no rape, and that McGee and the alleged rape victim had been having a consensual affair. Subsequent evidence since McGee’s conviction and electrocution corroborated that. Brownmiller neither knew all the evidence, nor did she apparently want to hear of any that would augur against her ontology about patriarchal female victimization. She was indeed fully prepared and needed to cast the “had an affair” explanation as not only false but part of “that effort to shift the blame in these cases to the white woman, either she was hysterical and having a fantasy, or she’d been having a long affair with the person.” The use of such defense explanations further confirmed for Brownmiller the political patterns involving the oppression of women. With the McGee case, Brownmiller could happily add how the oppressors of women could now more fully include the traditional political left. It was quite pleasing for her to see evidence of male domination not just from conservatives but on all parts of the political spectrum, as it gave her further proof of how deeply women were oppressed, with the construct of gender thus magnificently transcending all older political configurations. “The Communist Party,” she decried, “was always spearheading the defenses in these inter-racial rape cases and always said, ‘Everyone knew they were really having an affair.’ There’s a whole history in the left, they always wrote ‘rape’ with quotation marks around it, if it was a black-on-white case.” For Brownmiller, there was a joy in being able to cast all evidence and arguments in rape cases as showing how deeply entrenched were the patterns of oppression against women, and how her depth of sensitivity and analysis eclipsed all traditional left-right antipodes of politics. Given the horrible nature of the crime it was, and is, risky to criticize anyone posturing outrage about it. It was like any criticizing of Joseph McCarthy inviting charges that one must be a communist and sympathetic to Joseph Stalin. Brownmiller had

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her conclusions, and she was looking for corroboration. Her stands against pornography held a similarly closed-ended character. Any questioning of matters within the context of First Amendment rights would be construed to indicate that the critic actually favored pornography and was uncaring about violence against women, all illustrating just how deeply entrenched were the forces with which she and her colleagues had to do battle. When Brownmiller came to Abzug’s office to discuss the McGee case, Brownmiller remembered that Abzug “got very angry with me and escorted me out of her office.” Here Brownmiller cavalierly assumed that “she [Abzug] felt very threatened,” 11 a common catchall term in some feminist discourse of the day. Abzug’s sense of the truth of McGee’s innocence was likely not threatened in any way. Brownmiller’s posture of outrage marked an element of feminism, which she was spearheading. It involved an accepted party line that was going to be undermined here if all the facts of a case like McGee’s gained full exposure. In 1973, Willie McGee was long gone. Was it then worth it to Abzug to tell the full truth to Brownmiller, and thus undercut such moral certainties that were important in regard to the growth of the political movement that was feminism? If there was any sense of anything being threatened here, it was the mantra of feminism that Brownmiller was assuming to be an axiom—that the patterns of oppressive patriarchy were clearly in evidence and even included the 1940s Leftists’ defense of black men accused of rape. Abzug knew the truth about Willie McGee’s innocence. She also knew that Brownmiller did not want to face it. Brownmiller needed to believe in the notion of women being society’s ultimate sufferers, more so than even African Americans. Her book on rape marked an effort to demonstrate such an outlook. (The fact that she modeled the work after a study of lynching by Herbert Aptheker implied something different and was more than a bit paradoxical.) Many in the 1970s, sensitive to the obvious history of suffering borne by African Americans, were irritated by the posturings of some feminists to the effect that theirs was the ultimate case of suffering in human history. Abzug was one who certainly knew much of the history of African Americans and other minorities. Her enthusiasm for feminism never overtly countered any sense of the sufferings of others. When such a colleague as Susan Brownmiller then brought forth such selfentitling interpretations of the past, Abzug had to face that conflict. Her anger at Brownmiller may have been rooted in the fact that such conflicts were not the least bit pleasing to her. She knew the historical truths and did not care to spend a second of time having her political work having to operate in conflict with that history. Cases like that of Willie McGee, as Brownmiller so loosely and conveniently grasped it, supported her preconceived outlook. Abzug could not accept it. Her response was not to correct the facts but to get angry. “It was the first time,” Brownmiller recalled, that “I personally saw her temper.” Brown-

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miller was only capable of seeing Abzug’s anger as a consequence of the uncomfortable “truths” she was presenting to Abzug about her once defending a rapist in a way that disgraced the alleged rape victim. Abzug was more likely angry about being confronted by a political activist and ally who was using feminism to induce conclusions which she, Abzug, fully knew to be false and in which she had a professional and emotional investment. It may have been an anger driven by her knowledge of how she had to tell less than the whole truth so as not to curb enthusiasms and prompt any divisions among feminists as its political momentum was growing. It was a great joy for feminists like Brownmiller to posture their male opposition to involve even much of the political left. It nurtured their self-image of being the only true radicals of this, or any era. Abzug was no less committed a feminist, but she did not care for pipe dreams. While there certainly may have been an element of narcissistic rage in Abzug’s instantaneous reaction to Browmiller, she was not about to have Willie McGee subject to further exploitation. She chose to show Brownmiller the door. 12 The politics of feminism, like those of many insurgent movements, forced Abzug to make common cause with people who did not share her levels of knowledge, sophistication, or insight. But she was not an academic or a theologian, she was a politician, and such uncomfortable and anger-inducing compromises are part of the realities of politics. Some of the same sorts of tensions were growing for Abzug and others in regard to their liberalism, their legal training, and their dedication to First Amendment principles as they encountered many new issues. Support for Edward Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne notwithstanding, was another such case. With the matter of pornography, the adolescent certainty with which some feminists carried forth had some of the same uninformed, naive certainty that Brownmiller brought to the issue of rape. In New York, in September and October of 1979, feminists held a conference and a demonstration against pornography. As the issue was raised, the matter of the First Amendment naturally came forth. Reporter Leslie Bennetts of the New York Times went to the conference and asked many feminists about the matter of free speech and how they reconciled their antipornography views to the issues of civil liberties. Bennetts actually found many feminists simply, and haughtily, casting the matter aside as something that did not deserve to be taken seriously. Among those interviewed was Gloria Steinem, for example, who casually tossed off the First Amendment here as “a false issue.” The simple-minded hypocrisy was obvious. At least as alarming were the stated views of Susan Brownmiller. Favoring a ban on all displays of pornography in New York City, with the definition of pornography apparently left to her, Brownmiller rhapsodized, “I would do it if I were in charge—and deal with the civil libertarians afterward.” Yet more compelling than the disdain for the Constitution, perhaps, was the wealth-

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driven self-absorption that enabled the hypocrisy and the flippant tonality. Abzug had felt the need to toss Susan Brownmiller out of her office when considering the possibility of feminism facing the reality of racism being a greater evil than sexism in regard to the Willie McGee case. Here she had no need to be so abrupt with such friends as Steinem and Brownmiller. She joined with the other two to take a stand against pornography. At no time did she take her colleagues to task for any casual views of the First Amendment. As usual, however, Abzug did show more legalistic subtlety than her colleagues with respect to the question of free speech and the issue of pornography. No capable attorney would ever dare toss away the First Amendment as “a false issue,” and Abzug certainly did not. “I do not believe it is necessary for us to interfere with anyone’s constitutional right to produce pornography,” she declared to the New York Times. “But,” she added, “that doesn’t require us to encourage and assist in the proliferation of pornographic materials on the streets and in the stores.” 13 On the surface, that sounded like a meaningless statement. What feminist had ever “encouraged” or “assisted” with pornography in the first place? The key was that prior to 1979, few had ever addressed the issue, and at that point no feminist at the October meeting in New York would have cared to deal seriously with the implications of such questions which asked whether such a book as Fear of Flying was pornography and needed to be publically banned. Like any good political organizer, Abzug was interested in the building of political activism. With respect to such an issue as pornography, details as to targets, subsequent plans of action, and civil liberties issues could all come later. If a feminist like Erica Jong took exception to the idea of limiting free speech, she was simply to be ignored. In 1979 the point was nothing could be done with feminism’s agenda unless there was an activation of a large number of people, and that was Abzug’s immediate goal—have more meetings among the feminist elites to frame (or dictate) an agenda, then have larger demonstrations/meetings to excite others and convey a sense of rising popular will and, from there, put pressure on elected officials for further legislation, inquiries, commissions, and perquisites. It was the same pattern as had occurred with the events around the Houston convention in 1977. If subsequent activists wanted then to violate the First Amendment liberties of others, that would be a problem to be dealt with in the future. As at the Houston convention and elsewhere, Abzug was supremely confident in her ability to persuade, push, and control people within any organization once that organization was in motion. (Whether there was then a certain ambivalence about the fate of civil liberties in regard to people she did not respect was, and is, a vexing question, as was the speculation that she and others delighted in the notion of being able to restrict others’ freedoms.) Regardless of benign or malevolent motives, Abzug’s priority was to nudge ahead the politics then in motion; whatever forms the movement first took

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was not so important. Whether the potentially truculent views of such issues as rape or the First Amendment vis à vis pornography from the likes of Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem would ever take on more illiberal momentum than she could control was not an issue to which she appeared to give much serious care. Politics can make for odd alignments, and with the pornography issue, Abzug and her feminist colleagues were making common cause with such rising religious Right figures as Jerry Farwell. What that said about feminists’ self-proclaimed liberalism was a matter that some academics and intellectuals may have pondered. For Abzug the political issues had priority over any scholastic or philosophical dimensions. On another issue of the day, a similarly odd set of alignments and positions appeared. In January of 1980, as the Carter administration had consciously strengthened the U.S. military and as the Soviet Union had recently invaded Afghanistan, the President spoke of the need for further American military preparedness and of the possibility of reintroducing the draft. With the idea of a draft in mind, Carter noted that such a move could be preceded by the establishment of required military draft registration. As feminist calls for equality between the genders had been all about American public and private institutions for many years, the call for possible draft registration led many to assert that women ought to be as susceptible to the draft as men. This caused quite a stir. Many feminists did not want to be susceptible to military conscription, support for the ERA notwithstanding. Some ERA opponents then chortled at the apparent hypocrisy of women seeking equality but resisting the idea of being equally susceptible to the draft. Conversely, there was equal inconsistency among others who had opposed the ERA at every turn yet now favored women in the military draft. Witnessing such debates, journalist Judy Mann of the Washington Post noted that “it is a peculiarly American phenomenon that we can hunker down in the shadow of World War III and devote our attention, not to the cause of world survival, but to that vital detail of whether women should be drafted. If we could only get the Soviet Union to hold a similar debate,” she joked, “we might discover the way to world peace.” The Soviets would never discuss such a matter, of course. The debate was indeed “a peculiarly American phenomenon,” more precisely, a wealthy white American phenomenon. Mann’s musings offered a useful insight as to how so many feminist issues could indeed dominate in the media and in many areas of American private and institutional life, even though other matters involving greater economic suffering within other areas of America, let alone other parts of the world were comparatively ignored. Feminist issues repeatedly arose. Their inherent legitimacy did not necessarily justify the media’s attention, but gender matters lent comfortably housed topics of debate among the wealthy, as opposed to disquieting matters more class or racially based. No matter how earnest the

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tone of any issues or discussions may become, it is indeed always easier to grapple with issues and power matters among those who share the same abodes and neighborhoods than to do so with the people who pick up the neighborhoods’ garbage every few days, let alone with the people who pick through that garbage out at dump sites. All the more so when such contrasts are viewed internationally. In regard to the idea of a draft or the draft registration of women, some female activists were indeed alarmed. Anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly announced a nationwide petition drive to urge Congress not to draft women. She used the issue as a further illustration to women as to the dangers that could arise should the ERA pass. She joined those who noted here the ironies in many pro-ERA women also lining up against the draft. To Schlafly it was obvious: the language of the ERA certainly indicated that its supporters should not just accept but demand that any such imposed government duties ought to involve women and men equally. Along a different line, one antiERA argument held that, with the already existing Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, equality between the genders was already a legal reality. If that was so, then those elements of the anti-ERA forces should have recognized that, by then-current law, women should be included in any possible system of military conscription. Well aware of the appearance of potentially embarrassing inconsistencies among feminists who wanted equality but did not want to be drafted, various feminist leaders sought different lines of rhetorical rejoinders. “If equal rights is all about insisting that women should be as warmongering as men,” fumed Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado, “then we’ve blown it.” This may have constituted a nice rhetorical huff at the logical implications of a position which Schroeder did not care to consider, nonetheless the draft issue remained. Additionally, any anti-draft assumptions to the effect that women were, and are, inherently more pacific had, and has, never been proven, but these remained useful images for rhetorical poses. Eleanor Smeal reacted to the idea of a draft with more simple-minded selfishness: “We don’t want to be soldiers.” Along with her colleagues at Women USA like Patsy Mink and Yvonne Burke, Bella Abzug spoke both with less selfishness and hypocrisy and with more than mere emotional bombast. Abzug’s position was to oppose the drafting of anyone. Drawing from her own legacies going back to Women Strike for Peace, she asserted that “Women have always led antiwar movements, and we must speak out now against efforts to get us into another war.” The way out of the conundrum of women being susceptible to the draft was to oppose the draft entirely and remind everyone of the alleged notion that women feel more strongly about peace. The hope, again, was to rally theretofore silent women into political action. Still, in opposing the draft Abzug did find herself standing in league with her ERA rival Phyllis Schlafley. She would concede that if a draft registration were

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instituted, regardless of her promise of efforts to block it, “both men and women should be included.” Soon thereafter, in June of 1981, the Supreme Court actually upheld the Constitutionality of a male-only draft, but with an actual draft not established, significant protests from women and men did not ensue. Abzug may have envisioned Women USA would grow much like the anti-war movement, whose growth had been so intoxicating to activists of the 1960s. With no military draft, and with the popularity of Reagan, her movement developed little popular momentum. She and others in the peace movements of the 1980s pushed for unilateral disarmament moves, called for a nuclear freeze, and opposed the proliferation of nuclear power stations. The issues were there to be voiced, but they gained no levels of popularity that approached those of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Movements like Women USA largely curled up within their own rhetoric and membership. 14 While some feminists would gladly tread upon the spirit of civil liberties in regard to pornography, and while others could oppose the conscription of women while not opposing the same for men, Abzug could evince a certain truculence of her own. At the same time as the moves were growing against pornography and the campaign for Kennedy and against Carter was rolling, there remained the big issue of the Equal Rights Amendment. Even with the ratification extension passed by Congress, the prospect of securing passage in the needed thirty-eight states was anything but assured. At this point, a key battleground state was Illinois. The state had not voted passage, and within the large media market of Chicago, coverage of the issue had national as well as local significance. One of the most popular daytime television talk shows of the era, The Phil Donahue Show, was based in Chicago. Throughout the decade of the 1970s, Donahue and his show had been a major factor in television’s discussion and popularization of many feminist themes and ideas. He knew how to market to the nation’s daytime audience which, some feminists’ claims of impoverishment notwithstanding, remained largely that of economically comfortable women who had the leisure time for daytime television watching. While being undeniably friendly to feminist causes, Donahue was a responsible journalist and always strove to give fair time to opposing views on the various subjects he discussed on his program. In regard to the Equal Rights Amendment, Donahue hosted plenty of pro-amendment people, but he also hosted some who were against it, the most important and persuasive of whom was Abzug’s antagonist Phyllis Schlafly. With strong hopes of inducing the Illinois legislature to pass the ERA, various supporters, including Abzug, did not want the airing of any opposing views, especially Schlafly’s, for fear that they could stimulate popular support and generate pressure on the state legislature in a negative direction.

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An ERA vote in the Illinois legislature was coming the very week that Schlafly was scheduled to appear on Donahue’s show. Donahue was married to Abzug’s old friend, actress Marlo Thomas. Thomas recalled: “Bella called me and said, ‘You’ve got to tell him not to put her on.’” By no legal stretch did Abzug’s efforts at behind-the-scenes manipulation violate the spirit of free speech or free press as did Gloria Steinem’s Constitutionally outrageous dismissal of the First Amendment as “a false issue” with regard to pornography. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that if an influential conservative daytime talk show host had hosted Schlafly and her associates on the subject of the ERA and given little to no time to the likes of Abzug and Steinem, Abzug would have been all too ready to pounce with arguments about fairness and the responsibilities that come with a free press and media. Indeed in 1970 she had effectively used such arguments when she ran for Congress against radio personality Barry Farber. Elements of self-entitlement and hypocrisy were quite clear. Marlo Thomas did comply with Abzug’s request. She tried to persuade her husband to keep Schlafly off the air, emphasizing to him the fact of this being so critical a moment in regard to the fate of the ERA. Having hosted many pro-ERA people, including Eleanor Smeal and Abzug, Donahue would not compromise himself or his show’s credibility. Thomas recalled him telling her: “If you don’t understand why I have to put on Phyllis Schlafly . . ., then you don’t understand what I do.” Thomas recognized the obvious: “I knew that was going to be his answer.” While she knew the attempt would be futile, Marlo Thomas had done the best she could for her friend. When she told Abzug the outcome, however, Abzug showed anything but gratitude for the effort. As Thomas recalled, “She was furious . . . [and] banged the phone down.” Perhaps Abzug was projecting a sense of how her own husband had always yielded to all political issues upon which she had decided. Of course, as he supported everything she did in law and politics, she never imposed any demands upon his work as a stock broker or novelist. Similarly, Phil Donahue likely never imposed any demands upon issues regarding Marlo Thomas’ acting, and he was not about to let her politics, which he personally supported, to diminish the credibility of his highly successful and lucrative television program. This logic had no impact upon Abzug at the crucial time of the Illinois vote on the ERA, however. Political needs blithely overrode her cognizance of fairness principles. Schlafly appeared. Later, Illinois did not ratify. Abzug wanted something, and any logical impediments were to be brushed aside or met by a slammed telephone. If Lyndon Johnson behaved like that (and he often did), Abzug would certainly have criticized; meanwhile she always believed that women in power would behave differently. While her lawyerly instincts were such that Abzug was not advocating any violations of First Amendment rights, Abzug was certainly asking for a vio-

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lation of the spirit of balanced responsibility that undergirds those same rights, especially with respect to a free press. Had she succeeded, there would not have been any hint of regret. One of her old adversaries, Robert Moses had once mused, “if the ends don’t justify the means, what does?” Abzug hardly agreed with Moses on various issues, yet somehow it was different when she wanted to achieve something. It was not different. She was willing to do all she could to get what she wanted politically. That was hardly a crime, nor was it unusual for a politician. But any notion that women would bring a different voice to politics was exhibiting a decided hollowness. Perhaps a better tonality could have made a difference with the outcome of the ERA. Mary Russell of the Washington Post raised this very point in 1978. “The women’s movement,” she noted, “must also review its political tactics. A weary Chicago legislator who had voted consistently for the ERA says the stridency on both sides was wearing him down. ‘To tell you the truth, I would have promised my vote to the first side which offered not to yell at me anymore.’” The tonality of Bella Abzug could always be a potentially counter-productive factor in many sensitive political issues in which she was involved. With the ERA sitting precariously on the edge of failure, hopes for a potentially more productive lighter tone from her were absolutely out of the question. She was at her most ferocious, even with her close friends, and there was no stopping her. Apropos of the plight of various political prisoners of the day, there was graffiti in the men’s rooms of several Greenwich Village bars at the time which hailed: “Free Martin Abzug.” Bella Abzug could be troubled at taunts. Digs at her husband always made her maddest; she genuinely loved him. But the “long suffering spouse” image was there to be exploited, and the truculence with which she pursued such issues as the ERA fueled that perspective about her. 15 One stubborn feminist effort in regard to the ERA was to try to induce organizations, mostly in academe but others wherever possible, to avoid holding meetings and conventions in states that had not ratified the amendment. One problem here was that within the geography of many nonratifying states, such as Illinois and Florida, there was a clear division between the rural areas, where the opposition was strongest, and the urban areas whose people and representatives were generally more favorable. As the hotels, restaurants, and convention centers, where virtually all major meetings occurred, lay in urban areas, the boycotting of convention sites in non-ERA states tended to hurt the pro-ERA regions, whose workers, male and female, were often poor and would have preferred not to be used as dispensable pawns in a poorly played game of political chess. Florida and Illinois would never ratify the ERA. Boycotts of convention sites hurt the hotel and convention workers of Miami and Chicago. Conservative politicians in Southern and Central Illinois and in Central and Panhandle Florida cared not a bit and may have perversely delighted in a little ill fortune

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befalling people in Miami or Chicago. It seemed too that some well-off convention-going feminists did not care to consider the economic class implications of some of their ill-conceived tactics. 16 Amidst Abzug’s and other feminists’ desires to achieve what they wanted for women politically, and in their simultaneous desires to activate the voices of all women, there was always the problem of what would occur if women spoke about issues in ways that violated any political tenets of mainstream feminism. Feminists who did not believe in abortion were one example, but their small numbers and minimal coverage in the media rendered them not terribly problematic to the feminist mainstream. Another troublesome matter reappeared for Abzug and her colleagues when the United Nations sponsored its second International Women’s Conference. The first such conference had taken place in Mexico City in 1975. This second one convened in Copenhagen in July 1980. Abzug always regarded such meetings to be enormously important. While any UN gathering could obviously not pass actual acts or decrees that could directly alter the existing laws and customs of any nation, Abzug held hopes that such meetings could lead to the planting of seeds of thought and action among concerned women that could, in turn, generate a whole set of initiatives for positive changes for women all over the world. At one level, the question of what forms this would or could take was not so important to her. She simply wanted to start processes moving. Her outlook thus had a self-image of complete inclusiveness. Problems came when women from various parts of the world stepped forth with ideas for which Abzug and her friends did not care. At Mexico City some sentiments were expressed against Israel and about how the gathering’s leadership needed to be more respectful of and sensitive to the needs of the Third World. During and after the Mexico City gathering, with the knowledge of another meeting to come in Copenhagen, many women and men met in various nations, largely from the Third World and from the Soviet bloc. They felt they had thought more fully about the problems regarding the needs of women who did not hold the same priorities as those from North America and Western Europe. At Copenhagen they came forth rather forcefully. Most problematic here was the initiative, led by Palestinian delegates and many others sympathetic to them, condemning the state of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. This had come forth in Mexico City and had more general roots in the 1975 “Zionism is Racism” resolution by the UN. On the one hand, American and European feminists like Abzug wanted to foster an environment in which women were free to speak their minds. What then were they to do with such free expressions that were contrary to the beliefs and sensibilities of a leadership that appeared overly weighted with North Americans and Western Europeans? There could be no resolution here, and the Copenhagen meeting grew quite rancorous.

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The official goals of the meeting involved the setting of new targets for women’s advancement in the upcoming decade, but controversial political issues interceded throughout. At the convention’s opening, Jihan el-Sadat, wife of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, rose to address the meeting. Madame Sadat had been a staunch and outspoken supporter of women’s rights in Egypt. Meanwhile, Mr. Sadat had sought to make peace with Israel, a matter which had not been well received among many people and leaders in the Middle East. As Mrs. Sadat stepped to the rostrum in Copenhagen, protesters began derisively clapping and chanting “Palestine! Palestine!” Delegates from Iran, Turkey, Uganda, East Europe, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Syria, and other Arab states walked out as she spoke. At other times in the meeting, Arab and PLO delegates took every opportunity to denounce Israel, Egypt, and the Camp David peace accords. The Israel versus Palestine issue was not the only controversy at Copenhagen. Chinese delegates attacked the Soviet Union. Cuban representatives denounced the United States. There were walkouts and counter-walkouts, resolutions, counter resolutions, kidnaping threats, and protests. Discussions of women’s places in the world and their progress in such areas as health and education gave way to harsh explications upon Third World ideologies and Mideast politics. Abzug had been critical when she felt President Carter did not want her and her colleagues to range widely in the issues they raised. Now other women were raising widely ranging issues which Abzug felt to be inappropriate. Some delegation leaders at the conference tried to keep the tone civil, so much so that some noted the use of careful “UN’ese” language was becoming quite irritating. Karin Ahrland, a member of Sweden’s Parliament, noted: “We used the male politicians’ language, which means we spend a lot of time saying nothing.” Not only was productive ground hard to find, there was no consensus about procedures as to how to seek it. 17 Ahrland, Abzug, and about three hundred others departed from the chaos of the official conference and held meetings at nearby Copenhagen University where the topics and language could be more free-ranging yet without rancor. This was what Abzug hoped would occur—women freely speaking about what troubled them, leading to a sense of shared grievances that could prompt scores of ad-hoc cooperative efforts that may nudge forth meaningful change in any number of places and ways. Having now separated themselves from the discomforting questions of the allegedly wrong sorts of delegates, Abzug and her friends could speak in ways that pleased them. “We are told,” Abzug noted, “it is economic conditions, reinforced by discriminatory attitudes that keep women out of political power. Yet,” she emphasized with her usual lawyerly snap, “we must realize that without political power, women will not be able to change the socio-economic conditions that oppress them.” Economics before politics, politics before economics—the debate here was unresolvable. Abzug provided wonderful rhetoric, and it came with the hope

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that it could engender people to auger for change in many corners of the world. The politically charged priorities of Palestinian women were another matter. Even amidst the headiness of a selected open forum in Copenhagen, some of the same divisive points reappeared. On the one hand, when Abzug was leading a discussion, she asked the assembled women what they would “do to change things” were each “the prime minister of your country.” What arose was a variety of ideas, but with an allegedly greater emphasis on such issues as the promotion of literacy than may have come forth were the audience more traditional and male. Such responses fortified for Abzug her sense of the usefulness of such meetings and of the idea that women could and would use power differently if they ever had the opportunity. Elsewhere, however, divisions remained a leitmotif. Abzug wanted to discuss the issue of nuclear power. Ever since her days in Women Strike for Peace, she had always held a great investment in the view that women would always see the issue differently than men. At Copenhagen she found various Third World women dismissing the matter as peripheral to their concerns. One Guianan delegate noted: “I see no need to talk about nuclear power. . . . It doesn’t even exist in my country. We’re still looking for the bread and the little bit of butter that goes with it.” Abzug asked another of her favorite questions here: “If women ruled the world, would the world be any different?” Contrary to her hopes, the most poignant response was: “Which women?” 18 The idea of “women” transcending matters of ethnicity, religion, and nationality was a wonderful dream, but it seemed to resonate largely among those from Western Europe and North America with the wealth-enabled leisure time to ponder it. Amidst the Middle East controversies that tinged the conference, Bella Abzug made a direct effort to speak with people from one radical nation: Iran. In July of 1980, Americans’ attention was remaining riveted to the fact that Americans continued to be held hostage in the capital city of Teheran. Abzug went to a meeting of the Iranian delegation at the Copenhagen convention and asked the delegates, as women and mothers, to do what they could for the release of America’s hostages. Her request fell on deaf ears. Doubtlessly, Abzug was not surprised, but she likely felt it was worth the effort, with the hope in possibly planting some sort of seed among a few, or even one, of the Iranian women that could eventually lead to efforts to alter many traditional (and now growing) gender-degrading ways in Iran. On the surface, nothing changed one bit. Indeed, Mahri Bakhtiar of the Iranian delegation countered Abzug’s request by asking Abzug why American women were not marching on the White House to urge President Carter to hand the deposed Shah over to Iranian authorities. Each side in the discussion could claim complete sincerity, as well as argue that the other was posturing in regard to their respective domestic political priorities of their male leaders. 19

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In the end, the Copenhagen conference passed a 186-point plan of action. It included language equating Zionism with racism, and it called for all UN funds allocated for Palestinian women to be channeled through the PLO. The United States voted “No” to each. Led by Sarah Weddington, the U.S. delegation tried unsuccessfully to split the document into parts to be voted separately. Canada, Israel, and Australia supported the U.S. positions. Twenty-two European nations officially abstained. The meeting was thus torn apart at any number of other levels. Many expressed surprise that a women’s conference could be so disrupted. Here the Boston Globe noted ruefully: Women are supposed to agree on common goals despite differences. Women are supposed to rise above the divisiveness of politics. Surely, the UN conference challenges the naive assumption that women exist in a political vacuum where some kind of international sisterhood takes precedence over national self-interest. In a perfect world, the delegates . . . would have unanimously recognized that women have very little economic and political power. They would have seen that women will remain at the bottom of the ladder as long as they are illiterate and in bad health. They would have pledged to work together to fight sexism and religious fanaticism and political ideologies that keep women down. But this is not a perfect world and women are, after all, only human. And delegates from 94 countries saw fit to endorse a plan of action that mixes politics and policy that simply don’t mix. 20

Abzug had not been pleased whenever such divisive issues came forth in the UN or at the 1975 meeting in Mexico City. Her staunch support of Israel never wavered, so in Copenhagen she was always quite resistant to such intrusions into gender discussions as came from Palestinians and their supporters. She was not so naive as to believe that such divisions would stop coming up simply because the discussants of a major issue were women. Still, she appeared to cling to the belief that such barriers could be overcome, that the notion that gender could prove a key ingredient in some sort of new political ways which, however forged, would be definably better than older modes of diplomacy and exchange. To her, it was far too soon to abandon any such gendered notions as impossible dreams. The next such UN women’s meeting would be in Nairobi in 1985, and various women’s leaders, including Abzug, began to plan how they would do everything they could to prevent a recurrence of such Copenhagen altercations and embarrassments. How they would do this could lead to other embarrassments, however, and even if they succeeded, the question of any practical results that could come from any UN meeting still remained vexing. At Copenhagen, feminists from the United States accused the insurgent women from the Soviet bloc and from the Arab states of using politics to be disruptive. Of course, that was what many Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States had been fuming about for years in regard to many of

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the activities of Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and so many other feminists. When UN officials tried to tell the Palestinians that they need not be disruptive as their views were being heard, Palestinian women scoffed. At various junctures, Abzug had scoffed similarly at various Democratic leaders, including Jimmy Carter. The ironies were there, but for the moment, few took note. At Nairobi would come other battles and paradoxes. Leaders like Abzug wanted to have a world in which women were free to say and pursue what they wished in their lives. The problem was that a great many women in the world saw their nationalities or their religions to be as or more central to their lives and politics than their gender. Feminists would continually have difficulty with women whose choices as to how to exercise their freedom did not conform to feminist norms. As Abzug was pursuing such an array of feminist causes, she was appearing at times to lose sight of many of the principles that had been the basis of the liberation politics of the movement at its origins. The ways she clung to her notions about both ideology and tactics were eclipsing the basic point that feminism meant that women should be free to make choices for themselves. Perhaps it was too much to ask that any such movement never fall into such compromises, but some ideals were taking a beating as people like Abzug were often impatient with a diversity of views, and they could play a little fast and loose with notions of free speech and of a balanced press and media, all while claiming that women bring a more cooperative and higher tone and morality to political discourse. When Abzug was in the midst of her difficult 1978 Congressional nomination and election battles with Carter Burden and William Green and the prospect of her losing first appeared, one commentator from the New York Post had written in a kind of mock consternation “her novel cannot end this way.” It appeared to some that Abzug’s career had been a kind of noble Dickensian novel, with her just causes of peace and the rights of women and the poor gaining steadily from her efforts. It seemed so unfulfilling and dramatically incorrect that the progress she brought forth would fade at such an incomplete point as occurred in February, 1978. After she had left Congress and then stopped seeking elected office, a key shift had involved her purview becoming more exclusively feminist in nature, and that feminism was itself devolving towards lines of thought that embraced some positions that were less than supportive of traditional liberal principles. She thus seemed to have evolved out of the role of a protagonist in a novel and into one more like that of a heroine in a dramatic opera. The “libretto” of an opera cannot always carry the story. Some Shakespeare-based operas may stand to the contrary, but in many operas the libretto can often be thin and repetitive in its content. It may also be full of disparities and contradictions. The drama, the staging, the lighting, the costumes, and, above all, the music are the charms that sustain the art. Feminism had a great deal of dramatic content for

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political audiences, but the repetitiveness and illiberal contradictions were becoming identifiable drawbacks. The conflicts in Mexico City and Copenhagen were but two of many examples. In the context of a metaphorical opera, the surrounding music and dramatic effects may have lent more thunder, but beyond such metaphorical contexts, could the new, apparently necessary, dramatic enrichments carry the audience to create any lasting political importance? In 1979–1980, that remained an unanswered question. Throughout the “libretto,” Bella Abzug was clearly the diva, and her career was ever more attached to the dramatic operas she and her feministproducer friends chose to stage. They had a dependable audience, some of whom were most enthusiastic, but could their political artistry draw and infuse others with the same enthusiasm? The size of this potential audience would be crucial were any “operas” to have value beyond mere entertainment. Abzug had enormous powers of charm, but she wanted to be more than a mere entertainer. (When she appeared on NBC television’s Tonight Show, Johnny Carson once asked her to strum a bit on the mandolin, which she could play. She refused him, however, declaring firmly, “I’m a politician, not a performer.”) Much more at home with feminists than she was with Johnny Carson, Abzug may have been all too comfortably and egoistically allowing the dramatics of feminism to sweep her into modalities of “performance” far more than she realized, or for which she, at her most serious political levels, had cared one bit. 21 Elected office had provided Abzug a context in which she thrived brilliantly. Now in a freer but narrower political context her style and purview were changing. Personally she was giving herself freer range, yet ideologically she was growing more narrow. Needing her supporters, she did not want to cause any alienation among the faithful, and she certainly did not want to abandon or much refine any major feminist positions on such issues as abortion and pornography. If new arrivals to the feminist movements had different views on such central issues, they were not terribly welcome unless they kept silent. On the international stage, divergent views from foreign nations were not terribly welcome either. If the conundrums over civil liberties and matters of philosophical consistency were perceived problems, they may have been matters which she preferred to ignore or as things best addressed once back in a position of political authority. The problem was she never got there. Both literally and figuratively, she was a good swimmer, but the tides were flowing against her. In 1979 and 1980, whether it was over the issues of gender violence, pornography, the ERA, Carter’s dismissal, the divisiveness of Copenhagen, or the upcoming elections, Abzug’s and other feminists’ hopes for new cadres of politically activated women would simply not materialize to any significant degree. The messages from Abzug and her supporters certainly had a presence in the media, but they did not seem to take hold with many

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voters in ways that would have significant effects on the outcomes of any major primaries or elections, or on the politics of other nations where so many millions of women were truly oppressed. In regard to hopes to change peoples’ ways of viewing their economic state of affairs, the late 1970s was an era in which other leaders besides Abzug made such efforts. Recognizing the difficulties of the economy in the summer of 1979, President Carter tried to confront Americans with his ideas about a “crisis of confidence” that he felt to be affecting the nation. He argued this was a matter that was not just economic in nature but which possessed deeper psychological and spiritual roots. He felt a kind of cooperative spirit of rebirth was needed for the nation to extricate itself out of its malaise. Bella Abzug’s call for women to see gender-based politics as a key to understanding and correcting their economic woes, while a different plea in some of its ideological premises than President Carter’s, was similar in several fundamental respects. Each called upon people to take a hard look at some of the premises that undergirded their behavior. Each called for people to make very serious changes in their outlooks about the ways the economy worked and how they operated within that newly perceived framework. Carter asserted that “the strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.” Abzug too hoped that from many households could come a new consciousness about the gender-based forces that shaped peoples’ ability to provide for themselves. A third, and most politically important similarity between the two, concerned the simple fact that neither Carter nor Abzug were able to alter any great numbers of peoples’ thinking as each wished. Carter himself warned about the nation taking a “path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road,” he said, “lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path,” he predicted, “would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.” 22 To that end, Abzug’s call for greater gender consciousness marked such a potential path of fragmentation, and for any who came to accept “gender” as an overriding world view, the perspective did mark a significant change in politics. Millions of women may have been hurting economically. Most of those who were willing to accept any views that set women apart from men in regard to economic grievances made a political choice and commitment that contrasted with others, who may have felt just as strongly about issues of oppression, but who saw economic difficulties in the context of human and family pressures—matters that women, men, and children shared fully and collectively. Gender was thus a prism, a weltanschauung, there to be employed and exploited, but for many it required a significant detachment of social and psychological ties that held their own compelling legacy and logic, and dissonance.

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Both Carter and Abzug may have been sincere in their beliefs that people could be exhorted to revise many key fundamentals in their thinking and behavior in order to address and relieve their troubles. Each was asking for something that seldom occurs in a wealthy democracy, however. Even more, such changes were unlikely in an era when powerful countervailing messages came from the likes of Ronald Reagan who, and whose supporters, effectively preached that Americans need not change their ways, only their leaders. Politically, Reagan’s approach worked. Carter’s and Abzug’s did not. Who was right outside the realm of politics was a matter that commentators, theologians, academics, and people in general have discussed ever since. It was hard to preach to people about various dimensions of their selfishness. Only the genuinely unselfish would listen in such situations, and most psychiatrists maintain that a narcissistic personality is impossible to address therapeutically. Reagan’s approach told people that following the established pathways of the nation’s mainstream would ultimately see them through their troubles. Feminists were among the many who disagreed strongly here, and they had plenty of organizations and voices. Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Women USA, the Women’s Action League, the Women’s Lobby, the National Organization for Women were all politically active, as were other economically concerned people of the day like Dick Gregory, Ralph Nader, and Barry Commoner. They were all out speaking, writing, and demonstrating. 23 But, right or wrong, and the debates over the issues being raised could never be resolved, Reagan’s was the message that appeared to animate the vast majority of voters, male and female. In the political fights of 1980, a matter which further helped Reaganconcerned feminists, including Abzug, leading their supporters in favor of Edward Kennedy in the Democratic primaries. The resulting divisions and strains here continued well after Carter’s renomination. Within these primary battles, Abzug had a particular tactic in mind. Rather than seeking to become Kennedy delegates explicitly, Abzug, along with Gloria Steinem, urged that women seek to form consciously gender-based delegations at the Democratic National Convention. They hoped that women could be selected on an “uncommitted” or “favorite daughter” basis and that, from there, they could coalesce into a voting bloc. Even the term “favorite daughter” (as opposed to the old “favorite son”) was used to convey a sense of innovativeness and the brave forging of new political vistas. The language was good self-advertising but, in its substance, hardly a new tactic. Abzug expected these delegates would support Kennedy, but she wanted to show a certain gender strength that had an independence from any other’s control. She urged women to pursue this line and projected that it was “not impossible” that women could form a cohesive unit of five hundred delegates of the Democratic total of 3,331. 24 Beyond the hope for leverage at the convention, the ideal here was that the activity could take on a life of its own,

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with women forming a permanent enclave within the Democratic Party, with Abzug as its leader. It was a kind of political sociology seeking to forge its own reality, with Abzug, Steinem and their feminist colleagues not being very successful here. There would indeed be plenty of women at the Democratic convention. Fifty percent of the delegates were women, but they did not form any cohesive bloc under Abzug or anyone else, nor did they exert any hoped-for political pressure on the party’s leadership. To some reporters, the array of political cliques and factions was conveying a sense of deja vu. The New York Times noted that the array of competing interest groups was so predictable that election-year board games not only could be fashioned that way but had been. One board game called “Candidate” was already on sale at Macy’s for thirteen dollars. Decks of “politicards” were also on sale, with various well-ensconced figures assuming predictable roles. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter were the king and queen of diamonds. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were the king and queen of spades. Television figure Barbara Walters was one of the jokers, and, of course, the fearsome Queen of Hearts was Bella Abzug. 25 The old-hat predictability of it all underscored the sense that no great upset was in the offing that year, at either convention or in the overall electoral outcome. Aside from committed and predictable feminists, Abzug’s only other solid base of support at the convention came from the forty-two openly lesbian and gay delegates. They had formed a group called “Gay Vote 1980.” She met with them at an evening party where she loudly exhorted: “All of you come out of the closet! We want this convention to come out of the closet!” Amidst ensuing cheers of “Love you, Bella!” and “Bella for President!” Abzug went on: “Whether it’s Carter or Kennedy, we want to make them both sweat a little.” 26 Given some depressing political pressures in the lives of the lesbian and gay communities of the day such bravado certainly provided some catharsis. For Abzug, however, such temporary fun and ego boosts may have further marginalized her in the minds of the mass of moderate voters in the party, let alone in the general electorate. Conservatives had long since written her off. Abzug enjoyed her supporters, but the hyperbole to which she was prone amidst warm adulation was potentially embarrassing and politically constricting. The three New York elections she had lost showed that she had troubles even in a liberal state. Now that she was attempting a more national movement, the imagery she was establishing with her strongest allies contained risks. Knowing the likely impact in Middle America, the Republican Party delighted in the media coverage of all such matters. On the floor of the Democratic Convention, Abzug did lead feminists in a successful effort to have the party pass a statement of support for the ERA, a matter which some moderates also feared would tip pivotal support in many states toward the Republicans. With the successful passage of ERA support

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at the convention, and still remembering President Carter firing her the year before, Abzug chortled: “The White House . . . has always failed to understand [women’s issues], but they may understand them a bit better today.” The White House likely understood women’s issues and the other major politics of the day just as cogently as Bella Abzug. To Abzug, however, there appeared to be only one way to understand women’s issues and that was to agree with her on every point. In addition to the memory of her firing, Abzug remained extremely indignant over Carter’s willingness to couch the Democratic Party’s support for abortion rights within the context of his personal opposition to it. (Kennedy did much the same.) The fact that Carter held such a moral sense so sincerely that he would express it, no matter any political ramifications, was simply a matter beyond Abzug’s grasp. She wrote an angry letter in the New York Times in which she upbraided the President for the expression of his personal views: Mr. Carter’s “personal objections to abortion” are not only biologically inappropriate (what, after all, do men mean when they say they are personally against abortion, knowing that that can never be a personal decision they will have to make?), they are politically unwarranted by his party’s position.

The fact was that some men and women are faced with decisions about abortion. One did not have to be Jewish to stand in opposition to antiSemitism. Nonetheless, it appeared, while Carter’s expressions of his personal morality were inappropriate, the angry expressions of Abzug’s own views were matters of entitlement. In any case, while her voicing of anger may have endeared her to those already staunchly in her political corner, the disagreement only added to the divisions among the Democrats. The intraparty debate was of lesser importance anyway. Perhaps some of Abzug’s anger here lay in the fact that, deep down, she knew it. For Carter and Democrats who nominated him, the issue was not abortion and the real foe was not Abzug. It was Reagan and the Republicans. 27 Edward Kennedy would fall far short of securing the necessary support to wrest the Democratic nomination from Carter. From there, while many feminists glumly favored neither Carter nor Reagan, those that supported Carter as the lesser evil made no difference, as Reagan won by a wide margin. Reagan’s messages and solutions about such budgetary issues that Abzug and others had tried to exploit to build a feminist political base embodied anything but the sorts of ideas that feminists favored. Late in the campaign, Reagan did coopt a bit of the feminist agenda when he promised to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. This may not have won over many doctrinaire feminists to the Republicans, but the Republicans were not concerned with such groups in the first place, and if the promise picked up a few moderately liberal women’s votes, so much the better. The right wing was not going to

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abandon Reagan because of such a promise. In the end, Reagan won with overwhelming numbers. NOTES 1. Washington Post, January 14, 1979; January 16, 1979. 2. Marguerite Rawalt, Reminiscences, CUOHROC, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 202. 3. Interview with Robin Morgan,, January 30, 2003, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 227. 4. New York Times, January 31, 1980, p. B9; March 17, p. A14. 5. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979), passim; Jimmy Carter, The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech, American Experience, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ ps_crisis.html. 6. Midge Decter, The Liberated Woman and Other Americans. (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., 1971), pp. 66–95; The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation. (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972), passim.; Liberal Parents, Radical Children. (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975), passim.; Time Magazine, October 16, 1972, p. 88; Washington Post, July 31, 1979; New York Times, November 30, 1972, p. 12. 7. New York Times, April 11, 1979, p. A14; February 24, 1980, p. NJ16; Washington Post, July 2, 1979. 8. Washington Post, May 2, 1979. 9. Ibid. 10. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973), passim.; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 155–56; New York Times, August 13, 1984, p. C1. 11. Interview with Susan Brownmiller, November 29, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 48–49. 12. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), passim.; Interview with Susan Brownmiller, November 29, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 48–49. 13. New York Times, September 17, 1979, p. B10; October 21, p. 41; January 1, 1981, p. 23; August 13, 1984, p. C1. 14. Washington Post, February 1, 1980, February 5, February 9, February 10, March 21; New York Times, February 21, 1980, p. 16; May 24, 1981, p. 30, June 26, 1981, p. 12; June 27, 1982, p. 156. 15. Interview with Marlo Thomas, January 4, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 233–34; Washington Post, July 16, 1978; New York Post, February 16, 1978, p. 2 16. Washington Post, July 16, 1978. 17. New York Times, July 21, 1980, p. A15. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid, July 16, 1980, p. A3. 20. Boston Globe, July 16, 1980, July 23, August 1; Washington Post, July 16, 1980; New York Times, July 18, 1980, p. B4; www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/otherconferences/ Copenhagen/Copenhagen percent20Full percent20Optimized.pdf. 21. New York Post, January 17, 1978, p. 33; January 24, p. 31; February 15, p. 3. 22. See: Jimmy Carter, The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech, American Experience, www. pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html. 23. Washington Post, May 5, 1979; July 15, 1979, July 16, 1979. 24. Ibid, July 15, 1979, July 16; New York Times, August 8, 1980, p. A14. 25. New York Times, August 29, 1980, p. B6. 26. Washington Post, August 11, 1980.

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27. New York Times, August 30, 1980, p. 20; September 8, p. A18; Washington Post, August 13, 1980.

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With the rising national popularity and overwhelming electoral victory of Ronald Reagan, accompanied by significant Republican gains in both houses of Congress in 1980, Bella Abzug knew that in at least the near future she would have no role in any major political activity at the federal level. Unless she again pursued elected office, she would have to continue to seek means of political impact from the margins of the Democratic Party. The memories of those three bruising and unsuccessful campaigns in 1976, 1977, and 1978 were still fresh, so any random thoughts of another campaign were hardly tempting. Meanwhile, many ongoing issues loomed, and Abzug threw herself into them with her usual energy. There would hardly be a singularity of direction, yet with no externally driven complex docket of items or priorities with which elected officials must contend, Abzug’s genres of activity would be more matters of personal choice. Now driven by a politically narrower set of concerns, Abzug’s selected areas of work and her political constituency would come to be largely dominated by feminism. Abzug always said she preferred working exclusively with women, for in such a world, she held, “it is always easier to come to a confluence of opinion.” 1 Within that political realm there would certainly be more familiarity than was the case during her recent campaigns or during her time in the Carter administration, so at this point the choice may have been driven by a preference for a certain comfort. An important question here concerned whether her chosen sphere of activity would unduly isolate her from others among whom she still desired to exert influence. By 1981 the mainstream of the Democratic Party was in a state of mild confusion. With people like Bella Abzug in charge, the mainstream of feminism was by no means confused, but its predominant political link outside its own ranks had been the Democratic Party. While much of feminism was 159

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resolved, the Democratic Party appeared full of malaise and drift. The doctrinal focus of the party had grown unclear. In 1980, Jimmy Carter and the Democratic moderates had lost badly. Carter was a virtual exile. As an exPresident he would distinguish himself in humanitarian affairs, as well as publish over two dozen books (without any ghostwriting), but he would never again seek political office or become a significant player in any of the nation’s political matters. Meanwhile, members the liberal wing of the Democratic Party which had supported Edward Kennedy felt a contrasting sense of righteousness, and with that righteousness came little sense of any need to adjust or to compromise with virtually any other constituency. This outlook stood in haughty opposition to and disdain for the more moderate Carter Democrats, who may have defeated the liberals in the 1980 nomination fight but lost badly to Reagan. The idea that the Kennedy Democrats’ mild-at-best support for Carter may have been part of what helped elect Reagan was not to be considered. Had it been considered, the idea that Reagan could have been defeated appeared to provide no lessons about party unity better eclipsing internal fissions. On the other hand, the point that Reagan would have won anyway could have revealed the uncomfortable point that the liberalmoderate splits were of little national importance, a sui generis matter of significance only to precious insiders, including Bella Abzug. Liberals’ insular righteousness also stood in opposition both to the Republicans and to the mass of Americans who elected them so decisively. To much of the liberal community, relatively recent issues like Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Watergate still proved the political right wing to have been repeatedly in error. Accordingly, liberals of the early 1980s appeared continually to maintain not merely a sense of political righteousness but of moral superiority. Clinging to the lessons of what recent history had allegedly proven right and wrong, many of the nation’s liberals preferred to see Reagan as another ethically misguided choice of the political right, whose flaws would again eventually come forth. Somehow the liberals’ righteousness would ultimately prevail. A haughtiness ran deeply here, one that impeded many liberals from any notion that compromising and working with the newly elected political right could be expedient, let alone useful to the nation. During Reagan’s campaign and in the early years of his Presidency, the former actor was often the butt of jokes and received little serious regard. He was the target of a great deal of disdain and derision among established liberals. On the popular NBC program Saturday Night Live, for example, Mayor Ed Koch won great cheers from the show’s self-styled hep New York audience when, in May of 1983, he began his opening monologue referring to Reagan as “a wacko.” 2 Within their own circles, it may have been great fun for self-selected political elites to revel in their own sense of superiority, but were such excrescences going to do anything for anyone in a practical

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political sense? If anything the palpability of liberals’ sense of superiority in regard to all opponents was only going to strengthen the solidarity of their opposition. In the early 1980s it was highly questionable as to whether traditional liberals would soon be able to reassert any significant sort of power or pressure, given both the way the political winds of the nation had shifted and the utter imperviousness of so many liberals to any notion that the election of 1980 implied any lessons to be learned. For many liberals there remained a confident sense that their time would come again. Meanwhile, some commentators wondered whether liberals were risking, via a certain arrogance, a frittering away of what influence they could maintain and build upon. Individual liberal constituencies maintained their interpretations of major issues to be correct and saw those who disagreed as either wrong or unable to understand. Amidst such discussions and debates, various components of liberalism, including feminism, tended to splinter, with each earnestly pursuing their own course as the righteous one. Author Emmett Tyrrell called it a “Liberal Crack-Up.” 3 For Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and other feminist leaders there was the additional dimension of self-satisfaction in the work they were doing, as the achievement of coveted leadership roles within the feminist organizations became elements of gratification that could easily be pursued as ends in themselves. A contributing component to the sense of the cul de sac into which liberalism appeared to be devolving involved the unchanging, unrefreshed nature of the ranks of the faithful. In early 1980, the New York Times had noted a sort of inertia-at-rest having set in among the nation’s liberals, and the Times was hardly their ideological enemy. The Times pointed, for example, to an eleven-page list of Edward Kennedy supporters, regarding it emblematic of the stodginess they detected. The list was top-heavy with entertainers and celebrities “long identified with the liberal wing of the Democratic party.” Even within an exclusively New York context, there appeared few suburban or upstate politicians. It was a list, the paper noted, that was “hardly distinguishable from the lists of supporters of Bella Abzug’s mayoral and senatorial campaigns and the Presidential bids of Senators [George] McGovern and Eugene J. McCarthy.” 4 By 1980, Abzug had indeed become a touchstone in regard to the all-too familiar images that “liberalism” conjured. The messages of Abzug and other such liberals appeared to have devolved into a set of well-rehearsed traditions and clichés, with the same figures, supported verbally and financially by the same glamorous Hollywood, Broadway, and TV celebrities. Democrats may have regularly decried the power and influence that big corporate money lent to Republicans, but with the limousine liberals from Hollywood, Broadway, and the American Bar Association, people like Bella Abzug and the Kennedy Democrats could hardly plead poverty and gain much sympathy.

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At Abzug’s sixtieth birthday party in July of 1980, as well as at Gloria Steinem’s fiftieth birthday party in May of 1984, the guest rolls involved much the same list of wealthy liberals. 5 Abzug seemed to love “hanging” with celebrities. Indeed, she was becoming a bit of a celebrity herself. At Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard Jazz Club, she was seen playing the mandolin (and she was pretty good). It may have been important for people in any political movement to appear human, and not narrowly dedicated to their political agenda, but the particular nature of the publicized enjoyment here added to an effete image as much as it may have humanized. The people with whom Abzug had fun appeared to be only those wealthy people whose money she sought and with whom she shared common political convictions. 6 Various less than wealthy constituencies of many political persuasions felt little kinship to such celebrity patterns, and the Reagan handlers knew well how to cater to such alienation and resentment. While the Republicans were quite adept at “marketing their product,” various elements of the old New Left appeared to stumble a bit along such lines. In celebration of the heady sense of “sisterhood” among feminists, in 1980 one New York women’s group, for example, tried to start a line of “Supersisters” trading cards. They were like baseball cards, although they were not packaged with bubble gum. The idea was to build upon the fame of various feminist heroes, past and present, and use the cards as a means of generating more enthusiasm, as well as disseminating a bit of important historical and political information. “Bella Abzug” was, of course, one of the premier cards. Perhaps there was some legitimacy in the idea of “marketing” feminism in such a way as trading cards. Nonetheless, considering the noble legacies of such figures as Alice Paul, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger, the idea of trading cards may have struck some as a trifle demeaning and trivializing. In the 1977 Mayoral campaign, Abzug found herself navigating amidst discourses on such deadly serious issues of the day as crime and violence, while entertaining notions (from actress Shirley MacLaine) of a macro-biotic yogurt and nuts diet purportedly to control her temper. Abzug and other serious feminists of the day had to contend with such schemes as trading cards which may have trivialized otherwise deadly serious work. At no time could or did any major journalist or commentator of the day ever dub feminism trivial, but a certain self-involved indulgence appeared to have affected at least some of the movement and its politics. As with the emerging element of “celebrity” status among New York’s leading feminists, and like the trendy popularity of yogurt, a question emerged as to whether certain superfluities had eclipsed matters of genuine substance, thus devolving some aspects of feminism into mere middle-class consumer items, like trading cards and food items, suitable more to the entertainment sections of journalism than to the hard news.

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Beyond such questions, the “Supersisters” trading-card effort was also not something carried out in a purely free-market context. It was subsidized by a grant from the New York State Department of Education. 7 It was one thing to forge a politics and a sociology into a consumer item via the vagaries of private enterprise. With the “Supersisters” trading cards, success had to be attempted through the infiltration and the assistance of government bureaucracies, staffed by people of friendly political persuasions, with other bureaucrats, if at all recalcitrant, readily menaced by career-endangering McCarthyistic threats of hurtful labeling and derision. The New York State government’s subvention notwithstanding, baseball cards endured; “Supersisters” did not. (No word on whether Rozy Ruiz 8 was ever considered to be one of the cards; it would have been a perfect example of a sociology seeking to become a reality through an externally contrived and publically funded subvention driven by a middle-class ideology about “suffering” that gave license to postures among non-sufferers and frauds.) In any case, some pockets of feminism had found a home in the bureaucratic enclaves of at least one state government. There, they found secure comfortable salaries, as well as the ability to practice forms of discreet patronage on behalf of ideologicallylinked friends, with defaming rhetoric at the ready against critics, all the while maintaining general apathy, even disdain, for the genuinely suffering people of the world, male and female. Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and their New York celebrity worlds luxuriated in the sense that they were the absolute last word in what was politically hep. To many younger people of the early 1980s they were but a little more trendy than Frank Sinatra had been in the eyes of a Woodstock audience. Aside from the ongoing appeal of drugs in a few circles, the ways and politics of the 1960s Left had a decreasing resonation among the youth of its day. The now older New Left had always enjoyed recalling how they had blithely, and effectively, eclipsed both the politics and popular culture that dominated pre-1960s America. That was part of their appeal to the youth— no apparent ties to any past traditions, right or left. Now they were paradoxically thinking they held traditions that would, and should, appeal to those younger than they. As their new issues and music (and recreational drugs) had come forth, the New Left gave older traditions not the slightest thought. Half a generation later, as they witnessed the rise of Reagan and the Republicans, these now older politico’s may have been confidently waiting for some sort of similar transcending processes in both politics and popular culture. They could not take Reagan and his appeal with much serious regard. Their smug sense of their place in the future was firm. That, along with their various fetes and tax-supported marketing efforts, may have gratified some entertainment and psychological needs, but they did not appear to be accomplishing much that was politically productive, especially among the great

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majority of voters, including the youth, who were turning elsewhere for guidance and inspiration. The fate of the Equal Rights Amendment was a major failure in the Left’s hope to sustain itself and its traditions. In July of 1982, the ERA officially failed to win ratification. Bella Abzug and others came to Constitution Hall in Washington and held a night full of songs and speeches. The sense of moral superiority was clear, as was the isolation from the nation’s political mainstream. Words regarding the lessons of the past, consternation with the immediate future, and confirmed senses of resolve punctuated speeches by Bella Abzug and others. The irony of how such “oppressed” people could afford such a gala for one another was little noted. But the sense of how increasingly isolated was that congregation to which all the preachers and faithful were devoting their time and energies was quite apparent. When Abzug spoke at Harvard University in 1977, she had been confronted by students, male and female, who yawned at her warnings about unemployment and told her that women were not only not victims of discrimination but were now, in their view, being favored too much in areas of hiring and school admittance. Abzug tended to respond to such confrontations with what one reporter described as “stunning outrage.” She would never allow herself to get discouraged by such opposition. Neither, however, did she ever seem willing or able to develop much of a desire to learn from anything from contrasting views she encountered among younger generations of men or women. By the early 1980s these younger people were among the many who were politically turning elsewhere. 9 The confidence of such Harvard women (and men) was something Abzug could have chastened with warnings about the ways that the pursuit of careers will invariably clash with any desires for marriage and family. Here feminist lessons as to American capitalism continuing to be so unaccommodating to family issues could have been instructive. Abzug certainly understood these matters, yet she did not always address them. With such youth as she encountered at Harvard, her reactions largely involved frustration to the effect that they just did not understand. On another poignant occasion, in 1973, she encountered the young Patricia Schroeder, then a newly elected member of Congress from Colorado. At age thirty-one, Schroeder was the second youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and the first woman to enter Congress while still raising young children. Like other women in Congress, Abzug had waited until her daughters were grown before seeking political office. Schroeder revered Abzug, of course, and expected encouragement: “I thought, ‘Oh, she is going to be a good support.’” Given the rigors of Congressional duties she was about to face on top of family responsibilities, the pressures were certainly present. Abzug’s only words to Schroeder were a little different than expected, however. Knowing that her

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new colleague had young children, Abzug bluntly told her, “I hear you got young kids. I don’t think you can do the job.” 10 Such a conviction spoke to the utter dedication Abzug knew had to come from anyone if he or she was to be effective in the legislature. Mere symbolism was hardly enough for her. It marked a dedication to the details of the requisite tasks that may have lain more deeply within her than did various particular political convictions. Still, for Pat Schroeder it was a bit shocking. Beyond the ironies of Abzug’s words to Schroeder, the clash of family and professional goals would indeed be a conundrum for all concerned men and women. As the pressures of inflation had eroded the ability of most families to survive on a single paycheck, the matter has continued to strain all who ponder the issues’ many dimensions. Various stripes of feminism have raised ideas, as have many others. No solutions have fully satisfied or gained political ascendancy. Perhaps out of youthful exuberance, perhaps out of psychological denial, many younger women and men of the early 1980s and since have often treated the work/family issue as something that will somehow work out. Meanwhile, amidst keenly held career goals, many lessons of feminism and the labyrinths of feminist thought have appeared to have grown so ensconced that fewer and fewer young people sensed any need to take part in any rituals of devotion. For young women who wanted to become physicians, for example, it had become unimportant to dwell on how difficult/impossible it had once been for women to pursue careers in medicine. The cultural barriers, explicit institutional restrictions, and surrounding palimpsests had all faded away. For these young, devoted women, it was imperative that they focus on the immense work anyone had to do to become a physician. The old Feminine Mystique was no longer holding them back. Now the new Feminist Mystique was potentially holding some back, and there was no reason to let it. That selected history was a lot less important to them that the requisite chemistry and biology. Some other women may have had the affinity, the requisite wealth, and the leisure time, to pursue various feminist studies, but for those pursuing medicine, law, science, engineering, . . . the rhetoric of 1970s feminism was as peripheral to their lives as was the cult of traditional motherhood to which so much of feminism was continually and repetitiously reacting. Letty Cottin Pogrebin fussed with frustration, asking, “why do strong women disavow the feminist label?” 11 If any cared to take the time, younger women and men would have simply told her that she and her friends were now irrelevant. They were fighting a battle that was largely over. Where such a battle was still important, moreover, in parts of Appalachia and in the nation’s inner cities, as well as in East Africa, rural Latin America, and one thousand other such locales, most of America’s feminists seemed resplendently isolated, with so many content to remain in safe confines, to speak among the converted, and to discourse in formulaic academic con-

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structs about the meanings of Freud or about the meaning of the idea that there is no such thing as meaning. 12 With the specter of insularity, wealthy liberals’ ensconced ways and highhandedness hardly appealed to any working-class elements among the voters, nor to any overwhelming percentage of the nation’s youth vote. The youth votes of the 1980s were largely Republican. The traditional blue-collar voters went Republican too. The latter had formerly been one of the Democrats’ solid bases. Amidst the economic depression that hit the nation’s traditional industrial heartland in the 1970s and 1980s, the blue-collar vote, or what was left of it, had gone with Reagan and the Republicans. This marked the final departure in regard to the party loyalty of a former Democratic constituency that had once been central to the party’s base. (The Reagan Republicans would actually do little to nothing for them. They provided much in the way of pleasing, manipulative symbolism, but genuine economic assistance never materialized. The “Rust Belt” has never recovered.) For such a figure as Abzug, gone were the blue-collar New Yorkers who, barely ten years before, had rooted and voted for her. In trying to win back many of the political elements formerly within their camp, Democrats seemed somewhat adrift as to how to do it. Abzug and other feminists did not appear to be terribly willing to try. Back when she ran for Congress, Abzug had welcomed the city’s cabbies and truck drivers who had supported her with chants of “Give ‘em hell, Bella.” She never really understood why they supported her. (A lot of the appeal may have simply lain with her loud Bronx manner.) She had smiled and shrugged at it all, simply appreciating that a vote is a vote. Now these supporters were gone. The support of gays, feminists, and environmentalists was solid, but their collective political significance had revealed itself in the 1980 election. In regard to Abzug and other liberals, a key political question had to consider where there was any conveyed sense of political evolution or adaptation. Where could feminists find and cultivate new cadres of supporters? How could any former allies be recouped? Feminism and Bella Abzug had become a part of “the beautiful people” who appeared to giggle at the working classes, seeing their mentality akin to the TV character “Archie Bunker,” perhaps sentimental and lovable, but definitely retrograde and simply stupid in their political and social sensibilities. In All in the Family, Archie’s simple-minded but loveable wife Edith had a cousin named Maude. Played by actress Bea Arthur, Maude was cast as a classic liberal, and she was utterly disdainful of her dear cousin’s husband. (“You know what I’ve always liked about you, Archie?” asked Maude. “What?” replied Archie. Maude’s answer: “Nothing!”) Arthur played the part so well that network producers created a “spin-off” show entitled Maude. It ran for several successful seasons. The lead character was modeled directly after Bella Abzug.

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Liberals’ concerns continued to focus on issues like abortion, the ERA, and gay rights. As people like “Archie Bunker” were hardly supportive of such causes, they were regarded with haughty disdain and laughter. Meanwhile, Republicans held many traditional Democrats as objects of mockery. The popular TV show Family Ties, with its star Michael J. Fox playing a college-age Republican, shot various jabs at political liberals, and it was supposedly Ronald Reagan’s favorite program. Liberal Democrats took no more serious regard of popular culture here than did Republicans. Bella Abzug and her friends luxuriated in their celebrity status and comforted one another with their thoughts of moral superiority. Any protests from bluecollar political pockets gave them added bases for comfort and selfrighteousness. The lines between the two sides were decidedly drawn. And with Maude and Family Ties, popular culture provided each with imagery in which to revel. In 1981, Abzug was slated to speak in Providence, Rhode Island. Approximately one hundred protesters had persuaded the city’s Roman Catholic Bishop to withdraw permission for her to speak at a local church-owned auditorium. At issue were Abzug’s views on abortion. She would still make her scheduled appearance, but at the Providence public library. 13 For feminists, the occasion marked a triumph. Yet the disaffection of blue-collar voters from other elements of the Democratic Party was one of many reasons why the party had lost such ground as it did to the Republicans. In New York, blue-collar disaffection from Democratic candidates had certainly hurt Abzug in her losses to Pat Moynihan, Ed Koch, and Bill Green, but she could conceive of no bases for any reaching out or compromise. Such oppositions were beyond the pale, and as elected office no longer appeared in her plans, it was much more comfortable for her to stay close to her true supporters and disdain any and all opposition. Meanwhile, other elements of the Democratic Party continued to go elsewhere. Various commentators have cast the breakup and breakdown of liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s as a consequence of a new wave of self-centeredness, evidenced by a host of self-focused pursuits that displaced older, purportedly more selfless forms of consciousness and political action that earmarked preceding times when Vietnam and Civil Rights issues were dominant. Critics lamented the turn of supposedly committed social activists into more selfcentered pursuits—organic gardening, yoga, jogging, health foods, home gentrification, EST, transcendental meditation, modern dance, Reichian Therapy, psychoanalysis, Arica, rolfing, and aspects of feminism. Former late-1960s radical/clown Jerry Rubin eagerly called it “a smorgasbord [of] New Consciousness.” Some feminists may have resented such notions of self-centeredness, yet the tone of some of the resentment often underscored the very charges. There was certainly much serious political content in various forms of feminism in the era, but there were also elements which in-

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volved a self-orientation and absorption that even revealed points of narcissism. In 1998, liberal television host Phil Donahue commented along such lines when he eulogized at Abzug’s funeral. He held that while other committed activists from the 1960s had “copped out” from their previous commitments and turned to such self-indulgences as yoga and organic gardening, Bella, as he put it, “kept on.” Many areas of ongoing feminist politics were hardly as sui generis as yoga, and, as long as it constituted a modality of preparation in hopes of working to make some aspect of the world a better place, yoga did not have to draw its participants into utter self-absorption. Abzug did, indeed, maintain a focus on political issues and indulged no such “new age” trends as disco music or recreational drugs. Still, the feminist politics in which she was so deeply involved had themselves grown in more self-centered manners. One historian cited activist/writer Charlotte Bunch to describe feminism’s devolutions by the late 1970s and early 1980s: There were “striking numbers of burned out women. . . . The initial euphoria was long gone; consciousness raising groups had all but disappeared; feminists felt more isolated; and many movement institutions and collectives had collapsed. Differences, not solidarity, now seemed more compelling . . ., straight, white women had, in some cases, replaced men as the new enemy,” and anti-ERA and anti-abortion groups, involving women and men, gathered momentum. 14 Perhaps the rising appeal of the political right could have but did not give pause or prompt sober reflections and intelligent adjustments among feminist activists. Considering why “straight, white women . . . replaced men as the new enemy,” some could have asked why any vaguely defined mass of people had to be so sweepingly cast as an enemy in the first place. Was such a need for “enemies” indicative of an immaturity that was hurting the movement’s effectiveness and appeal? Would dismissive reactions to such questions be further indicative of that same self-damaging immaturity? The choice to remain in the political arena that marked Bella Abzug’s “keeping on” may have outwardly shown less self-absorption than was apparent among many who copped-out with organic gardening and yoga, yet when compared with the wide breadth of issues and constituencies with which Abzug once dealt, the relative narrowness of her emerging political focus also displayed elements of self-absorption. She may have kept on, but she did not always keep up, preferring to keep on thinking of herself as the oracle with whom others needed to keep up. Back in 1973 Abzug had affirmed her sense of the need for greater diversity in Washington when she asserted that “Congress needs more women, some trade unionists, city planners, younger people and minority members.” 15 By 1981 many such positive notions about diversity in the Capitol had devolved into mere numbers games often on behalf of wealthy white women. Elements of the labor movement were sometimes at odds with the preeminence of gender as a priority criterion with respect to hiring and pro-

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motion. The Democrats had established a principle calling for an equal number of men and women among their convention delegates. For labor people in the party, there remained a tension. Some labor leaders raised the point that the Democratic Party should increase the number of elected officials serving as party delegates. This stemmed in no small measure from the awareness of how people chosen out of gender- (or race-) based selection processes often saw their role in the party votes more purely as a matter of representing their defined group of activists. 16 This appeared to mark an infiltrated bureaucracy coming to define and reward its own interest groups, rather than being genuinely inclusive through broader processes of electoral politics and the economy. This marked a deviation from Bella Abzug’s older view of a need for a diversity of voices and ideas in Congress. A more singular sense of the right ideas was the essence of “Women, USA.” Diversity of thought was no longer the goal, much less what such diversity would ideally provide. The goal here was for women, period. Like Charlotte Bunch, Abzug’s friend Shirley MacLaine admitted a certain ennui coming over feminism and much of liberalism in the early 1980s. Her own unique sense of how to proceed from such a state was to wait for death and then try again amidst another reincarnation. “Bella Abzug and some of my really tough, realistic, down-to-earth friends,” she noted, “are struggling with their consciousness to be able to include this [the idea of reincarnation]. Some have said ‘I can’t stretch that far and still make sense of all things I always believed.’ Bella’s going through that period now,” said MacLaine, “and I don’t know, she may never want to go any further.” 17 Abzug would never see the notion of waiting for another reincarnation as anything but nonsense. Meanwhile, independent of her weird ideas about reincarnation, MacLaine’s musings were revealing of a movement whose leaders had grown so taken with one another, that they felt that earnest commentaries about their various spiritual struggles must be so important to the rest of the world as to deserve mention. The overwhelming majority of Americans were hardly concerned. If they read about such things, it was purely for entertainment. Not content to wait for a reincarnation, Abzug also appeared not to agonize much about whether to include any notions of reincarnation in her consciousness (although she later said that in the next life she still wanted to be Shirley MacLaine’s friend.) 18 Nonetheless, she did turn ever more exclusively to feminism, and away from the wider breadth of causes she had taken, or had to take, on as an elected official. That narrowing marked a kind of political reincarnation. One risk in the self-indulgence that was spicing her more narrowed work involved a willingness among her followers to accept her judgments in all things, be it out of conviction or, even more revealingly, out of fear. Abzug had always been notorious for the ways she drove her staffs and her minions, and sometimes such combinations of fearsome intel-

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lect and personality can victimize themselves. At Abzug’s funeral in 1998, Shirley MacLaine (while noting in her eulogy that she was “speaking to Bella directly”) proudly proclaimed how Abzug’s political instincts were unerring, and that she was always right when it came to assessing the character of anyone that she and the feminist cause ever encountered. 19 The point here was how MacLaine and others had unapologetically apotheosized a world where they could submit to the will of one person. All too easily then, notions of due process could become unimportant among the devotees. To such followers, “Bella” was a kind of oracle. No other source of judgment was needed, and any exception-taking views about fairness or due process, and the ultimately Constitutional principles that underlay them, were simply irritating and to be fussily cast aside. How inviting could a cause of such personalized orientation be to wider audiences in a society otherwise accustomed to democratic processes? Abzug’s own reflections reinforced this problem. She had stated that she preferred to work exclusively with women “because there are fewer boundaries and impediments and areas of personal conflict. It is always easier to come to a confluence of opinion.” Without fully realizing it, she had become her own confluence. 20 As the Reagan years commenced, Abzug maintained a keen optimism as to her chosen political operations and their righteousness, but she risked encasing herself within circles of friends and fans. In this select group came a single person-based moral certainty. Ironically, this certainty operated with much the same sureness among the smug Jim Crow–era Mississippians with which Abzug had clashed in the late 1940s when she defended Willie McGee. In each case, the insiders held firmly to a country-club view which asserted with complete unquestioning confidence: we’re right, and those who take exception are to be derisively dismissed as people who are not only wrong but who do not understand, who are suspicious characters, best regarded as dangerous outsiders unable to grasp the issues properly, who are unappreciative of the special struggles that the insiders have experienced, and who can even be legitimately suspected of seeking to undermine the righteous stability of the community. Notions of openness to new ideas or to procedural fairness of processes in the determination of right and wrong were not to be considered. In the 1940s and 1950s, such behavior among Mississippians was commonly seen as reactionary. The echoes of such attitudes and behavior in the 1970s and 1980s came to be known in other regions and institutional settings as “illiberalism.” Among her own supporters Abzug’s own allegedly unerring sense of right and wrong maintained a reverence that bordered on idolatry. Historically, few such singularly led insurgent efforts have ever made terribly much impact on American politics. Even when focused more broadly in alliance with Edward Kennedy, mainstream feminism had been unsuccessful trying to help wrest the Democratic nomination from Carter. With the elections of

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1980, Abzug and the feminists were even more self-consciously on their own. It constituted quite a self absorbed sense of optimism then to believe that the movement could succeed where so many other singularly focused groups had fallen short. But any who argued for other, more humanistically inclusive outlooks would be easily ostracized. Any pitfalls of insularity were not to be considered. In this context for Abzug, Women USA was to be her primary organizational focus. Women USA articulated a tenet that women were not merely the chief base for the movement’s future success, they were the only base, with no other political constituency worth much time or indulgence. Such a point of view fit well within the simultaneous malaise and drift of the Democrats. Women USA was devoted to the idea that if women could exercise the potential which lay in the quantity of their available voting numbers, they would bring about positive changes for themselves. The primary goals then were to spread a feminist message, get out the vote, and not be diluted by any other organizations or causes. In that gender-based spirit of the possible Abzug attempted to give both leadership and explicit support to the belief that feminist-motivated women, independent of other constituencies, could achieve political power and effect righteous changes. She sternly kept up the fight, trying to activate the political consciousness of women as to her belief about the nature of their alleged oppression and what could be done about it. Her speaking at campuses and other community and religious organizations would continue, often at an extraordinary pace. She continued to preach the message about women’s particular sufferings in the modern economy and how women need to grow ever more conscious of pertinent facts, and assert that consciousness through the power of the numbers they appeared to possess in the electorate. To add allegedly social scientific proof to the ideas being asserted here, Abzug joined with her best friend and colleague she had known since their days at Hunter College, Miriam “Mim” Kelber, to write further about what she had perceived to be a discernible political niche that could be developed to good ends. The result was the publication in 1984 of Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for American Women. Her goal here was not any mere academic exploration of a discernible social science phenomenon. The effort was openly propagandistic. The book purported to identify “a significant difference in the way women vote as compared to men.” This she emphasized as a growing trend which was going to change the face of U.S. politics. Women, she believed, not only could but would increasingly vote in ways that were distinguishable from men and with a consciousness of issues that were especially meaningful to women. To Abzug, the perception of women’s increasingly gender-definable voting habits signified the possibility of great political change and reform. With more women supporting such “female” values as “eating every day, having work, shelter, clothing, education, and health care,” it could become clear to the country that, “what’s good

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for women is good for men, good for children, good for America. . . . The gender gap vote is evidence of the growing political awareness and experience of American women.” Encouraging women not only to go to the polls, but to run for office as well, she extolled and warned: “We can learn to become political leaders and activists, or we can sit back and let a minority of men in government, backed by powerful money and military interests, run our country and try to run the whole world. It’s up to us.” 21 Women, Abzug proclaimed, will decide who will be voted into the White House in 1984. Here one potential statistical point was undeniable: if all American women voted for one candidate, that candidate would win no matter what all the other voters did. Abzug argued that women do join together, believing that they do so to a greater degree than men, across lines of race or region. While she did not exactly prove that women did join together, her hope was that by writing that women do something she could bring such a phenomenon to life. In the 1980 election, some network television exit polls showed that Reagan trounced Carter by a 19 percent margin among male voters, while Carter almost broke even with Reagan among women. This appeared to be unprecedented, although the accuracy of the polling was hard to prove. Nonetheless, Abzug was determined to make the most of it. Some argued that these polls, if accurate, may illustrate that women as a group were less receptive to change, so they stayed with the incumbent (hence, that they would do so again in 1984). Others felt the key issue involved a gender-based difference over foreign issues, with greater numbers of women fearing that Reagan would be more adventurous and prone to use the armed forces or even nuclear weapons in the context of his foreign policy. Amidst the debates over such varying interpretations, there was one view that could not be fully denied—that the TV networks’ exit poll samples were narrowly cast, possibly inaccurate, and did not measure anything of real meaning. 22 For Abzug and Kelber, the idea of gender-based political behavior was too obvious to do anything but underscore to the utmost. One simple point remained, however: women held a range of attitudes and opinions that varied just as much as they did among men. Further, even if one woman from a farm state voted against Ronald Reagan out of fears over his alleged willingness to resort to the use of nuclear weapons, and another woman from Boston opposed Reagan because of his stance on abortion, the commonality of their votes did not necessarily mean there was much basis for any political ground to be developed between them. The addition of the word “gender” to that voting pattern may have lent no greater weight, only euphoric rhetoric. Where bonds of common experience and political behavior arose in regard to issues like child care support and fair wages, the matters were driven not by gender, per se, but by economic needs involving women (and men) living at economically precarious levels. Gender may have been

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part of this picture, but it could have been as much a rhetorical attachment as a matter of genuine political substance. An irony here involved the fact that such “gendered” outlooks in regard to matters of poverty appeared to resonate most among those who were wealthy enough to maintain the pleasure of their ideological stances. Abzug’s ideas involved something of a sociology in search of a reality. In a 1983 speech she shook her fist and shouted, “the gender gap is merely a suppressed expression of women who felt powerless outside the power structure!” 23 Her thundering invocations of a gender gap may have actually revealed the narrower frustrations of someone who now felt more powerless than she had been when she was in “the power structure,” especially after so many unsuccessful attempts to get back in. Selfless or selfish in motive (or both), Abzug was attempting to put her phenomenology into practice. She was trying to use the perception of a gender gap as a way of inducing women both to accept the feminist concepts she was preaching and to act upon them both in their voting and in their general political activities. It was certainly reasonable to attempt such an assertion of will. Many politicians have made such efforts—build a movement by forcefully proclaiming the inherent validity of its rationale and hope that repetitions of the ideas will take hold in the hearts and minds of constituents. Women would indeed become more politically active over the next decades, but would the resulting patterns take the forms that Abzug predicted, and would they bring forth the ideological changes she envisioned? Moreover, would the hoped-for political groundswell at last thrust Bella Abzug back into a position of political significance? The success of Phyllis Schlafly and the anti-ERA forces spoke to the contrary, but there were some hopeful signs in the early 1980s beyond the possible existence of a gender gap in the 1980 Presidential voting. In 1981, women appeared decisive in tipping the Virginia Governor’s race to Charles Robb. In 1982, the women’s vote appeared to help in the victories of candidates in gubernatorial races in Texas (Mark White), Michigan (James Blanchard), and New York (Mario Cuomo). Again, the profiles were based on possibly inaccurate polling, but with such signs, hopes grew that women would not only be a gender but that this gender could be fully induced to behave as a political class. Abzug and others were, as one commentator put it, “engaging in a longstanding tradition of partisan political wishful thinking.” 24 Their hopes never fully materialized, however. Women would take the full gamut of positions on the issues of the day, as did men, and as women had been taking for years. It remained pleasurable for feminists to hold onto the fancy about a brave new genderbased world. It formed a kind of meditative mantra. Various academics have reveled in it. At many national and international women’s gatherings one of Bella Abzug’s favorite topics to raise for group discussions concerned the question:

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How will the world be different when it is run by women? Gender had then to be accepted as the base of political existence and discussion. The fact that gender would likely be one of many such points of identity and action was not permitted to enter into the cogitations and discussions that Abzug wanted to nurture. Like an excessively controlling teacher in a classroom, she wanted her assignments to be followed without any questions as to their premises or their rationality. Her hope was that the selectively focused speculations could reify participants’ political sensibilities in ways she deemed politically wise, leading them to go home, enthused and ready to put her/their ideas into action, thus bringing her hopeful gender-based vision ever more into reality. It was a perfectly logical political tactic, but it was based on an assertion of purported fact that actually demanded a leap of faith from all participants, an ideological cleaving which prompted among the believers great impatience and indignation with regard to any who dared to question any premises. Many political organizers use the psychological game of having people imagine an ideal to give it greater tangibility as a goal. One problem can be that the organizers can remain in such a state of fancy and have the processes of imagining becoming enjoyable habits as well as ends in themselves. The fact that gender would never become an all-subsuming, determinative theme of political behavior, in America or Western Europe, let alone elsewhere, was not merely a point that people would consider with the benefit of hindsight. Even at the very time when Abzug and Kelber were first formulating their ideas about a gender gap, other commentators noted women’s growing presence in politics and considered the variety of positions and ideas that numerous women already in political offices were taking. They did so with an eye explicitly on the point that gender, per se, did not appear to mean much as a unifying political theme. Unsurprisingly, for example, many prominent women in the business community backed Reagan as strongly as most major businessmen. Occupation and economic interest seemed to trump gender. Notions about women being more pacific on military and war matters was an outlook that was one of the most pleasing ways that feminists like Abzug had interpreted the supposed Carter-Reagan gender gap. Those who loved such notions had then to consider various national heads of state of the era like Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher (and her 1982 war against Argentina). Each could, as one journalist put it, “be as hard line and hawkish as their male counterparts.” With respect to the topic of nuclear power, any ideas that women in political authority would be more enlightened and less reckless had to contend with the state of Washington’s Governor Dixy Lee Ray. Governor Ray held pro-nuclear positions as brazenly and unashamedly as any of her male colleagues. Recalling from the Vietnam years the infamous “Madame Nhu,” the corrupt Saigon madam and wife of former South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Ray was indeed vilified among environmentalists as “Madame Nuke.” Her notoriety at this time was

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especially poignant given the all-too-fresh memories of the 1979 Three-Mile Island near-disaster in Pennsylvania. In regard to postures of gender-based ethical superiority, the city of Chicago’s Mayor Jane Byrne maintained an administration which was clearly no less laden with graft and cronyism than many of the notorious ones which had preceded it. There may have been a rising new wave of female politicians, but as early as 1984 any idea that this would bring forth some sort of new tonality or content seemed unrealistic even at the very time the idea was being asserted. Many feminists of the day, however, did not wish to let the facts stand in the way of a good story. 25 By the early 1980s a woman in politics was no longer anything unique or the slightest bit remarkable. Women in politics were a narrative fact, and that narrative resisted efforts to make it into anything more evaluative. For those like Abzug who increasingly revealed a strong investment in the concept of gender, there was an additional wrinkle in that many women were then coming explicitly to disavow notions of gender and their implied politics. One feminist, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, commented with frustration about this very point. “Why do strong women disavow the feminist label?” she wrote. 26 Abzug and her friends appeared to take no note of any such points. They simply did not like to consider them. Such a dismissive tonality was likely a significant reason for the gap in the feminist label’s acceptability among women. The movement’s leadership appeared uninvitingly resistant to contrary ideas. In the early 1980s there were other feminists who considered “what do we do now?” sorts of questions. With the election of Reagan, the country had clearly taken a new political turn. The nature of the economy was placing all sorts of new pressures on families. In the context of such a backdrop, there were other approaches besides Abzug’s notions of fostering and exploiting an alleged gender gap to promote women gaining power in politics. At the time Abzug was formulating “gender gap,” her sometimes colleague, sometimes rival, Betty Friedan had asserted a completely different outlook on the state of affairs for feminism and for the society at large. Published first, and poignantly, in the Sunday New York Times on the July 4 weekend of 1981, and subsequently in book form as The Second Stage, Friedan bypassed many of her own previous views of The Feminine Mystique. Showing none of the “ennui” over which Shirley MacLaine lamented among her feminist freinds, Friedan called for a “ground-up” reformation in social behavior that would erode many traditional gender divisions of activity, at least among the white middle class. She called for women and men to work together, sharing so many of the labors that had formerly been gender divided back in days when a typical (white) family could live nicely on a single income. 27 Between Abzug’s perhaps ennui-driven notion of feminists hunkering down within their own political fold versus Friedan’s idea of women and men reaching out beyond old boundaries, the question of who was right was, and remains, a

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matter for all interested individuals to determine for themselves. But without question there was little in the way of common ground here. People like Shirley MacLaine may have felt Abzug’s instincts were unerring, and many other feminists were then willing to go along, out of compliance or fear. Betty Friedan was never so impressed, however, let alone awed or intimidated. She and Abzug often clashed over matters of philosophy and political tactics. Each was the sort who cared to have few opposing voices around her. This difference of outlook and sensibility was one of many that arose between them, and it would never end. Friedan may have wanted men to become more involved in domestic duties, now that their partners were generally working outside the home just as long and hard as they. She may have also wanted feminists to get past the Feminist Mystique, move to a new stage, no longer so much against men but with them. The problem for her was that few feminists appeared to listen. Indeed, many were quite hostile. In the hands of people like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, mainstream feminism did not appear to wish any departures from rhetoric which maintained a posture of gender conflict, and which emphasized gender exceptionalism. They appeared driven to hold for themselves a place of righteousness, which was especially poignant in the context of the new Republican administration. Carter had been bad enough, given especially what he appeared to have done to Abzug. Reagan was completely beyond the pale, so there was only to maintain discipline in the ranks, draw more into the fold, and keep up the fight wherever it could be waged. Some began to criticize aspects of feminism for such narrowness. In 1991 the feminist Susan Faludi published a compilation and analysis of some of these criticisms. She called it Backlash. Ironically, her book’s sub-title actually revealed the ongoing insularity among some feminists, for while virtually all the books, articles, and authors that Faludi critiqued focused on aspects of feminism, Faludi subtitled her book, “The Undeclared War Against American Women” [emphases added]. Virtually none of the authors that Faludi examined ever criticized “American women,” yet with complete aplomb she happily cast reactions to feminism as a backlash against all of the nation’s female population. Her looping was indicative of a bedrock among so many feminists—because they claimed to speak for women, criticisms of them were not merely anti-feminist but anti-woman and possibly misogynist. All instructive legacies of McCarthyism here were ignored just as blithely as Joe McCarthy and his friends had ignored the likes of Arthur Miller. Faludi became one of the intellectual darlings of such feminist leaders as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. She reinforced what they wanted to hear. In 1986, the literary critic Nina Auerbach wrote of how much of American feminism had devolved into something “very constraining. When it [feminism] became institutionalized,” Auerbach felt, “it became something in itself to free oneself from.” She may have liked the tenderness of the prison, but the “Roman-

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tic Imprisonment,” as she dubbed it, did not earn her praise. 28 For Faludi, Steinem, and Abzug there appeared to be no receipt of message. Abzug was not to be dissuaded from her notions of a gender-based politics. Running for office had not worked, neither had coalitions with other liberal groups. In regard to her gender gap–based tactic of feminists going it alone, questions about evidence, philosophical cogency, or breadth of impact were apparently to be answered not by academic discussions but by future successes, and to this she devoted herself utterly. There was a new election on the horizon. With 1984 approaching, Abzug sought to be a player of significance in the nominating processes of the Democratic Party. On the Republican side, there was no question that Ronald Reagan was going to run for reelection without party opposition. Meanwhile, the Democrats fielded several significant candidates, the chief ones being Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and Walter Mondale. (John Glenn also ran; more nominally so did Joseph Biden, George McGovern, and Thomas Eagleton, none accumulating any significant quantity of delegates.) Some of the primary battles were heated, but Mondale won, and he did so rather handily. Well before the party convention in San Francisco in July, with Mondale the clear victor, the chief party question concerned who would be the Vice Presidential candidate. As Mondale had the nomination sewn up well in advance of the convention, he appeared to be able to do as he pleased in regard to his choice of a running mate. When he had been running for the nomination against Mondale, candidate Jesse Jackson had sought notoriety and votes by promising to name a woman on his ticket if he won the nomination. Earlier in his campaign, Mondale had spoken to the National Women’s Political Caucus convention in San Antonio. There he had proclaimed, “I am a feminist! I want your help—and I need it.” In the elite circles of the party, the idea of women as a political entity, per se, had verbal currency. Leading Democratic women like Bella Abzug could thus hold forth with their ideas about gender gaps and receive support. No Democrat with any political sense would dispute her, no matter the question of actual evidence. Throughout the primary season, the idea of a female Vice Presidential candidate was alive in the party’s discourse. Mondale was considering various possibilities, and the considerations were unashamedly driven by notions of symbolism and identity. The liberal identity of the party had certainly shifted from the early/mid-1960s ideal of people not being judged by their race or their gender. In 1984 strikingly few prominent liberal voices were raised about the ironies of identity politics motivating the party’s choice of Vice President. For Mondale, Mayors Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Henry Cisneros of San Antonio were possible running mates, Bradley because he was African-American, and Cisneros because he was Hispanic. Mayor Diane Feinstein of San Francisco, Kentucky Governor Martha Layne Collins, and New York Congresswoman

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Geraldine Ferraro were also being considered, all expressly because they were women. Liberal politics had indeed come a great distance since the idealism of earlier generations of civil rights workers who envisioned the day when people would be judged solely “by the content of their characters,” as Martin Luther King had eloquently put it. Jesse Jackson indeed scoffed at Mondale’s running mate ruminations, calling the list of Vice Presidential nominee hopefuls a “p.r. parade of personalities.” Given his own promise to name a woman as his running mate were he nominated, Jackson’s criticisms of Mondale rang a trifle hollow. 29 With identity politics fully in place, eclipsing all traditional liberal ideals, Abzug and others began to exert pressure on Mondale and his people to nominate a woman as his running mate. As the primaries were closing, a “Gender Gap Action Campaign” was formed, its title revealing the assumptions that had been motivating Abzug to seek gendered results for their own sake, believing all work to that end would boost women’s voting power. Abzug personally contacted many state party chairs and vice chairs, as well as various Democratic governors and members of Congress, all with the idea of drumming up support for a woman as the party Vice Presidential nominee. Added pressure on Mondale came with the threat of an embarrassing convention floor fight over the issue. “I would not rule out a walkout,” warned Alice Travis, an associate of Abzug and head of the Democratic task force of the National Women’s Political Caucus. The memories from 1972 convention were still fresh. The Democratic delegates’ loud bickering (and Bella Abzug’s yelling) over the platform issue of abortion, and the subsequent landslide-level loss of McGovern to Richard Nixon, were part of the party’s memory. As matters stood, Democrats knew their chances of defeating Reagan were thin at best. Some then calculated that a divisive floor fight could be politically damaging to a campaign given little chance in the first place. Conversely, some worried that responding to such partisan pressures could render Mondale’s image as weak, someone who could be threatened and buffaloed by any pack of political schemers wanting their own way no matter any wider issues or constituencies. Some elements in the party did not want to be seen either as quota driven or as interest-group controlled. 30 Abzug appeared to pay no heed to matters involving the ironies of identity politics among liberals, or of the possible bad publicity for a party appearing to discriminate on the basis of gender. In 1984 she was singularly focused on the VP issue. Abzug, Eleanor Smeal of NOW, Colorado Representative Pat Schroeder (who had worked for Gary Hart), and various other prominent Democratic women all wanted a woman on the ticket. Ironies about the ideal of no discrimination were not to be considered; it was simple as that. The National Organization for Women had recently adopted a set of standards by which they would judge candidates. One involved “electability,” and another concerned the candidate’s position on and priority of wom-

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en’s issues. These were perfectly straightforward matters. Two others involved frank language about the number of women a candidate had in key staff positions, and the candidate’s willingness to select a woman as Vice President. 31 No one seemed in any sort of mood to dare question whether the fights against discrimination had now become discriminatory. Within another ironic context of competing identities in politics, gender appeared to trump ethnicity and race among the mid-1980s Democrats. Had notions of engineered justice among the liberal Democratic leaders come to focus more exclusively upon wealthy white women, people who were closest to home? Very much because of the issue of gender, the Democrats had chosen Kentucky Governor Martha Layne Collins to be the party’s convention chair. It may have been quite embarrassing to the Democrats had Collins had to handle a floor fight or a walkout of disgruntled feminists were a man chosen as Vice Presidential nominee. But this matter never had to be confronted. Among the names which Mondale was considering, Geraldine Ferraro emerged as the top choice, and Ferraro was willing to be “the woman candidate.” Meanwhile, some hoped for a selection of the second-place finisher in the primaries, Gary Hart. He seemed to bring greater visibility and electability to the ticket. In the primary debates, Hart had had some tough encounters with Mondale, however. Mondale had scoffed at Hart’s postures of “new ideas” as empty verbiage. (“Where’s the beef?” he joked, drawing upon the day’s popular advertising slogan of the fast food restaurant, Wendy’s.) With the resulting touch of bad blood, there was little likelihood or felt need for the two to mend any fences, despite some hoping they would. On June 23, Mondale hosted a meeting with Bella Abzug and other women’s leaders. (In addition to Abzug, attending the meeting were Barbara Mikulski, Mary Rose Oakar, Barbara B. Kennelly, Anne Wexler, Carol Bellamy, Betty Friedan, Sharon Pratt Dixon, and Carol Foreman.) The topic was exclusively the matter of who would be his running mate. The groundswell of identity politics, ironies notwithstanding, and the possibility of a loud floor fight was apparently enough of a threat, so Mondale yielded to what the New York Times called “super pressure.” The night Mondale announced the choice of Ferraro, Abzug was ready like a new parent, passing out cigars with pink bands displaying the words “It’s a Girl.” Ferraro said that Abzug was one of the first people she called after her selection as Vice Presidential candidate. The convention nominated her by acclamation. Three delegates did vote for Shirley Chisholm, however. 32 As the campaign ensued, Abzug worked hard for the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. Ferraro’s candidacy was supposed to change the course of politics. To the average voter, Ferraro was not so much “a woman” as much as she was a complete unknown clearly selected because she was a woman. Unheeding and continuing to rely hard on her gender-gap assumptions, Abzug thundered against Reagan, criticizing his links to the religious Right and how he ap-

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peared to use the White House as a pulpit. Attempting to appeal to the hopedfor women’s vote, she emphasized that women fault Reagan for doing little about potential arms agreements, for supporting a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, for opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, and for cutting the funding of social service programs. “Young women are wondering,” she asserted, “‘what is this great macho image that he is projecting.’” Which young women she felt she was quoting here was something she never made clear, but, in line with her gender-gap efforts, she hoped and believed that women would unite around her words and, in effect, come to say what she said they’d said. In further opposition to Reagan, Abzug added that Jewish women are particularly critical of the President because he had not been supportive of Israel and had not done much to help Soviet Jews emigrate. (She had actually praised Jimmy Carter for his efforts here. Some Democrats may have wondered if only she had grasped such a comparison four years earlier and not been so willing to turn against Carter.) Again, Abzug was presuming to speak for Jewish women with the same assuredness that her feminism enabled her to believe she spoke for women in general. And in regard to all women she continued to stress: “We are a majority of the population and, indeed, we are fifty-four percent of the electorate and we can make a difference.” With regard to the fact of Ferraro on the ticket, Abzug was of course effusive, even hyperbolic. A woman on the Democratic ticket has, she declared, forever changed American politics: “The door is open. National politics and all other politics will never be the same.” The implicit notion that women, per se, would make a difference of viewpoint was not to be questioned. How various ethnic or racial minority activists may have felt about such a “triumph” among white Democrats was apparently not to be asked. What great things had now changed beyond the narrative fact that a woman was a Vice Presidential candidate was never specified, nor could it be. During the campaign, Ferraro ran into some criticisms in the press, especially because of some of her husband’s questionable financial dealings. Abzug complained about the press treatment here, asserting that Ferraro has been treated unfairly because she is a woman. Implying the financial questions were a ruse, she exclaimed: “Those who have power are afraid of new power—and those who have power are male.” 33 It was always an easy ploy to claim that a critic feels threatened, for then one can ignore the contents of the criticism and deal only in generalities about a critic’s alleged motives. Joe McCarthy made a career of responding to criticisms just that way. It was euphoric for some feminists to project the notion that people felt threatened. The counterpoint was never raised—that Abzug and others may have dearly wanted to be genuinely threatening because they knew they really were not. Meanwhile, the fact was that any questionable financial

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dealings of any major national candidates, male or female, or their spouses, have always come under scrutiny. Ferraro was in no way singled out here because of her gender. She was singled out because of her candidacy, and her candidacy existed because of her gender. When she confronted her critics over the financial questions, Ferraro actually made a wisecrack about how people needed to understand that her husband was Italian. Some could have expressed great horror over her apparent ethnic bashing here, but few did. Similarly, when Ferraro squared off against George H. W. Bush in a televised debate between Vice Presidential candidates, Bush felt he had gotten the better of the match and commented that he had “kicked a little ass.” In response, Abzug postured horror, huffing that Bush “has behaved in a most rude, sexist way.” 34 Politicians and the media had not even begun to sort out any differing senses of propriety that were supposed to operate with regard to female as opposed to male candidates. Apparently Abzug was one who felt, perhaps without fully realizing it, that women should be treated differently. The legacy of Susan B. Anthony may have spoken to the contrary. Abzug’s dreadful indignation over the phrase “kicking a little ass” also struck many as more than a little disingenuous, for the language was decidedly mild compared with what Abzug had heaped upon many political opponents (and friends) for years. Abzug and others may have been euphoric about a woman on the national ticket of a major party, but her euphoria contained other elements of irony. Well in advance of Mondale’s selection of Ferraro, the Washington Post wrote in praise of her possible candidacy. One point they were eager to make was that she was not only a woman, but a woman from “the second wave 35 of women politicians, a feminist who is also comfortable with the boys, less prone to combat than predecessors like Bella Abzug. In fact,” the Post emphasized, Ferraro “is a case study in post-Bella politics, a woman who has mastered the process faster than most men. . . . Her success is a story of how it is done.” Even accepting the not-so-flattering contrast to “Bella” and all that her manner symbolized, some could then praise Abzug as the sort of personality who was needed to blaze the trails so that others like Ferraro could then progress with greater ease. Sensitive to the Bella-bashing/Ferraropraising that was whispering about the campaign, Abzug friend and supporter Ronnie Eldridge addressed the issue with a piece entitled, “In Praise of Shrillness.” She asserted that “we may think we hear a different voice when Gerry Ferraro talks . . . ‘Isn’t she marvelous—she isn’t shrill.’ . . . [But] when Gerry Ferraro speaks, she knows and I know and so do all the women who came through all the years that somewhere in that voice, hidden but part of it forever, is Bella Abzug bellowing.” 36 Eldridge held onto a pleasing selfimposed in-the-bunker mentality, shown here by her vague, though to her completely clear notion about “all the women who came through all the years.” It was always pleasurable for feminists to think of their late 1960s

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and 1970s political fights to be akin to such epic struggles as those against slavery or against ruthless dictators. There were many real issues, to be sure, but the comparatively bourgeois dimensions always made some scoff about any notions of epic dimensions and various sorts of grand camaraderie. People like Eldridge and Abzug may have had more affection for the fights than for their resolutions. Few people who have been in genuinely life-threatening combat can be drawn to any such self-Romanticizations. Sentimentality about the good ole’ days readily reinforced elders sense of superiority over younger people who purportedly could not appreciate what had been sacrificed for them. It all served to dress the party line and to argue that the tonality of the most strident was necessary and not to be opposed. The fact was that the comparison of tone between Ferraro and Abzug was a compelling point to some Democrats in 1984, and not just because of an academic desire to give an interpretation of the history of the women’s movement, but out of a desire to win votes in the Presidential election. Eldridge’s compulsion to defend the legacy of Abzug and others’ sharp aggressiveness was indicative of how some now-older feminists did want to consider either the idea that there could be differing evaluations of feminists’ previous work or that there may have been an element of wisdom in the evolutions that various forms of feminism were taking. For some it was also hard simply to recognize that alternative views had to be countenanced, let alone that the expressions of such views were part of how supporting votes could be garnered. In academe and elsewhere, there was always a certain illiberal resistance to the idea of alternative interpretations of feminist movements. To that end, the idea that Ferraro’s intra-party success may have come not just in the wake of but in spite of the many infamous manifestations of the tonality of Bella Abzug was not to be considered. Debate over past tonalities could never be resolved, but even in the early 1980s it was already being considered. In addition to Eldridge’s praise of shrillness, Kathy Wilson, chair of the National Women’s Political Caucus, took exception to the “ho-hum” attitude which she and others sensed many younger women were taking toward feminism. From a feminist standpoint, the sad but acknowledged fact was that many young women of the 1980s were increasingly seeing the women’s movement as somewhat passé. In addition to warning women how Reagan was “a dangerous man” in regard to abortion issues and women’s rights, Wilson scoffed at how “even some young practicing lawyers or young businesswomen will sit there and make fun of Bella Abzug. The naivete,” Wilson admonished, “is ridiculous.” Stressing then that “had it not been for the Bella Abzugs of the world, [these women] would not have business degrees.” Whether she was right or not about whether Abzug helped change the admissions policies of such institutions as Harvard Law School and the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, Wilson found young women’s apparent lack of appreciation to be

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both “arrogant” and “infuriating.” 37 While there was cogency in her argument, there was also more than a slight degree of arrogance in feminists like Wilson and Eldridge, in effect, telling young women how they should best think and express themselves both politically and historically. In so many of their high-toned epistles, feminists always stressed their desire for women to be free to make choices for themselves. It was then highly frustrating when some younger women did not make the apparently “right” choices or display “proper” levels of appreciation. In the recent past, ironically, perhaps only the most traditional pre-1960s parents had ever treated young women with such a stern unapologetic sense of righteous control. With regard to some of those “ungrateful” young women of the 1980s and beyond, some of the feminists’ imperious tone and behavior may have actually magnified some of the “younger sisters’” infuriating non-cooperation and disrespect. Over a half century before, amidst women’s efforts to achieve the right to vote, a major rift had developed. On the one hand were those who wanted to strive for suffrage in altogether rational, well-balanced ways, lobbying cogently with legislators who cast important votes in Washington and in state capitols. On the other were various figures and organizations that believed dramatic, even violent acts were necessary to arouse public concern and achieve desired results. Since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, commentators on the suffrage movement have also divided as to whether the radical actions and attitudes were effective, irrelevant, or even counterproductive in the processes which led to the Nineteenth Amendment. That historical debate has never been resolved, nor can it be. Similarly, debates over the effectiveness of confrontational personalities and tonalities in regard to feminist issues of the 1970s and 1980s yield many opinions but no resolutions. No matter the unresolvable conflicting opinions raised here, one matter in the debates was constant: Bella Abzug was always a central point of focus in the discussions. Some saw her as an image from which it was best to flee; others demanded she be idolized. There was little middle ground, save for the mass of young women and men who simply did not give the matter much thought. Ferraro’s candidacy may have held symbolic value for feminists predisposed to see political matters within the context of such ideals as positive role models. Among the millions of women then pursuing careers in medicine, law, business, and politics, did her candidacy actually spark anyone who otherwise would not have taken any decisive steps in their own careers? Notions about setting a gendered example have always rested on assumptions which were ideological leaps of faith, often defended with negative rhetorical castings of any who questioned them. Regarding the matter of “role models,” psychologists have never agreed as to the significance of such a concept, especially beyond such immediate levels as parents and siblings. Further, even accepting the utility of the vague idea of “role models,” no one has ever

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demonstrated gender’s centrality in the context of any such socialpsychological dynamics. Cannot a woman be a role model for a young man, or a man be so for a young woman? More fundamentally, do young women or men need role models, or was, and is, it more a matter of some older women and men needing to feel needed as role models? Abzug and her colleagues’ sense of the gender-gap ideology being a matter that needed to be preached to women to get them politically to behave as desired certainly underscored such a notion of needing to feel needed. Even in the context of the identity politics at play, the willingness of the Democratic Party to indulge the issue of gender, clearly ahead of race or ethnicity, indicated a class-based preference of the predominantly wealthy and white to keep efforts for social justice trained on the most nonthreatening and loudest “squeaky wheels.” As an old saying held, it was more “just us” than “justice.” Abzug was one who never wanted to consider such dimensions. When she spoke at Harvard in 1977 and tried to exhort young women to overcome the favors that men have traditionally received, she encountered people who told her that in their experience women were being favored too much. 38 Abzug would pay no heed. Like any good lawyer, she continued to work for her “client” and would choose to ignore questions and comments whose airings did not serve her case. Beyond all questions of usefulness and justice, in actual political terms the Ferraro candidacy met with no success. Her candidacy was supposed to help win the New York vote and the Catholic vote as well as the women’s vote. The Democrats lost New York. They lost the Catholic vote, and they failed even to come close to winning the vote of a majority of women. They did not win much else besides. The Mondale-Ferraro ticket lost even worse than most political pundits had expected. The pairing lost forty-nine states, and the one state they won, Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, they carried by less than two-tenths of 1 percent. It was worse than McGovern’s disaster of 1972. It was a popular and electoral vote landslide equaled only by Franklin Roosevelt’s victory over Alf Landon in 1936. (In 1964, Lyndon Johnson had defeated Barry Goldwater by a wider margin in the popular vote, but Goldwater did carry six states. Adlai Stevenson had also taken a few states in each of his massive losses to Dwight Eisenhower.) All of Abzug’s and others’ hopeful predictions of a female candidate further galvanizing women, already supposedly forming a political class with an alleged gender gap in voting, did not prove to have any value or significant impact in the Presidential election of 1984. Nothing materialized for the cause of gender in any politically meaningful way. Abzug was undaunted by the 1984 Reagan landslide. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, to her the gender gap still existed. There was an estimated difference that exit polls showed between Reagan’s popularity with women versus his strength with men. A CBS News/New York Times

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poll, for example, showed Reagan won 61 percent of the male vote and 57 percent of the women’s vote. The 57 percent was still remarkable. Had Reagan won the popular vote by 57 percent (he got 59 percent), the election would have still been considered a landslide. Fifty-seven was the popular vote percentage that Theodore Roosevelt had received in 1904. Virtually all contemporaries had called that a landslide. It was to that point the greatest popular vote margin in any contested U.S. Presidential election. Although Bella Abzug was still claiming the existence of a gender gap, the election results had proven that whatever corners of the electorate she or anyone could claim to be gender conscious were of no significance. In 1984, “The Gender Gap” had proven to be a frivolous matter. 39 As “gender gap” had gained some currency as a media phrase, various reporters and political strategists began to assess its significance. Where it was in evidence in voting patterns, it seemed a little of the gap stemmed from any gender-identified responses to various Reagan policies. The vast majority of the gap appeared attributable to people with established patterns of intransigent opposition to Reagan and the Republicans. This involved three particular groups: Jewish women, African American women, and selfidentifying feminists. One Republican political advisor actually dubbed this “the Bella Abzug agenda.” He noted, “if Reagan was a woman and a liberal [but] running as a Republican, he [still] couldn’t get the Jewish, the black, and radical women. That’s the party’s gender gap.” (As best as it can be calculated, the women’s 1984 vote, independent of the “Bella gap,” was virtually the same as that of men.) Given that “feminists” were identified among those who would vote in congruence with the gap, however, it still made political sense for a believer like Abzug to maintain the efforts to win all women over to the cause (and to posture that she spoke for all women while doing so). No matter any overwhelming election results, for her there was only to keep on with notions of gender exceptionalism. 40 She would keep trying to make her sociology take hold, and her force of personality would continue to dominate within her highly select world. Meanwhile, in November of 1984, the rest of the nation appeared to be not the slightest bit interested. The month of July’s marveling at a Vice Presidential candidate because she was a woman had gained no traction except among the small group which was already disposed to celebrate on the basis of gender and whose votes were already assured. Speaking in Miami just before the election, Abzug had dismissed Reagan’s popularity as “an escapism.” With a rather casual swipe, she acknowledged that Reagan makes people feel good and asserted, as if it was somehow profound, “I do think that people like to feel good.” (It certainly felt good for her to say that, and the assertion may have enabled some antiReaganites to indulge in a bit of escapism themselves.) Abzug was clearly trying to treat the sum total of Reagan’s appeal in as casual a manner as she

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could, as she did not want to recognize the formidability his appeal actually posed to her side of the political spectrum. 41 Any opponent of her feminist ideas could have easily asserted much the same about her appeal—that feminists merely make their largely wealthy minions feel good, hence that their appeal was merely superficial. Any political phenomena can be reduced in such terms. In 1984, Republicans did not need to be so nervously reductive of their opponents. The election did that vastly more effectively than could any mere political rhetoric. Abzug may have been trying to make herself “feel good” amidst a doomed election. She never admitted it, but she was obviously aware of the point that the Democrats had indulged the call for a woman to be on the ticket because they knew they were bound to lose. Her McCarthyism worked but only in a political climate devoid of genuine hope. Geraldine Ferraro admitted that her first reaction to the idea of she, or any woman, being the Democrat’s Vice Presidential nominee was a cynical one. She recalled saying: “There is no way any presidential candidate is going to choose a woman as a running mate unless he’s fifteen points behind in the polls.” I had said [this] to a closed meeting of the increasingly displeased members of the Democratic caucus. . . . “I just don’t see these guys doing it, and it’s guys who run these campaigns.” If a candidate is so far behind that there’s really no chance of winning, I went on, then and only then he might decide, why not? And even at that, it was still a long shot. “They’re never going to choose a woman because they think it’s the right thing to do,” I concluded.

Ferraro’s words prompted a great deal of anger from her colleagues. She recalled one “feisty feminist in her seventies,” labor activist Millie Jeffrey, scolding her: “That’s a terrible thing to say.” 42 It may have indeed been “terrible,” as telling a simple truth can often be. The fact was that Mondale and the Democrats had every expectation that they were going to lose to Reagan. In 1984, there was absolutely no indication of any sort of political surge that was going to alter political alignments. Reagan was already seventy-three, so there was the possibility of him passing away or having to step down because of injury or illness. Aside from that, even with the incumbent President’s poor showing in one of the televised debates, nothing appeared to be changing the views of the vast preponderance of American voters. The November landslide was thus overwhelming but not surprising, and it was very much in anticipation of this outcome, that the Democratic Party’s mainstream was open to the idea of a female Vice Presidential selection. Mondale certainly did not choose a woman exclusively because he thought it was the right thing to do. He acted very much out of political expediency, being pressured by Abzug and other feminists who were using the opportunity that the certainty of a Reagan victory opened for them and

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threatening to make an embarrassing fuss on the floor of the party convention if they did not get their way. What Abzug and others then assumed—that a woman on the ticket would draw votes and could prove decisive—was also not on the minds of many voters. Here lay a critical point in the insularity of Abzug and feminism as they had evolved by 1984. Classically liberal ideals of equity and gender blindness had long passed. The choosing of a woman was “the right thing to do” but only among feminists. To most others it was certainly not the wrong thing to do but neither was it necessarily the right thing. To a determinative number of American voters, then and since, the right thing was to make such a choice regardless of gender. Even though she had predicted that a female candidate would attract women’s votes, illiberal gender-identity politicking of feminists like Abzug was pushing many gender fairness-minded voters away from the Democrats. Abzug, most feminists, and many Democrats had long abandoned notions of gender-, race-, or any other sort of identity blindness. Theirs was a political game now more driven by identity politics. Fears of feminist-vocabularied McCarthyism from within the fold kept party regulars from openly questioning any illogic or hypocrisy. Among the broader mass of voters who could not be bludgeoned by such McCarthyistic means, the idea of identity as a political determinant did not, and never would, take hold nearly to the degree to which some Democrats of the day, including Bella Abzug, had earnestly predicted it would. Their alleged liberalism would never take hold, as the rest of the country generally found it a betrayal of genuinely liberal thinking. Democratic leaders like Mondale may have readily understood this, as they only indulged the notion of gender identity with Ferraro when they knew they had virtually no chance of winning. It may have been a “terrible thing,” but to some the frank abandonment of the old liberal ideal of identity blindness may have been an even more terrible thing. NOTES 1. New York Times, November 7, 1981, p. 30; Abzug, Oral History, session 4, p. 73; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 69. 2. snltranscripts.jt.org/82/82t.phtml. 3. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., The Liberal Crack-Up (New York: Simon & Schuster; 1st Edition, 1984), passim. 4. New York Times, January 31, 1980, B9; 5. New York Times, February 28, 1980 p. B4; May 24, 1984, p. C10. 6. New York Times, November 14, 1980, p. C4 7. New York Times, February 5, 1980, p. B4; March 9, 1980, p. WC10. 8. Rosie Ruiz was a phony “marathon runner” who attempted to steal the women’s medal of the 1980 Boston Marathon by taking the city subway to a spot within a half mile of the finish, pushing her way through the crowd on Commonwealth Avenue, and finishing the final 800 yards several minutes ahead of the real women’s winner. With overwhelming evidence of her fraudulence, Boston Marathon officials eventually stripped Ruiz of her title. Ruiz always held she ran the full race and claimed she was a victim of discrimination because of her gender.

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(Later she was arrested both for embezzling money from a real estate company and for involvement in cocaine dealing.) Boston Herald, April 15, 2005; Running Times, July 1, 1980. 9. Washington Post, July 2, 1982; New York Magazine, June 20, 1977, nymag.com/news/ politics/49892/. 10. Interview with Patricia Schroeder, August 25, 2004, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 156. 11. New York Times, September 22, 1982, p. C2. 12. Ibid., April 19, 1981, p. 35; May 5, p. C1. 13. Ibid., October 17, 1981, p. 47. 14. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979), p. 14; Jerry Rubin, Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven (New York: M. Evans & Co., 1976), passim.; Phil Donahue’s eulogy of Bella Abzug, www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv1Q_mQZe70; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open, p. 264. 15. New York Times, November 29, 1973, p. 45. 16. Ibid, November 7, 1981 p. 30 17. Washington Post, June 21, 1983. 18. Ibid., April 24, 1984. 19. Shirley MacLaine’s eulogy of Bella Abzug, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx0ggm b2eaM. 20. Abzug, Oral History, session 4, p. 73; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 69. 21. Bella Abzug, Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for American Women, with Mim Kelber (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), pp. 116, 241–42. 22. Washington Post, March 4, 1984. 23. Ibid., July 9, 1983. 24. Ibid. 25. “New Wave of Women Politicians,” New York Times, October 19, 1980, Sunday Magazine, p. 7, 31, 105; May 22, 1984. 26. New York Times, September 22, 1983, p. C2. 27. Ibid, July 5, 1981, Sunday Magazine, p. 4; Betty Friedan, The Second Stage. (New York: Summit Books, 1981), passim. 28. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishing, 1991), passim.; Nina Auerbach, New York Times, January 5, 1986; Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1st edition (January 1986), passim. 29. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/jackson.htm.; Washington Post, July 11, 1983; Time Magazine July 2, 1984; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,926644,00.html; Time, May 28, 1984. 30. New York Times, June 28, 1984, p. A22; July 3, p. A1. 31. www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/conventions/feminfluence.htm. 32. Washington Post, June 28, 1984; New York Times, July 3, 1984, p. A1; October 29, 1985; Geraldine Ferraro and Linda Bird Francke, My Story (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), p. 114; www.NewYorkTimes.com/1998/04/03/nyregion/recalling-bella-abzug-s-politics-andpassion.html. 33. Quoted in Miami Herald, October 29, 1984. 34. Ibid. 35. This use of the term “second wave” would later prove confusing, as many feminists came to use “second wave” in reference to the generation of Abzug, Friedan, Steinem, and others. The “first wave” involved the suffragists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A self-proclaimed “third wave” would come forth in the 1980s and 1990s, its distinction from the “second wave” being chronologically, politically, and philosophically much less clear than that drawn between the first and second. 36. Washington Post, April 29, 1984; New York Times, August 3, 1984, p. A23. 37. Washington Post, July 24, 1983. 38. New York Magazine, June 20, 1977, nymag.com/news/politics/49892/. 39. New York Times, November 23, 1984, p. A35.

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40. Washington Post, September 19, 1983; New York Times, November 23, 1984, p. A35. 41. Miami Herald, October 29, 1984. 42. Ferraro, My Story, p. 25.

Chapter Seven

Keeping Faith All the Way to Nairobi

Within a month of Mondale and Ferraro’s loss to Reagan and Bush, the Boston Globe published a lengthy article in which they summarized various political commentators’ explanations of the election of 1984. Many had noted that Mondale had shown a decided lack of charisma. Organized labor, especially the AFL-CIO, had been conspicuous in its failure to deliver the vote of its rank and file, a phenomenon that subsequent elections would prove to be ever more unsurprising. Geraldine Ferraro’s financial problems had been embarrassing. And Reagan’s personal appeal had been overwhelming. Acknowledging these points, the Globe was eager to add one more. This concerned “the feminist leaders who mistakenly assume that they speak for the majority of women in the United States.” Democratic leaders, the politically liberal paper intoned, need to “catch on to the reality that the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion Rights Action League only represent small cliques who have little in common with the average housewife.” Until they grasp this, the Globe maintained, “the Democrats’ electoral problems will continue.” The party seemed overly reluctant to take on the small clique of feminists who had threatened potentially embarrassing convention floor fights and who had apparently put one over both on the party, as well as on themselves, about an allegedly critical gender gap in voting. Regarding those who were prone to pious arguments to the effect that the Democrats should not compromise on certain ideals, the Globe frankly noted how the party had both consciously and successfully relegated the visibility of gay leaders during the San Francisco convention. Democrats had thus displayed some understanding of how the open presence various party constituencies may come across to the general voters who were watching their convention on television and 191

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making some voting decisions on the basis of what they saw. To note this may have been painfully unpopular among some party regulars, but it was important as it showed that the party was not completely immune to issues of projected media images. Nonetheless, lamented the Globe, the Democratic leadership sought to exercise no such authority with regard to “the feminist leaders who were very visible on national TV throughout convention week, starting with the insistence that Mondale choose a woman as his running mate.” Various feminists like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, they noted, “were all over the convention scene bragging on TV about the Ferraro factor and what a boon it would be against Reagan.” The key point was, of course, that on election day the boastful predictions proved utter nonsense. Ferraro’s nomination may have lent euphoria to some feminists, but, noted the Globe, “you didn’t have to be a pollster to gauge their potential for turning off large numbers of female, as well as male, voters.” The party may have been willing to limit the visibility of some gay supporters, but it remained afraid to say “no” to the likes of Bella Abzug. After November 1984 a key question concerned whether the indulgence of the Democrats’ vocal feminists had paid, or would ever pay any political dividends. Here the Boston Globe quoted the respected Democratic leader Frank Mankiewicz. Like the Globe, Mr. Mankiewicz was hardly a conservative; he had been George McGovern’s Presidential campaign manager. Mankiewicz remarked that “in the olden days the worst thing you could say about a man [in politics] was that he couldn’t deliver his wife.” The point here was anything but a silly matter of fashionable language—that one should update how one phrases “the worst thing . . .” and refer to “. . . a person was that he or she couldn’t deliver his or her spouse or partner.” Pseudo-aware preoccupations with such superficialities were indeed part of the Democrats’ ongoing malaise. Indeed all such focusing was part of feminism’s malaise, as obsessions over banalities had often overtaken concerns for genuinely suffering people. They were anything but on point with regard to the chief political priorities of the day. The fact that it was politically risky in some circles to raise such an idea only underscored the Democratic Party’s problem. Mankiewicz was not the slightest bit concerned with superficialities. His point was that “these people [feminists] can’t deliver their sisters.” Considering that “anybody who can get a majority of women as Reagan did without ever going to the National Organization of Women convention” Mankiewicz acknowledged: “there’s got to be a lesson somewhere.” From there he wondered: “How can the feminists deliver the women’s vote when they are remote from the women’s vote? Look at them and listen to them. They are not talking like most American women are talking.” Mankiewicz was daring to say what others knew but would not admit for fears of McCarthyistic name-calling and intra-party altercations—that mainstream Democratic feminism was a political clique of vastly overrated signif-

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icance, and that their indulgence was not only not helping the party, it was hurting. The Globe asserted, “you could probably count on one hand the number of Democratic senators who would not concur privately with Mankiewicz. Yet most of them continue to be apprehensive about crossing the feminist leaders whose conventions and platforms for years have generated national media coverage beyond their merits.” 1 Bella Abzug and her minions had achieved an apparent victory for themselves from within the Democratic party. They had bullied their associates into dreading and indulging them. They had convinced the party that it needed them, and that their wrath was something to fear. It was wonderful to feel such power and influence, and the visibility that television and other media elements gave them only added to the elation. Yet did they deliver the women’s vote, and did they speak for America’s women as they purported to? The election gave many people a clear answer here, and it was hardly one that gave any credence to the sense of legitimate power and influence that Bella Abzug and others had been flaunting. With regard to such a sui generis world as the Democratic Party, a pertinent question involved whether the leadership would, or could, make any intelligent adaptations away from mainstream feminism and toward mainstream voters. The counterpoint here was also important: could the feminist mainstream make any significant alterations in their political actions and postures? At the end of 1984, prospects did not look good for the Democrats, for feminism, or for Bella Abzug, yet to Abzug there appeared to be no felt need to adjust anything. She still believed in pushing for female candidates, holding fast to the belief that “gender,” per se, would eventually succeed as a political tactic. Being a demonstrable presence in the Democratic Party was strongly connected to the need to show the world that women have power and influence. To use whatever means of force of personality and feministvocabularied McCarthyism to achieve these ends thus remained perfectly acceptable. To back away from such an outlook would appear to involve a retrograde acquiescence to the old male power structure. It was a most addicting and self-confining set of rhetorical and tactical habits. In early February, 1985, Abzug helped organize a party for Geraldine Ferraro. The political tonality surrounding the event gave a clear indication that there was no change in the offing for mainstream feminism. Abzug had been insisting that Ferraro had been unduly bludgeoned in the campaign about her husband’s finances because of her gender. The idea that the finances of any national candidate, male or female, would be held to the same levels of scrutiny was apparently not to be considered. To Abzug, Ferraro was thus not an electoral loser; she was a victim. Any such notions as Mankiewicz’s sense of undue feminist influence in the party were certainly not to be given a nanosecond of thought. Many other feminists concurred with such thinking, and they all gathered at New York’s Roosevelt House (once the

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home of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt when they lived in the city), now the property of the City University’s Hunter College, with the college’s President, Donna Shalala, eagerly joining with Abzug to host the event for Ferraro. “It was,” Ferraro recalled, “more like a reunion than a reception.” 2 Like any such political gathering, no matter the gender, but especially if such a factor as gender is a consciously felt matter of identity and oppression, the participants would never question certain key premises. The gathering was not to analyze what anyone in the fold had done, or failed to do. Instead, as with other gatherings after Reagan’s wins or after the failure of the ERA, there remained a collective reinforcing of beliefs about the just cause, about the altogether proper tactics to which they were devoted, and about the unfairness and moral inferiority of opponents and critics. Any who may have contemplated adjustments of rhetoric or tactics knew better than to voice their concerns. The most willful triumphed. In addition to reinforcing one another’s sense of righteousness, there were elements of politics in the gathering which many hoped could develop. The Vice Presidential running mate in a losing campaign can often do well in the following rounds of Presidential primaries. Abzug was certainly aware of this, and so was Ferraro. Ed Muskie had done well in 1972 before Nixon’s people sabotaged him, and Mondale’s standing in the party in 1984 was rooted in his status under Carter, no matter the former President’s fall. With the image of her continued support of Ferraro, Abzug could maintain her sense of being a major political player and queen maker. The huge loss in the 1984 election prompted no significant adjustments. The sociology of “gender gap” exceptionalism remained intact in Abzug’s mind. With institutions like Hunter College always available to provide institutional subvention whenever needed, the imagery of political significance could be further maintained. Fearing rhetorical attacks and whispering campaigns, no major New York Democrat would dare criticize such political uses of a public institution. Meanwhile, some similarly motivated patterns of media attention continued as well. The 1988 election was a long way off, of course, and efforts on behalf of such a figure as Geraldine Ferraro would be very much a “back burner” matter for Bella Abzug or anyone else so inclined. Meanwhile, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had itself fallen very much to low-priority status in national politics. People like Abzug had become symbols of an older era. Reagan Republicans felt the voters had repudiated much of the liberals’ agenda. Meanwhile, the majority of younger people, male and female, did not seem to take up many of the traditional liberal causes. Mainstream newspapers and magazines were already beginning to use the term “postfeminist.” Women’s studies professors on college campuses were commenting, in many cases lamenting, that “feminism is not interesting to eighteenyear-olds.” Gone were most of the demonstrations, the rabble-rousing lead-

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ers, the clenched fists, the sloganeering talk of “the sisterhood,” “male chauvinist pigs,” and “the politics of housework.” To some this marked the extremist rhetoric being brought up short by illustrations of its own needlessness and bourgeois preciousness. As importantly, if not more so, many of the demands of the early 1970s had simply come to pass. A woman in medical school, law school, or any other major profession was now strikingly unremarkable, and it had been so for years. Robin Morgan, a feminist of undeniable credentials among “the sisterhood,” said, “the so-called shrillness of the 1960s was necessary because there were [then] only about six of us then and the rest was done with mirrors. When there are millions of us, you don’t have to get so hoarse because there’s a roar.” Some feminists may have lamented any mainstreaming of the movement. Notwithstanding the point that feminism may have been more chic than genuinely radical in the first place, a serious question for feminism in the mid-1980s concerned then how to proceed. There had always been major currents of sectarianism in feminism, especially as the term had come to mean so many contradictory things in the minds of so many diverse people. While many supposedly radical movements had witnessed great internal struggles and divisions, feminists themselves keenly noted this tendency among one another. Old versus young, black versus white, gay versus straight, even “lipstick lesbians” versus “granola lesbians”—the divisions were everywhere, with many feminist political gatherings rife with dissension and heated debates. Some even ascribed the strife to the effects of FBI and CIA infiltrations into various parts of the women’s movement. It is possible that the high levels of self-examination and analysis were indicative of an underlying narcissism that loved to focus on, magnify, and dramatize all such internal squabbles. It may have also underlain the degree to which some sought, even here, to find and luxuriate even in the allegedly gendered characteristics of feminists’ internal fighting. Considering various intra-feminist attacks on Gloria Steinem, for example, Carolyn Heilbrun held forth with the sweeping opinion “just as men victimize the weak member of their group, women victimize the strong one.” The need for self-gratification may have been overweening in such attempts at asserting gender distinctions, and one hundred psychologists would likely put forth at least one hundred unconvincing opinions here. Meanwhile, dozens of mafia hits on unsavory bosses, steady Congressional and executive snipings at various leaders, and thousands of corporate mutinies against CFOs and CEOs certainly speak to the contrary. So, conversely, do various ways that Gloria Steinem could be considered to have been less than strong. There was, as well, one feminist leader, to whom Steinem regularly and fearfully deferred, who always displayed undeniable strengths and who was never attacked from within any of feminism’s many folds. As in other contexts—from her unapologetic wearing of makeup and traditional styles of dress, to her unashamed love for her husband—Bella Abzug defied so many

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feminist conventions, never altered her ways, and dared anyone to attack her. No one did. Notwithstanding Heilbrun’s sweepingly unconvincing generalities about gender, weakness, and strength, Abzug was always too strong for any feminist opposition. 3 In regard to prior political circumstances, Abzug had certainly been an effective leader when it came to things like street demonstrations and political organizing. She had also been enormously capable within the corridors of Congress. Her ability at political insider manipulations, such as she had shown in helping get Ferraro nominated, remained one of her strengths as a Democratic Party operator. To any who were less prone to praise, her successes were clearly indicative of how she had skillfully spearheaded a feminist special interest group to the point of being able, well beyond any numerical power, to gain determinative impact upon the Democrats’ political discourse. It was clear that Abzug and her feminist minions would continue such insinuations and subversions whenever possible. In a time of general political power on the Right, now reinforced by the ongoing popularity of Reagan (and Margaret Thatcher), a decided sense remained among Republicans to maintain the avoidance of any such influences as Abzug showed among Democrats. Feminists’ noisy reactions to given matters may have received media attention, but their political significance had proven to be tiny. Politically they appeared to be boxed in. Amidst such currents and counter-currents, a few select enclaves and institutions would be feminist friendly. Educational institutions and some churches would be major examples here, and many feminists would find save havens. Meanwhile, within the context of the nation’s now Republican-dominated political priorities, especially in the once-again expanding military industrial complex, a new set of equally eager and greedy interest groups were ready to spring forth, bringing perhaps even greater levels of self-serving waste and subversion, as well as their own McCarthyist labeling of critics. Those Republican ironies brought problems of their own. Now critics would be called “unpatriotic” rather than “sexists,” but there remained a common way of attacking enemies. Meanwhile, Abzug had become a virtual poster child for middle-ofthe-road and right-wing Americans’ disdain for the Democrats’ ways of doing the nation’s business—interest groups that were able, through guilt and McCarthyism, to “put one over” on select political bodies and gain influence and petty perquisites. As Bella Abzug would continue to be an icon of entrenched liberalism, New York City’s Mayor Ed Koch would eagerly use the image she cast as a way of pushing his own standing as a new and better sort of political figure. Koch always tried to project himself as the perfect politician for his time, one who could be effective as a Democrat in a Republican era. (His calling Reagan a “wacko” on national television was somehow not to be recalled. Koch never said how he rationalized that or ever explained such public slurs

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to the White House officials with whom he conferred. Likely, he cavalierly dismissed the matter as trivial.) While acknowledging that he had certainly not supported Reagan for President, Koch boastfully held forth about how he often contacted the White House and had regular, substantive conversations with such major Reagan staffers as James Baker and Ed Meese. Confirming the wisdom in his willingness and ability to speak with officials in the Reagan White House, Koch bragged that his calls to the White House are always returned in a half hour, and here he made a point of noting, with decided emphasis: “Could Bella Abzug get that? I don’t think so.” Koch found such a comparison to be useful in the enhancing of his own image. Elsewhere, Koch further described Abzug (and Herman Badillo) as “uninformed, totally naive, unthinking, or just plain dumb.” Ed Koch would continually endeavor to show that his political ways were different than such dig-in-the-heels Democrats as Abzug and exactly what New York City (and the nation) needed to make its management work effectively and avoid falling into the bickering and ineffectiveness of older times. He would continue to use Abzug as a convenient example when he wanted to illustrate any such points. 4 In his book Mayor, published in 1984, Koch highlighted some of his prior clashes with Abzug, always, of course, in ways that were flattering to him and insulting to her. He described Abzug’s 1960s peace movement, Women Strike for Peace, as “far left.” (The WSP was certainly not any sort of Communist front.) He raised the point of her 1968 opposition to the sale of jets to Israel, emphasizing simultaneously that he had been for it. The invoking of this issue recalled some of the bitter 1976 clashes between Abzug and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Koch well knew how an emphasis of the story had ill served Abzug. Koch also raised the fact that Abzug had favored a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from NATO, here aligning himself, like most New Yorkers, with the President concerning the notion that it was better to maintain a tough countenance and stand up to the Soviets. Overall, “she and I have never gotten along,” Koch shrugged, adding with a likely note of disingenuous magnanimity that “I don’t hold it against her. There are so many things I hold against her. [So] I don’t need that one [NATO] to add to it.” (Of course, here he was adding to it.) Knowing the ill feelings over Abzug’s 1972 Congressional primary against the late Bill Ryan, Koch also conveniently recalled his support of Ryan. When the vote of West Side Manhattan came in for Ryan, reporters, he said, “came running over to me . . . and they asked, ‘Congressman, isn’t this unusual? How do you explain this? Isn’t it surprising that Mrs. Abzug would lose in her own district? Why do you think that happened?’ I thought for a moment,” Koch recalled, “There was a pregnant pause, and I said, ‘Her neighbors know her.’ She never got over it. On later occasions, whenever we attempted rapprochements—good will and forget about the past—she’d say, ‘Why did you have to say, “Her neighbors know her?”’”

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Apparently Bella Abzug was not the only one who never forgot. Few politicians do. Clearly some of Koch’s musings had been mean-spirited, but they suited his purposes, as he was penning his book to help sustain his popularity as Mayor with an eye on the upcoming election for him in 1985. Any complaints here from Abzug would only underscore what Koch was most eager to note—that she was completely on the periphery. In another instance, Koch used his personal regard for Martin Abzug to cast further swipes at Bella. “Martin Abzug was always very friendly to me,” Koch wrote. “I liked him. One time [when in Congress] I saw him by the elevators in the Capitol, and we stopped and spoke for a while. And when he got on the elevator his parting words were, ‘I won’t tell Bella I saw you.’ I always loved that.” 5 Whether or not Koch “loved” it, he certainly loved telling it. Likely, Martin Abzug may not have shared with his wife the fact of a trivial chat with Ed Koch. Mentioning the conversation in his book, Koch obviously knew the matter would then get back to and greatly irritate Bella Abzug. Like many politicians, Koch could be simply mean, as could his rivals, including Abzug. Abzug wrote a letter to the Times in response to Koch. As with Pat Moynihan in ‘76, she was incensed by his reference to the issue of opposition to jets for Israel, and she accused him of making “a retroactive smear.” She went on to say there was more generally “a consistent pattern of personal attack by him on political leaders, especially women, who are past or possibly future competitors.” She never said who the “women” were. Readers could note only one. Meanwhile, her standing as a possibly future competitor was but a dream. Koch responded to the Times letter, once more simply affirming her opposition to selling jets to Israel. It was clear that Koch got the better of the jabs here, as Abzug’s complaints came across as kvetching and merely underscored the fact that she was on the outside and he was in. As long as Koch perceived that his jovially bumptious tone would play well among New York City voters, he would dig away at any rival, and Abzug was an obvious one. 6 In 1985, Koch would run for a third term. One of his main opponents was Abzug’s friend, City Council President Carol Bellamy. Abzug supported Bellamy. Koch won handily. When Koch’s Mayor became a Broadway play in 1985, the sense of the political rivalry with Abzug only grew among the public, and Abzug’s status as a former player now on the periphery received additional emphasis. Like anything superficial, the light play dealt with nothing of political substance. With regard to Abzug, the play underscored her loud Bronx accent and her “amply proportioned” physique, as one reviewer put it. Other journalistic coverage of the day made similar remarks. As long as she remained on the political fringes, Abzug’s outer image would continue to eclipse her once renowned reputation for intellectual substance, for the latter no longer had much practical focus. At this time, a woman named Marge Schott became the

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owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. She proved to be a loathsome character, prone to boorish, drunken, and racist remarks. Because she was big, loud, and brassy, one Ohio paper, summarizing Schott’s persona, simply remarked how “Marge . . . reminds you of former Congresswoman Bella Abzug.” The image was everywhere. Phineas T. Barnum may have famously welcomed any sort of notoriety, but there was such a thing as bad publicity, and as long as Abzug remained on the outskirts of the political world, the trivialities of her public persona would dominate most discourse about her. 7 Amidst the rise of smugly confident political insiders, be they Mayor Koch or the Reagan Republicans, and amidst the apparent floundering of the political left, the latter continued to be an easy target of derision, a bête noire for the nation’s new political mainstream. Various figures like Abzug served as touchstones for what the newly empowered political right believed to have been wrong with a world now being thankfully eclipsed. Back in the summer of 1980, three major economists of the time sat down for an extended conversation with the New York Times to discuss the prospects of the nation’s economic future. (The economists were Robert Lekachman, professor at Lehman College; Ray Marshall, secretary of labor under Carter; and Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Nixon and Ford.) Among the prospects they discussed was the idea of greater national planning. With a decidedly more conservative turn in the nation already perceptible, no one was predicting or favoring any great shifts in the direction of government domination or controls over the market place. The economists dwelled on more modest levels. Lekachman outlined the notion of existing entities like the Congress and President consulting with one another over the idea of federal encouragement of desired industrial sectors via credit policies, loan guarantees, and tax benefits. Aware of conservative, free-market feelings in the nation, Lekachman nonetheless noted his belief that “we’re probably drifting in this direction.” He emphasized that he was not at all comfortable with the idea, as invariably the emerging mechanisms could easily be accompanied by thickening bureaucracies which could become politicized, with “some kind of national planning agency” then being led or influenced by this or that figure with a decided political agenda. When considering the worst sort of person/example to illustrate the point here, Ben Stein immediately chimed in with “Bella Abzug.” To this Lekachman guffawed that he would “rather have Barry Commoner, or if not, then Michael Harrington,” each anything but a champion of a free marketplace. The sense of how resonating an image of Abzug and feminism held among the public was indeed well ensconced among astute economists and politicians. 8 Ever more notorious merely for her personality, Abzug was seen as the very sort of politician who would always be drawn to any processes of bureaucratic thickening and who would readily bring her considerable skills to exploit such processes and even subvert the nature of any original inten-

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tions in the name of her feminist priorities, no matter whose concerns were ignored, and regardless of the interests of the nation’s economy as a whole. She would appear to set herself up as a bureaucratic labyrinth, complete with feminist-vocabularied demands that gave old-style patronage a disingenuously liberal veneer, as well as a McCarthyistic set of rhetorical weapons to attack and label any who resisted or criticized. Tip O’Neill may have been proud of such actions, but to such economists as the Times convened, feminism seemed to embody a liberalism that no longer trusted open democratic processes and the free exchange of ideas, or of trade. Abzug’s work within the Democratic Party on behalf of Geraldine Ferraro had revealed such untoward influence. The subsequent loss notwithstanding, she would continue to find outlets for her political maneuvering. It was not just some of the nation’s leading economists who found Abzug as a resonating negative symbol. In the same political climate, Joan R. Wright, a Bergen County representative in the New Jersey State Assembly, spoke positively of herself, like many of her new generation, as someone who is “a feminist and feminine.” Amplifying her point, she went on: “We look at all Republican women as being like Phyllis Schlafly and all Democratic women as being like Bella Abzug.” Her point was that neither of these old symbols any longer embody the political realities in which the vast majority of women (and men) operate and find appealing. “The truth,” she concluded, “is [that] most of us are somewhere in the middle.” 9 Whether such extremism of personality that Abzug symbolized had ever had political utility was a matter of philosophical and academic debate, although some who felt that extremism was useful would never even accept that there could be alternative views here. Such unyielding senses of point of view as fact were part of liberalism’s decay into illiberal intolerance in various academic circles. 10 In the world of real politics, as it was unfolding in the early/mid1980s, any such symbols of the recent past now served largely as points of disdain, save among a select group of well-heeled insiders. In 1982 a minor flap erupted in the New York State legislature that further reflected the depths to which the image of Bella Abzug had penetrated. The matter involved Long Island State Senator Carol Berman filing a civil suit against State Assemblyman Dean G. Skelos. Berman claimed Skelos had slandered her. Skelos had criticized Berman for voting against a bill whose purpose was to require insurance companies to write their policies in plain English devoid of legalistic jargon and undue complexity. Skelos endeavored to show that Berman had ulterior motives in her “no” vote. He noted poignantly in a political brochure that Berman’s husband was in the insurance business. Claiming she was trying to bully her colleagues in the name of a special interest, he went on to describe her as “the Bella Abzug of Nassau County.” (No wonder she sued him.) 11

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Abzug would do little to offset such imagery. Gender exceptionalism would remain a rhetorical mantra for her and for many other feminists in the mid-1980s and beyond. Abzug continued to appear on the college campus lecture circuit. Even if feminism was passé to many younger women and men, she could still find audiences. The trouble was that, to many students, her appeal and significance had become more matters of history and entertainment. Along such lines, for example, she and Martin were able to get passage in February and March of 1985 on a month-long cruise touring Hong Kong, Malaysia, and India. The cruise line hired her to give a series of lectures to passengers on women’s issues. As with her lecturing at elite women’s colleges and her partying with show-business elites, the radical idea of “taking the ideas to the masses” had, among 1980s feminists, devolved along decidedly comfortable, self-entitled pathways. Some felt that much of modern feminism had never strayed from such avenues in the first place. But even accepting that some genuine radicalism had once been present, by the mid-1980s, “j’accuse” had devolved to jacuzzi, and “burn baby burn” had yielded to Jane Fonda’s narcissistically assertive “go for the burn.” In this same vein, Abzug was turning “taking it to the streets” into “taking it to the Straits.” Real issues certainly remained to be championed, but the act of championing appeared steadily to involve less the issues themselves and more the self-promotion and the creature comforts of the champions. How her cruise lectures came to impact the plight of poor women in the Asian ports that Abzug and the other passengers visited was hardly a matter to be considered. On the way back from her Asian cruise, Abzug also made a noisy scene at the American Airline ticket counter at the San Diego airport. She yelled and lectured to the airline employees and squatted on the floor in protest, all as a result of a flight delay. “Get up off the floor, Bella,” yelled another New York–bound passenger, who was apparently neither amused nor politically inspired, “this is not New York.” The key was that it was not just not New York, it was not politically meaningful. Ed Koch doubtlessly loved the story. Abzug was on the periphery, and, when it came to her image and sense of self-entitlement eclipsing her substance, she was not helping herself very much. She appeared as vehement about being held over at an airport as she was about serious issues like poverty. The legacies of Alice Paul and Emma Goldman were hardly being served. 12 Beyond squatting and yelling in protest over a flight delay in San Diego, Abzug’s chief refrain was to keep raising gender-exceptionalism mantras and to assert that Reagan’s time would pass and that her feminists’ hour would come ‘round again. Many now-older 1960s liberals did prove to have an often unproductive attachment to the headiness and euphoria that accompanied a condescending moralistic certainty many had held “back in the old days.” Few others, especially the younger generations had little interest in such nostalgia or narcotics, and the condescending tone of their allegedly

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liberal elders was often irritating. To many young observers the political rage of their elders was merely entertaining, like the antics of such a contemporaneous sports figure as the tennis player John McEnroe. In his own field he was considered brilliant, but in the public eye, his raging tonality often eclipsed maters of substance. The persona itself was a consumer item. Much the same was also the case for Bella Abzug Indeed, to handle the organizing and financial details of her many speaking engagements, Abzug employed the firm of Brian Winthrop International, Ltd. Among Brian Winthrop’s other clients of the day were ex-Nixon operative G. Gordon Liddy and former LSD guru Timothy Leary. When the fundamental goals are entertainment and money making, matters of political content can become humorously peripheral and eclectic. 13 Traveling in the South in late July, 1985, amidst a meeting of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Atlanta, Abzug spoke to the annual convention of the Florida Bar Association. There was certainly an element of irony in her appearance—the state’s bar association meeting was now largely composed of women. She would not have wanted to acknowledge that the fight for women being able to enter such a field as law was long over, but there it was. Many male attorneys in Florida may have also noted here how their state bar association had become bureaucratically truncated. Women’s presence at the bar association convention in plush Boca Raton may have been a product of gerrymandering in that politically savvy women could play a gender card and get law firms to validate their attendance while male colleagues stayed at the office and worked. In any case, the doors to women in the field of law had now been long open, and the meeting in Boca illustrated this nicely. There may have been ongoing discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in regard to Florida’s law school admissions and law firm hirings and promotions, but wealthy white women were doing just fine. Abzug paid no heed of this, but there was obviously no countervailing force of sexism against which to be ever on guard. She spoke instead for new types of political action. Recognizing that with Reagan in power the prospects for meaningful political change were minimal, Abzug enunciated a variation on her “gender gap” phenomenology. She noted, in addition to the ERA’s failing, that many bills recently before Congress which could allegedly help women, children, and the poor have lost out to Reagan’s budget cuts and his defense spending priorities. Given that impasse, Abzug asserted a call for more fundamental political action. “Women,” she asserted, “have recognized what we need is the passage of new laws. The rejection of the ERA brought a new resolve to those who want to restructure government.” Never one to admit the other side had won, Abzug was taking Reagan’s victories as a sign of a need for change of a more radical nature. The sweep was quite broad here. What she specifically meant by a “restructuring” of government she never really enunciated. She did refer to details like the need for more funding for shelters for

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victims of domestic violence (neither she nor virtually anyone of that time considered male victims here), and she called for laws requiring insurance companies to extend health coverage to widows (she never said widowers) for five years after the death of a spouse. Beyond these specifics, she was vague. She apparently had in mind some fundamental changes involving much more than just increases in welfare expenditures. Still believing that such a measure as the ERA was necessary, she held that the cause for women now had to involve some sort of basic Constitutional change, i.e., if the government would not pass the ERA, then the government itself needed to be changed. Some of the headiness, and the vagueness, of vintage 1968 radicalism were clearly still alive in her. How she expected people to be motivated to work for such changes (be it in the Presidency, in the Congress, or in the courts?) she never said, nor did she pinpoint what these changes were to be. Amidst her generalities, she was continuing to claim both the entitlement and the moral right to speak, not for feminists but for women. Here she returned to her favorite theme of gender exceptionalism: “Women have recognized what we need is the passage of new laws. . . . Women still disagree with Reagan. Women have favored peace initiatives and concern for the poor.” Some attorneys in the audience may have wondered here about Margaret Thatcher, as had many in regard to any often expressed notions of women being inherently more pacific. Given that she was speaking to a Florida audience, some attendees may have also thought about their own very conservative Republican Senator Paula Hawkins. Returning to the memories of the 1984 campaign, Abzug further intoned the notion that the Ferraro candidacy “changed the landscape of the country politically. It forever changed perceptions.” How political matters had suddenly and forever changed as a result of this highly unsuccessful campaign she never said. In the Florida Bar gender matters had apparently changed long ago, at least among wealthy white people. Further, how Abzug knew what “women” have recognized what she claimed they’ve recognized she could not say either. As with “Gender Gap,” she was speaking about how she wanted women to behave politically, hoping to motivate them by saying that women were already doing what she dearly hoped they would do. The tinge of extremism in the vague ideas she was outlining was indicative of the point, amidst the popularity of Reagan among men and women, that she could offer little substance and mainly verve. The attorneys who gathered in Boca Raton were not stirred into any radical actions, but they apparently enjoyed the spectacle. It was good entertainment for the Florida bar’s luncheon. Another of their scheduled speakers was retired General William C. Westmoreland. From Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy to William Westmoreland and Bella Abzug, there was quite an array of personalities available to organizations who could afford the hefty speaker fees. After both Florida presentations, the

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attorneys politely applauded, finished their desserts, and then went back to their wills and suits. 14 While meetings with professional women presented Abzug with, at best, ideologically mixed audiences interested in entertainment, even within her feminist fold all was not united either. Some women were coming to regard Abzug as one who represented a kind of entrenched establishment within feminism. In late June of 1985 the National Women’s Political Caucus met in Atlanta, the first time the caucus met in the Deep South. One of the chief items for discussion concerned the election of a new leader. Part of the reason to meet in the South was to demonstrate that the caucus and the brand of feminism it represented appealed beyond the traditional elites of the Northeastern cities. In regard to the chairwoman, nonetheless, Bella Abzug (along with Gloria Steinem) staunchly supported the candidacy of Irene Natividad, a fellow New Yorker. Natividad was opposed by Linda Hallenborg, a Pittsburgh native who had relocated to Vinnings, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Natividad confidently spoke in general terms, describing herself as “a national leader for a national movement.” Hallenborg cast herself as “a good bridge between the different parts of the country,” implying that such linkages needed to be stronger. Beyond the simple matter of two people vying for an office, the serious dimension here concerned how some members of the NWPC felt the organization had grown distant from and needed to reach out to women and viewpoints from areas outside New York City and the other major Northeastern population centers. Georgia State Representative Cathey Steinberg, also a Pennsylvania native, reinforced this sentiment in support of Hallenborg. “You get a more balanced point of view from down here,” asserted Steinberg. “I know, because I’ve been in both places.” In some feminists’ eyes, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem had become symbols of a sub-class of the Northeastern Establishment. They were famous for believing that they, as women, were therefore oppressed and always more sensitive, open, and inclusive than their male counterparts merely because they said they were. Paradoxically, their gender-based sense of superiority appeared to enable some of the very sort of closed-mindedness to which they felt themselves superior and immune. A sensitivity to this paradox was present even among committed feminists who saw a typical New York provincialism and arrogance at work in the existing caucus leadership. But Abzug would appear to take no heed. Coretta Scott King spoke to the caucus and caused a mild stir when, as a Georgian, she proclaimed: “I hope you will understand I have to stick with my Southern sister.” Rosalynn Carter supported Hallenborg too. Nonetheless, Natividad won the caucus election. 15 New York provincialism was not the only source of division in the NWPC. Former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm was a member of the caucus’s advisory board, but she would conspicuously not attend the Atlanta meeting. A month before she had been in Atlanta for the first convention of

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the National Political Congress for Black Women. There, she and others spoke pointedly of no longer wanting white “surrogates” to presume to speak for them. Observers noted here, with a touch of concern, how divisions among early twentieth-century feminists had been pronounced, with some of the differences perhaps contributing to the slowness in the gaining of suffrage. Chisholm made a point of saying that she did not want to prompt efforts at internal segregation, but the unacceptable status quo appeared to involve a certain presumptuousness among the leadership that needed to be put on notice. The newly elected chairwoman Natividad grasped the situation and tried to be graciously non-divisive, encouraging women of various ethnic minorities to form their own groups. Naturally, the newly elected Natividad wanted to put such developments in a positive light: “I don’t view it negatively. I see it as progress.” Chisholm cast matters with a bit more of an edge. She cited the heralded nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as an example of a state of affairs within American women’s politics that needed to be addressed. When Mondale chose a white woman from New York to be his running mate, she noted, “Black women finally came to the realization that although we are loyal, we are dedicated, [and] we are talented, nobody pays us any attention.” Chisholm begged to point out to white feminists that at the time of Ferraro’s Vice Presidential selection “no black woman was given the courtesy of being called to [Mondale’s home in] North Oaks, Minnesota.” Here she inquired: “What about Barbara Jordan, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Mary Frances Berry, Pat Harris [or Shirley Chisholm]?” 16 For Chisholm there also remained the memory of the not-so-delightful contrast between the tepid interest white women had shown for her 1972 Presidential candidacy versus the widespread enthusiasm so many had, and expected others to show, for Ferraro’s candidacy in 1984. Chisholm had had to work hard for the pre-convention support she amassed in the 1972 primaries. Ferraro’s nomination was a simple gift. The contrast between a black woman fighting for every delegate and a wealthy white woman breezing into prominence and rave support was indeed sharp. It would still have been a mistake for any commentator of the day to have written here about any great fissures emerging in the women’s movement, and Chisholm was indeed much too nuanced a political thinker to operate in any such stark a manner. Her antipathy to Bella Abzug underscored this, as she always considered Abzug “so vulgar.” 17 Her moves here did serve a bit of notice on established feminist leaders like Abzug. It was then not only external political developments that were pushing Abzug to make adjustments, pressures were present from the inside the world of Democratic women as well. Questions concerned whether she would listen and what forms, if any, would changes take. Meetings of a wider social venue that summer would provide an answer.

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The years from 1975 to 1985 had been given an official designation from the United Nations as the “Decade for Women.” The designation enabled the UN to spend some of its considerable budget on the staging of several international women’s conferences. The first had been in Mexico City in 1975; the second had convened in Copenhagen in 1980. In July of 1985 a third such meeting was to take place in Nairobi, Kenya. At the previous international gatherings great rancor had erupted as various delegations appeared bent on using the conferences to express their governments’ positions on key international issues. Their hopes were to use the meetings to give visibility to their concerns and possibly to embarrass another state with whom they were in conflict. At Copenhagen and Mexico City, for example, Palestinian women made many attempts to call attention to their claims of sufferings at the hands of Israel. Resolutions equating Zionism with racism came forward repeatedly. The Israelis and their allies, including Abzug, had been upset over such displays of partisanship, deeming many to be engaging in disingenuous posturing, claiming to be addressing women’s issues while asserting a party line against a rival state. Abzug angrily cast this as women serving the male leaders of their home nations. The question of what were properly women’s issues was then a matter that leaders of the Nairobi conference, including Abzug, wanted to control as effectively as they could to avoid further strife and embarrassment. Naturally, many women sympathetic to the plight of such peoples as the Palestinians and others saw this as another imperious ploy by the major Western nations’ leaders to maintain ongoing patterns of oppression. In Mexico and Denmark, they had pressed for condemnations of Israel and heckled Jewish women whenever and wherever they spoke. It seemed doubtful that any mere force of personality or will was going to prevent such acts from occurring again. By 1985, few of the conditions which prompted the international resentments had changed. Although the troubles in Mexico City had put people on guard as they planned the meeting in Copenhagen, strife still arose there. Despite all plans to avoid conflict, Nairobi would prove little different. As feminist leaders like Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan, were fully aware of the likelihood of efforts by various delegations to raise issues that appeared to be designed to embarrass the U.S. government and its allies, many points of irony arose. Working largely in accord here, Abzug and Friedan were hardly friendly with the Reagan administration, so it may have been more than a trifle galling for either to be put in a position of appearing to defend President Reagan. British feminists felt much the same vis à vis Margaret Thatcher, with the obvious added irony of their antipathy being directed toward the policies of a female politician. With her life’s work and reputation, Abzug had achieved such prominence in the worlds of feminists that she was a major star at Nairobi, so was Betty Friedan. At the first day’s initial ceremony, an estimated six thousand

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women packed the assembly hall and overflowed into the hallways and stairwells. It seemed at least half of them wanted to meet Bella Abzug. Throughout the adulation she was gracious. “To think that somebody like me could get to talk to somebody like you,” exclaimed an enthralled delegate from Australia. “Anytime, anytime,” Abzug assured her. The good feeling was pronounced. One journalist described the atmosphere as “part Woodstock, part fall college registration, and part tent meeting. . . . It is not a meeting, it is not a conference, it is an encounter and a happening.” 18 Within the “feel good” environment, a question on many observers minds concerned what of practical significance could such a convention ever carry out besides a spending of the UN’s budget. The spirit and good feelings, officially called “mabibi tuungane” (Swahili for “women unite”), remained very much on hand throughout the meetings, but such conflicts as had arisen in Mexico City and Copenhagen could never be squelched. In addition to the good feelings, “there was,” noted one reporter, “a lot of anger wafting around.” Some of it was cultural, and despite any optimistic theorizing, the gaps of sensibility were all matters that gender could not overcome even to the slightest degree. There was the hostility, as a Washington Post reporter sensed it, “from the Iranian women shrouded in black, who sweep across the anemic grass like a flock of crows, extolling the virtues of the well-known feminist Ayatollah Khomeini and encountering skepticism wherever they went.” Meanwhile, Americans were apparently “irritated with Latin Americans who could never accept the idea of forming a line” for anything, and “South Americans [were] weary of Yankees who think the Western Hemisphere stops at Texas. . . . Africans stiffen [both] at the way the Americans expect everything done yesterday and [at] the way Europeans don’t.” One feminist film was not allowed to be shown, as socially conservative Kenyan officials judged it to be pornographic. Kenyan authorities also ordered a group called the International Lesbian Information Service to stop distributing a pamphlet called “Women Loving Women.” The group was not stopped from holding a series of outdoor discussion sessions on the campus of the University of Nairobi, however, and their sessions actually attracted large crowds of Kenyan men who spent hours asking them questions. Troubles with overbooked hotels prompted the Kenyan government to try to use the city’s university dormitories as alternative housing. Bella Abzug led a group of American delegates in a refusal to leave their hotels for the dormitories in which the government wished them to reside. Fortunately, this did not produce as bad a scene as Abzug had instigated at the San Diego airport earlier that year. 19 To some, like the Kenyan men encountering openly lesbian women for the first time, such diversity could have been intriguing and even informative, but other people’s senses of entitlement and anger, including Bella Abzug’s, were often overriding. Beyond the individual stories in such clashes of cul-

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ture, the gaps of sensibility belied some serious matters concerning what some people wanted to discuss versus others who wanted to silence selected matters as well as the people who sought to raise them. Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and other leading American feminists were resolute about doing all they could to keep the Nairobi conference discussions from devolving as matters had in Mexico City and Copenhagen. Abzug explicitly affirmed this, declaring, “We are determined that there be no domination and diversion of the conference on political issues that this conference really has no power to affect.” President Reagan sent his daughter Maureen to head the American delegation, and he voiced to her much the same outlook: “The members of your delegation firmly believe that the business of this conference is women, not propaganda.” Reporters noted that Abzug and others did indeed bristle at any suggestion that were echoing Reagan administration views, but they had no choice but to accept the fact of common concerns. 20 When critics had chastised various efforts by Abzug on behalf of women as mere propaganda, she would be highly dismissive. Now she was willing to dismiss as propaganda any efforts in Nairobi that appeared to auger against her established lines of discourse. There were, of course, many divergent views and organizations represented even among just the Americans at Nairobi. The varieties of matters on their minds ranged from equal rights to abortion, pay issues, illiteracy, battered women, refugees, and clean water. While emphases and priorities varied among the Americans, their differences were minor compared to the intentionally sharp matters that women of many other, poorer nations wanted to raise. These matters included South Africa’s ongoing system of apartheid, international disarmament, Palestinian rights, and the terms of trade and debt issues between wealthy and poor countries. To some degree, had the parties been willing to be genuinely open with one another, there was some common ground to be developed. Matters of schooling and water systems in poor nations, for example, had obvious financial dimensions, hence there were clear linkages here to the high interest rates and debt issues between the major lending and borrowing countries. Such matters could have been profitably explored. People like Abzug and Friedan were also happy to support anti-apartheid statements, as embarrassment to such a state as South Africa was not something they minded at all. But the key was that the overall perceptions various groups had of one another were full of suspicions and preconceptions, with many having prepared a lot of rhetoric to address their opposition, both directly and through the press. The idea of developing common ground was anything but a driving force. 21 Women from Third World and socialist nations were ready to dispute both the rich nations’ ideas of how to run the convention and the fact that the wealthy Westerners presumed they could and should run it in the first place. Margaret Papandreou, the American-born wife of Greece’s Prime Minister

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spoke to the press and gave a speech in Nairobi attacking Western feminists and especially the U.S. delegation as mere pawns of their male-dominated “anti-feminist” governments. She received enthusiastic applause from thousands of non-Western women as she criticized President Reagan for burdening his daughter with the task of keeping the conference focused on his version of women’s issues like health care and education and away from broader questions. “Why is it this conference becomes politicized when you discuss the rights of refugee women or racist violence experienced by women in South Africa? Is that any more political than the issues that are called ‘women’s issues?’” Calling for women to stand up to the likes of Reagan, be it Maureen or her father, was an obvious emotional point for Papandreou to exploit, and she did it very well. She won over many delegates, and there was nothing that Abzug and her colleagues could do about it. 22 Many other such broadly sweeping sentiments came forth. Vietnamese and Afghan delegates asserted that U.S. militarism hurt women in their lands. The head of the Soviet Union’s delegation, former cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space), proclaimed that America’s imperialist policies and its research on space-based defense systems (commonly dubbed “Star Wars”) were major obstacles to women’s progress. Cause and effect here were always a little fuzzy, and this was not merely due to bad translations. In certain respects, the cast of Tereshkova’s arguments was actually quite similar to the points Bella Abzug had employed in 1969 when serving the Mayoral campaign of John Lindsay. Abzug had endeavored to pit her candidate against Nixon and the Vietnam War, claiming wasteful military expenditures took valuable resources away from anti-poverty programs that would benefit women. Thus in New York, 1969, Abzug’s call was to oppose Nixon and the war and support poor New Yorkers; in Nairobi, 1985, Tereshkova was opposing Abzug and America in support of poor women. 23 For Abzug and her friends, all such eruptions of anti-American feelings could not be controlled. They were rather naive and perhaps indulging of more than a bit of self-importance to think, amidst their preparations, that there was some way they could be. Any such efforts from them would only accentuate the sense of sides being so sharply drawn. No one noted it at the time, but Papandreou’s resistance to any narrowly drawn strictures about appropriate topics for discussion and debate was analogous to what Bella Abzug had been striving for when she insisted President Carter allow her Women’s Commission to discourse in broader areas than he thought appropriate. In 1985, Abzug thus found herself in the role of Jimmy Carter, 1978–1979. The big difference here was that neither Abzug, Maureen Reagan, nor any American could silence or fire such people as Valentina Tereshkova and Margaret Papandreou. One American delegate, Esther Coopersmith, an associate of Abzug’s, a Democratic fund raiser, and former U.S. representative to the UN under President Carter, felt the same frustration as

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Abzug and called Papandreou’s remarks “unladylike.” There would certainly have been quite an explosion in Washington had President Carter or Hamilton Jordan cast such a remark at Bella Abzug when she was lecturing President Carter about her women’s committee’s need for a wider political purview. 24 The self-styled oppressed never like to be seen as oppressors. Other such clashes occurred throughout the convention. There were, after all, over 10,000 delegates and observers from 160 nations gathered in Nairobi. Any feminist ideals that women constituted a unique political class with special interests were hardly proving true. Abzug’s claim that with groups of women “it is always easier to come to a confluence of opinion” seemed ludicrously naive. There was no hint of any shared concerns about the plight of women generating a different, overriding tonality of cooperation. With war ongoing between their two countries, women from Iraq and Iran went at each other viciously. Palestinian and Israeli women again shouted angrily at one another. Abzug tried to infuse gender into the situation, declaring, “we must not make the mistake of talking about our concerns in the same way the men running our governments do.” Few appeared to listen. The hailing of “gender” did not appeal. Even more than with her ideals of “gender gap,” Abzug’s sociology could not be brought into reality through any means, be it exhortation, guilt, or force of personality. People in Nairobi would not be bulldozed, by Abzug or anyone else. It may have been an enjoyable fancy to believe, as Abzug knew from her family after her father had passed away, that women could go it alone and even be better off for it. When Abzug again held a discussion on her favorite conference theme of what the life would be like “If Women Ruled the World,” she heard many generalities she liked. As one journalist sardonically described: “The panel . . . answered the loaded question with the properly loaded answer: the world would improve.” Such insights led to no change in tonality in Nairobi, let alone from there. 25 No matter how deeply, or sincerely such convictions about gender differences and superiority may have run in Abzug, the reality of others’ worlds was decidedly different, and in many cases no less genuine. Where Abzug and her American associates could control dialogue and discussion they could also reveal themselves to be as adamant and inflexible as any socialist bureaucrat mechanically cheering the likes of Margaret Papandreou. Betty Friedan attempted to create her own little seminar in Nairobi, as she met with all interested women under a tree at a quad on the campus of the University of Nairobi where many of the convention’s activities took place. At one of her gatherings a Mexican woman, who had neither a government prompting her nor any hidden motives to embarrass the U.S. or anyone else, raised to Friedan the fact that Mexico’s few feminists who could afford to get to such a place as Nairobi were not the ones who needed the conference. More generally, she noted that the needs of poor women had to be

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understood in an economic context. (The data presented by the United Nations to the delegations of member states actually supported the Mexican woman’s point. The UN’s own evidence revealed that in the so-called Decade for Women “the improvements observed had benefited only a limited number of women.”) The woman from Mexico asserted that the predicament of most women in her nation, and in virtually all poor nations, could not be improved without some sort of solution to the Third World debt crisis, which most understood to involve some debt forgiveness or refinancing by the very reluctant governments in the U.S. and Western Europe. She also raised the issues of the American government’s hostile actions in such locales as Nicaragua and of the horrible impact this was having upon women there. 26 In response, Friedan was anything but inclusive or conciliatory. “Why did you come here if you think that way?” she snapped. “You are not a feminist.” Apparently the classic notion that feminism involved a woman’s right to make choices and to think for herself had no relevance under Friedan’s tree. To Friedan, there was only for women to be free to think the “right way.” Narrowly seeing any difference of opinion to constitute yet more Mexico City/Copenhagen–style tactics, Friedan was predisposed to hostility and resistance. She asserted that issues like Nicaragua had no place at the conference. She did raise the somewhat substantive point that educated women must be at the conference, arguing that the beginnings of almost any revolution can be found among the educated. That argument may have had flaws: Historically, many “uneducated” women and men (France’s sans-culottes, for example) have effectively challenged political orders. What, as well, was being said in Nairobi about which educated women had not already known and read for years; hence why have a conference? Here Friedan was at least showing some respect for the content of the points that the woman from Mexico was raising. The rest of her rant was merely rhetorical, shamefully abusive, and horrifying to some who were present. According to witnesses, the Mexican woman began to cry. She made a brief reference to the point that Americans do indeed have a hard time understanding such people as she. Then she quickly got up and left. 27 American reporter Mary McGrory had seen the exchange, and several days later she noted “the person I identify with most closely at the women’s conference in Nairobi is a woman whose name I don’t even know. She is Mexican, and she was a foil to one of the high priestesses of feminism, Betty Friedan. It took me back,” wrote McGrory with a sardonic chuckle, all the way to 1971, to a conversation with Bella Abzug, who was telling me triumphantly, about the formation of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Hundreds of women were coming, the feminist movement was on its way, she said. “Will they come out against the war in Vietnam?” I asked. To me it was the first item of national business. “No,” she said, “We have a lot of Republi-

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For Abzug, gender, per se, was the goal. She always presumed her views would win out within any organization in which she was involved. Like Betty Friedan, her ideas as to how to proceed were not to be questioned. She had always been driven by the notion that if women would join together, all issues and matters of viewpoint would eventually work themselves out, and for the better. Within the once-established world of women, she could then be unashamedly harsh in regard to anyone who did not set the same priorities as she, honestly but truculently believing that those who disagreed either did not understand or were against her. Thus if someone in 1971 saw the Vietnam War of transcending importance to the mere narrative fact of women forming a caucus, or if a Mexican woman in 1985 saw her nation’s debt situation or the violence being done in a neighboring country each to be more important than “women,” per se, let alone the concerns of rich educated women, they were simply not to be heeded or even respected. Indeed they were seen as part of a conspiracy to derail the conference’s party line that American leadership had established. Abzug’s and Friedan’s attitudes reinforced the Mexican woman’s complaint, one that many Mexicans have expressed: “We’re too far from heaven and too close to the United States.” 29 As long as Abzug and Friedan were dominating matters where they could in Nairobi, this would not change. Other Americans accompanying Abzug in Nairobi displayed similar sorts of arrogance. Mimi Alperin, co-chair of the American Jewish Committee delegation, while noting that there was a bit less hostility toward Jews at the Nairobi conference than had been present in Mexico City and Copenhagen, still scoffed at the criticisms of Israel and of various American policies she was hearing as “largely the same old garbage—trading atrocities from the past.” 30 Many Jewish women and men have taken umbrage at people who react with any sort of yawning deja vu toward discussions of the Holocaust. And many American feminists have seethed whenever confronted with criticisms of their many meetings as covering “largely the same old garbage.” Yet here Alperin and Abzug felt entitled to be as cavalierly dismissive as they wished in regard to voices they did not care to hear. Abzug was not the slightest bit disingenuous when she raised objections to socialist and Third World representatives’ efforts to subvert discussions and issues at Nairobi. She was obviously trying to shame her opponents when referring to them as the pawns of their male-run governments and saying they were “talking about our concerns in the same way the men running our governments do.” Of course, opponents like Margaret Papandreou were trying to tar people like Abzug with a “male brush” as well. It was all anything but a surprise— women in political conflict using some of the same mud-slinging tactics that

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many men use when in the same positions. In their criticisms of one another, each may have been right, assuming the behavior each did not like was masculine. Perhaps the greater point to be learned was that such behavior is neither masculine nor feminine but human (as well as mean-spirited). Such a conclusion was not to be considered, however, as it augured against Abzug’s political raison d’être. Her gender-vocabularied sociology was not to be abandoned, no matter any evidence she brought forth via her colleagues’ and her own behavior. One of Abzug’s desires in regard to the convention had been to avoid the Mexico City and Copenhagen–like politicization. Along with her colleagues, she failed here. Her efforts were hardly supportive of the ideals of women freely airing their voices. The charge of “maleness” against those who would not cooperate with her smacked of McCarthyism with a different bête noire. The way she cast her resistance also brought to light another conundrum for the entire UN operation. Abzug had thundered about being “determined that there be no domination and diversion of the conference on political issues that this conference really has no power to affect.” Taken literally, this could have implied that the entire conference had nothing to discuss, as it had no legally binding authority over anyone. Whether focusing on the broad issues called for by Margaret Papandreou and her colleagues or on the narrower matters preferred by Abzug, Betty Friedan, and their friends, any and all ensuing resolutions were just that—resolutions. At one level, any adopted resolutions then went before the UN General Assembly, which debated matters and may have passed resolutions of its own. At another level, one in which Abzug placed some emotional investment, women at the meeting heard the many lectures and discussions and went back home, possibly imbued with new ideas and energy for positive action. In either case, what actually changed? Many such national leaders as Syria’s President Hafez alAssad heard of such ideas and activities from his diplomats or from other elements of his population and, at best, merely nodded with a disingenuous “very interesting.” Abzug had left the U.S. Congress and had never found a way back in. The political right came to dominate at the national level. She had turned ever more tenaciously toward brands of feminism that some colleagues found compelling, which traditionalists opposed, and which others found less than avant-garde and ever more passé. Abzug may have been quick to cast any who opposed her to be conservatives, yet people from Shirley Chisholm to Margaret Papandreou had challenged her, not only on ideological lines, but because they found her too rigid and overly bourgeois. Meanwhile, in her quest for venues, Abzug had found a pulpit in the United Nations, but it had no binding authority on anyone. There remained for her a congenial, at times fearful, clique of associates whose enthusiasm always proved heartening and spiritually restorative. It was largely a sui generis world, however, and there

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seemed only points of opposition anywhere else she turned. Such a state of affairs was in no way altered by anything that occurred in Nairobi. At best, the Nairobi conference was merely, as one writer had dubbed it, “a happening.” Having gerrymandered the christening of the Decade for Women in the UN, Abzug and her colleagues had been able to spend a fair piece of the organization’s budget. But beyond such a mundane level of perquisites, her work appeared to be doing little but aggrandizing the feminist faithful. (Having to stay in a Nairobi dormitory rather than a fancy hotel was thus a genuine setback.) The faithful were her political “locals.” Like her good friend Tip O’Neill, she had consistently taken care of her own, only she did it with international funds, paid largely by the taxpayers of Japan, Western Europe, the United States, and Canada, who had always been the chief underwriters of the UN’s considerable costs. Here she was a success, and that was an achievement but largely in the realm of patronage. What greater cause she was actually serving remained unclear. Grinding poverty and the oppression of women and men in many parts of the world were matters well beyond her reach. Meanwhile, those in actual political power, from Ronald Reagan to Hafez al-Assad appeared to be at best well mannered but not the slightest bit interested in what she and her colleagues had to say. NOTES 1. Boston Globe, December 3, 1984. 2. The Record (New Jersey), February 11, 1985; Ferraro, My Story, pp. 325–26. 3. Orlando Sentinel, March 6, 1985; Dallas Morning News, March 6, 1985; Sara Evans, Forward to Stephanie Gilmore, ed., Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on SecondWave Feminist in the United States. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. x; Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), p. 294; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open, chapter 7. 4. New York Times, September 23, 1981, p. A 28; January 22, 1984, p. E 6. 5. Ibid., February 5, 1984, Sunday Magazine, p. 40. 6. Ibid., April15, 1984, Sunday Magazine, p. 114; June 3, 1984, Sunday Magazine, p. 122. 7. New York Times, March 15, 1985; Atlanta Constitution, February 18, 1985; Akron Beacon Journal, April 7, 1985. 8. New York Times, July 13, 1980, p. E3. 9. Ibid., February 25, 1983, p. B6. 10. Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991), passim. 11. New York Times, December 5, 1982, Long Island section, pp. 1, 18. 12. Dallas Morning News, March 6, 1985; Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1985; New York Times, March 31, 1985; San Diego Evening Tribune, March 26, 1985. 13. New York Times, August 30, 1982, p. D5; May 6, 1983, Long Island section, p. 12; April 8, 1982, p. C8. 14. Orlando Sentinel, June 29, 1985; Miami Herald, June 19, 1985. 15. Atlanta Constitution, June 27, 1985; June 30; December 31; Atlanta Journal, June 27, 1985. 16. Atlanta Constitution, July 3, 1985.

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17. Shirley Chisholm quoted by Ed Koch, Koch Oral History, January 5, 1976, p. 39, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 131. 18. Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1985; Washington Post, July 11, 1985. 19. Washington Post, July 11, 1985; July 13; Dallas Morning News, July 14, 1985. 20. Washington Post, July 15, 1985; July 18. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., July 15, 1985. 23. Ibid., July 15, 1985; Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1985; San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 1985. 24. Dallas Morning News, July 20, 1985; Washington Post, July 15, 1985. 25. Dallas Morning News, July 20, 1985; July 28; San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 1985; Washington Post, July 28, 1985; Orlando Sentinel, July 26, 1985. 26. “Under the Tree With Betty,” Washington Post, July 13, 1985; www.un.org/en/ development/devagenda/gender.shtml. 27. “Under the Tree With Betty,” Washington Post, July 13, 1985. 28. Mary McGrory, “One Woman’s Departure From Feminism,” Washington Post, July 21, 1985. 29. “Under the Tree With Betty,” Washington Post, July 13, 1985. 30. Dallas Morning News, July 14, 1985.

Chapter Eight

Presumptuous Irrelevance in Geneva

The Nairobi conference ended in July of 1985. The good feelings left whatever emotional marks they did, but as with all such UN work, a sense of tangible political results was elusive to all observers and participants, all euphemistic justifications for the conference notwithstanding. Having witnessed the rancor of the conference and hearing earnest assertions as to how the world would be better if women were in charge, one journalist concluded that “female chauvinism is as useless and as addled as the male kind. . . . Feelings of destiny emerge naturally at conferences. Group solidarity reinforces group think.” 1 Abzug was not unique among feminists in her affection for any such flights of gender fancy, but the sense was so especially part of her very being. Her belief in female exceptionalism appeared to be running deeper than her practical politics. She had lived so much of her formative years achieving amidst an all-female world—an all-female college, an allfemale high school, most of all an all-female family after the trauma of her grandfather and father passing away. To her a world “ruled” by women was more than a mere fantasy, it seemed to be a primal emotional leitmotif. After losing several elections, she had turned ever more exclusively to feminism. Such a zone gave comfort but also encasement. The gap between the fancy which guided elements of Abzug’s life versus the simple fact that men were a reality of life was one that would never really close for her. Her now more exclusively feminist political realm only widened the gap. There was no question that the certainty that she and many others had been expressing about women’s rights and abilities to achieve anything they wanted was infectious, ennobling, and the best spiritual tonic many women could possibly get in overcoming any obstacles in the development of their lives. But the stern insistence upon equity and the contradic217

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tions in the idea that gender-based fancies could be real was a theme which was never far away as well. In certain respects, Abzug could not fully separate the two matters. In contrast, for many young people, who were now pursuing the careers they desired, the division was completely obvious. They embraced the idea of liberation, but many fewer were attracted to a politics tied to notions of special or superior traits regarding one gender versus the other. The Feminine Mystique was gone; now a Feminist Mystique loomed and was there to be avoided. It was the point where liberation and liberalism turned toward illiberal intolerance. Those who did not care to see any contradictions in these views could readily seek to control the free thought and speech of others. Those who then felt unduly controlled would not want to remain very close, leaving the faithful ever more isolated. The personal factors in Abzug’s gravitation away from purely equity ideals and toward gender-feminist views had combined with the political fact that, once out of Congress and having failed to win any other elected office, her political purview and constituency became more purely feminist. This happened to emerge at the very time that other aspects of feminist politics also turned away from equity and toward notions of gender exceptionalism. The two elements had always existed, but by the 1980s, the latter appeared to dominate. Some may speculate that the failure of the ERA caused this shift. 2 It may have also been the fact that, in effect, the ERA did come to pass, as legal enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment did the job. (This had been one of the points of criticism of the ERA—that it was unnecessary, as existing law already covered the issue.) Legal equity was achieved in the 1970s, but feminism needed to maintain itself, if only for personal, bureaucratic, and psychological reasons, some of which may have been magnified by reactions to the ERA’s failure to gain passage. Gender feminism eclipsed a largely, if unspectacularly, achieved equity. Equityminded women and men turned to other issues, usually involving poor people, where greater justice was sorely needed. For the feminists who felt drawn into gender-based modes of thought, absolutist personalities like Abzug’s, when combined with such brilliance as she obviously possessed, could be addictive, as well as a bit frightening. And the loyalty of Abzug’s friends always had a decided intensity here. Shortly after she returned from Africa, friends threw her a surprise sixty-fifth birthday party, complete with the now usual plaudits of idolatry. It was the same group of limousine liberals as always convened around her at such times. 3 At age sixty-five, Abzug certainly showed no signs of retirement. Her mind was as quick and sharp as ever, as were her political passions. She was still very much a political outsider, however. Many of the feminist goals about which she and her colleagues continued to chant had succeeded. What young woman in 1985 needed to be persuaded that she could become a physician or an attorney if that was her desire and she was willing to do the work? As

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millions of women were now able to pursue virtually any walk of life, the concept of “role models,” flawed as it was in so many ways, had less and less urgency. At some of the highest levels of government, the issues of gender representation had begun to work themselves out in manners that some feminists may not have liked. The Reagan-promised appointment of a woman to the Supreme Court did not prove to change very much. Indeed Sandra Day O’Connor was very much a conservative, agreeing the vast majority of the time with her colleague William Rehnquist. Despite feminist and liberal fears of a hostile Court, furthermore, the Roe v. Wade decision was never overturned, nor was affirmative action. While so many of the former gender barriers of the old days had been overcome, some feminists were still calling for people to get out and fight, and to so many of the younger generations the stance seemed quite odd. The monuments to victory had already been built; the dedication ceremonies were long over. While the parallel has limits and can evoke levels of emotion, the state of feminism in the mid-1980s was oddly like that of Playboy Magazine. Each had once been quite popular and avant-garde. They had voiced often similar calls for meaningful resistance and change with regard to repressive Victorian attitudes about freedom of choice and conscience for all concerning such matters as lifestyle and sexuality. They were fighting much the same fight in many ways, and by the mid-1980s, each had largely won. As the sense of urgency was waning among the youth, among feminists the faithful still appeared to respond with calls for greater solidarity and verve. This fostered a level of intolerance. Any messages that the battles of the past were over were not to be received. In regard to the claim of gender inequity, one of the basic mantras of feminists throughout the 1970s and 1980s had been that women were paid less money than men. In the early 1980s, a widespread claim was that women made but 59 percent of what men made. In 1984, the economist Thomas Sowell published a book in which he carefully challenged such claims. Sowell used no rhetoric. He simply analyzed the data of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which had been the basis of the claims of a gender wage gap in the first place. In his analysis, Sowell pointed out that the overall male versus female wage level comparison conflated the factors of marriage and children. The same data base showed, for example, that, within the same age groups, married men made more money than unmarried men, and married women made less money than unmarried women. In neither case was there discrimination at the work place. Employers were not deliberately paying unmarried women more than married women. There was instead the intervening issue of the time taken in regard to children. Sowell then calculated a more precise and intellectually cogent comparison between unmarried women and unmarried men in the age group of twenty-five to sixty-four. Each

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obviously had the same sorts of bills to pay and had fewer (but not zero) intervening issues related to children. “Women who remain single,” he wrote, “earn 91 percent of the income of men who remain single.” Even that smaller gap did not indicate gender biases. The 9 percent gap, Sowell showed, cannot “automatically be attributed to employer discrimination, since women are not educated as often in such highly paid fields as mathematics, science, and engineering,” nor are they found much in “physically taxing and well-paid fields such as construction work, lumberjacking, coal mining, and the like. Moreover,” he wrote, “the rise of unwed motherhood means that even among [some] women who never married, the economic constraints of motherhood have not been entirely eliminated.” These points may have indicated ongoing problems, but nothing indicated that the preponderance of employers were doing anything wrong when issuing paychecks. There was, Sowell concluded, virtual parity between the incomes of women and men who never married. Sowell added that was not a new phenomenon: “In 1971, women who had remained unmarried into their thirties and who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly higher incomes than men of the very same description. In the academic world, single women who received their PhDs in the 1930s had by the 1950s become full professors slightly more often than male PhDs as a whole. Academic women who never married averaged slightly higher incomes in 1968–1969 than academic men who never married [emphases his].” 4 Feminist reactions to such calculations were minimal, it seemed because silence was one of the party-line ways to respond to facts which ran contrary to accepted views. From the time of the publication of Sowell’s study, well into the twenty-first century, feminists have emphasized the alleged pay gap between men and women. Other theories and analyses certainly exist besides those of Thomas Sowell. The key is that discussions of wage issues, be they in feminist-friendly media organs or in the reading lists of thousands of women’s studies courses, rarely if ever include such materials as those put forth by such a significant figure as Sowell. If many college courses which consider gender wage issues assigned only writings of Sowell, great criticisms would arise concerning the need to present other points of view. The exclusions of such rational points as those of Thomas Sowell engender few, if any such criticisms, however. Indeed to suggest any such alternative views was, and is, to invite charges of sexism, gender hostility, and misogyny. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a scholar of impeccable credentials, and at one time the President of the National Women’s Studies Association, once commented on signs of narrowness in feminism which the intellectual and pedagogical embargoing of a writer like Thomas Sowell represented. Professor Fox-Genovese criticized what she saw as a selfish individualism that tinged the women’s movement, an outlook which she said tended to benefit wealthy white women but did little for the poor. She also saw an intolerance of

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opposing views. Fox-Genovese made the point that women in such academic confines as women’s studies programs must toe certain party lines or risk much with regard to their careers. If, for example, a woman had a tremendous professional record in teaching and publishing, but happened to be openly pro-life on the abortion issue, her ability to get hired, tenured, or promoted could be greatly compromised. 5 Others with less substantive records but whose political views conformed properly would more easily succeed. In the 1950s, Abzug used to defend people who were being blackballed from jobs because of their alleged failures to conform to emotionally laden political strictures of that day. Thirty years later, as “sexist” had replaced “communist” as a favorite bête noire in some wealthy and powerful political circles, Bella Abzug found herself an iconic figure among people who were doing much the same thing. Rosalind Rosenberg, a distinguished professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, ran into the very sort of intellectual intolerance that FoxGenovese decried. A court case emerged in 1984–1985 involving the company Sears Roebuck and its employee promotion practices. An interpretation of Sears’s promotion statistics indicated that women were not being hired and promoted at the same rates as men in the area of sales. There were no specific “smoking-gun” cases, just the data. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided to bring a suit against Sears on the basis of that interpreted data. In the eventual civil trial, the EEOC produced an academic witness, Alice Kessler-Harris of Hofstra University in New York, who affirmed that the variation in promotion rates was proof of sexist discrimination. Professor Rosenberg testified for Sears. Based on her research, Rosenberg articulated an analysis that the frequency of women who take time off or take shorter hours because of pregnancy and for the choice to devote time to children and family priorities explains much of the differences in the data that were the basis of the civil suit. Hearing the conflict between the experts, the judge threw out the EEOC’s suit. He added that Rosenberg presented “reasonable, well-supported opinions,” while Kessler-Harris presented “sweeping generalizations.” No one could argue with the legal logic of the judge’s decision, nor could anyone argue that there was any illogic in Rosenberg’s analysis. Feminists had long debated the point that in a legal context women and men should be treated the same versus the idea, given such issues as pregnancy, that differences should be recognized. Should pregnancy be a special issue in employment rules and law, or should it be treated like any other such absences as illness and injury? There was no consensus here among feminists, Rosenberg was one who clearly believed the latter, and her testimony was based on that very conviction, theretofore fully accepted by many feminists. Unlike their general non-reaction to Thomas Sowell, feminists would not simply ignore Rosalind Rosenberg. Her academic discipline was history, and

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women’s groups of the venerable American Historical Association passed a resolution criticizing and chastising Rosenberg for her testimony. “We believe as feminist scholars we have a responsibility not to allow our scholarship to be used against the interests of women struggling for equity in our society.” Such wording was extraordinary, as it demanded, under apparent threats of communal derision, condemnation, and shunning, that the entire concept disinterested scholarship was to be abandoned. Insularity had led debates within the academic and ideological fold of feminism to devolve in such ways that apparently certain views should not be given the right of free speech in such a venue as a court of law. This ideological stricture of feminism was apparently not to be questioned. Evidence derived from thoroughly competent research was not to be freely aired if it did not conform to what certain politically entrenched people already believed. The party line was more important than facts. Those who did not conform and raised any uncomfortable facts were not to be tolerated. In her timeline with which she prefaced her history of the women’s movement, Ruth Rosen cited the 1986 case: “The Supreme Court rules in EEOC v. Sears that Sears did not discriminate.” Listed in bold face, as were other displeasing events, the Sears citation implied the case marked a clear setback to the cause of women. The idea that it could have been a clarification or correction of past errors or excesses was apparently inconceivable. 6 In any field, academic or otherwise, the whole point of research involves the testing of hypotheses and of theretofore accepted theories. A basic assumption that had always held firm in the scholarly community of men and women was that people would integrate into their thinking proven ideas that effectively challenged previously accepted points of view. In this context, the willingness to be intellectually open comprises the very essence of the word “integrity.” It was that very idea of integrity that elements of American feminism appeared to be blithely abandoning. At work here was not just the frank Stalinism in the party-line thinking at hand in such statements as those of the women in the American Historical Association, it was the enabling and completely unapologetic sense of entitlement that accompanied it. Driven by years of successful bludgeonings of opponents with threats of McCarthyism and never having to confront compelling evidence they did not care to acknowledge, areas of feminism had clearly compromised their own integrity. Rosenberg was ostracized, much like the Mexican woman in Nairobi who dared to raise uncomfortable issues to Betty Friedan, and much like the blacklisted “communists” that Bella Abzug had once nobly defended. It may have been an economically comfortable world in which many now illiberal feminists thrived, and there remained many legitimate issues to be faced, but the “tender prison” into which feminism was devolving that literary critic Nina Auerbach had criticized was contradicting many of its original Constitutional, scholarly, and humanistic precepts. In doing so, it was tolerat-

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ing some of the most extreme and Constitutionally perverse views from within its fold. While Rosalind Rosenberg was ostracized by feminist scholars, extravagant claims from people within acceptable feminist circles continued to be accepted. Fears of McCarthyistic attacks negated the raising of relevant facts that could have eclipsed the victimology rhetoric at work here. Hyperbole could go to many extremes in such an environment in which irrationality was seldom checked. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, for example, repeatedly claimed she was a victim of gender bias, hence that she was being ostracized. She was, however, always able to get her works published in major houses, despite some rather absurd and irrational assertions. Among Dworkin’s claims was such a blind judgment as: “Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks.” Dworkin’s colleague, and Abzug’s friend and compatriot on the issue of pornography, Susan Brownmiller wrote similarly that “rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” 7 (Apparently rape and domestic violence involving women victimizing men, men victimizing men, or women victimizing women were not important to these writers.) Presuming their claims to be true, it also followed that Mr. Martin Abzug must have been repeatedly guilty of raping and intimidating his wife. Bella Abzug never accused her husband of anything but honestly and completely loving her, and he felt the same way about her, but to various extremists like Dworkin and Brownmiller, such an example meant nothing. Of course, Dworkin would never make any such accusations directly at Abzug. It was hyperbole that was somehow to be accepted among feminists, never questioned, and published by major houses. All evidence to the contrary was to go unheeded, and any who insisted on bringing up simple facts that negated the accepted truths of established feminists were to be ignored or attacked. The existence of such irrational statements as Dworkin’s was part of a greater picture in which those who knew better were unwilling to step forth and limit such borderline irrationality. It was similar to the culture of an old Jim Crow–era Southern town like Laurel, Mississippi, where Abzug tried to defend Willie McGee back in the late 1940s. The hate-driven racist extremists may have been a minority of white Southerners, but the vast majority of people were unwilling or fearful about stepping up against the most extreme within their community. Mainstream feminism was still focusing on major issues like abortion, but many also appeared reluctant to take exception to their extremists. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese saw such anti-freedom pressures within feminist academic circles, and the party-line response to Rosalind Rosenberg’s testimony in the Sears case underscored this, with the message not lost among young people who steadily embraced liberation while eschewing much of feminism. The fear-laden environments gave impetus to extremists who responded with greater levels of hyperbole. A sense of be-

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longing and membership within such an order, be it Jim Crow Southern or feminist, was not a narrative fact, it was an evaluative one. From within that order criticism would regularly be dismissed ad hominem. The voices of those who were not an accepted part of the community were to be ignored, and if they could not be ignored, they were to be attacked. The distinguished historian Gerda Lerner wrote of the Grimke sisters, two native South Carolinians of the slavery era who became abolitionists. Southerners were indeed appalled by such traitors, and had they not moved to New England the Grimkes would have faced extreme persecution or even death, no matter that they were female. To Lerner, these sisters were women who displayed the courage to tell the truth against all social pressures to the contrary, absolutely the best sort of example of women making a difference in history, role models for subsequent generations of feminists. 8 That world of seemingly unchallengeable Southern prejudice that the Grimke sisters and Gerda Lerner assailed actually shared some qualities with the intolerance some feminists were displaying in the 1980s and beyond. If commentators like Christopher Lasch were right, the intolerance was an extension of a narcissism that was growing in a society of diminishing economic expectations. At a more purely political level, it appeared that certain sectors of the economy and society, such as academe and other select political circles, sought and found safe, lucrative havens amidst a time of general Republican domination. A criticism of Republican conservatism had always raised the point that liberals cared more about the plight of the poor. Many Republicans argued against government largesse here, asserting their prescription of relying on the private sector dynamics of the marketplace would ultimately serve the poor better than would government mechanisms of social welfare. Some developments of feminism in the 1970s had left liberals an appearance of now caring increasingly about their own ranks, as they appeared to give convenient outlets through which state and federal government largesse could serve wealthy white women, demonstrably the least suffering of those who claimed to be victims of discrimination. Such a bourgeois bias had been part of the charges with which many socialist and Third World women had charged Bella Abzug and others at UN meetings in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi. Some who raised such charges may have been disingenuous, but there was also a logic that could not be simply denied. Even though it could indeed not be denied, however, it could be ignored or silenced. Such internal contradictions were on hand in many feminist circles, and the most prominent of feminists, like Abzug, were not immune. At no time, despite many appearances in academic institutions, did she ever take to task the party-line atmosphere that Elizabeth FoxGenovese decried. Nor did she ever comment on the anti-free speech perspectives that were part of the umbrage with which feminists indignantly reacted to Rosalind Rosenberg.

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Betty Friedan was also the victim of a lot of political sniping for appearing to violate the party line. In March of 1986, she joined a coalition that supported a 1978 California law requiring employers to grant levels of unpaid leave to women who are unable to work due to pregnancy or childbirth. Seemingly harmless, the law drew the ire of many feminists who felt it singled out women for special benefits which they believed to be discriminatory and a dangerous precedent. The National Organization for Women and the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union supported a legal challenge to the California law. Friedan declared it was “outrageous” for feminists to align themselves with an employer (in this case, a bank) that was trying to evade an offering of important benefits to women. Abzug would not be a voice of Voltaire-like reason here. Indeed, she and Friedan continued to be adversaries. 9 The next major political effort that Bella Abzug took on in late 1985 further reflected some of the insularity into which some parts of feminism had devolved. In November of 1985, President Reagan was to hold his first face-to-face meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Abzug joined with a group of prominent women from politics and Hollywood to form a coalition called “Women for a Meaningful Summit.” Their goal was to try to induce the U.S. and Soviet leaders to make significant moves in the direction of scaling back levels of nuclear armaments. “Women,” asserted Abzug, “have been largely invisible in foreign policy decision-making, but they have cared historically about the policies of peace, and now it has become a survival issue—an issue of family, an issue of future generations.” The assumption here was another extension of Abzug’s and others’ gender sociology—that women have a unique perspective on matters about armaments, hence that they can make a contribution which others cannot. Ever since her days atop Women Strike for Peace some twenty years earlier, proof about the gender qualities in her assertions here was never raised. She presented no such evidence in 1985 either. She simply pressed forward, asserting “women feel that this is a very crucial moment in history, [and] we hope very seriously to make ourselves heard to those who are negotiating, as well as to try to influence the court of world opinion.” The cogency of her gender-based assertions, and the question of how she expected to make herself heard in a meaningful way by the likes of Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev was never clear, but she still drew the attention of a variety of news organizations. 10 In Geneva, Gorbachev agreed to meet with Bella Abzug, along with Jesse Jackson, Congresswomen Barbara Boxer and Pat Schroeder, and others who were part of the initiative. Gorbachev and the Soviets were desirous of persuading Reagan to scale back such nuclear defense initiatives as the so-called “Star Wars” research, a matter which apparently scared Soviet leaders far more than it impressed the American scientific community or the public in

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general. Gorbachev may have been using Abzug and her group as a way of trying to put a bit of pressure on Reagan. The Soviet leader may have given Abzug and her colleagues a little more visibility, but he had no such impact on Reagan. Gorbachev always loved philosophical exchanges, and he was good at them. With such a group as Abzug and her colleagues, he readily put forth the point that, like them, his desire was disarmament. He added, then in but the second day of discussions with Reagan, that it was too early to come to any conclusions about any possible progress being made at the summit. What impact Jackson and Abzug thought they could have remained a mystery. Jackson, Abzug, and others also raised to the Soviet leader the issue of the human rights of Soviet Jews. Here Gorbachev would not even recognize that such a problem existed. 11 Where Abzug and her colleagues’ presence could be of possible use to Gorbachev he would appear to be open, elsewhere he would be outwardly gracious but utterly unaccommodating. Abzug and her colleagues were attempting to play a role in international affairs, but they had absolutely no leverage. Beyond a few lines in the media, their significance would only involve what the principals, for their own purposes, would grant them. They did not even achieve the role of gadflies. Amidst the flurry of activities in Geneva, President Reagan’s chief of staff, Donald Regan, took a misstep. It was rather silly but typical of his often-boorish manner, and it actually served Abzug. Amidst reportage of the details of the Reagan-Gorbachev discussions, the media was also giving significant coverage to the social (and not altogether friendly) activities of first ladies Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev. Here Regan told reporters that he expected the stories of the first ladies’ doings would hold high appeal, especially among women: “They’re not . . . going to understand [missile] throw-weights or what is happening in Afghanistan or what is happening in human rights. Some women will, but most women—believe me, your readers for the most part if you took a poll—would rather read the human interest stuff of what happened.” As her search for visibility and influence had not gotten her far, Bella Abzug was given quite a gift here. She pounced on Regan’s gaffe, of course, asserting wherever she could that “Mr. Regan has made a big mistake. Women have historically been interested in the course and conduct of policy, particularly in the area of peace. . . . Considering the fact that 35 women [are] here representing 200 organizations including people like myself, a former Congresswoman, involved in the international area, it does not make sense.” Phyllis Schlafly was also in Geneva, once again shadowing Abzug and making the point that Abzug hardly spoke for all women (“I think,” she affirmed, “Mr. Reagan is just 1000 percent OK.”). Even Schlafly took issue with Donald Regan and affirmed her conviction that women “do understand the issues.” In addition, Gorbachev, as one reporter cast it, “greeted a question about Regan’s remark like a baseball slugger welcoming a soft pitch:” “My view,” Gorbachev jovially nodded, “is that

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both men and women in the United States and the Soviet Union, all over the world, are interested in having peace for themselves.” The flurries of obvious comments made their rounds in the media, but nothing more came of the matter. 12 Women may not have been merely concerned with “the human interest stuff,” as Regan blathered, but some women and journalists were interested in the feminist-interest stuff that was happening at the edges of the real discussions. President Reagan was reported to have been “slightly miffed” by Regan’s remark. He did attempt to say that the comment “was misinterpreted.” 13 Otherwise, the fallout was nil. The remark gave Abzug and her colleagues but a brief extra moment in the spotlight, but it gave Gorbachev no basis for any bargaining leverage with Reagan. Abzug had been trying to assert a women-think-differently view, as she sought to have an impact on international affairs, and, perhaps, to get herself back into a more visible political position. Good manners, and fears of being called sexists, may have prevented many from expressing how inconsequential her actions were here. Former American ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick did, nonetheless, make a point of deriding Jesse Jackson and Abzug for thinking they could have some sort of impact on Gorbachev, be it about armaments or about the plight of Soviet Jews. To her, the extra meeting between Gorbachev and them lacked seriousness. Kirkpatrick was like Reagan in her belief that the Soviets, like any party of opposition in a negotiation, do not respond to mere moral suasion. Indeed they may see it as preciously condescending, as though they cannot think about such issues in the same terms as Abzug or Jackson. “They of all people” discussing the plight of the Soviet Jews, mocked Kirkpatrick, “God knows what Jackson and Abzug will do next.” 14 Sometimes outsiders can call attention to issues that political insiders avoid. At other times, they merely call attention to themselves with a somewhat deluding sense that they have unique thoughts and are making some sort of difference. Presuming her motives did not solely involve a mere cynical desire to regain political visibility, Abzug and her colleagues held a belief that the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States needed to be induced by someone in a morally superior position to move away from the dangerous levels of mutually destructive nuclear power that each possessed. Her desire to invoke gender here, no matter how her joining forces with Jesse Jackson spoke to the contrary, was rooted in her emotional leitmotif about preferring to work in a world of women, as well as in her repeated practice of hoping phenomenologically that the invocation of gender would somehow induce women to press for desired changes at quantitatively new levels. The idea that this could come forth in the United States, let alone worldwide, was more than a bit far-fetched. Like many in the past, such women as Phyllis Schlafly and Jeane Kirkpatrick were already illustrating that Abzug did not speak for all women, and, in direct contradiction to Abzug’s explicit predic-

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tions just a year before, women had voted overwhelmingly for Reagan in 1984. In regard to the Soviet Union, any notions that women could somehow begin to exert effective pressure on their leaders along the pacific lines that Abzug desired was even more of a pipe dream. Abzug’s vision of disarmament also implied that a gendered view of the issue could legitimately brush aside all matters concerning the contrasting political systems of the United States and the USSR. To many, those who held that it was best to ignore the totalitarianism and police state character that was utterly central to the Soviet system appeared naive to say the least. Any apparent sense of accompanying moral superiority was even more odd. To Reagan and his colleagues, the fundamental human rights contrast between the two societies and their political systems was salient. With that as an unshakable premise in his thinking, he dealt with Gorbachev and tried to convey to him, both in Geneva and in subsequent meetings, that the Soviets could not win an arms race. Political figures rooted in the 1960s like Abzug, could never take Reagan seriously, nor could they step away from their sense of their own moral superiority. Ever since Vietnam, they believed they had been right about all foreign policy issues, so they had to be right about subsequent international matters involving ways to deal with communist states. To Abzug, the Soviet system was a fact of life. To Reagan it was a moral abomination that needed to be delegitimized. Ever since George F. Kennan, there had been the view that steady pressure on the Soviet system could bring it to a point of internal collapse, given its inability to sustain itself economically, especially with its expenses in the maintaining of an internal police state, a massive bureaucracy, and a strong military. Furthermore, at the time of the Geneva summit, as well as at other times, former Soviets, including prominent scientists who were aware of the nation’s nuclear capabilities, regularly affirmed the view that the Soviet leadership was not interested in genuine coexistence and would only respond to the perception of an adversary’s strength. 15 They regarded people like Abzug as utterly naive and not the slightest bit morally superior. Fortified by such views, Reagan would never be deterred from his convictions. Soviet advances could not only be stopped, the whole empire could collapse, and his policies could help make that happen. Like an amateur poker player who simply knew he had a superior hand, no fancy gamesmanship from such a rhetorically skillful opponent as Gorbachev would make Reagan flinch. Even accepting the criticisms of Reagan as being intellectually unsophisticated, there are times when simple, straightforward thinking has its benefits. Reagan’s was an entirely different vision that people like Abzug could countenance. The fact that the Soviet system would collapse within seven years was obviously something she could not foresee, but even after that point she would never admit that Reagan may have employed a reasonable approach to Soviet relations. Beyond such philosophical

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differences, the fact was that Abzug and her colleagues’ efforts had absolutely no significance in the international events of the 1980s which lay about the eventual working out of issues between the United States and the failing Soviet Union. Abzug had been out of elected office for years. She clearly believed she deserved to have a meaningful voice in national and international affairs. The ways she attempted to call attention to her views and herself largely served to emphasize how utterly marginalized a figure she had become. NOTES 1. Dallas Morning News, July 28, 1985; San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 1985; Washington Post, July 28, 1985; Orlando Sentinel, July 26, 1985. 2. Rene Denfeld, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (New York: Warner Books, 1995), p. 17. 3. New York Times, July 26, 1985. 4. Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1984), pp. 91–99. 5. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 11–32. 6. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company, Decision of U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, in Daily Labor Report, February 2, 1986, pp. D1–D43. See also Jon Weiner, “Women’s History on Trial,” The Nation, September 7, 1985, pp. 176–80; Karen Winkler, “Two Scholars Conflict in Sears Sex Bias Case Sets Off War in Women’s History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 1986, p. A-8; Rosalind Rosenberg, “From the Witness Stand: Previously Unpublished Testimony in the Sex Discrimination Case against Sears,” Academic Questions, Winter 1987–1988, pp. 16–34; Coordinating Committee of Women in the History Profession Newsletter, February 1986, p. 8; Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education, The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. (New York: The Free Press), 1991, pp. 203–4; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open, p. xxxii. 7. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. xxii; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1995; Susan Brownmiller; Against Our Will (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), p. 6. 8. Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters From South Carolina, Rebels Against Slavery. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), passim. 9. Time Magazine, August 18, 1986; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,962052,00.html#ixzz1Bhbim7Qy. 10. San Francisco Chronicle, October 17, 1985; New York Times, November 17, 1985; Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 1985; November 18; Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1985; Los Angeles Daily News, November 18, 1985; Miami Herald, November 19, 1985; Charlotte Observer, November 19, 1985; Boston Globe, November 20, 1985. 11. Boston Globe, November 20, 1985 12. Houston Chronicle, November 20, 1985; Seattle Times, November 20, 1985; Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1985; Philadelphia Inquirer, November 19, 1985; November 21; San Jose Mercury News, November 20, 1985; Miami Herald, November 19, 1985; Charlotte Observer, November 19, 1985; Washington Post, November 21, 1985. 13. Houston Chronicle, November 20, 1985; Seattle Times, November 20, 1985; Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1985; Philadelphia Inquirer, November 19, 1985. 14. San Francisco Chronicle, November 21, 1985 15. X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 25, no. 4 (1947), pp. 566–582; George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), passim.; New York Times, November 17, 1985, p. 62.

Chapter Nine

Later Years Martin’s Passing and More Identity Politics

Ever since Abzug’s three successive and painful election losses between September, 1976 and February of 1978, she had never pursued another electoral candidacy. She had nonetheless remained a self-styled “player” in Democratic Party politics. Meanwhile, her visibility as a feminist was still of highest significance within those political circles and consequently in the eyes of many in the media. Wherever she had forayed into political matters, however, she had generally failed. In service to Jimmy Carter, she tried to address matters beyond levels with which the President felt comfortable, and he dismissed her. In response she had worked hard on behalf of the Edward Kennedy campaign to unseat Carter for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1980, and that failed. She strove to get Geraldine Ferraro the 1984 Vice Presidential nomination and was one of the major trumpeters of the confident prediction that a female candidate would secure for the Democratic ticket that elusive phenomena she called “the women’s vote.” Ferraro got the nomination, but the women’s vote failed to materialize, as did the favor of other such definable voting groups as Catholics and New Yorkers allegedly disposed to her. In Geneva, Abzug’s efforts to press the point that women could somehow form a decidedly different and better framework in regard to American and Soviet negotiations over armaments proved to have zero impact. Various United Nations–sponsored gatherings in which she was involved gave rise to many internal conflicts and prompted resolutions that had no significant impact upon any nation’s internal affairs vis à vis women or anyone else. The basic notion she could do a lot of good “from the outside” had proven more image than reality. The solemn sense of having fought the good fight 231

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may have been personally gratifying, and in a general sense, Abzug and others may have been an inspiration to many women, but by the mid-1980s their gender message was hardly anything new, and the intolerance she and other feminists had sometimes shown toward differing views was yet another message, one that was anything but inspiring. She continued to lead Women USA, and within that organization there remained ongoing feminist issues and events like abortion rights marches and speaking engagements, often to criticize the Reagan administration. The composite of such events and issues hardly held a fully sustaining political focus, however. It may have been hard to acknowledge that the narrowing purview here was proving frustrating, but when Abzug and about 80,000 others marched for abortion rights in March of 1986, some leaders at the gathering proclaimed the march to be a sign of a “rejuvenation” in the women’s movement. 1 No one had been willing to admit that the women’s movement, loosely configured as it may have been, had ever been in any sort of decline, but the implicit admission in the hailing of rejuvenation was clear. For Abzug the danger remained of being in a political cul de sac. By 1986, the painful memories of Abzug’s three consecutive election failures of the late 1970s had grown more distant. The futility of always being on the outside now appeared more immediate and irritating. In this context, she chose to reenter the fray of political campaigning. Back in 1984, her old friend and colleague, Congressman Richard Ottinger, the Democrat who had lost the 1970 New York Senate bid to James Buckley, had retired from his eight-term House of Representatives seat from the 20th District in Westchester County. That year, Ottinger’s Congressional Chief of Staff, Oren J. Teicher, had attempted to win the seat, but he lost to a Republican, Joseph J. DioGuardi. The margin had been less than 2 percent, a mere 4,100 votes out of a vote total of 213,000. Given both that margin and the fact that DioGuardi had not distinguished himself in any significant way during his term in Washington, New York pundits felt a good Democratic candidate could defeat DioGuardi in 1986. Abzug certainly had some roots in Westchester County, having lived and raised her two daughters in Mt. Vernon in the 1950s and early 1960s. In August of 1985 she conspicuously opened a law office in the downtown section of White Plains at One North Broadway (she would later move the office to Fifty Main Street). While she and her husband still maintained a cooperative apartment in Manhattan, in May of 1986 she also rented a small one-bedroom flat in White Plains, ostensibly to use at times when her work schedule in White Plains made journeying back and forth to Manhattan inconvenient. It was not just a law office and weeknight convenience that was prompting Abzug’s moves in Westchester County, however, and political observers well knew it. She was establishing points of residency to make an effective run for Congress in 1986. By late May she had told friends that she

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was going to run, and on June 4 she made it official. Papers all over the country gave coverage to the notice of her Congressional candidacy. This was certainly an indication that her political caché still had viability. 2 Before Oren Teicher ran against DioGuardi in 1984, there had been a hotly contested Democratic primary. That battle had caused some ill feelings, and some analysts attributed the party’s divisiveness to have been one of the causes of the DioGuardi’s narrow victory. Despite hopes for party harmony this time around, the 1986 Democratic Congressional nomination in Westchester would again have many contenders. As Abzug well knew, things are seldom simple in New York politics. Having previously lost by such a close margin, Oren Teicher felt he had a good chance and was running again. Among the other candidates was a former New York State Housing Commissioner, Richard Berman, and the Town Supervisor of Mamaroneck, New York, Dolores Battalia. Abzug waded into the competition with her usual aggressiveness. She knew her general notoriety would itself be a major point of interest as well as a way to get out voters otherwise prone to be apathetic in off-year elections. She sought to capitalize on this point: “I believe I am the only Democrat who can defeat the Republican candidate in the general election, and that is one of the reasons I have decided to run.” For obvious reasons, the other primary candidates did not appreciate suddenly having to compete with such a well-known figure as Bella Abzug. They hit back with rhetorical swipes, a major one being that she should stay down in Manhattan. As her renting an apartment and leasing a law office had appeared disingenuous, the word “carpetbagger” came up repeatedly. Dolores Battalia also chided Abzug for violating feminist goals, asserting she was hurting the chances of an established female candidate, that is, Battalia. Abzug was not the least bit taken aback by such pushes and shoves. Indeed she seemed to revel in such political fights as she had come to miss. She felt comfortable in the campaign and exuded confidence. While expectations of winning had also been present when she lost in bids for Senate, Mayor, and House, she would not be dissuaded. 3 Through June and early July, as her primary campaign was rolling nicely up in Westchester, Abzug’s husband Martin remained most of the time in Manhattan. He was sixty-nine years old and still worked in the city’s financial sector with the brokerage firm of Philips, Appel, and Walden. Always active intellectually, Mr. Abzug had also just finished writing his third novel, about a man engaged in a life-long search for his former Nazi prosecutor. For almost ten years, he had been having coronary troubles, but he was keeping to a careful regimen of proper diet and moderate exercise, and all seemed well. On the morning of Friday, July 18, he went for a light bit of jogging, as he had many times. As can often be the case for those with heart problems, significant stress on the heart can come, especially on a hot summer day, at the point immediately after one has finished exercising. The heart may still

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pounding hard while the body is otherwise gearing down, resulting in coronary stress. Amidst exercise, the brisk flow of blood can also free a fragment of plaque from the wall of a vessel, with that fragment possibly clogging an artery near the heart. This may have happened to Mr. Abzug, for after his light morning run he found himself not feeling well. Knowing what may be occurring, he immediately called downstairs to his apartment’s management desk, telling them to summon an ambulance. This they did, but by the time the ambulance people arrived at the apartment, Mr. Abzug had collapsed. He did not survive. Bella Abzug was notified immediately, of course, and she dropped everything she had been doing in the Westchester County campaign. The love which the two shared for over forty years had been total, and it had never ebbed. Some media wags had always wanted to cast their relationship as that of a domineering woman and a meek, long-suffering man. It was never that way at all. Their two daughters and every close friend knew that full well. While her husband’s history of coronary trouble had obviously made Abzug previously think of the possibility of something happening to him, the suddenness of his passing was nonetheless devastating. Friends all noted how deeply affected she was. Her daughters and many friends rallied around her. In accordance with Orthodox traditions, the funeral and burial were held in very short order. Over four hundred friends and family came to the funeral service at Riverside Memorial Chapel on Amsterdam Avenue. The burial at Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Queens was private. 4 In regard to Martin Abzug’s passing, Gloria Steinem remarked, “I don’t think that she ever, ever, ever got over the fact that Martin was no longer there. She was a slightly different person forever.” Doubtlessly, there was some truth in that. “Anything I ever did,” Abzug noted, “I could not have done without him.” (So-called radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin made no comment nor did they appear to learn anything here.) No one can lose the love of her life and be the same thereafter, even after the immediate shock and grief subsides. As late as 1990 she admitted “I still have this tremendous pain.” Others remarked similarly about how she no longer had the same energy. “[For] a person you would usually think was like a furnace,” recalled her friend Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “she was [now] a cold furnace.” Even in her grief, however, some of her strength remained. Barbara Bick recalled, when actress Shirley MacLaine arrived just hours after Martin’s passing: “she [MacLaine] swings the door open and runs across the room and plunks herself down on Bella’s lap. She says, ‘Oh, Bella, he’s where he wanted to be.’” Bella, Bick recalled, immediately “pushed her off her lap.” Independent of the possible inappropriateness of MacLaine’s comment and behavior, had Abzug truly been the proverbial “cold furnace,” her reaction to MacLaine may not have shown such a reserve of inner strength, and not just in the physical sense. She would get through this tragedy, in part because she knew

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it was what Martin would have wanted. In 1987, the National Women’s Political Caucus created the “Good Guy” awards to give recognition to men who have helped women in their ambitions. They named it the “Martin Abzug Memorial Award.” 5 Abzug spent three weeks in seclusion with her daughters and friends. Old friends and political figures sent notes of condolence, including Mario Cuomo, Daniel Moynihan, Edward Kennedy, and Joseph DioGuardi. She was grateful and acknowledged the comfort these expressions had brought her. On Thursday, August 7, newspapers reported “she was back on the campaign trail.” At her first appearance, feelings of grief were still in evidence as her voice “crackled with emotion.” Grief and sorrow may have remained but so did her determination. She brought the two feelings together, saying that getting back in the campaign is exactly what Martin would have wished her to do. Pushing forward in her campaign, she made the rounds at various shopping malls and commuter stops. Utilizing her show-business connections, she raised $275,000 and was able to advertise effectively. No matter the sincere feelings throughout the political world over her husband’s passing, when she returned to the campaign, her opponents and critics went after her. The “carpetbagging” charge continued to be raised. Conspicuously, Mayor Ed Koch chided, “She’s what I would refer to as a carpetbagger; she shops for congressional districts.” Polly Rothstein, director of Westchester’s County’s Coalition for Legal Abortion, had supported Abzug against Moynihan in 1976, but in 1986 she supported Oren Teicher. The opposition was intense, but in September she won the Democratic primary with 36 percent of the vote. It was national news. Her daughters stood with her on the bittersweet victory night. 6 The ensuing campaign against DioGuardi proved relatively calm. Charges of “carpetbagger” continued to come forth, but the general tone of the DioGuardi camp was mild. DioGuardi was the incumbent and the clear front-runner. He was a very different kind of opponent than the vicious S. William Green of 1978. There was a third candidate in the mix, a “Right to Life Party” candidate named Florence O’Grady, whose whole platform was devoted to her opposition to abortion rights. O’Grady’s presence could have underscored the unreality in Abzug and other feminists’ steady assertions about women, per se, bringing special views to politics. O’Grady’s candidacy never amounted to much, however, so any such troubling implications for Abzug and her feminist colleagues never had to be considered with much seriousness. DioGuardi was also mildly pro-choice on the abortion issue, rendering O’Grady’s sui generis position yet more stark and underscoring the weakness of feminist assertions that gender, per se, makes a difference in key political matters. Contrasting with the earlier campaigns against Moynihan, Koch, or especially Green, in the race between Abzug and DioGuardi neither side dis-

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played terribly much personal venom. DioGuardi, a conscientious certified public accountant, appealed to the suburban county’s economically conservative sensibilities. As expected, he emphasized that Abzug was a radical, far too left-wing for Westchester County. Abzug countered with swipes at DioGruardi’s alleged moderation, saying he was really an extremist, very much to the right of the district, a man who got elected in 1984 via Reagan’s coattails. Abzug’s chief pollster, a thirty-seven-year-old named Dick Morris, later an advisor to, then an adversary of, William and Hillary Clinton, emphasized a strategy that would attempt to turn Abzug’s negative “overbearing” image into a positive trait, that is, someone who would be an effective opponent of President Reagan’s policies. 7 Morris’s strategy may have worked to activate an anti-Reagan base. A troublesome point here was that voter registration statistics in Westchester gave DioGuardi a decided edge. Republicans greatly outnumbered Democrats, no matter how the latter’s base was activated. With an eye on keeping their supporters optimistic, Abzug and her campaign always endeavored to dispute the fact of this political balance, although they would never release their own campaign’s data, if indeed they had any. One hopeful point about activating one’s base against an unfavorable voter registration balance is that turnout is often light in Congressional races during non-Presidential years. It can then be pivotal as to how well a candidate can get people to go to the polls. Abzug and the Democrats hoped her notoriety and optimism could motivate a get-out-the-vote spirit. It had worked for her in the primary, where indeed supporters transported many to the polls, notably in her old residence of Mt. Vernon. Abzug campaigned hard. Morning after morning, she arose early and got herself to various Westchester train stations, where she shook hands with thousands of commuters. She made appearances all over the county. Steadily she emphasized that she had the experience to do the job, and that she would stand in opposition to many of the positions of the Reagan administration. Some media coverage coupled any mentioning of her hopes for her notoriety to stimulate voter interest with the old point that her fame could also motivate at least as many to vote against her. Neither position could be verified with any evidence. No one questioned the fact that Abzug was qualified. Her prior years in Congress had proven that completely. Her opposition to Reagan gave Westchester’s voters a clear ideological choice. DioGuardi claimed a certain level of ideological independence, but he was an unashamed Republican. When Abzug worked for John Lindsay in 1969, she had tried to exploit anti-war and anti-Nixon feelings in the campaign and make national issues have local significance. Hoping opposition to Reagan in Westchester to be significant, she believed the same sort of tactic could work there. Tactically, it was her most logical choice. Issues of gender, personality, and history, may

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have motivated some, but they were the already-established faithful, ideologically disposed to an anti-Reagan candidate anyway. The question was whether she could tap into any wider segments of the voting population. Given the preponderance of Republicans in Westchester, she certainly needed to. Abzug had the money and presence of some show business people to lend more visibility to her campaign. Shirley MacLaine, Lily Tomlin, Harry Belafonte, and Barbra Streisand put in appearances for her. The Republicans countered with appearances for DioGuardi by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and Vice President George Bush. They spoke at several $250- and $500-plate dinners. In the end, the financial battle drew about even. Each candidate spent just under $900,000, a high level for a Congressional campaign in 1986, even in New York. Abzug’s name had made the race a high-profile one, and some Republicans clearly did not want her back in Congress. Republicans reminded voters of some of Abzug’s early 1970s positions that favored the decriminalization of possessions of up to three ounces of marijuana. Abzug countered that she always favored the police going after the hard elements of the drug rather than seeing “lots of kids . . . being picked up and sent to jail for smoking a joint.” What was hep on the West Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s, however, now had less appeal in Westchester. Such references to drug issues were about as edgy a level as the campaign ever achieved. Republicans may have thought of raising other social positions from Abzug’s past, but any backfiring due to excess appeared not worth the risk. The New York Times did endorse Abzug, but in a Westchester County election the paper may not have carried quite the influence Abzug needed. The election came down to a straightforward Republican–Democrat, Reagan–anti-Reagan split, and in 1986 Westchester County would continue to be decidedly Republican. The final vote proved not even close. DioGuardi drew 54 percent; Abzug garnered 44 percent, with Florence O’Grady picking up the remaining 2 percent. Unlike the three earlier close electoral losses for Senate, Mayor, and Congress, the wide margin here left no “what-ifs” over which to agonize. The Republicans held Westchester County with no trouble. Reagan remained popular there. Abzug’s notoriety and her positions on the issues could not overcome that, and her personae may have indeed motivated many Republicans in an off-year election to vote in opposition to her. The contest did indeed draw the greatest quantity of votes of any electoral contest that year in Westchester County. 8 It was Abzug’s fourth and final electoral loss. She took it graciously. She had certainly gone through a much bigger loss in July. In August of 1986, an emerging young journalist of the day, Maureen Dowd, declared that the idea of “women in politics is no longer a novelty.” This may have been a self-evident truth that older feminists of the day wished not to be uttered, but, as in most political contexts, a new generation

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will always define what sets of ideas constitute the cutting edge, as well as what do not. Try as some may, no elders can do that for them. Dowd was hardly any sort of anti-feminist or conservative, and she was revealing some of the same tendencies that other young people of the mid-1980s displayed. Among other things, they did not share the same sense of urgency that older women held about electing women, per se. The sense of bravely blazing new trails on the basis of gender held less resonance. There was no lack of gratitude for what had taken place in prior generations, but the key was to deal with the present and not dwell on the past for the sake of any “gazing into the mirror.” The younger people had a decided sense that women could represent any number of points of view. Betty Friedan’s old bête noire—the spiritual vacuity of the world of traditional middle class housewives—also held little first-hand poignancy to younger women. The age of the homemaker in Dwight Eisenhower’s time was literally as distant to Maureen Dowd as the time of Calvin Coolidge had been to Bella Abzug. Any “remember from where we’ve come” scoldings were not going to alter anyone’s thinking or sensibilities; indeed they could sharpen generational divides. By the mid-1980s, many younger people had stepped back from what they perceived as some of the excesses and brittleness that feminism had shown in the 1970s and early 1980s. There was little to nothing appealing about notions of gender superiority, any more than notions of gender inferiority had been popular in earlier times but to right-wing traditionalists. Ensconced radical feminist views had calcified almost as rapidly as they had been expressed. For younger people like Maureen Dowd there was little appeal in any such rigidity. As usual, Abzug was herself a point of reference in the discourse, for Dowd wrote not only that the idea of women in politics was no longer a novelty, but that the forceful tonality of prior generations was no longer novel either. “Bella Abzug,” she noted, “had anglicized chutzpah,” and now that much of such assertiveness had gone mainstream, the appeal of an aggressive personal style for its own sake had none of the force or charm that it had once carried, save among a small group of politically faithful. 9 In the elections of 1986, many feminists, while they lamented Abzug’s loss, were largely happy with the year’s results. Particularly noteworthy was the Senate victory of Barbara Mikulski in Maryland. Even here, however, gender-based euphoria was muted, as Mikulski’s victory had been over the Republicans’ Linda Chavez. Feminism’s success had eclipsed the women versus men models that had been compelling rallying points in earlier times. That November, indeed, feminists were anything but sorry that the conservative Republican Paula Hawkins had lost her Senate reelection bid in Florida to Bob Graham. Elsewhere that year, women made gains in the House. 10 Abzug’s loss in Westchester was thus not indicative of any sort of gender backlash. She lost, but there was no pattern of victimology upon which to

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seize. In 1986, Westchester County was simply too Republican for virtually any New York Democrat, much less someone who conjured the downtown, West Side–radical imagery of Bella Abzug. Few feminists would have cared, or dared, to point out that Abzug ceased fully to embody the kind of persona and style that other female politicians wished to cultivate or to which terribly many voters felt drawn. But people like Maureen Dowd were intimating that such a different outlook was already in place among a new generation. That same year a writer named Anthony Astrachan published a book in which he attempted to analyze male reactions to the now well-established women’s movement. He pointed out a fully understood idea in both journalism and social science research—that the nature of how questions are posed is important in regard to the reactions and comments the questioner/surveyor receives. In view of this, Astrachan noted how one drew hostile reactions from men when they were asked how they felt “about the women’s liberation movement.” In contrast, Astrachan said the same men answered differently when asked “about women doing your kind of work” or “about changes in the home, in your life, and in your community.” To the latter questions, the answers tended to be much more thoughtful and supportive. The questions about “women’s liberation,” Astrachan emphasized, were not as useful “because then you get reactions to Bella Abzug.” Once again, the double-edged sword that was her persona showed itself to be very much at issue. The images here may have involved some latent anti-Semitism or levels of hostility to New York City. They could not have been explained away as mere gender prejudice, however, as the overall issue at stake was gender and how the formation of questions and images affected reactions. Abzug’s own nature was a major part of the picture. Indeed to Astrachan she was a primal example of what he was asserting. By 1986, the fact appeared that some gender dynamics in electoral politics had bypassed Abzug. Many women won that year. Abzug’s loss could not be ascribed to any broader gender dynamics. 11 To many people in 1986, “women,” per se, were no longer an issue. Others even noted a replacement identity. Perhaps a trifle puckishly, the New York Times noted that “Italian” was the new trendy political identity in New York. The 1986 elections were not only successful for Joseph DioGuardi, but also for Governor Mario Cuomo and for Senator Alphonse D’Amato. Italians were also victorious in a number of other state and local elections. New York’s Coalition of Italo-American Associations had endorsed DioGuardi over Abzug. This may not have mattered terribly much, but their endorsement had drawn the decided ire of Geraldine Ferraro. She called their action sexist. No matter the obvious puckishness in the assertion that “Italian” was the new “in” identity, it was clear that “gender” was losing some caché among younger people, with one simple reason being that it had succeeded. Warnings about not taking for granted what has been won may have come

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forth, but the defensiveness of the statements only reinforced the point that the political ground was shifting. The tonality of a Bella Abzug was no longer useful; indeed to many it was harmful. 12 Such an issue as Italian identity may have been merely coincidental to the 1986 election results. To many voters, indeed, the issue of identity, be it ethnic or gender, appeared to be a thankfully passing fancy. Wasn’t identity blindness the ideal that Martin Luther King had articulated back in 1963 when he spoke of “the content of character” and not “the color of skin?” After Abzug’s 1986 loss, despite the message of voters, and the words of such writers as Maureen Dowd, against (or above) identity politics, Bella Abzug appeared to take little heed. She returned to her political/psychological comfort zone that focused on gender. Wealthy feminists were happy to welcome her. “You can call Bella a lot of things,” exclaimed a friend, actress Marlo Thomas, “but you can’t call her a wimp.” 13 No one ever had. The fact that such a devotee needed to invent such an image just to attack it was indicative of how certain enclaves of feminism were not terribly open to any signs of change for which they did not care. There was only to believe in the same negative images that had rallied the faithful for years. That December, Abzug once again teamed with Mim Kelber and wrote a piece in the New York Times where they reasserted some very familiar themes. President Reagan, ever more under the cloud of the “Iran-Contra” scandal, had recently raised the nebulous point about how he was working out these troubles and had sought the counsel of “wise men.” By this juncture, the responses here were utterly pat and predictable. It was like the reaction to Donald Regan’s gaffe about “women’s concerns” in Geneva. “Wise men” was the obvious faux pas, with the simple point here being that Reagan could have referred to “wise people.” He did not, and Abzug and Kelber leapt at the opportunity, with the Times dutifully indulging them. With a clear banality of pseudo-awareness, in regard the issues facing the nation, Abzug earnestly asked, “Are there no wise women in our nation who might have some sound advice to offer?” The faithful nodded in agreement over something they had heard a thousand times before. Others rolled their eyes having listened to such platitudes just as often. Revealingly, even Abzug and Kelber were aware of the tiresome deja vu that such a cliched response engendered here, for they made a point of adding: “We can hear the groans. Does there have to be a ‘woman’s angle’ to everything . . . ?” Their answer: “Yes, more than ever.” Here they raised no further arguments or proof. None could be. There were only assertions. And that was what Abzug would be doing in much of her future work—manufacturing a woman’s angle in regard to any number of issues, purportedly to serve the needs of oppressed women. What would remain unclear was whether she would serve any oppressed people, or whether she would merely help feminist nomencla-

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tura help themselves maintaining journalistic and bureaucratic visibility through repeated rhetoric. With Abzug’s focus on gender, and the media attention she was able to draw, the marginalizations of those who had historically suffered more on such bases as ethnicity or race continued to receive less attention. It was all predictable posturing among the rich, with a clear message that commerce in shop-worn cliches about politically correct language earns space in the media and in many other institutional settings where such trafficking conveyed to all true believers that they are engaged in something so terribly liberalizing in its content. The reality was that no singular woman’s angle existed; there was among women only an array of angles, as was the case with men. For Abzug and her many imitators, such an obvious point was not to be heeded. Her action was just blind averment, a reassertion of a comfortable rhetorical position whose posturing in such an organ as the New York Times lent a gratifying sense of notoriety. It was a pattern that would continue to resonate among some politicians, academics, and media people, and which many preferred not to criticize for fear of political name calling via feministvocabularied forms of McCarthyism. Abzug and Kelber did add one new point in their well-rehearsed genderposture. For many years the old assertions that women in power would behave differently had already yielded many responses that pointed to such a confounding example as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Recognizing that Thatcher “is cited as proof that, given power, women will behave just like so many present male leaders do,” Abzug then asserted that “the true answer” to the question of how the world will be different when more women are in charge “will come only when a ‘critical mass’ of women—as many as men—are allowed to govern and counsel us. It will,” Abzug now noted, “take significant numbers of women to correct the present imbalances in the way our nation is led and policies decided.” By 1986, getting women in power was apparently no longer enough. It could not be, for it had not yielded the predicted results. “Women in power” used to be a key rallying cry, but ample evidence now showed that gender, per se, was conclusive of nothing. Rather than recognizing the point that gender may not have so much meaning as eager feminists had been blindly assuming, Abzug and others seized upon the notion of a need for some sort of gender-based “critical mass.” It was hard to admit they had been in error. A replacing notion was now more useful, and it was so generalized that it could not be put to any practical examination. Lecturing about the judicial system several months later, Abzug raised an equally earnest and highly generalized point that meaningful change can only come “when we have brought about fundamental changes in the nature of power.” She would repeat this phrase many times. 14

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“The nature of power”; the phrase smacked of students of the 1960s decrying the injustices of “the system.” Abzug never explained what she meant here, other than the usual calling for more female judges, as well as for female figures in authority in other political positions. Her feminist leitmotif had now evolved into a fancy that could never be tested. If elected women did not behave properly, she could now argue that there were not enough of them. Like any matter of religious faith, the whole matter of gender making a difference could only be believed. It was not that women in power would behave differently; it was that a collective of women in power (worldwide apparently) could someday, somehow create something different and better. When that would occur was anyone’s guess, but it provided an entree into further legitimizing efforts to draw lots of resources out of such international organizations as the United Nations to stage conferences that could grapple with gender and the nature of power. Meanwhile, presuming any sort of gender-based critical mass could be reached, a completely unexplained point concerned how any theretofore nonconforming women, like Margaret Thatcher, would then suddenly fade away or come to toe some sort of gender-based line of compliance. It was somehow just going to happen. Anyone who knew the likes of Mrs. Thatcher or Indira Gandhi knew that to be laughable. The logical point—that more women in power would merely yield more women showing the same varieties of concerns, abilities, priorities, and viewpoints as men—could not be countenanced, despite the fact that the bitter quarrels at such large international gatherings as those in which Abzug had participated at Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi all spoke poignantly against any gender-based fancies about power. For Abzug the point was not to be able to answer such questions. The key was to get figures in organizations like the UN to buy into the idea that such “deep” questions as those concerning gender and the nature of power were worth funding. It was easy for UN officials to agree with this, for patronage was one of their primary reasons to be, and they did not have to face reelections over issues of their spending practices. In this very era of ongoing assertions about “patriarchy,” “male hegemony,” and gender exceptionalism, many feminist critics had emerged. Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Cynthia Ozick, Daphne Patai, Noretta Koertge, Camille Paglia, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Christina Hoff Sommers all attempted in different ways to voice reasonable arguments against various contradictions and against many signs of misandry and gender hostility that some ensconced feminists had been showing. Even more pointedly perhaps, they criticized many feminists’ embarrassingly illiberal and often nasty intolerance of opposing views on many key issues. Christina Hoff Sommers was one of the most noteworthy of the critics. Sommers saw a classic equity feminism of the 1960s and early 1970s to embody a liberating set of views that sought to break down barriers that had previously impeded women from

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achieving all they sought, the very things for which early feminist leaders like Bella Abzug once stood. Sommers was highly critical of the new sorts of alleged feminism, which she termed “gender feminism,” that appeared to turn many feminist ideals about liberation on their head. She illustrated attempts among feminists to cast women as a discrete tribe, complete with a group of tribal elders, in effect, who sought to rule with little attention or inclusiveness in regard to a diversity of views. She saw an unhealthy addiction to a rhetoric of oppression, and she criticized efforts to make arguments both with faulty statistics and with sweeping castings of men as predators, proto-batterers, and proto-rapists. The need to sustain a crisis environment appeared to be good for feminist bureaucrats in various organizations and agencies, what Sommers called “the burgeoning new victim/bias industry,” who made money through the ongoing postures of oppression. 15 Sommers saw much of the gender theorizing of the day as anything but liberating. Indeed much of it appeared to maintain an ideal that women, especially younger women, remain cowering and submissive, not with respect to men but to feminist leaders who claimed to know what was best for everyone. Who may have been right or wrong amidst arguments over such issues involved debates that have never ended. What was striking was the degree to which so many feminists who luxuriated in self-images of liberalism proved truculently intolerant of any such alternative views. The intolerance in many of the reactions to such people as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Rosalind Rosenberg, Christina Hoff Sommers, and others underscored the validity of many of these writers’ criticisms of what feminism had become. 16 Abzug appeared to pay no direct heed of the journalistic and academic debates that surrounded such critiques. She did, however, show some of the signs of intolerance that were hardly consistent with prior liberating calls for all voices to be heard and none to be silenced. She had once expressed the classically liberal views that women should be free to pursue whatever ideas and goals they wished. In trying to correct many of the political entanglements that stood in the way of such ideals, she had organized a myriad of groups and political initiatives. Within these organizations, she and others contended with various dynamics that prompted much additional thinking about whether and how women may or may not behave differently in political contexts. Notions of gender exceptionalism grew here, along with many competing ideas. What made an idealization of women’s uniqueness eclipse idealizations of gender-blindness was a complicated matter. The relative merit of the various theories at hand was a matter that could never be conclusively resolved, as judgments came down to matters of subjective preference. Another factor involved economics: it made sense for feminists to maintain and insure whatever political holdings they possessed, be they from elected or appointed posts in government, education, or in private business. Highlighting gender and, in course, highlighting all possible gender castings of

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political opposition was a way to accomplish this. As some succeeded, the lucrative pathways of gender exeptionalism then became clear to others. Advocating a new epistemology as though it was an improved way of looking at the world became a way for some feminists to ignore the content of whatever discipline in which they were involved (assuming they ever had such grounding in the first place) and become advocates of the gender issue. Administrative superiors indulged this, often out of fear of being labeled gender-hostile, much as their predecessors indulged various types of witch hunters out of fear of being labeled devils or communists. Gender advocates thus carved an intellectually simple pathway to financial success. If there were then, and not coincidentally, distortion of evidence in pursuit of postures of victimization (150,000 women die every year from anorexia; one out of five women in America is raped; domestic violence rises 40 percent on Super Bowl Sunday; abuse of pregnant women causes more birth defects than all other causes combined—all false), an “ends justifying the means” rationale could easily hold within the fold. Any who raised unwelcome evidence were easily attacked, at the very least as being insufficiently dedicated to the bigger goals at stake for women, and usually much worse. Sommers praised previously dominant notions of “equity feminism” and derided many aspects of the “gender feminism” which had displaced it. She and others certainly saw the accompanying rise of such illiberalisms to be equally lamentable. Amidst this evolution in the tenets of modern feminism, Abzug was always an undisputed leader among the nation’s feminists. Ever since her youth, she developed many of her political habits and sensibilities amidst predominantly female dealings. With that deeply seeded background, she found such environments to be points of comfort, especially in hard times like those after political disappointments or after her husband’s passing. When she ran for Congress and served in Washington, her political “plate” had been full of issues, both of a feminist nature and of many other casts. There she was most effective and enjoyed the respect of all, including some of her most extreme ideological opponents. After losing several elections her political purview grew much narrower. By 1978, earlier issues like racial justice, labor rights, education, nuclear power, urban decay, and international peace were no longer as central to her areas of political activism. Ever more exclusively feminist, the “gender feminism” within her own spirit appeared to eclipse styles and sensibilities that were more tied to the “equity feminism” which had, not just coincidentally, characterized her days of more broadly gauged politics. There was always a combination of such elements in her, as is so in any complex political activist. In her days of activism against nuclear proliferation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Abzug had often raised the idea that women, more specifically

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mothers, were uniquely equipped to be a force against the madness of nuclear weaponry. The idea that women, per se, could bring a unique perspective to issues marked an outlook that many early feminists had vehemently opposed. They wanted to avoid classically female stereotypes, even if they were positive ones. They adamantly wanted women to be treated as equals in every respect. Abzug had voiced this view many times as well. This was an easy stance with regard to the rights of exceptional women getting ahead. But Abzug emphasized that it was not only female geniuses that should rise where their talents take them, regardless of their gender. As she emphasized, “we [also] want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.” 17 Embedded laws and customs that had to be altered were matters she had been addressing while in Congress. She wanted to do more, and sought a bigger political office. Failures in elections from 1976 to 1978, which could certainly have gone either way, left her with fewer outlets for her ambitions and a narrowed political purview. This political development combined with the psychological habits of her heart and proved determinative. Abzug was never not a feminist, but the kind of feminist she was did evolve, and this evolution happened to occur just as feminism itself was showing shifts from liberation into less classically liberal forms which highlighted gender differences and which often sought to control discourse within various institutional settings. One of Abzug’s friends, Robin Morgan, recalled how Abzug “came late to feminism.” There was a self-flattering, even self-absorbed element in her outlook that Abzug’s political evolution here amounted to steady progress toward greater and greater levels of wisdom and insight. Morgan noted that Abzug had seen herself more “as a champion on civil rights and on poor people . . . [and on] peace and war,” with women’s issues part of that picture. Morgan remarked with a kind of fascination that Abzug “was really honest about that,” as though such honesty was something noteworthy, with claims to be a feminist apparently something upon which any politician with any sense should seize as soon as possible. 18 Whether Abzug’s changes in political focus from human sufferings towards the concerns of women, rich and poor, were for better or worse lay in the eye of the beholder. To someone like Robin Morgan, however, there was apparently only one way to view it. Whether or not it was a morally higher ground, the narrowness to which Abzug’s political activism did turn was more exclusively feminist. She had no wider political constituency, and as her political work was often focused on gaining influence, emphases on gender over equity often came forth. With her incredible political skills, superior intellect, bulldozing personality, and extraordinary capacity for work, Abzug remained an undisputed leader. To her enthusiasts it seemed she could do no wrong, and in many gatherings she could rule dictatorially. Some tendencies here did disturb fundamental notions of liberalism. At the large Houston gathering of 1977,

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the issues were exclusively feminist as far as Abzug and her friends were concerned. There, she proceeded to engineer a vast convention with opposing views largely shut out, a process involving the very sorts of illiberalism that many equity-minded feminist critics had always decried. In her work with President Carter, she had been rather truculent in her demands to be heard in a myriad of seemingly incongruous contexts and was most impatient with the arguments of any who took exception to her demands for a presence and influence. Her firing only confirmed her sense of being right. Her treatment of staff was always full of impatience and anger. In 1986 she took her already well-known harshness with staffers to a point of violence. Ann Horaday wrote in the Washington Post how she felt compelled to quit working for Abzug in 1986. Horaday said she was “alienated or finally exhausted by her [Abzug’s] notorious impatience, temper, and verbal strafings.” Many who had worked for Abzug responded similarly. Horaday indeed noted here as well that, compared to other staffers, she “had it easy.” Abzug, she remembered, “once called to apologize to an aide after punching him during a scheduling contretemps: ‘Michael . . . How’s your kidney?’” she asked. 19 Such behavior was hard to reconcile with the point that, back in her peace movement days, Abzug had firmly maintained that violence never solved anything. Republican males behaving with any such high-handedness, let alone with violence, would definitely incur the wrath of feminists, including Abzug. Other Congressional candidates could be equally abusive with staff (though few were violent), but Abzug could be just as bad, and this point lay starkly in the face of the fact that she had always held that women would handle matters not just differently but better. The contrast between the ideals of gender-based superiority and such intolerance and violence were hardly ennobling. Abzug appeared to have evolved in some of the very ways that were giving critics pause over what had happened to feminism since its earlier days of equity and liberation. As with the feminists’ reactions to Christine Hoff Sommers’s and other critics’ writings about feminism, Abzug’s intolerant excrescences revealed a clear paradox. Various feminists had been claiming for years about their superiority in many private and public genres. When people took exception, be it directly or inadvertently, the impatience, the self-entitlement, and vituperation seemed to know no bounds, and it tended to contradict so many of the positive things feminists had been claiming to bring to human discourse. Many examples of such paradoxes abounded in academe. The reaction of a women’s caucus in the American Historical Association to Rosalind Rosenberg’s determinative testimony in the EEOC/Sears Roebuck litigation was a classic example. Another clear illustration of this paradox came forth for Bella Abzug during the election activities of 1992. In the Presidential contest that year, her role was not terribly significant. The 1991 post–Iraq War euphoria in the

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nation appeared to make George H. W. Bush unbeatable. As a result, many major Democrats (Sam Nunn, Richard Gephardt, Mario Cuomo, Bill Bradley, and Lloyd Bentsen) sat out the race. Among the few remaining candidates, Abzug supported former California Governor Jerry Brown. 20 The candidacy of Bill Clinton quickly gained traction over Brown, as well as over Paul Tsongas, the only other major Democratic contender (in all the party primaries, no one else amassed even 2 percent of the total votes). Abzug then supported Clinton, and she established a good rapport with him, and even more with Hillary Clinton, something which would serve her well in subsequent years. The 1992 election that took up more of Abzug’s attention concerned New York’s U.S. Senate seat. Republican Alfonse D’Amato was the incumbent, and he had no trouble securing his party’s renomination. Abzug dearly wanted to see a Democrat defeat the ultra-conservative, anti-abortion D’Amato. A major battle grew in the state’s Democratic Party, however, as several candidates vied for the nomination. Among the contenders were Elizabeth Holtzman and Geraldine Ferraro (two others seeking the Democratic nomination in New York that year were State Attorney Journal Robert Abrams and the Reverend Al Sharpton). Amidst the primary campaign, the two female candidates went at each other just as harshly as any opposing pair of male politicians in the country. Holtzman’s criticisms of Ferraro involved some nasty rehashings of various matters raised in 1984 over her husband’s questionable financial dealings. Holtzman’s efforts drew a lot of anger from Bella Abzug, as well as from Letty Cottin Pogrebin one of the founders of the magazine Ms. Abzug and Pogrebin strongly supported Ferraro, and they fully expected all other prominent Democratic women in New York would dutifully follow their lead. Abzug had long asserted the confident notion that women would behave differently in politics. With such assertions apparently held as fact, or as some sort of established consensus, Abzug seemed to feel that women were then duty-bound to conform to the political behavior patterns she had decreed. For Abzug and other such feminists, reality had to conform to the sociology they had forged in their minds. When a woman like Holtzman appeared to defy her, Abzug got very mad. She railed against “too much negative campaigning,” which she meant in reference to Holtzman’s citings of Ferraro’s financial issues. Abzug charged Holtzman with employing “antifeminist standards.” Rabid anti-communists of the 1950s regularly labeled non-conformists and critics as communists; here feminists used antifeminism as the righteous label with which to smear opponents. Given the postures of gender superiority, the Holtzman/Ferraro/Abzug name calling and mudslinging, noted the New York Times and others, posed feminists with serious questions. Feminists had long held that women would behave differently. Here the obvious point was that women were not behav-

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ing differently. That was no surprise, save for the fact that people like Abzug and Pogrebin had always said they would. “Women are promising to do it differently and do it better,” contended Letty Pogrebin, and “with her sleazy campaign, Liz Holtzman has betrayed that promise.” Ferraro and Holtzman were scrapping like men, and Abzug and Pogrebin were bitterly attacking the disobedient non-Ferraro supporters with a fierceness and self-entitlement that smacked of some imperious male politician like Lyndon Johnson when crossed. The rosy predictions of Abzug, Mim Kelber, and other gender exceptionalists were taking a clear beating, and Abzug’s and Pogrebin’s blistering commentaries were part of the contradiction. If feminists say women were more civil, why would they respond with such incivility to examples of perceived incivility? The New York Times termed it “the Feminist Paradox.” As feminists failed to conform to their own sociology, the legitimacy of the assertions of gender exceptionalism were undermined. 21 Clearly the mere assertions that women would behave differently in regard to political power had gained some acceptance in the media and in some academic circles, if only out of administrative fear. The only paradox at hand lay in the fact that anyone had ever given any credence to such unproven notions. It was a bill of goods of which Abzug had been one of the leading salespersons. Fears of McCarthyism with a feminist vocabulary had been a potent force against many political observers’ and media pundits’ reservations about pointing out the ironies in the illiberalisms at hand. Feminists had cowed administrators in universities and other institutions. Abzug and other feminist politicians appeared to have done much the same with elements in the media that covered politics. Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia, and others were starting to expose and disentangle the confusions and falsehoods that surrounded the feminist hegemony, both in academe and beyond. The evidence in the public eye in the New York Senate Democratic primary also undercut some of the tenets which Abzug had pushed in state and national politics. Abzug would not be dissuaded from her mission, however. No longer in elected office, feminism was now her overwhelmingly dominant theme, and with that exclusiveness she gravitated towards sociological views about gender that augured in directions that accommodated such a narrowing domain and which were at variance, not just with conservatives but with some political views which had been hallmarks of earlier, classically liberal forms of feminism she had once championed. The move toward a narrower gender-feminism was an evolution many other feminists took in the 1980s and 1990s along with Abzug. Since 1981, Betty Friedan had advocated an opposing path, toward a more cooperative male-female reunion. This marked quite a change, as her earlier work, paralleling the state of middle-class housewives with that of Nazi concentration camp prisoners, could not have been more radical or hyperbolic. But Friedan was seldom afraid to be out of step with any mainstream, be it social or

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feminist. Who was correct or incorrect here in the fissures between the gender and equity feminists remained a hotly debated matter. Among many active feminists the arguments were often heated, but within many of their obedient ranks, Friedan’s views did not appear to hold great resonance. Among those in the general public who were at all interested, and, perhaps more importantly, among the many young women in whose hands the future of feminism would inevitably rest, the results would not be so decisive for the gender feminist side. In regard to Abzug, her loyalists proclaimed that her feminism was growing stronger. Just as logical is the point that, as feminism displaced other issues after elected office was out of her life, the nature of that feminism took on a different character in the years that its proportional significance was shifting within her. Was it a return to a place of spiritual comfort that had been in her since childhood, or was it a more random consequence of losses in close elections that could have as easily turned out differently? Whatever the possible answers, her liberalism, like the occasional office staffer, was taking a beating. In the actual 1992 New York Democratic primary with which Abzug was so concerned, the battles between Holtzman and Ferraro left neither victorious. Robert Abrams won. The statistical outcome of the primary added to Abzug’s anger at Holtzman and confirmed her sense that women ought to toe a party line with more loyalty and obedience. Ferraro lost to Abrams by a mere 37 percent to 35 percent, with Al Sharpton polling 14 percent and Holtzman taking but 13 percent. 22 To Abzug this outcome was eerily like her 36 percent to 35 percent primary loss to Moynihan in 1976, when she came up just short with Ramsey Clark and Paul O’Dwyer each siphoning 9–10 percent of votes that would have likely gone to her had either been willing to face the reality of their lowly standing and drop out. It was not hard for her to conjecture, and feel anger over the point that Ferraro may indeed have won if Holtzman had shown the “correct” gender solidarity and stepped aside in Ferraro’s favor. That was at least a feminist view of it. The next year, when Holtzman ran again (for the office of New York City Comptroller), the bitterness was still in evidence. 23 Liberal as well as conservative leaders in the social and economic mainstream of the nation may have largely agreed that gender was no major sort of political determinant, but those who insisted upon following certain sociological prescriptions were not to be dissuaded. Be they ensconced in academe or in electoral politics, some of feminism’s religiously faithful could not countenance any intrusions. Meanwhile the political mainstream was not terribly much affected, although the specter of Abzug raging at those who did not conform to her behavioral contention that women were inherently more harmonious did prompt more than a few snickers. As Robert Abrams won the Democratic nomination, he subsequently squared off against the bombastic incumbent Alfonse M. D’Amato. As

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D’Amato was, among other things, an ardent foe of abortion, Democrats like Abzug gave their support to Abrams. In early October, Abzug had just given an impassioned speech in St. Louis about “abortion rights [being] here to stay.” 24 The threat that a man like D’Amato posed here angered her greatly. She and the rest of the state’s Democrats dearly wanted to defeat him, but a certain self-righteousness caused them to stumble, and Abzug would be among the more visible stumblers. In mid-October, the Abrams camp was reported to have called D’Amato a “fascist,” very much because of his abortion positions. (Italian Fascists, like their Nazi allies, had actually supported the uses of extreme birth control measures wherever they considered them useful, but in the 1992 New York Senate campaign no one was interested in such historical details, let alone any of the ironies such details may have raised.) The game at hand was attack politics, and to such extreme mudslinging, D’Amato and members of his campaign protested, no doubt a bit disingenuously, denouncing such remarks, claiming they constituted a slur upon all Italian-Americans. To them it was as though someone had called a German-American a Nazi. Abzug stepped into the fray here, openly laughing to Abrams and reporters: “Bob, I might not have called him a ‘Fascist,’ but he qualifies.” D’Amato pounced on this, claiming Abzug’s remark to be part of a concerted Democratic tag-team tactic of name calling. Always eager to participate, Abzug responded, declaring D’Amato to be both “a Fascist and a Nazi [emphasis hers].” Abzug may have been feeling the entitlement and freedom of someone now slightly out of the main political loops and who saw herself completely superior to her opponent. Her clear hatred and disdain for D’Amato was obvious, and she may have thought the remark would stand well among those who felt as she. The trouble was that virtually all those who smirked at her words were already staunchly anti-D’Amato. Elsewhere her remarks were hardly contributing to the civility of a campaign which had shown little in the first place, with this having a possible impact upon uncommitted voters. Abzug may have then enjoyed a moment of triumph in almost playground-level teasing, but it hardly denoted the better angels of her nature, and her remarks did not seem to sit well with many mainstream New York voters. They were part of what reporters described as a campaign, from both sides, degenerating into a schoolyard brawl. They also did little to underscore Abzug’s claims that women in politics would behave differently and better. Her entitlement-driven remarks here may have made her loyalists giggle, but they hardly served any liberal interest. D’Amato would win by 1.2 percent, and Abzug was not happy. Would Abrams have won had Democrats like Abzug taken a loftier rhetorical road? For Abzug a major point of speculation here focused on the notion that if Ferraro had won the nomination, she may have defeated D’Amato. This only underscored the anger she felt about Holtzman’s alleged lack of proper gen-

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der solidarity. 25 Mentions then of any feminist paradoxes regarding freedom and appreciating diversity appeared to have no impact on Abzug. Abzug would remain active and visible in the Democratic Party through these years. She was a member of the Democratic National Committee. Her political life continued to focus on major feminist issues. 26 A sense of the sui generis nature of her activity grew evident to some observers. At a large prochoice rally in Washington in April of 1989, with Abzug, of course, one of the stars of the gala, one reporter observed the mingling of Bella Abzug and the other pro-choice elites. The reporter noted especially the “distilled cosmos in which they moved around” and into which their rarefied world had devolved. There was the actress “Morgan Fairchild having her picture taken with Bella Abzug; Cybill Shepherd and Jesse Jackson passing each other and automatically falling into a side-by-side smiling stance for photographers.” They all knew one another, and everybody knew exactly what to say, wear, and do at such functions. The issues were important, to be sure, but it had all become so formulaic. It was highly doubtful if anyone’s views on the subject would be changed by any such well-rehearsed gatherings. Whether it was pro-choice rallies or other such demonstrations as those against global pollution, Abzug would be a regular among the celebrities, but were there any new points of view to be expressed? Could any honest debate be countenanced? Still another question here concerned whether the money allocated for such activities, no matter how well the activities made the many participants feel, would do much for the needs of poor women and men who could not always afford pertinent medical procedures, much less enjoy taking part in any such rallies in places like Washington, DC, let alone at any more exotic locales where the UN would repeatedly hold women’s conferences in which Abzug would take part. Abzug would indeed travel much in these years, spreading her views among the faithful. With decided help from the UN’s budget, Abzug would travel worldwide, hold meetings, and preach about gender. She was an ideologically hep jet-setter, a lifestyle that aroused the envy of many. Beyond the dissemination of a flamboyant, assertive image, what she was actually accomplishing for poor women, or men, remained puzzling. The significant class dimensions of such ongoing feminist activities as Abzug’s came forth rather neatly in a New York Times advertisement later that same spring. The Princess Cruise Company sought to induce people to book tickets for a Mexico trip on which lectures saluting “women of distinction” by Bella Abzug would be featured. Another cruise was to feature the presence of former National Football League coach George Allen. As with organizers of the visiting lecturers for wealthy colleges, whatever the pastime rich audiences preferred, be it football or feminism, Princess Cruises would fill the need. The disposable income was there to fund it, and people like Abzug and Allen got free trips, as she had before. Aspects of feminism

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remained bourgeois indulgences. Covering an Abzug appearance before the Women’s Political Caucus in July of 1988, the Philadelphia Inquirer emphasized the important issue at hand concerning a desire to get the Democratic Party to support a no–first use stand on nuclear weapons. “It was all very serious,” noted the Inquirer. “There was no partying at that meeting.” The fact that the paper felt the need to note so explicitly that there was not a lot of partying, backhandedly underscored what was otherwise too often the case at so many political gatherings among limousine liberals. It was the good life, with a lot of earnest speeches, deep thought, fine food, and hefty fees. 27 A few months after Abzug’s 1989 cruise, Ed Koch bowed out as New York City Mayor’s office after three terms. He and Abzug had been longstanding antagonists, but with Koch’s departure, there was no sense of anyone turning back to such a figure as Abzug. Abzug voiced support for Koch’s Democratic successor, David Dinkins, but her support and presence appeared to carry little significance. In office from 1990 to 1994, Mayor Dinkins did name Abzug as Chair of the City’s Commission on the Status of Women. The creation of such commissions had become another bureaucratic sinecure for feminists, with the internal proceedings often following predictable party lines. The ideal that gender-blindness could be achieved and that women, per se, should eventually not be an issue was a point that such commissions and commissioners could never countenance. In thousands of businesses, schools, and other institutions there was too much to be lost in terms of comfortable bureaucratic status and perquisites, and McCarthyistic attacks on any well-meaning questioning of premises kept at bay many rational discussions about the idea of “gender” and how it may evolve. Meanwhile, even within the context of such bureaucratic coveting, the idea of any institutional commissions focusing more on the status of poor people never gained as much traction. In a myriad of institutional contexts, gender had steadily eclipsed class. In her work on New York City’s Commission on the Status of Women, Abzug held hearings to explore such important issues as possible links between breast cancer and the environment. She would continue this work in future activities under the auspices of the United Nations. Neither Abzug’s commission nor any others ever considered similar matters with respect to such deadly issues as testicular or prostate cancer, however. Her committee also addressed issues of domestic violence, which of course could have involved both perpetrators and victims of either gender. But the focus here was only on women victimized by men. Other aspects of the issue involving male victims of women, male victims of other men, or anything involving women victimized by women received little to no attention. Potential gender prejudices notwithstanding, in the city’s electoral politics, Abzug’s voice was beginning to convey a bit more of an aura of nostalgia and of well-rehearsed ideological tenets. With such important issues as

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cancer and violence, was a focus so exclusively on women at one with the evolving sensibilities of the city and the nation by the early 1990s? No one with any sense questioned the seriousness of matters like breast cancer and domestic violence, but a virtually cliché-driven focus on gender, no matter any injustices in regard to whom and what the chosen feminist prism left out, did not convey quite the fully humanist dimensions that could have been more ennobling. Mayors of New York elected after Dinkins would take somewhat different views of the commission, and various writers of the day like Christine Hoff Sommers, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and others would take to task the narrowness in the orthodoxy that views issues as feminist rather than humanist matters. 28 Whatever the fire that remained in Abzug over women’s issues and over past fights with people from the old days like Koch, it no longer appeared to count quite as much among the mass of New York City’s voters. Issues like domestic violence and cancer (in all forms) were obviously important, but their being a base for further political arousing along feminist lines did not have quite the same resonance of older times. Considering her remaining political viability, Abzug briefly tested the political waters in September 1992. That month Congressman Ted Weiss suddenly died of heart failure. Mr. Weiss was the New York politician who had succeeded Abzug in 1976 as the Congressman from Manhattan’s West Side (and who had refused to step aside in her favor after she had lost the Senate nomination bid to Moynihan). Weiss’s passing lay open a Congressional seat and candidacy less than eight weeks before the 1992 election. Abzug made it known that she was ready and willing both to take the seat and to run for the office that fall. New York Democrats quickly held a meeting after Weiss’s passing. Abzug’s selfpromotions came as no real surprise. Reminding people that “I’m a known clobberer,” she proclaimed. “I’m raring to go.” She may have been keen on the idea, but few others were. The New York Times sarcastically panned: “Bella Abzug served capably in Congress but has become no less abrasive in fifteen years out of office.” Few Democratic regulars took her idea of a Congressional run seriously, and she soon withdrew. The scramble reminded a few of the unhappy days in the fall of 1972 when Abzug successfully sought to step into the Congressional nomination left by the death of Bill Ryan. Indeed, this time the deceased’s widow also sought the seat, but so did others like Richard Gottfried and Abzug’s friend, New York City Councilwoman Ronnie Eldridge. The party’s nod, however, went to another of Abzug’s former associates, Jerrold Nadler, and that November he was victorious. It would be Abzug’s final try at electoral politics. 29 When Mayor Dinkins ran for reelection in 1993, Abzug supported him, but her endorsement did not carry much weight. The mainstream of the city’s voters had not only departed from her wing of the Democratic Party, they turned away from the Democrats altogether. In the Mayor’s election of 1993

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the victor was Republican Rudolph Giuliani. Abzug’s ways, like her clashes with Ed Koch, seemed preciously of an older time. Still, the popular, feisty images were still there, indeed they had evolved to the point of cliché. The 1987 edition of the Dictionary of American Slang was already using “Bella Abzug” in their definition of “left wing.” Trying to illustrate the great tension between two prominent Republican leaders in Philadelphia in 1992, a journalist noted that one “would have had about as much chance of showing up at [the other’s political fundraisers] as, say, Bella Abzug.” That same year, when disparaging the quality of the defense of the National Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs, a sports reporter chuckled: “The Chiefs have eight linebackers, six of whom couldn’t tackle Bella Abzug.” (Actually, that may have not been too easy.) Expressing his frustrations at what he perceived to be a clear political bias in much of the programming of the cable television station “Lifetime: Television for Women,” conservative columnist L. Brent Bozell fumed: “it might as well be called ‘The Bella Abzug Network.’” In 1994, when Teresa Heinz, widow of deceased (1991) Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz, married Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, some were shocked. John Heinz had been a moderate Republican while Kerry was a liberal Democrat. A Pittsburgh paper dismissed the shock as overdrawn, guffawing that “many people might have gotten the impression that [conservative North Carolina Senator] Jesse Helms was marrying Bella Abzug.” Her ultra-liberal touchstone status remained, but the vintage was of an earlier day. Bella Abzug was more a classical political reference than a contemporary one. She and others like Ed Koch were simply seen as rivals of older times. 30 When Koch retired, he and Abzug actually became neighbors. They each lived in the same apartment complex on lower Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square. Some minor differences arose. When apartment building workers went on strike in the spring of 1991, various residents, including Koch, took turns doing security desk duties. Abzug would not take part: “I don’t have the time, and I don’t want to take over other peoples’ jobs as a matter of principle.” Abzug may have been a bit taken aback by the fact of Koch as a neighbor, but another of the apartment’s residents, a temperamental playwright and AIDS activist named Larry Kramer, was scandalized. “Mr. Mayor, don’t move here. Nobody wants you,” he screamed. “Jews must never forget Hitler. Gays must never forget Ed Koch.” Going back as far as 1975, Kramer had been in correspondence with Abzug over issues of gay rights. Koch had never been terribly accommodating on the issue. In 1991, expecting support, Kramer asked Abzug what to do about Koch’s presence. Abzug snapped back at him: “We’re going to live with him, that’s what we’re going to do. You[’re] crazy, you’ll murder him and I’ll have to defend you.” As in her defense of alleged communists in the 1950s, Abzug was at her noblest when her libertarian instincts were strongest. Another feature of her most humane side came forth amidst a kind of reconciliation between

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herself and Koch, with the rapprochement coming in a most poignant manner. They each participated in a series of public readings with local children to promote interest in reading books among the city’s young. It was a classy point of tenderness that marked the better angels of both their natures. (No such hint of cordiality ever emerged between Ed Koch and Larry Kramer, however.) 31 Causes involving feminism and gender identity continued for Abzug. Much of it seemed predictable, and the same questions surrounding the truth in the assertions of gender exceptionalism remained unresolved. Abzug lent her name to (unsuccessful) efforts to raise funds to make a shrine of the home of early twentieth-century activist Alice Paul in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. She took part in a publicized “Women’s Seder” for Passover in 1990, and in several others thereafter. As with her notions that women would handle political issues better, attaching gender to the spiritual dimensions of a Seder was a wonderful, however repetitive narcotic for believers. Did a gendersegregated Seder provide open any new spiritual pathways, or was it merely a fancy for women of wealthy means to indulge among one another? It had become an axiom to Abzug’s political followers that one gender was superior. An implicit McCarthyism—that any who disagreed or raised any disquieting questions could easily be labeled as sexists—loomed as a threat to enable the truculent assertions here, no matter their superficiality or inaccuracy. Taking virtually any issue and attaching gender to any connected matters of staffing had become her standard political cant. Along such lines of predictability, when the Gulf War began in the winter of 1991, Abzug’s opposition was equally unsurprising. She called for “George Bush and the UN to immediately withdraw from Kuwait.” She was hoping to lead what would become a swell of Vietnam-type peace protests, activities for which she had the fondest of memories going back to the Vietnam era and Women Strike for Peace. As the military efforts of the United States and its allies were quick and successful, no groundswell of war opposition erupted. Abzug and other critics quickly grew silent. 32 When the Anita Hill controversy arose in 1992, Abzug was among the many who supported Hill in her claims that Republican Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. “Women tell the truth” was the mantra at a support meeting/celebration at Hunter College that year. There were many others like it. At Hunter, Abzug participated in the celebration of gender. Somehow the notion that most women, like most men, tell the truth was not politically acceptable. No one dared remind her or anyone of the fact that nearly a half century earlier in her career Abzug had argued that the woman who had accused Willie McGee of rape was not telling the truth. Any who raised any such points in 1992 could be accused of being insufficiently sensitive to, or even condoning of, sexual harassment. As an attorney, Abzug may have been asked to consider whether, if all women tell the truth,

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the criminal justice system should then dispense with trials and summarily convict all the accused simply because a woman had raised charges against them. Why waste time and money, after all? (What, as well, did one do if a young girl accused a woman of lesbian rape? If the accused denied the charge, then one female had to be not telling the truth.) Back in the 1950s Abzug defended people who were accused of being communists with the accusers exuding a smug self-righteousness. In that era, the mere accusations of wrongdoing were equally if not even more damning to the accused, no matter the actual guilt or innocence. To McCarthyists of the day, anti-communists must have been telling the truth too. The enabling sense among conservatives from the 1950s—of a misguidedly indulged, silent coddling of left wingers—had, in 1992, been superseded by what Anita Hill called “the silent history of sexual harassment” that women share. 33 The prior neglect of an issue in earlier times somehow lent validation to a charge. It was as though rules of evidence could be changed on the basis of prior generations’ patterns of apathy. The irony here was that the heroic resistance of some, like Abzug, to anti-communist political pressures in the McCarthy era provided no lessons to truculent feminists in the early 1990s. Feminists had learned from such history about as well as McCarthyists learned from the lessons of the Salem Witch Trials. Abzug never commented on the parallels, but she now appeared perversely to be enjoying the smug feelings and power of the blind moral certainty whose aggressive manifestations she had once so vigorously opposed when she defended many accused communists and one accused rapist. The morally certain disdain for due process and proper jurisprudence of the early 1990s involved new and differently vocabularied forms of McCarthyism. A few civil liberties–driven opponents arose, but this time Abzug was not among them. Ignoring any civil rights issues at hand, she was instead among the many to proclaim 1992 as the “Year of the Woman.” She said it would mark “the beginning of a new era.” Some wondered what all the feminist work of the previous quarter century then signified. For Abzug and other New York feminists, the Geraldine Ferraro–Elizabeth Holtzman conflict that same summer in the fight for the Democratic nomination for the Senate was also hard to reconcile to the enthusiasm over gender defining a politically better way. 34 In the 1992 Presidential election Abzug desired the defeat of George H. W. Bush, and she came to support Bill and Hillary Clinton. A few conservative editors attempted to use the links Abzug had to the Clinton campaign as a point to stir the political right against the Democrats. Just two days before the Presidential election, Ross Mackenzie of the Richmond Times-Dispatch raised the banner of fear he hoped would get out the conservative vote. In an article ominously entitled “And What if Slick Willie Wins?” he warned: “Given the coterie of leftists with whom he [Clinton] has surrounded himself,

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such types would be likely in the cabinet and in White House advisory posts. Nor should anyone doubt the likely elevation of ACLUists and Naderites—or of Hillarynistas such as Bella Abzug.” 35 The right-wing call to arms obviously did not work, or to the extent that it did, some of the aroused decided to cast their votes for Ross Perot rather than for George Bush. To the political right, the seventy-two-year-old Abzug was still an image to exploit. Clinton’s victory thus pleased Abzug no end. Subsequent connections with the Clinton administration would serve her well, especially with her various efforts through the United Nations. Especially with Clinton’s victory, Abzug could giggle at any attempted smears of her as a leftist. Meanwhile other disquieting parallels with the McCarthy era that such controversies as Anita Hill raised appeared to have no impact upon her. She continued to trumpet the call for more women in elected office. Despite her certainty, the pitfalls in the many vagaries and impulses of identity politics did come forth for Abzug. They did so most poignantly and personally in the summer and fall of 1991, amidst a New York City Council election. She did not run this time, but her daughter did. Liz Abzug ran for Democratic nomination for City Council in a newly redrawn council district in Manhattan involving parts of Clinton, Chelsea, and the West Side of Greenwich Village. Her mother supported her of course and worked very hard on her behalf. By 1991, the West Village had long been a major center of the city’s large gay and lesbian communities. Liz Abzug had recently gone public with the fact that she was a lesbian, as had her sister. The trouble was that when she ran for City Council, Liz Abzug found herself attacked, although not at all for her lesbianism. By 1991, a gay or lesbian identity in Greenwich Village was so unextraordinary that it hardly merited comment. Indeed, in that particular City Council election there were two major candidates, and each was gay. (There was a third candidate, a high school teacher named Victor A. Del Mastro. He was heterosexual and thus received virtually no attention.) Few Greenwich Villagers lauded Liz Abzug for her lifestyle. She was actually the subject of criticism for “coming out late” (in June of 1991) and charged with harboring cynical political motives—trying to curry favor with voters via her newly open identity in a recently redrawn City Council district that now appeared to be “gaywinnable.” Beyond the “out but late” criticisms raised against Liz Abzug, her principal opponent, Thomas K. Duane, was not only gay, he was HIV positive. Here the foci of identity politics took another turn. No longer concerned about the now-mundane matter of someone being gay, New York City’s media made much of the fact that Duane was, as the New York Times heralded, “believed to be the first candidate seeking elected office who had admitted to being infected with the virus that causes AIDS.” Short of someone running from a hospital bed with fully developed AIDS, this was a brand

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of identity politics that was hard to overcome. No one was minimizing the gravity of AIDS, of course, but journalists noted a “can you top this” identity tonality entering into the primary. A lengthy piece in the Village Voice detailed various points of Duane’s distinctions. He was openly gay and had for several years been an effective advocate for gay issues. The Voice also pointedly emphasized the criticisms of Liz Abzug that she had then only recently come out as a lesbian. They quoted Lidell Jackson, head of the gay organization “Men of All Colors Together,” saying: “we’ve lately coined a phrase ‘doing an Abzug’ to mean ‘being an opportunist.’” The long Village Voice article contained but a little passing reference to the fact that the major candidates did not disagree and “would wind up voting similarly on the major issues.” It seemed that few local voters appeared to care very much about such practical matters as taxes, trash collection, the quality of public schools, or winter-time snow removal. The important question was whose brand of identity politics carried the most caché. Voters in this trendy section of Manhattan appeared to be concerned about little else. With fearsome issues like AIDS looming, there was reason for this, but a certain wealth-enabled self-indulgence was part of the psycho-political picture as well. In the campaign Liz Abzug wrote a leaflet in which she spoke to no practical issues, trying instead to appeal to lesbians: “Two gay candidates are running,” she proclaimed. “But only one of us is a woman.” Some prominent women took exception to the plea. Thomas Duane received the endorsements of Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick (the first openly lesbian woman in the Albany assembly), and City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman. (Bella Abzug never said, but Holtzman’s stand here may have added to the vehemence with which Abzug supported her old friend Geraldine Ferraro against Holtzman in 1992, as well as to her anger over Holtzman’s criticisms of Ferraro when the two women ran for the New York Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.) Liz Abzug’s appeal placed the local lesbian community under pressure. Should they support a lesbian, per se, or support a man who appeared to have a stronger record of advocacy for gay and lesbian issues? Charges of Liz’s opportunism in her “coming out” late would prove effective. The Village Voice noted that “most lesbian activists are backing Duane.” Given Abzug’s famous name, the race drew wide attention across the nation, as well as in Canada. Many of Abzug’s famous friends, including Gloria Steinem, Lesley Gore, Marlo Thomas, and Shirley MacLaine, put in appearances for her Liz. Because of Bella Abzug’s support for David Dinkins, the Mayor supported Liz Abzug too. Dick Dadey, executive director of the gay Empire State Pride Agenda, was among many incensed about the Mayor’s actions here. He declared that the endorsing of Liz Abzug would “have an enormous impact in distancing the mayor from the gay and lesbian

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community.” (In 1993, they would indeed be lukewarm about Dinkins as he lost his reelection bid to Rudolph Giuliani.) Identity politics had certainly grown contentious, and here it was driven largely by the mere point that Liz Abzug had allegedly come out late. The Village Voice was indeed rather harsh, as they proclaimed in a headline: “Bella She Ain’t . . . an ActivistCome-Lately . . . [with] Some Powerful Friends.” (Ouch!) As usual, Bella Abzug was a match for anyone’s harshness. The Times opined that she “has proved less restrained than her daughter.” They chortled about her “fierce, Gypsy Rose Lee–like campaign on behalf of her daughter,” noting that her tonality escalated the contentiousness of the campaign. Few were surprised, of course. Bella Abzug would work the phones, raise campaign money, and stump at various subway stops, replete in her trademark floppy hats and often accompanied by some famous showbiz friends. She and the rest of her daughter’s supporters tried to claim that there was nothing wrong with her having maintained a privacy about her lesbianism before she became a candidate. Given how people had criticized her daughter for coming out late and doing so with a political motive, Bella Abzug asserted that Duane’s proclamation (in August of ‘91) of being HIV positive was no less politically motivated. It may not have been a bad point, although Duane had long been open about being gay and was forthcoming about his medical condition. Given the enormous sensitivities in New York over AIDS in 1991, Bella Abzug may not have been a terribly wise to raise such a criticism. Abzug’s harshness did not stop there. In a caustically sweeping attack, she further dismissed Duane as a mere political “hack,” pompously adding that she had known many of the City Councilmen over the years, and that they were all hacks. There seemed to be an ill-advised imperiousness in the comment. Did Bella Abzug feel so self-assured that she believed she would be able to carry the day with voters via presumptions of a superiority-driven one-word diminution of an entire rank of politicians? What voters would be moved to vote for her daughter because of such high-handedness? The level of a City Council election may have been small potatoes for a woman who’d served three terms in Congress, but it was hardly helpful for her to point this out, and in such a disparaging manner no less. Some voters would likely identify with those very lesser types Abzug was imperiously demeaning. (And was her daughter not then running for the office of a “hack?”) One Canadian reporter noted that Liz Abzug “has not been helped by the endless verbal assaults on Duane by her mother.” Liz felt obliged to attempt to make light of her mother’s hectoring with a nervous shrug: “She’s a Jewish mother.” That apparently did not begin to mollify those already prone to be hostile. In the end, Thomas Duane would win the primary, and the tally proved not even close. Duane carried 59 percent of the vote (9,245); Abzug took a mere 26 percent (4,016), with Del Mastro taking the remaining 15 percent. 36

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Beyond the sadness of the loss, ironies lay all about the questions as to what had happened to the old liberal notions for which Bella Abzug had so conspicuously and courageously campaigned back in the early 1970s. With personal matters and style transcendent, mere tonality could ever more eclipse content, and Abzug’s swipe at the City Council being but a bunch of political hacks hardly helped here. This was, of course, nothing new in politics, not at least since the days of Cicero. Still, for such a figure as Bella Abzug the triumph of identity seemed to be driving her into an ever narrower cul de sac. Fifteen years before, when she was in her own primary fights against figures like Daniel P. Moynihan, Ramsey Clark, Mario Cuomo, and Ed Koch, she had certainly talked about more than mere issues of identity. While she may have decried “hacks” like Thomas Duane, it seemed that gender and lesbian issues had turned into bases of political identity that were turning her into a bit of the very sort of narrow ideological “hack” she had so sarcastically derided. Thomas Duane would serve several terms in the City Council. Subsequently he served effectively in the New York State Senate. He fortunately had the resources to enable himself access to the best treatments and medical care to keep his HIV infection from growing into anything grave. Obviously no one with any common sense would hold the fact of Duane’s illness against him. But it was astounding how Liz’s coming out late and the narrative fact of someone having such an affliction as HIV had come to have political significance in the way it apparently had in the Manhattan neighborhoods of Greenwich Village, Clinton, and Chelsea. There used to be a liberal ideal that being gay or straight, having or not having a disability, being black or white, or being a woman or man should not matter. This had been long displaced. Now such things did matter, albeit in the opposite manners they had in times of previous prejudices. Greatly enabling was an accompanying narcissism that could be so extreme and caustic in its manifestations that few could even consider raising mere hints about the lessons of the obvious ironies at hand. Back when Bella Abzug first championed movements like feminism and gay rights, she had asserted a clear, fundamentally liberal point that gender and lifestyle should not matter in regard to politics and that no one, no matter their gender or lifestyle, should have that limit their achievements in politics or anywhere else. What some in Abzug’s generation had brought in their subsequent patterns of identity politics had not only displaced old liberal ideals, they had come to present a frustratingly superficial defiance of actual political substance. The appallingly low quality of the public schools, the inefficiency of the City’s bureaucracies, high taxes, poor snow removal or trash collection meant little when economically comfortable-to-wealthy identity-driven voters were considering such a distinction as that of a lesbian who’d come out late versus someone who was HIV-positive. By 1991 the wrinkles upon the wrinkles of

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identity politics in a West Side Greenwich Village election were indeed getting beyond the realm of rational comprehension. In contrast to the old 1960s New Left dogma, “the political is personal,” feminists had almost as long ago coined the phrase “the personal is political.” The counterpoint was conscious. When such matters as abortion and divorce laws were at hand, the phrase held great significance. At other times the assertion could distort matters with undue levels of ego, or even narcissism. For Bella Abzug the matters of gay identity in politics had come to affect her in the oddest of ways. Who could have predicted in 1971 that, within a generation, the gay and lesbian communities of New York would bristle at and reject Bella Abzug’s openly lesbian daughter’s City Council candidacy? Politics makes for strange non-bedfellows too. It had never mattered to Bella Abzug that many of her friends and associates had been lesbians. In 1970, when she had first championed the point that the gay communities should never be victims of discrimination, she never thought she needed to say that those same communities should not engage in discrimination themselves. But by the early 1990s “coming out” in a timely manner obviously made a big difference, especially in New York City where AIDS ravaged and leaders like Mayor Koch had so frustrated so many gay activists for so long. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Abzug had always emphasized to her associates that she was not interested in anything but the political dimensions of her advocacy of gay rights. Her adamant words here about actual gay activity had been: “don’t tell me what they do!” It had also been a source of private distress to her that both her daughters were lesbians. Here she had asked some close friends a Portnoy’s Complaint–type question: “Both my girls, where did I go wrong?” Were it in a movie script, such a line would have been funny, but for Abzug it was no laughing matter. She struggled with this. She had some conflicts with her daughter Liz over the matter, with Liz threatening to cut all ties if her mother would not accept her fully. Ultimately Bella Abzug would come to the completely sensible answer, one that she would have doubtlessly held forth, if asked, to any other parent in a similar position: that she had not done anything wrong and that her daughters were just fine. At times when her daughters had any sorts of troubles, Abzug admitted she asked, in cognizance particularly of her many long absences, “Do you think it’s my fault?” They told her affirmatively, “You did what you had to do.” 37 What had gone awry was the late 1960s/early 1970s ideal of homosexuality (or race or gender or any other such issue) not mattering. By the 1990s such labels meant a whole lot to those who wanted to assert that political content somehow rested in personal identity. It may have been a contradiction. It may have, amidst failing school systems, been part of a dumbing down of voting populations that left them susceptible to such superficial appeals and manipulations. Whatever the causes, the emotional urges, or the cynical senses of political

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utility, those content to play any identity cards simply disregarded all logical flaws and prior ideals. Through much of Bella Abzug’s early and middle years of life, the profession of psychiatry had regarded homosexuality as a form of mental illness. It had always been a major part of Abzug’s political courage to defy any established political sensibilities, no matter their entrenchment or popularity, if they made no sense to her. She had stood for the political acceptance of homosexuality when there was much to risk in doing so. By 1990 much had changed in at least some of the world’s (and psychiatry’s) views of homosexuality. By the 1990s, when Liz Abzug ran for City Council, what remained paradoxically unchecked and unrevised were some views among homosexuals in which they blithely projected their own sensibilities onto others, and now it was not merely about identity but about the “right kind” of details any individual should display within that right kind of identity. This was carried forth with some of the very same aplomb inherent in the judgments of professional psychiatrists of older times. Liz Abzug paid the price for it with a losing candidacy. Bella Abzug encountered some elements of this politically correct highhandedness herself. Never harboring any prejudices, she spent much of her leisure time, especially after Martin’s death, with various friends on Long Island, where she purchased a summer home, formerly owned by sports and television figures Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford. “One of my daughters,” she remembered, “has been going out to the Hamptons for years and has loved it, so I decided we’d get a place together. I spend summers there and weekends all through the year.” Abzug loved the gatherings, with everyone eating big dinners and playing lots of card games, something she had loved to do ever since law school. Through the help of her friend, the singer/entertainer Leslie Gore, Abzug once staged a Marlene Dietrich impersonation at the Hamptons, complete with full tuxedo. In response, some could not help themselves with their personal projections to the effect that deep down Bella Abzug must be saying that she was a lesbian herself. It was quite possible that Abzug knew that some would want to see such latent messages in both her performances and her social patterns. It was also possible that Abzug, now in her seventies, did not care one whit about any implications one way or the other in her performances, appearances, or friendship patterns. And like (more than?) many politicians, she always had a bit of the ham in her and could have easily desired to please any audience, especially one full of friends and admirers whose identities she well knew. Some could not leave it at that, however. “Gimme a break,” her friend Robin Morgan exclaimed to her, “could we look at the pattern here? Most of your closest friends are lesbian or bisexual women. You hang with the Muffies and the Poofies in the Hamptons. You’re up there in a tux singing Marlene Dietrich songs. Both of your daughters are lesbians. I love Martin, and you had a great love affair, but let

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me just say, if I were a few years older or you were a few years younger, I’d give you a run for your money.” (Her forty-year relationship with Martin could hardly be accurately cast as a mere “love affair.”) 38 Morgan said that Abzug had a good sense of humor about her assertions, but Morgan herself was being something other than purely funny. She was as certain in her views as established 1950s-vintage psychiatrists would have been in their assertions that lesbianism was a form of mental illness. The sense of righteousness and moral superiority was part of the pattern that had grown all too encasing over Abzug’s political appeal. It was an easy and enjoyable social world for Abzug, but it contained variations on some of the same themes of close-mindedness against which she had vigorously fought since her early days of political activism. There was no evidence that she was or had ever been a lesbian. Nonetheless there was a pervading pressure against any who would assert such a point against those who felt a smug confidence to the effect that they knew was really going on in someone else’s heart. Beyond any smugness in such fancies, some lesbian and gay activists had to reconcile a troublesome point: that one of, if not the greatest figures of modern feminism had a personal life of a loving husband and two children, the very traditional form at which elements of trendy, late twentieth-century radical feminism tersely turned up their noses. No matter the projections of some identity-driven politics, sometimes the personal is just that, personal. It is not and does not have to be political. When some try to force personal projections into a topic, the results can merely involve distortions and contradictions, replete with a reflexive bristling at any who point them out. NOTES 1. New York Times, March 2, 1986; March 10, p. A1; Chicago Sun-Times, February 22, 1986; Knickerbocker News, March 18, 1986. 2. New York Times, January 12, 1986; May 18; May 23; Philadelphia Inquirer, June 6, 1986, p. C.2; Knickerbocker News, June 5, 1986; San Francisco Chronicle, June 6, 1986; Seattle Times, June 6, 1986; Lexington Herald-Leader (Ky), June 7, 1986; Atlanta Constitution, June 6, 1986; San Jose Mercury News, June 6, 1986; Miami Herald, June 6, 1986; Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1986. 3. New York Times, June 6, 1986; June 15; June 22. 4. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 19, 1986, p. A7; New York Times, July 19, 1986, p. 14; Los Angeles Times, July 18, p. 1; July 20, p. 32; Chicago Tribune, July 20, 1986, p. 7; July 21, p. 10; Long Island Newsday, July 19, 1986, p. 15; July 21, p. 33; San Francisco Chronicle, July 19, 1986, p. 9. 5. Interview with Judy Lerner, May 11, 2005; interview with Maggi Peyton, May 10, 2006; interview with Barbara Bick, June 9, 2005; interview with Letty Cottin Pogrebin, December 22, 2005; interview with Gloria Steinem, January 30, 2003, August 26, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 243–45; Ms., August, 1990; Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1990, p. 1; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 19, 1986, p. A7; New York Times, July 19, 1986, p. 14; Long Island Newsday, September 4, 1986, p. 1; USA Today, October 22, 1987, p. A4; Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 270.

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6. Long Island Newsday, September 4, 1986, p. 1; Providence Journal, September 21, 1986, p. A19; New York Times, September 10, 1986, p. B5; Orlando Sentinel, September 11, 1986, p. A4; San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 1986, p. 9; Montreal Gazette, September 11, 1986, p. F 13; Houston Chronicle, September 10, 1986, p. 6; Chicago Tribune, September10, 1986, p. 1; Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1986, p. 1. 7. The Record (Bergen Co., NJ), September 18, 1996, p. 8. 8. Philadelphia Inquirer, October 28, 1986, p. A10; October 30, p. A1; Long Island Newsday, December 6, 1986, p. 18; New York Times, October 5, 1986, p. A36; October 30, p. A30; November 2, pp. WC1 and 36; November 5, p. B13. 9. New York Times, August 12, 1986. 10. Chicago Sun-Times, November 5, 1986, pp. 6, 30; Boston Globe, November 5, 1986, p. 28; Long Island Newsday, November 6, 1986, p. 36. 11. Anthony Astrachan, How Men Feel: Their Response to Women’s Demands for Equality and Power (New York: Abner Doubleday, 1986), pp. 15–17; Chicago Sun-Times, November 5, 1986, pp. 6, 30; Boston Globe, November 5, 1986, p. 28; December 2, p. 29; Long Island Newsday, November 6, 1986, p. 36; November 19, p. 5. 12. New York Times, November 9, 1986, p. E22; Philadelphia Inquirer, December 27, 1986, p. C2. 13. Orlando Sentinel, November 2, 1986, p. A2. 14. New York Times, December 20, 1986, p. 27; June 8, 1987, p. C12. 15. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Christine Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminsim? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Rene Denfeld, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (New York: Warner Books, 1995); Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women’s Studies (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Camille Paglia, Vamps & Tramps, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 16. New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1994, p. 13; Boston Globe, June 16, 1994; New Republic, vol. 211, July 11, 1994, p. 32; Newsweek, vol. 123, June 20, 1994, p. 68; Time, vol. 144, August 1, 1994, p. 61; Women’s Review of Books. vol. 12, December 1994; Feminist Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 1998, p. 159; The Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 82, no. 2, May 1996, p. 171; Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, vol. 35, no. 2, Spring, 1996, p. 327; Public Interest, no. 118, Winter, 1995, p. 100; Publishers Weekly, vol. 242, no. 14, April 3, 1995, p. 58; Signs, vol. 20, no. 3, Spring 1995, p. 668. 17. Interview with Gloria Steinem, January 30, 2003, and August 26, 2006; Abzug quoted by Myra MacPherson, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 63, xiii. 18. Interview with Robin Morgan, January 30, 2003, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 108. 19. Washington Post, September 19, 2008, p. C 1. 20. Allentown Morning Call March 29, 1992, p. A 6. 21. New York Times, August 27, 1993, p. 32; August 30, p. 33; September 3, p. B 6; Sept. 5, pp. 1, 22; November 4, p. 1; Nov. 5, p. 1; Long Island Newsday, August 21, 1992, p. 38; September 10, p. 50; Buffalo News, September 7, 1992; Sept. 12, p. C 7; Montreal Gazette, August 31, 1992, p. D 7; see also Rene Denfeld, The New Victorians, p. 186. 22. New York Times, September 16, 1992, p. 1; San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 1992, p. 1. 23. Long Island Newsday, September 11, 1993, p. 3; Buffalo News, September 14, 1993, p. 8. 24. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 5, 1992, p. 3. 25. Long Island Newsday, October 15, 1992, p. 4; Oct. 18, p. 7; The Record (Bergen Co., NJ), October 16, 1992, p. C20; Buffalo News, October 18, 1992, p. 1; New York Magazine, October 26, 1992, p. 60. 26. New York Times, June 4, 1988, pp. 29, 32; February 10, 1989, p. A14; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 14, 1992, p. A1. 27. New York Times, April 9, 1989, p. 28; April 10, pp. A1, B; April 12, p. C4; June 18, p. xxii; interview with Martha Baker, October 7, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 270; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 21, 1988, p. H5; April 10, 1989, p. A1; April 23, p. A9.

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28. Interview with Martha Baker, October 7, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 270; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Christine Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminsim? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Denfeld, The New Victorians. 29. New York Times, April 1, 1998, pp. 1, 13; September 22, 1992, p. 26; Long Island Newsday, September 17, 1992, p. 101; Philadelphia Inquirer, September 15, 1992, p. B6; September 16, p. A4; USA Today, September 22, 1992, p. 4; Washington Post, September 25, 1992, p. 21; Buffalo News, September 20, 1992, p. 9; Bergen Record, September 20, 1992, p. 8. 30. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 2, 1987, p. D1; January 17, 1993, p. C2; April 25, 1983, p. C1; Washington Times, March 26, 1995, p. B 4; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 17, 1994, p. D16. 31. New York Times, September 13, 1989, p. B5; January 4, 1990, p. B1; September 23, p. C15; November 7, p. B13; November 23, p. C15; Long Island Newsday, November 12, 1990, p. 18; Orlando Sentinel, November 7, 1990, p. A16; Philadelphia Inquirer, November 22, 1989, p. E2; April 25, 1991, p. D2; May 1, p. D1; Abzug Papers, Box 152, folder 1, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.. 32. New York Times, February 1, 1990, p. C13; April 9, p. B4; October 28, p. 16; February 18, 1991, p. 8; Long Island Newsday, February 18, 1991, p. 6; Arizona Republic, April 23, 1991, p. C1; Phoenix Gazette, April 16, 1991, p. B3; Philadelphia Inquirer, September 5, 1989, p. B5; Boston Herald, March 31, 1993, p. 43. 33. New York Amsterdam News, May 2, 1992, p. 5. 34. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 27, 1992, p. C2; July 14, p. A1. 35. Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 1, 1992, p. F7. 36. Village Voice, vol. 36, issue 33, August 13, 1991, p. 11; New York Times, May 17, 1991, p. B4; August 8, pp. B1, 5; September 10, p. B1; Sept. 11, p. B6; Long Island Newsday, August 25, 1991, p. 8; September 6, p. 13; Sept. 8, p. 4; Toronto Star, September 1, 1991, p. H2; Vancouver Sun, September 12, 1991, p. A24; Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1991, p. 17; Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 26, 1991, p. 5; San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 1991, p. 3; Washington Post, September 11, 1991, p. A3; Houston Chronicle, August 9, 1991, p. 20; USA Today, August 9, 1991, p. A6; www.tomduane.com/bio.html; www.thebody.com/ content/art30694.html. 37. Interview with Robin Morgan, January 30, 2003; interview with Liz Abzug, July 28, 2004, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 256–57; Long Island Newsday, December 11, 1995, p. A 27. 38. Interview with Robin Morgan, January 30, 2003, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 256–57; Long Island Newsday, December 11, 1995, p. A 27.

Chapter Ten

International Patronage

Whether helping her daughter in politics or “hanging” in various wealthy social circles of Long Island, Abzug continued to operate squarely within the realms of gender politics. She would take various issues in international directions largely through the bureaucracy of the United Nations. Liz Abzug recalled: “After Carter fired her [in 1979] . . ., I think my mother was really at a loss to figure out what she was going to do in terms of having political clout, nationally or locally. She was saying, ‘What do I do with all my energy? Maybe I should look globally, because they’re rejecting what I’m saying at the domestic level.’” 1 With the 1980 election of Reagan, she had no chance of any significant influence in domestic matters, unless she ran for office again. In 1986, another try there failed again. Global levels were open for the testing. Here the potential of feminist politics forming sui generis intellectual and spiritual cul de sacs would be ever present, as many international initiatives would serve their participants while any broader, tangible impact was difficult to discern. With Mim Kelber, her constant friend since their Hunter College days, Abzug established the Women’s Environment and Development Organization in 1991. Previously, Abzug had cagily procured tax-exempt status for Women USA, and the Women’s Environment and Development Organization grew out of this tax-exempt organization. Abzug capitalized on some facts surrounding a 1991 United Nations conference on the environment. “I read the documents,” she noted, “and noticed there were only two mentions of women in [them]. . . . I decided to form a women’s caucus.” She sought then to use the issue of “women,” with the complaint that their voices needed to be heard. Any point that they were being heard was simply cast beyond the pale. The idea that women, per se, could contribute simply by virtue of their gender may have had sexist premises, but this was not a matter Abzug cared 267

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to debate. She used the matter of the number of mentions of “women” in a set of environment-focused documents to wedge her foot in the UN door. She was seeking bureaucratic enclaves and at least the image of influence, and she succeeded. With gender identity providing leverage for presence and visibility, she happily remembered, “we went to every meeting the UN had.” 2 The tactic of using gender to gain presence and influence had failed miserably in the Carter administration. Within the UN it succeeded. There was no reason for any UN official to deny such access. Unlike heads of state, they were largely immune from any political controversies that could arise over matters like budgetary waste or thickening bureaucracies. Thousands of educational, corporate, and other institutional contexts have witnessed this sort of bureaucratization. Those proposing a women’s committee/division/ staff can readily posture that they are being ignored. More importantly, those who do not yield the desired bureaucratic space, perquisites, and resources can be readily cast as gender biased or even misogynist. In the age of Joe McCarthy, few wanted to be labeled as insufficiently anti-communist. The political vocabulary had changed, but the political methods had not. As Abzug wanted, the new women’s organization was immediately known by its initials: WEDO. Like “NOW” and “Women Strike for Peace,” the organization’s common name, “We Do,” had the unmistakable stamp of Abzug and Kelber. The choice of name was part of her/their style of pepping up the potential membership through rhetoric. Abzug was always very good at this. Beyond her undeniable political passions and adept marketing/advertising skills, Abzug was also a gifted parliamentarian, and this came forth in WEDO as well. She could organize in ways, as her friend Ronnie Eldridge recalled, that could create the illusion of mass mobilization even when there were no masses: “There’d be a caucus this, a grass-roots that—she [Abzug] used mirrors.” 3 Abzug had indeed been able to drum up enthusiasm and give the impression of many an institutional apparatus being in place for her causes, always with the completely rational and hopeful point that, once in motion, movements could garner funding, take on lives of their own, and achieve more than mere images of significance. Like anyone else in such a position, she could never predict what her work would create, but she had certainly been successful with such efforts in the past. With WEDO, Abzug continued some of her work in regard to breast cancer awareness. When she had been the head of the New York City Commission on the Status of Women under Mayor David Dinkins, she had used the commission to highlight issues related to breast cancer. In 1993, she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself and underwent a partial mastectomy. Aside from the recovery time from the operation, cancer did not slow her work one bit. As always, she was completely uninhibited, indeed fearless about being open about her medical condition. This may have helped ennoble

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other women (and men) to overcome many such repressions themselves, and it certainly added poignancy to any of her discussions about the issue. 4 The significance of the City Commission on Women did not last much beyond the single term of David Dinkins. That was one of the motives to use “mirrors” in the development of WEDO to maintain the image of status and conspicuousness. By early 1994, under New York’s new Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the City Commission on Women no longer received the same financial support. Giuliani also fired two women from prominent posts in the city government. Abzug protested the firings and, in solidarity, resigned her post as the commission’s chair, calling the new Mayor’s budget cuts “brutal.” With a decided smirk, the press described Mayor Giuliani as “less than distraught at Abzug’s resignation.” “Okay, you can send it in,” Giuliani quipped. “I have a feeling that when I get it, I’ll accept it.” Abzug asserted here that the Mayor’s cuts would hurt women most. 5 Some could have argued that gender was hardly the issue at stake and that such groups as the disadvantaged youth and the elderly may have been hurt more. Her gender assertions harkened back to her resignation from Jimmy Carter’s commission, when she attempted to push similar analyses that appeared politically self-serving. With President Carter the political fallout in which she participated (including her support for Edward Kennedy in 1980) may have hurt the President’s and the Democrats’ political strength. Here there seemed little she could do to hurt Giuliani. It would have been naive for her to think she could. If anything, Giuliani likely felt that any publicity from her well-known temper directed at him would work to his political benefit. As for the issue of cancer, she continued the efforts, using WEDO as a forum to give herself and the issue visibility. As WEDO was ostensibly an environmental group, Abzug used a report from the environmental group Greenpeace to raise the issue of chemical pollutants’ links to breast cancer. Other cancers that affected men and women did not appear to concern her. Her hope was to promote a campaign to force the government to “eliminate the sources of chemical pollution that contribute to the breast cancer epidemic.” The concern here was especially focused on chlorine-based compounds, organochlorines. As Abzug was a politician and not a scientist, her sweeping recommendations to ban all chlorine compounds were less than convincing. She recognized that 30 percent of breast cancer in women has been “explained from diet, fat, and so on. [But] seventy percent,” she intoned, “is unaccounted for. So what is it?” She was asking as though someone knew the answer, and that the force of her audacity was going to bring out theretofore hidden secrets that had been holding women down. The fact was that no one was hiding any information. The chief, precise causes of breast cancer were not known, and her calls then to eliminate all organochlorines made little sense. Such broad-stroke approaches may have been effective in some areas of politics. End all Jim Crow

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laws, pull out of Vietnam immediately—these had been logical calls in the 1960s. The existence of simple answers was part of the attraction of a lot of political activism in that era. Here the science at hand demanded something more exacting and complex. There were actually more than fifteen thousand organochlorine compounds. Lumping them all together made no scientific sense, and no McCarthyistic sorts of attacks could apply to scientists and others who raised such factual points. Anyone who pointed out the complexities of the issue and the quantity of compounds could hardly be branded as insensitive to the issue of breast cancer. Indeed researchers at the National Cancer Institute, no less, were among those who pointed out the number of compounds to illustrate the intricacy of the problem, all in contrast to the sweeping generalities Abzug was raising. Abzug was impatient with such complexities, and here her impatience did not serve the issue terribly well. Her advocacy may have stimulated talk and press coverage. Abzug allowed her own recent medical history with breast cancer to add drama, but it all led to no actual legislation. 6 The characteristics of some issues are such that political panache can be useful. Abzug had learned this well during her days as a peace activist and in the early days of the women’s movement. When the issue involved legal technicalities, she was a master of procedure. Her days in Congress proved that, to the point of gaining respect even among her ideological opponents. Scientific/environmental issues were another matter. Abzug could raise consciousness by pointing out the fact that breast cancer was something of which all women should be aware. No one argued about that, and breast cancer was anything but an unknown issue by the time. (Betty Ford had bravely shared her condition with the public back in 1974.) Precisely focused legislation against harmful chemicals required knowledge and skills that were beyond her. A few months after her general pleas about organochlorines, Abzug penned a lambast of Sports Illustrated’s famous swimsuit issue, then marking its thirtieth anniversary. 7 Here was a topic in regard to which her sweeping indictment style was much better suited. Again, her criticisms hardly constituted new thoughts on the subject, nor did she succeed in banning or curbing Sports Illustrated any more than she had been able to ban all or any chlorine compounds. Scientific illiteracy was not the barrier with regard to her complaints about Sports Illustrated, it was the First Amendment, and the implications as to feminism’s support of liberal values like free speech were not matters she and her colleagues felt needed to be considered. Others, however, did continue to note such illiberal tendencies within feminism. With WEDO, Abzug’s work would come to have its greatest institutional impact in the United Nations. Having used verbiage-driven force to gain a presence for WEDO in the UN, Abzug built from there. One of WEDO’s first UN activities was to stage a conference. There would be many. From November 8–12, 1991, a World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet met

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in Miami. The Miami meeting was organized in Abzug’s savvy anticipation of a then-forthcoming United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, colloquially called the “UN Earth Summit,” to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1992. At the Miami meeting, a group of five women (some only half-jokingly called it a “tribunal”) heard testimony. Here there was hardly any disagreement. Received testimony emphasized how various environmental troubles of the world affected women everywhere. It was much like the 1977 Houston Women’s Conference, only there was no countermeeting in support of other points of view. The leaders knew in advance what they wished the Miami Congress to express, and they produced what they wanted. Someone could have raised the obvious point that matters raised like air pollution and unclean water affected men just as much as women. But that was not the point of the Congress. In Miami, there was no greater audience, which was not the case with the Houston Convention, whose purpose was to prepare a report for the President. The Miami meeting was for its own people. There the delegates ratified a “Women’s Action Agenda 21,” the number being Abzug’s obvious reference to the upcoming new century. In the resolutions for a healthy environment, the officially stated aims of the Miami congress were clear and obvious, but a series of empty gestures was not the goal. Abzug and her associates were savvy in their strategic thinking. With the Miami decrees on paper, they would then approach bureaucrats in the UN, before whom they could present themselves as a group who had done some political organizing. Others planning to have some input at the Rio meeting may have been equally sincere and easily more scientifically aware and precise in their research and recommendations. Their academic credentials may have been unassailable as well, but Abzug grasped that a major part of the work in Rio was going to be not scientific but political. Abzug had no particular scientific expertise herself, but she was an expert on how to wangle influence. She presented the Agenda of the Miami meeting to a UN official named Maurice Strong, the head of the upcoming Congress in Rio. Strong was a Canadian business leader in the energy field and a major UN figure in matters pertaining to energy and the environment. He obviously knew who Abzug was, and he certainly respected a clearly crafted set of ideas. He responded to Abzug’s submission by immediately appointing her to be his advisor for the Rio meetings. Science was not the issue; it was politics, and here Abzug was, as usual, very smart. At Rio, an agreement was framed which articulated a set of principles ostensibly to provide nations with guidance about responsible and sustainable resource development. Significantly, the agreement was known as “Agenda 21.” Strong never said, but the impact of Abzug was apparent. As with so many such UN undertakings that lead to earnest pronouncements, how much the words of the Rio Agenda would ever guide any nation’s

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subsequent work in environment and resource development remained unclear. Of bureaucratic significance was that, as a result of her skillful maneuvering, Abzug had gained a new level of institutional standing. From that point, she would be a significant player in UN activities and remain so for the rest of her life. 8 At the “Earth Summit” in Rio, many patterns of patronage and self promotion were in evidence. Abzug tried to control discussions at a separate but well-funded “Global Forum” of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). With another bit of savvy manipulation, she had pushed the point among UN officials about NGOs deserving special status and support. Given their considerable budget, the UN leaders were happy to comply. In this instance, the UN’s topic was the environment. Abzug and her colleagues tried to push arguments that the environment was actually a women’s issue, that more women in power would lead to more responsible environmental management, hence that any sorts of discussions about women and power vis à vis the environment were valid matters to discuss and fund. Any thoughts about pesticides and other problematic substances affecting women no more than men, or that the idea that gender had no real meaning in regard to management, were not to be countenanced. Free thought was hardly a priority among those who considered themselves to be the innovative thinkers here. The preference was to luxuriate in the idea of gender. Issues like sexual violence, poverty, birth control, and abortion were then raised, as was the matter of breast cancer, and any who voiced objections as to their pertinence with respect to a meeting on the environment risked being charged with insensitivity to such issues as violence, rape, and breast cancer. Abzug proclaimed mightily to those gathered in Rio, “the world is divided between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless. A large part of that is because of the imbalance in the decision-making process. If more women are not included in decision making, the imbalance will continue.” The claim about “imbalance” was key. No one could question it without the risk of being called a sexist, and from there all funded discussions about any matter of gender balance in politics were fair game. Abzug also seized upon the world population issue. She pointed out that it was not on the agenda of the main environment meeting because so few women were in positions of authority. Would female geologists and chemists more readily turn to population issues when preparing papers on environmental issues, and do so because of their gender? It was highly pleasurable to entertain such a notion, but neither Abzug nor anyone else could offer any systematic proof here. As she was piggy-backing the issue of gender onto the issue of environment, rhetorical cleverness would eclipse anything of scientific substance. She did not focus so much upon the population issue, per se, as on the related point that it, or part of it, was being ignored. Commenting on the alleged neglect of women here, she quipped: “That’s the way men are. They act like

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they don’t even engage in sex.” Abzug was always good at such casting. The quip had no real meaning, and it may have been largely untrue. Some women act that way too; some do not, as is the case among men. Abzug could certainly present no proof for her rhetorical assertions. The key was that in such political games, gratuitous banalities united her supporters, galvanized them with artful dashes of sarcasm and humor, and left her opposition feeling jarred and perhaps even humiliated. It was fun, like winning through rhetoric in a moot court exercise in law school. It lent a false sense of empowerment, and it overrode issues of scientific content with politically fashionable flair. Back when Abzug was defending Willie McGee, the Jim Crow–era Southern leaders she faced were always good at the same sort of sniggering preachings, singling out the enemies and insulting them with derisive clichés that brought equally derisive guffaws from the faithful followers. Such behavior did not derive from the better angels of Abzug’s nature, but her loyalists loved it. Amidst the rousing at Rio, some women took exception and complained about imbalances in regard to who was and was not allowed to speak. These women asserted that alternative voices were not being heard on such matters as population growth. This was not unlike the criticisms raised against Abzug before and during the Houston Convention of 1977. Noting the uniideological tenor of the gathering, one journalist dared to conjecture that Abzug’s large presence in Rio reflected a kind of socialist approach that apparently continued to work among people “who still haven’t heard that their ideology died in Russia last year [1991] and in Eastern Europe in 1989.” Just as Abzug was good at name-calling, she was equally adept, through force of personality, at paying it no heed. She had heard such things before and knew it best blithely to ignore any such debate, especially as she had developed an effective rhetorical repertoire of her own. She was concerned with building an administrative realm for herself and her friends. Systematically answering questions about the philosophical legitimacy of her claims or about any matters of internal consistency or procedural fairness were best left unaddressed as long as the critics remained on the periphery and as long as she had access to the institutional corridors of financial power with which she was concerned and whose resources she coveted. As at other UN gatherings, the practical point of the Rio conference was unclear, for the results were, and could only involve, a long series of resolutions that were binding upon no one, and all hammered out via processes that were not necessarily democratic. Avoiding any comment on criticisms about narrowness and intolerance, Abzug fell back on her mantra that “the challenge is for women to change the nature of power. They have to insist on different values and different priorities.” What those values and priorities were and how women, per se, would somehow come to represent them with any unanimity or in any different ways than men were matters she would

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never specifically address. It was a comfortable pose, and it was one that continued to enable Abzug to garner the use of resources from the UN’s lavish budget. As before, her notion of “the nature of power” was never explained, but it certainly conveyed a weighty notion of earnest work in which all could engage. 9 While the United Nations certainly held a high level of international prestige, the actual impact of much of its work has always remained a question in many analysts’ minds. As with so much of her previous work in the women’s movements, be it with Women USA, with the UN’s conferences on women, and with WEDO, Abzug’s hopes had been that, amidst the many flurries of meetings and discussions, some sorts of seeds could be planted among women on as wide a basis as possible, with these women taking many of the ideas and commitments garnered at gatherings and somehow putting them into action in their homelands. It was a perfectly reasonable hope. A basic element in any democracy concerns the ideals of freedom of assembly, and here any sort of meeting or rally is seldom just for its own sake but for the purpose of disseminating information, ideas, and enthusiasm possibly to effect changes on broader levels. Abzug hoped this would occur through the women with whom she and her colleagues came into contact. Idealistic hopes notwithstanding, some pitfalls still lay in such work as Abzug pursued via WEDO and the UN. Besides an intolerance of opposing views, other pitfalls here were inherent in the work of some of the feminist movements with which she had previously been involved. They concerned how various efforts surrounding meetings and related activities could, in effect, become ends in themselves and merely perpetuate more and more preparation activity that served only the participants. This problem was obvious in regard to work connected to the United Nations, given the non-binding nature of any of its recommendations. In contrast, when organizing people for the Houston Convention in 1977, for example, Abzug and her friends’ goal was to frame an agenda that would constitute the basis of a report that was to go to the President who would then, people hoped, use it to make recommendations to Congress in the formation of actual legislation. With the United Nations similar processes were at work, but with no legislative ends in sight. Abzug and her colleagues met in Miami. They would work out a set of ideas. (How democratically they did this was a matter of debate among those involved, but that was no different than Houston.) Then they would take the results to officials in the United Nations who could choose to use them as a guide in the framing of agenda for further meetings (such as the one in Rio) about environmental issues. The results of that meeting(s) would then be relayed to the delegations of the UN General Assembly, which would then possibly be guided by their thoughts in regard not to potential laws but to possible resolutions which that body may or may not pass. The issue of “resolutions” marked the big difference. While the result of such work as

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Abzug had previously done often linked to the Congress and its possible passing of laws, her activities now connected to a body that could only pass resolutions. Abzug’s old friend Geraldine Ferraro attempted a bit of fast-talk rationalization here when she opined in praise of Abzug’s work: “The UN is very much a legislative body, even though they come out with resolutions rather than legislation.” That was anything but a distinction without a difference, however. When any American state legislature or the U.S. Congress turns to matters that involve mere resolutions rather than actual legislation, little in the way of political partisanship remains in the picture. Good manners generally pervade, as does an overall shrugging tone of “whatever.” With the UN a certain common tone of good manners always pervades. Resolutions constitute so much with which the organization contends. Additionally, so many of the representatives from the various member nations covet the UN bureaucratic posts and the perquisites they bring. It behooves virtually all the UN delegates to get along with one another, for an (the) overriding interest for the vast majority involved focuses not so much upon the impact (if there is any) of the organizations’ work on actual people, but on the continuation of the existence of the body and its handsomely compensated participants. In the governments of many poor nations, a chance to become the country’s UN ambassador, delegate, or a member of the country’s UN staff is highly desirable. The accompanying lifestyle for oneself and family is luxurious compared to almost anything that can be expected from other political posts. Living in New York City, or in its immediate suburbs, working at the UN building, going to meetings and to a myriad of polite and sumptuous receptions all makes for a rather nice life. Thanks to the taxpayers of contributing nations like Germany, Japan, Canada, the United States, and so on, the pay and perquisites are excellent. One has to be fluent in languages and adept at the intricacies of diplomatic protocols. One dares not do anything that may create an embarrassing situation. It is, thus, a rather bourgeois existence. Therein lies a decided paradox: the non-bourgeois and often frightful matters which international diplomatic affairs often consider form such a contrast to the lifestyles of those in the UN who purportedly face these grave matters. Vicariousness is the key, and amidst that vicariousness skillful operators like Abzug have proven quite savvy, tagging things like the gender issue onto any number of initiatives and garnering funding as a result. The key with much UN activity is that it purports to take on major international issues involving war and human suffering. In that posture lies a key to its continued existence, for any significant advocacy from anywhere in the world that questions the UN’s utility will almost automatically engender defensive reactions to the effect that the critics must be insensitive to the weighty issues of human suffering with which the UN purportedly deals. The implied notion here—that the problems of the world would be worse were it

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not for the UN discussing many of the world’s problems—may be highly debatable, but the UN’s continued existence (and its healthy budgets) thrive on the point that, out of political expediency, few want to raise and discuss any questions as to the body’s genuine effectiveness. Luxuriating above many levels of honest criticism, the UN’s patronage qualities easily become the central dimension of its internal culture. It was into this safe, rich world that Abzug and her feminist colleagues wangled entry. To no insignificant degree, Abzug and her friends maintained their security within the UN because of the possible points of rejoinder that would confront any potential critic. Would any politician dare criticize the UN holding a major series of conferences on the environment without running the risk of being labeled anti-environmental? Could anyone then criticize any UN time and money being spent on a series of meetings, receptions, and dinners about women without running the risk of being dubbed anti-female or even misogynist? A month after the UN meeting in Rio, a follow-up gathering in Dublin maintained a perceived party line especially on population issues. In Dublin, some working-class Irish women then asserted that they were not allowed to be heard. Their views on birth control did not appear to conform to the leadership’s dictates. 10 Only acceptable, apparently, was the belief that a greater preponderance of women would somehow generate new, better, and more harmonious points of view, as well as new, better, and more harmonious ways of arriving at decisions. Meanwhile, no opposing views were to be tolerated, a rather ironic position, obviously, given the inclusiveness that more women in power would supposedly promote. In a myriad of institutional settings in North America and Western Europe, feminists amassed millions in funding and perquisites with various forms of McCarthyism always ready to threaten critics or any less than fully cooperative administrators. Meanwhile, the same sorts of questions lurked as to what of any practical significance all the expensive talks and meetings were actually doing. The positive spins that Abzug and her colleagues gave to so many of the international meetings illustrate self-serving surrealisms afoot in the many activities. In her welcome speech at the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet in Miami, Abzug had gushed: “We’ve worked for almost two years to bring you all here together, and you’re a beautiful sight. Together we’re going to change the world—not for the worse but for the better.” (Was there ever any such a gathering in which someone asserted that they were going to change anything for the worse?) For Abzug and her colleagues to be so self-congratulatory underscored the self-serving nature that drove such international meetings. Among one another, the only justifications about any such meetings’ quality needed to mention that they focused on women. Raves about the gatherings abounded and recapitulated the themes of selfcongratulations. Abzug’s friend Brownie Ledbetter effused however vague-

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ly: “that was the most amazing conference I have ever seen. The design of it was utterly fabulous.” Noting that some were resentful about Abzug, because she was an American and being so dominant, Ledbetter went on to describe how Abzug won over such critics because “she was so incredibly good politically.” 11 Overcoming the purported disadvantage of being an American was not much of an accomplishment. Meanwhile, sweeping adjectives like “amazing” and references to “design” underscored how supporters could suffuse themselves in verbiage, with the vague language further underscoring the nebulous nature of the activities at hand. The key point beneath any self-congratulations concerned the question of what of any practical consequence was actually accomplished from the many meetings and conferences. Over and over, the focus of the enthusiasts centered on how the activities served the needs of women and overcame potentially divisive internal matters of ethnic and regional diversity. Because there were no practical dimensions to the work, such internal foci were all that could be considered. The sui generis nature of the activities was ever-apparent. Active women and other UN officials lent one another means to act inclusively in regard to personnel matters among wealthy participants. They were inventing an ersatz sense of opposition to be overcome, all the while congratulating themselves in their earnest work. At the Rio conference, Canadian editor and feminist activist, Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg excitedly observed how “Maurice Strong acknowledged the importance of the Women’s Agenda —he could hardly avoid it.” What Rosenberg dearly wanted to believe, apparently, was that Strong harbored any thoughts of resistance in the first place. She noted how “the indomitable Bella Abzug shook her finger at him, saying, ‘Do you hear the women, Mr. Strong?’” 12 The simple but ego-deflating point was that there was absolutely no reason for Strong not to hear. He was completely on their side. Abzug and the feminists needed to persuade themselves as to how their earnest labors had intimidated and defeated an entrenched enemy. Meanwhile, all over the world genuine opposition from various national leaders remained, and nothing that UN-funded feminists were doing was addressing this. The inclusion of an allegedly gender-based agenda was no intrusion or inconvenience to any UN functionary. It was fun, however, for feminists to think that some enormous forms of resistance and bastions of male privilege were being overcome. In reality, a bastion of privilege was being broadened a bit—rich people were passing the possibility of generous perquisites onto more rich people, with all now being able to say they were proving their liberalism by being more inclusive of wealthy, white women of the Western world. Meanwhile, the plight of environmentally endangered and impoverished women, and men, in many areas of the world continued to receive no assistance whatsoever.

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After working effectively with the cooperative Maurice Strong, Abzug, under the guise of WEDO, was able to secure office space at the UN, albeit in the building’s basement. As one Canadian journalist had summarized after the Rio meeting, “Abzug has been a mover and shaker at UN summits ever since.” The UN’s Development Program gave funding to Abzug’s Women’s Environment and Development Organization. In the UN corridors, Abzug did not represent the United States, per se, although the Clinton administration never opposed her. She was able to set herself up as a self-designated leader among non-governmental organizations. For Abzug the enterprise was geographically convenient as well. Her declining health in these years made it impossible to walk the blocks from 5th Avenue across midtown Manhattan to the UN building, but her urban commute was quite short. From her UN office, she proceeded to hold informal meetings with female delegates and staff. She also cultivated the significance of NGOs, helping give them greater visibility. Somehow the governments represented their nations’ leaderships, while the self-proclaimed leaders of NGOs represented everyone else? Theirs was in no small measure a bureaucracy which represented itself. Abzug and her colleagues would examine documents and hold workshops. The hope was that various nations’ UN delegations could then be influenced. Some delegations would be influenced, but only at rhetorical levels. With the results only affecting non-binding UN resolutions, there was little to no resistance to overcome anyway. Abzug earnestly asserted that “the NGOs have done a significant job educating the UN,” but the corporate culture of the UN was all too willing to be “educated” as the resulting earnest processes allowed them to give greater texture to the perquisites and general patronage patterns of the organization. 13 From Miami, to Rio, to Dublin, to Cairo, to Copenhagen, to Bejing, to Istanbul, the 1990s conferences of the UN came year after year. It was good for the hotel and restaurant businesses in many of the cities, so some working women, and men, in these urban centers made a little extra cash. Otherwise any actual help to poor women and men in socially, politically, economically, and environmentally impacted regions did not materialize. The goals of the conferences were not really focused on poverty or on the environment anyway. One of Abzug’s Hollywood friends, Jane Fonda, revealed an element of the sui generis nature of the activities when she recalled an experience from her participation in a UN conference in Cairo. The conference was purportedly focused on population issues. Fonda was excited to report that the conference was “so crucial . . . because that was the first time women’s NGOs were actually at the table.” To the millions of suffering poor in the world, the gender makeup around various UN conference tables may not have been terribly important. Fonda was nonetheless certain as to the signifi-

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cance of a select group of women now being at the table, even though the significance of what may lie beyond the table was never clear. Fonda was equally if not more certain as to how her own eyes were opened by her experiences in Cairo, and this had nothing to do with any such substantive things as an exposure to the poor people living in Egypt’s massive garbage dumps, of which she showed no awareness. Fonda recalled: “I was seeing population at the point in my evolution as an environmental issue. So I spoke to them [some of those gathered in Cairo] from that point of view—and I got booed!” Noting that Bella Abzug may have deliberately led her into this situation, Fonda concluded, in a manner not unlike that of a religious convert, “She [Bella Abzug] knew that I needed to hear from women that the real conceptual framework of the conference—of everything!— was gender. I had never understood before [exclamation hers].” 14 How Jane Fonda’s “evolution” from an environmental focus to one of gender implied some sort of deeper understanding, or how it then affected her subsequent commitments to humanity remain unanswered questions. Meanwhile, there were many intellectually rigorous population and demography experts who continued to see population through various conceptual frameworks, be they medical, environmental, economic, ethnic, religious, geographic, . . . Few if any experts would deny the many and various ways in which notions of gender can be applied, as well as misapplied, to the topic. They are clearly part of the picture. But few people of any substance from any pertinent professional or academic field would so simplistically cast gender as so allsubsuming as Fonda excitedly reported (“the real conceptual framework . . . of everything!”). Such was the zealotry that can tinge meetings in which ideological constructs override practicalities as well as undercut all matters of scientific rigor (and, perhaps most importantly, where a particular zealot can bring a lot of her own vast financial resources to the conference table.) The UN gatherings were not so much conferences about population, development, or environment, nor really even conferences about women. More accurately, they were conferences for wealthy people to gather and use such topics as population, environment, development, and of course gender as a means to take trips, eat meals, gather perquisites, and hold earnest discussions largely devoid of ideological diversity. The intellectual caliber of the exchanges may have been high, or not so high, but that did not really matter very much. For what was being framed were statements that had no real impact on any lawmaking body, political leader, or head of state. More importantly, they were having no impact on any poor people. In such a selfencased world, the degree to which one learns to toe a particular party line, and fit into an existing social framework, can easily eclipse standards of intellectual quality and substance. Jane Fonda, for example, revealingly saw her conversion along such lines as a matter that was central to her evolution. A purely personal concern was clearly sufficient for her, but others may have

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dared to see a greater priority in the needs of the still largely unaided poor women and men of the world. The presence of people like Fonda and Abzug, representing the United States at such meetings as the one in Cairo, certainly caused a stir among some conservative politicians and commentators. Under President Clinton, there had been some official policy shifts that related to such topics as international population issues. Ronald Reagan had previously issued a Presidential directive banning U.S. funds for any organizations that promoted abortions in foreign countries. President George H. W. Bush had not altered that policy. In the context of the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Brazil, Abzug had written in the strongest possible terms against such policies. She cast them in the context of “the Bush administration’s relentless effort to deprive American women of free choice.” 15 In January of 1993, within the first week of his Presidency, Clinton revoked the previous administrations’ policy regarding organizations that promoted abortions. Conservative critics reacted strongly. One columnist, Joseph Duggan of the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote with horror of how the President has “allowed, among others, the International Planned Parenthood Federation to return to the U.S. foreign aid trough . . ., [giving] this powerful abortion provider and lobbying organization $75 million. . . . The administration,” Duggan bemoaned, “wants governments around the world to double their spending on abortion, condoms, and other birth control methods.” To underscore what he saw as the insidiousness afoot here, Dugan noted how “Clinton dispatched Bella Abzug and others of like mind to reinforce his policy as U.S. delegates to . . . the [United Nations’ 1994] Cairo meeting.” 16 In addition to the UN support, for her work regarding the population conference in Cairo, Abzug garnered pay from the U.S. government as a private sector adviser to Timothy Wirth, undersecretary of state for global affairs. Now seventy-four years old, Abzug remained a symbol of evil to much of the political right. “Yes,” lamented Joseph Sobran, a syndicated columnist and writer for the National Review, “Ms. Abzug, who some of us had rashly assumed had been safely retired, has turned up among the masterminds of the Cairo do.” The Boston Herald’s Donald Feder blasted the fact of “an international abortion crusade at the Cairo Population conference, where Jane Fonda and Bella Abzug set the tone for the U.S. delegation.” Another commentator, critical of the “pro-abortion” stance of the Clinton administration also noted Abzug’s presence in regard to the Cairo conference, decrying that she was “staunchly pro-abortion and anti-papist,” leaving “a paper trail that cannot be obscured.” Many conservatives clearly believed that feminists and their alleged sympathizers both in the media and in the Clinton administration were indeed trying to deny or obscure the political bias at hand in their work. How much “danger” Bella Abzug and her colleagues constituted to the political and practical standing of abortion and

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birth control policies in the world, and whether any demonstrable results regarding birth control ever came about in various nations as a result of her efforts were debatable matters. The threat of shifts in American foreign aid policies was present. But much of the fight appeared to be over symbolism and over who was allowed to gain access to perquisites. Led by Saudi Arabia, some nations officially opposed to abortion did decide to skip the Cairo conference as a result of the American (and Abzug’s) position in “support [of] reproductive choice, including access to safe abortion.” The Saudi’s were obviously not going to be the least bit influenced by any American foreign aid policies. Perhaps even more poignantly, Pope John Paul II did put forth an official Vatican statement critical of American policy here. 17 Back and forth the emotionally charged arguments went, with Abzug’s presence adding a decided level of intensity to the debates. While a clear bête noire to the political right, Abzug was, as always, never the slightest bit hesitant in the face of any such controversies. Indeed she loved them. The links to Clinton were useful to her. They gave her greater visibility and leverage with the UN. What tangible significance all the travel and talk would bring continued to be unclear. When she was in the hospital for her cancer surgery in 1993 (even then tirelessly holding meetings with colleagues from her hospital bed), she did mutter to her anesthesiologist, as she was lapsing in and out of coherence, that she needed another twenty years to accomplish what she had to do. From the Cairo conference, Abzug could point to tangible achievements only by asserting that by even discussing matters pertaining to sexuality, adolescent sexual behavior and other issues of concern to women and families, the conference had “broken the taboo.” As she had so many times before, Abzug was admitting that the whole matter had a long way to go. Perhaps her notion of needing twenty years was an underestimation. In any case, she would not get the time. Meanwhile, the reactions of the political right were giving her a point of opposition against which she could skirmish verbally and claim progress. 18 One clear success for Abzug and her followers involved their ability to provide further texture to the patronage patterns of the UN bureaucracy. The Cairo conference called for a funding target of $17 billion to implement their Program of Action by the year 2000. Abzug knew that such “targets” and “programs” could amount to little but more talks, meetings, and printings. “Unless we provide the resources that are really needed to implement these programs,” she affirmed, “then it is a lot of forests being cut down for a lot of paper.” With regard to prior resolutions from Rio, whose officially approved agenda numbered eight hundred pages, for example, UN initiatives on environment not only received little funding to carry out their plans, they did not even raise or allocate enough money to monitor the relevant areas of concern. How silly it must have then seemed to so many in Cairo to sit earnestly and discuss how much money should be raised when everyone knew that the

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financial goals would never be reached. The only thing more silly would be if anyone actually thought they could be. Abzug was happy to note, however, that among the eight hundred pages from the Rio Declaration “key recommendations from the Women’s Action Agenda were included [and] among these were a major section supporting our call for gender balance and increasing funding for UN-sponsored women’s programs.” 19 In the context of questions as to how actual lives were changed among the poor, the idea of women gaining inclusion in an eight hundred-page UN document was not much of a victory. The idea of gender balance could affect other UN conferences, however, and Abzug was keenly aware of this. The measure could certainly serve the generally well-off bureaucrats who happened to be women. Their perquisites would grow, but women, per se, were not much helped, especially in poor nations. Abzug’s notions about sacrificing forests hardly constituted any unique turn of phrase, and the fact of noting of such a cynical point about wasting paper did nothing to allay the actual problem of so much of her work indeed being but vaporous verbiage. If she thought that the casting of such cynical smirks somehow gave her work a different cast, above that of the many other international conference regulars who did little to nothing but issue statements, then she was deluding herself. She could thunder after Cairo: “We have a constituency that is committed very deeply to this program, and I believe that governments will have to respond to it.” Later she added: “We changed the whole thinking on population in Cairo. They recognized that if they didn’t improve the conditions of women, they were not really going to deal with the population issue.” 20 At best she could hope her proclamations would move people, but the transparency of such euphemisms as “a constituency that is committed . . .” was hard to miss. Her “mirrors” games, as her friend Ronnie Eldridge frankly described them, could only go so far. Whoever “they” were in the UN or elsewhere, it may have been clear to them that they were simply going to fund a series of UN talks in various parts of the world and were not going to deal with real population issues. They could easily acknowledge and deconstruct the mirage that Abzug had constructed for herself and her colleagues, but it was not in the economic and status interests of UN bureaucrats to do that, for many of them were benefitting financially from the same sorts of surreal patronage dynamics. Abzug had to put the strongest public face on matters of how such issues as cancer awareness and population control were progressing, but the essential hollowness of the UN’s pronouncements was undeniable. As the Cairo conference did officially define abortion as a major public health problem, Abzug could then claim that she had frustrated the Vatican, which had sought to keep any such language out of the conference’s official statements. Defeating the Vatican was one thing, but could she do anything about the actual problems she was addressing? What impoverished woman in any nation felt

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anything as a result of Bella Abzug winning a pseudo-parliamentary scuffle with the Pope? Whether or not it was politically wise to have engaged in such an epistolary exchange with the Vatican was a matter for those in elected office like President Clinton to consider. The Clinton administration’s political standing did not fare well in the off-year elections of 1994. Accounting for the significant Republican gains that fall, conservative columnist Donald Feder ruefully noted Clinton’s legacy of “homosexuals in the military, a surgeon general who pushes condoms, . . . a Justice Department that tried to weaken child pornography laws, . . . and an international abortion crusade at the Cairo Population conference, where media mogul’s wife Jane Fonda and feminist exemplar Bella Abzug set the ideological tone of the U.S. delegation.” 21 Clinton may have suffered a political setback in 1994, but some wealthy women were able to take exotic trips at others’ expense. Meanwhile, beyond the levels of the political games played among the wealthy, the troubles of the world’s poor went on untouched. Abzug admitted that world poverty was indeed the deepest trouble surrounding all the issues with which her conferences dealt, but to this she eagerly advocated the that poverty rates were greater among women. 22 How it then followed, to her or to anyone else, that repeated gatherings of generally wealthy women to expound upon variations of the issue of gender would help the world’s poor, male or female, was not, and could not be, addressed. Abzug’s victories at snagging resources and perquisites for conferences were sui generis. Slightly varying the famous words of the feminist Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, a poor woman, or man, in Africa, Asia, or Latin America may have seen Abzug and her UN colleagues’ many meetings thus: “There it is then, before our eyes, the procession of feminist bureaucrats, ascending those pulpits, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, preaching, teaching, administering their versions of justice, garnering perquisites, making money.” Virginia Woolf had written as she did to ask women if the entrenched ways of the established male-dominated world were truly the things they simply wished to “accept” and perpetuate. Abzug and other wealthy feminists had clearly done so, leaving many dynamics of oppression unaddressed, just as Virginia Woolf suggested may occur. In this case it was race- and class-based subjugation that continued, addressed merely with speeches, meetings, and pages upon pages of politically fashionable verbiage. 23 Thus nominally triumphant, the domination of the UN’s nomenclature appeared to be euphoric for Abzug. In the wake of the Cairo meeting she mused to a Canadian journalist how “I like to say that the world is going through a global nervous breakdown, and we can’t appeal to the people who have created it to change it.” 24 Indeed she did “like to say” such things. It was self-gratifying—start with a fiction about some sort of nervous breakdown at hand, superficially de-legitimize those she blindly accused of caus-

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ing the trouble, and imply that, uniquely, she and her colleagues held the solutions. Always good at verbal swipes, Abzug was able to suffuse herself in an orbit from which she could hold forth, claiming to possess a unique mastery of the sweep of the world’s problems, a special immunity from its maladies, and a singular grasp over the questions of who caused them and how to solve them. Meanwhile, all was defended by attack rhetoric at the ready about the sexism or insensitivity of any who took exception. An awareness of population issues had, of course, not begun with a UN gathering in Cairo. It had been around at least since the days of Thomas Malthus, whose first writings on population appeared in 1798. What was so especially and precariously jittery about the world’s perceptions of population issues in 1994–1995 was also never clear, save for the point that casting the world’s anxieties in such a high-handed, pseudo-concerned manner was good for the ego of the self-appointed, well-compensated analyst. Abzug’s “solutions,” such as they were, also solved no substantive matters. They perpetuated calls for more talk, travel, and meetings. They gave the useful impression of being solutions among those who preferred such pseudoactions in order to avoid the real troubles, whose depth and intractability, if fully grasped, could expose the essential irrelevance of the comfortable bureaucratic enclaves ostensibly devoted to addressing the world’s troubles. Such people loved to contend that they uniquely understood and held the solutions to the world’s “nervous breakdown,” and they expressed their understanding with such confident condescension. It may have actually been Abzug and her UN colleagues who were the nervous ones, most nervous indeed about the fact that, if exposed, the uselessness of their many, many meetings could engender a crashing breakdown of a lucrative UN patronage system anytime the funding nations’ taxpayers wanted to call a halt to the endless verbiage and spending. The topics of various UN-sponsored discussions about cancer, AIDS, domestic violence, population, and environmental issues were all morally undeniable. But again and again, the basic question came back as to what of any practical consequence was being accomplished besides a cynical serving of the patronage needs of the organization’s operatives. “Raising consciousness” was hardly much of an answer, given both the costs and how much, or little, impact any alleged consciousness actually had upon the poorer classes. At one major conference in 1995 in Beijing, delegates passed a resolution declaring that women should have the right to say “no” to sex with their spouses. This certainly drew publicity, and no one questioned the morality and logic of standing in opposition to any form of physical coercion regarding intimacy or anything else. Still, the obvious questions about significance and impact were not addressed. Was even one domestic situation involving coercion anywhere in the world ever affected by such a UN resolution? Abzug could respond only with sweeping generalities: “no change happens

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anywhere until you fight for it.” Elsewhere she had asserted that UN Conference resolutions should “not simply dump more unfulfilled promises on the mountain of past pledges made to the female half of the world’s population.” Clearly she understood the pattern of what she openly conceded were “more empty promises.” 25 How her conference activities would somehow be different from all the others was a mystery. What could she, or anyone else, do to keep the problematic pattern of “empty promises” from recurring? There appeared to be little if anything in the offing that was threatening to any national or corporate interests. Because she simply spoke against the patterns of emptiness and uselessness, she may have convinced herself that she and others were somehow superior and did not perpetuate such patterns as did so many others. It did not make sense, save for exposing an obvious level of self-absorption at work. The singular nature of Abzug’s focus came forth amidst the preparations for the UN’s fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in the late summer of 1995. This was a climactic event in Abzug’s international ventures. As the conference time approached, authorities in China appeared to feel a certain leeriness about the presence in their capital of so many politically active foreigners, be they male or female. “The Chinese have always been uneasy about large-scale political meetings,” wrote East Asian specialist Kenneth Lieberthal, a political scientist from the University of Michigan. Whether that anxiety was especially greater in China was a matter of speculation, but like everyone else, the Chinese often resented outsiders who appeared to meddle in what they considered to be their internal affairs. At that point in 1995, there was added tension. The Chinese had just imprisoned a Chinese-born American citizen, Harry Wu, a human rights activist who attempted to videotape Chinese abuses in their prisons and labor camps. The Chinese government had sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. Pressure to free Mr. Wu was a sensitive matter to Chinese officials, and the visibility of the issue grew with the coming of the Conference on Women. First Lady Hillary Clinton had been conspicuous in her criticism of some Chinese government conduct regarding human rights. 26 The imprisonment of Harry Wu, the legacy of the Tiananmen Square massacres of 1989, and the general violations of human rights in China propelled many American political leaders, sincerely or disingenuously, to oppose U.S. participation in the Beijing conference on women. Abzug very much wanted the Beijing conference to occur, as did Hillary Clinton. Of all the international conferences in which Abzug took part since the 1975 gathering in Mexico City, this one was her biggest enterprise. If anything stood in the way of this conference occurring, she was not going to be terribly sympathetic. The case of Harry Wu motivated some Republican leaders in Congress, notably House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, to take stands against any American participation.

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Abzug could (and did) easily sniff at the motives of such Republicans, but the actual case of Mr. Wu could not but command attention, striving so bravely as he had on behalf of human rights and jailed by the Chinese against so many international protests. Here Abzug would not dare be so cavalier. The combination of Wu’s obviously compelling case and fears of feminist politicking that was appearing to belie the Beijing conference preparations combined to upset some conservative critics. Columnist Cal Thomas wrote: “The arrest of China human rights advocate Harry Wu is only one reason the United States should not be represented at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women. . . . The other reason is that the U.S. delegation has been taken over by its own brand of human rights violators seeking to impose on the world’s women a radical-feminist ideology that will be harmful to women, men and children.” Such criticisms placed some pressure on Abzug. To a greater degree, it placed pressure upon the White House with regard to First Lady Hillary Clinton’s attendance. Mr. Wu himself voiced the view that Mrs. Clinton should not go to Beijing. Bella Abzug was not so important to him. Mrs. Clinton wanted very much to attend the Beijing conference, however, despite the fact that her appearance could be interpreted as acquiescence in regard to a significant and highly publicized human rights violation by the Chinese government. 27 Abzug was not the least bit supportive of the idea that she, the First Lady, or any American women should be compelled to boycott the Beijing conference for any reason, including the imprisonment of Harry Wu. With a decidedly cold tone Abzug asserted an argument that smacked of Orwellian bureaucratese: “This conference has a whole section dealing with human rights, and therefore to thwart it because of one case is simply a diversion.” How did the existence of a section in a planned conference agenda address the point of an actual human rights issue immediately at hand? It did not. Indeed it was just verbiage, but Abzug appeared to have her mind made up. In regard to the previous Cairo conference, she had spoken of the need to do more for the rights of oppressed people than merely putting words on paper, yet here she justified not being bothered by the Wu case with a reference to mere words on paper. Impugning the motives of critics, she appeared to scoff: “it seems everyone has a reason why the United States shouldn’t send a delegation to Beijing . . . or why Hillary Rodham Clinton shouldn’t attend—whether it is peddlers of conspiracy theories or opportunistic China bashers.” Previously, Abzug had been critical of various Chinese government policies, especially those which affected women, including what she derided as their “forced one-baby-per-family quota system.” 28 She appeared to back away from such criticisms, especially as they also appealed to antiabortionists, with abortion one of the chief means by which the Chinese government enforced its one-child rule. Abzug did not want to help any “prolife” constituencies, nor did she want criticisms to cause any snafus with the

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Chinese government that could endanger her conference. She thus left no room for those “peddlers . . . or opportunistic China bashers,” even if they may have been sincere about their concerns for such a human rights activist as Harry Wu. She was determined to have the conference take place in Beijing and to avoid any complications. Some may have wondered what would have been her position had such an imprisoned activist as Wu been female. Back when a severely restrictive culture in Jim Crow Mississippi arrested a man named Willie McGee, she had been defiantly on the side of human rights no matter any political expediency. Now that Abzug was the political insider, Mr. Wu was somehow different. Like a lot of white Jim Crow Mississippians in 1948, she felt it best to overlook the details of one case and gleefully attack the motives of those who took exception to her political agenda. In regard to other points of background regarding the conference, Abzug also exhibited a certain rigidity. In the pre-conference meetings in the spring and early summer of 1995, as before the Houston Conference of 1977, Abzug played a significant role in the preparations of working drafts. She had always been very good at pressing her way into positions of bureaucratic authority via the mastery of the minute details of relevant procedures. Her lawyerly skills and instincts were always invaluable in such instances. The preparation meetings were conducted through the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Another organization of the UN, its Development Program, had funded Abzug’s Women’s Environment and Development Organization. Ronnie Eldridge’s point about Abzug’s skill with “mirrors” was in evidence here, as Abzug used her UN links and visibility to leverage a lobbying presence with the Women’s Commission. The UN’s Commission honored the status of its Development Program, permitting Abzug access and participation. Her motives here appeared to involve much the same mixtures that were present in so many politicians, no matter their gender. Abzug wanted to achieve what she regarded as good legislative ends. Meanwhile, she also enjoyed the power over others that came with the authority. In 1992 she had confessed to the Chicago Tribune, “I miss the battle, the battle of getting the law passed and getting that broad platform where I could tell people where to go, what to do, and how to do it.” (The Tribune reporter made a point of noting how Abzug said this while “reflexively bashing her fist through the air on an invisible rostrum.”) 29 She clearly wanted to do what she felt to be the best things for women, but she also loved accruing and using the power over men and women that came with the processes. In her work with the UN, especially with regard to the Beijing conference, she would seek and gain some of the gratification that she missed and apparently still needed. Her own gratification now seemed to be a principal goal. In the preparations for the Beijing conference on Women, Abzug was called “the most important lobbyist” at the meetings. She exercised influ-

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ence, and in the preparations some viewpoints appeared to be more important than others. Women from such conservative groups as Concerned Women for America were initially denied credentials to attend preparatory meetings. People from the more ideologically acceptable Ms. Foundation encountered no such troubles; indeed later that summer over one hundred Ms. Foundation members would be in the U.S. delegation to Beijing. A working “Draft Program” was written in the absence of much ideological diversity. Later, amendments from conservatives were offered, and in August, all the amendments would be quietly expunged. 30 One issue that proved especially significant was a language guideline which demanded most notions of and references to the word “sex” be replaced by “gender.” Abzug was frank here. She wanted the use of gender “to express the reality that women’s and men’s roles are socially constructed and subject to change.” Here was a case of a sociology demanding its own reification. The conference’s “Draft Program” criticized “the gender division of labor between productive and reproductive roles.” The implication was that reproduction was not necessarily to be considered a productive activity. “In many countries,” the draft noted critically, “the differences between women’s and men’s achievements and activities are still not recognized as the consequences of socially constructed gender roles rather than immutable biological differences.” The viewpoint was clear and defendable, but it was a viewpoint, and a socially constructed viewpoint no less. Troublesome matters here involved indications of a viewpoint being asserted as fact and of opposing views not being recognized at all. A delegate from Guatemala sent a letter to the Beijing conference organizers on behalf of Central and South American delegates. She protested the draft’s use of “gender” and the implications which presumed that the word could only be taken as a social construction, hence that biological differences had to be minimized or even denied. A fourteen-member committee was formed purportedly to investigate the matter, but in the end the gender-construction language remained unchanged. Back in 1975, Betty Friedan had interviewed Simone de Beauvoir for Saturday Review. There Beauvoir asserted: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” The arrogant sense of “we know best” was quite clear, and Abzug’s exclusion of opposing views appeared to continue this sort of conceit. The effort, as one critic put it, “subjects women from other cultures to an ideological makeover to suit the tastes of Western feminists.” And without any doubt, he noted, “Bella Abzug and her Women’s Environmental Development Organization have had their way in shaping the [Beijing] Platform for Action.” In the platform, one writer, Mary Ann Glendon, an attorney and writer for the Los Angeles Times,

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counted fifteen references to motherhood. Two references seemed neutral; one was positive; the other twelve were decidedly negative, including one which cast motherhood “as an impediment to self-realization.” 31 Many feminists, before and since, have emphasized how motherhood can be anything but an impediment to someone’s self-realization. Future waves of feminism would allow, even champion such diverging views. In Beijing in 1995, however, Bella Abzug and her minions were as ideologically rigid as many of their Chinese government hosts. Gender as mere construction was certainly an idea worth considering, but the idea that “gender as construction” was itself a construction had, by all intellectual logic, to be considered too. It was not, ironically leaving “gender as construction” as constricting a shibboleth as much of the patriarchy it sought to supersede. As Abzug wanted, the conference platform also contained language that criticized “demeaning” and “degrading” forms of “gender stereotypes.” Here media images were criticized, as were education curricula, especially the sciences which were dubbed “gender biased” and undermining of “girls’ selfesteem.” To offset this, Abzug and her associates wanted calls for “gendersensitive” government intervention, programs for “gender-impact analysis,” for “affirmative action,” and for “centers for women’s studies.” One hopeful presumption here for people like Abzug was that the document’s recommendations could prompt a further ensconcing of politically acceptable feminists into comfortably paying positions in the UN or elsewhere to run the bureaucratically sanctioned “centers” and perform such duties as “gender-impact analysis.” 32 Beyond the bounds of consideration apparently were any notions that gender analysts could be predisposed to have conclusions already in mind before engaging in any alleged analysis or that they could ignore or minimize any identifiable victims deemed politically inappropriate. Debatable theories and statistics could be taken as axioms, as was already occurring (e.g., one out of five women in the United States is a victim of rape, a matter Abzug and others asserted in various UN meetings to be a fact). Debates and criticisms could yield responses which attacked critics ad hominem and encouraged a pervading atmosphere of entitlement that was potentially injurious to civil liberties. The Soviet Union may have fallen apart only a few years before, but the lessons of too much bureaucracy staffed by people (the “nomenclatura,” as Russian critics had sneeringly dubbed them) merely conversant in the politically acceptable official lingo never appeared to have any impact on such UN operatives as Abzug. The goal was ostensibly to help women in need on a worldwide basis. Yet here the goal appeared to be much more to empower well-placed female bureaucrats from generally well-to-do circumstances who could sustain one another’s employment and perquisite gathering while posturing that they stood for the empowerment of women and who could attack as anti-women any who disputed the legitimacy of their work.

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Even if the imposed ideas about gender as a mere construction could yield significant bureaucratic posts to feminists, such assertions about gender roles were the topics of regular arguments, as were many other now-ensconced assumptions about gender and feminism. Earlier in May 1995 Abzug had actually dialogued with author Naomi Wolf about various matters facing women and feminists, and Wolf was hardly an antagonist. A key point which Wolf raised focused on the fact that increasing numbers of younger women do not feel comfortable with the identity of being feminists. “They call it the ‘f’ word,” she noted, only half-jokingly, obviously aware of the younger versus older generation derision upon which she was touching. Younger women, at least wealthy women who had the luxury of being able to contemplate such matters, felt a certain pressure to conform, pressure not merely from traditional males but from older feminists. This was a matter Wolf felt many older feminists may have needed to heed. It was part of the so-called “third wave” of feminism, a loose label for a variety of feminist efforts, which sought to distinguish itself/themselves from an older generation which had not always appeared open to a diversity of ideas. Abzug would not be hostile, either to Wolfe or to most of the younger feminists she encountered. Those in the audience in Houston appeared to enjoy the discussion. 33 Meanwhile, any such cause as was concerning Abzug in 1995—of being able to bring forth an agenda to a major international meeting in China—was not going to muddied by the point that other women, even other feminists, had different views that deserved to be heard. Acting always like an attorney, Abzug’s instinct was to pay attention to the views which supported her position. She knew, as well, that if other views could not be effectively countered, they were best left ignored. Beyond the diversity of women’s views that were not being sincerely acknowledged in preparations for Beijing, there was a matter of intrinsic logic in the politically accepted notion of “gender” that could have been considered: the allegation that “gender roles must be solely cast as mere social constructions” needed, itself, to be considered as a mere “social construction subject to change.” How could the first point be honestly asserted without the latter’s validity being acknowledged? Abzug’s own notion that working with women was always better because “it is always easier to come to a confluence of opinion” also gave credence to any who saw disingenuousness in Abzug’s singular claim of gender being a mere social construction. 34 At some level she obviously did not believe it herself. She and her colleagues were just using a constructivist bromide where it was politically convenient. Nonetheless, no conflicting points would ever come forth in the discussions over the Beijing Conference Platform for Action or anywhere else where Abzug sat. Regarding the (at best) quasi-democratic nature of Germany’s parliamentary system of the late nineteenth century, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck

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once famously observed that the people need only be but so aware of what goes into the making of their laws and their sausages. Abzug displayed much the same attitude in regard to the inclusiveness of viewpoints in her parliamentary preparations in such activities as the Beijing conference. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she clearly believed she knew what was best for women and that trusting the mass of women to judge for themselves could be risky. Unlike Bismarck and Beauvoir, Abzug could not dare to be so frank about her high-handedness. Criticisms of closed processes were simply to be weathered; ‘the less said the better. With her connections in the UN’s bureaucracy and in the White House, and with her mastery of subject matter and procedure, she was remarkably able at getting away with what she wanted. The ends now justified the means, as was the case among the rape prosecutors and anti-communist activists she had once bravely opposed. Conservatives criticized the domination that Abzug appeared to wield over the conference, the agenda, and the nature of how the United States would be represented. Abzug’s cold ambivalence notwithstanding, the Chinese government did release (and expel) Harry Wu. As this removed a major obstacle from the political milieu surrounding the conference, Hillary Clinton was able to attend as she so wanted, despite Mr. Wu’s urging that she not go. When Mrs. Clinton spoke to the gathered, Bella Abzug spoke immediately before her. The speeches were well received of course. A highlight of Clinton’s speech asserted that “if there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.” Such vague generalities were part of a tone of celebration that tinged much of the conference, and while no one with any basic sense would ever deny that women’s rights are human rights, the notion that human rights are women’s rights to the potential exclusion of non-women’s issues, was hardly appealing. The conspicuous case of Mr. Wu certainly spoke otherwise. Like the previous UN Conferences on Women in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi, the Beijing conference involved many sweeping statements as well as a fantastic array of meetings, talks, meals, exchanges, debates, and confusions. Approximately 30,000 women attended from 180 countries. As she had been at earlier meetings, Abzug was clearly a star among the gathered. 35 In regard to the formal resolutions that had been hammered out in advance, Abzug was able to get much of what she wanted. There was rancor, however. The official subject of “differences between women’s and men’s activities and achievements [being] consequences of socially controlled gender roles rather than immutable biological differences” received great attention. Reporter Suzanne Fields noted that “women harangue each other over the meaning and significance of this sentence like Talmudic scholars or Jesuit priests.” Still, far more important than the question of who won any of the debates, Fields wondered, was the matter of how all the wrangling could

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lead to any actions which would touch individual lives out where it counted among the world’s poor. 36 This question would come forth repeatedly, as it had at other conferences. Gatherings of already-committed activists may have been pleasant experiences for everyone involved, but beyond more bureaucracies, meetings, and resolutions, the questions of what actual hard changes would or could occur among the world’s many genuinely suffering people would not cease. While Abzug had been non-committal in regard to the outrage at the Chinese government’s imprisoning of Harry Wu, she would nonetheless have her own troubles with some decisions of the host authorities. Chinese officials were leery of thousands of foreigners in their capital. Representatives from China had been sure to be present at the UN conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi, and they took note of many details that gave them pause. In prior conferences, there had been such workshop topics as “lesbian flirtation techniques.” In Nairobi, strident demonstrations by some lesbian groups had involved nudity. Chinese authorities were wary of any such activities recurring. Among other preemptive moves here, they made sure that Beijing policemen were issued bed sheets. At a smaller Copenhagen gathering in March of 1995, members of the non-government organizations at the meeting had also booed a Chinese speaker, Minister Ping Li. The NGOs seemed a bit more of a wild card, as they did not represent any nation and were not then as bound by many protocols of diplomacy. Abzug had been one of the NGO’s leaders and had utilized the bureaucratic classification to gain visibility in the UN. As the local arrangements for the Beijing conference jelled, the NGOs discovered that the Chinese had moved their portions of the conference to the town of Huairou, a small Chinese town (pop. 100,000) about forty miles north of Beijing. While some feminists may have wanted to control various agenda and displayed an intolerance of ideological diversity within the context of many of their own activities, with the Chinese government they were on the receiving end of such illiberalism and arbitrariness. Abzug and others expressed their dissatisfaction with what seemed an obviously planned physical marginalization. Eager to push the significance of her little enclave, Abzug rhapsodized: “I think they are afraid of the strength of the NGO community, because we are independent, free-thinking and free-wheeling.” Such self-luxuriation was always fun for her. Various people, including Abzug, protested the geographic separation and obvious relegation, but there was nothing she or anyone else could do to alter the local arrangements. During the meeting it took an hour on bad roads to get from Beijing to Huairou. Abzug repeatedly needed to be in both places, so she endured many bone jarring rides back and forth on a bus. There were taxis for hire. A cab from Beijing to Huairou cost $50 to $75, however, and the cabs were only slightly less bumpy and not always

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available. (One good thing about Huairou was that the Great Wall was only another twelve miles away, so, wheelchair assisted, Abzug paid it a visit.) 37 There may have been a bit of intentional irony in the heart of the Chinese bureaucrats who moved the NGO meetings to Huairou. In Mandarin, the word “huairou” meant “soft bosom,” with the derivation rooted in ancient lore regarding an emperor who was said to have a vulnerable spot on his breast that was excised only after he had used brute force to compel the capitulation of some non-compliant villagers in his realm. In light of this etymology, one journalist joked here that the Beijing officials must have “heard about Bella Abzug and the chaotic nature of the nonofficial, nongovernmental organizations that run a parallel conference.” The NGO’s own meetings were certainly diverse, sometimes raucous, and Abzug’s reputation for forcefulness certainly preceded her. The common people of Huairou did not seem to mind, as they sold the visitors a lot of trinkets. Meanwhile at the NGO gatherings, there were some five thousand workshops, ranging from “Sexism and the Buddhist Religion,” to “Women’s Empowerment,” to “Cooking with Sunshine: A Global Strategy,” to “Support for Hawaiian Independence.” Some wanted to protest nuclear weapons testing in China. One NGO delegate, insisting that HIV does not cause AIDS, demanded that the United States should stop asserting that it does. Others, including Abzug, joined hands with other women in prayerful tributes to “Mother Earth.” 38 It was a bewildering mass of seriousness and silliness. To what practical end any of the activities would or could be directed continued to be a question that many asked and to which no one seemed to have anything close to a cogent answer. Amidst the flurry of activities, questions about the “Draft Platform of Action,” in whose composing Abzug had been so influential, continued to come forward. As in prior UN conferences, the abortion issue arose. Abzug again stood openly against representatives from the Vatican. Conference delegates from the Vatican also criticized influential European and American delegates for removing from the official platform statements any references to religion, morals, ethics, and spirituality, and for leaving references to religion in the platform only in contexts where religion was associated with intolerance or extremism. The Vatican delegation pressured to change the language about family issues. The famous UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) had contained pro-family language. Abzug and her colleagues wanted this removed from conference’s official platform. Here they also wanted language which referred not to “the family” but to “families,” implying the inclusion of single-parent families, gay households, and other formations beyond the traditional nuclear family. Another issue concerned the assertion of young women’s rights to privacy and confidentiality. This touched on the issue of underage girls’ access to contraception and abortion without parental consent or involvement. Many

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took exception, and Abzug’s responses to criticisms were not generous. At a news conference she confronted Vatican spokesperson Joaquin NavarroValls and Monsignor Peter J. Elliott of Great Britain. “The Holy See,” she shrugged, “has a right to make a statement, but I tell you it’s a statement of desperation.” The Vatican, she warned, “wants to define femininity on [its] own terms” but has “not been successful in ramming down people’s throats a narrow religious philosophy that not everybody agrees to. . . . More significantly,” she added, theirs “is a statement ignoring the will of a large, large consensus which exists.” The question as to the size of that alleged consensus was part of the debate surrounding the conference. Abzug and her colleagues were not terribly open to such debate, however. The Vatican, she admonished, “opposes reproductive rights. They’re opposing the fact that there are changes in the way families live [and that] there are different forms of families. It’s just out of date. The UN conference is a secular conference. No one religious view can be dominant.” Later she would frankly admit, “Personally, I’m not too concerned with what the church thinks.” Many were, however. To some it also seemed that it was Abzug and her feminist associates who were the ones who were willing both to define femininity on their own terms and to ram a few of their views down others’ throats while heralding that they had a consensus. Maybe Abzug actually believed one “religious” view could be dominant—hers. On that score, as well as in her disdain for the Catholic Church, she and her colleagues may have fit in rather well with their official Chinese hosts whose high-handedness they had elsewhere criticized. 39 On so many issues, sides squared off, and of course no consensus emerged, but most of Abzug’s preferences remained in the platform. Among the others with whom she encountered dissonance was her old rival Betty Friedan. Friedan had also traveled to Beijing. Abzug and her colleagues continually spread the message that women must wage political and economic warfare against men to end male domination throughout the world and empower themselves. Speaking at a panel, Friedan presented a different outlook. She exhorted women to join men in efforts to bring love and cooperation back to family relationships and to go beyond the sexual politics, which she claimed to be both discredited as well counterproductive to any goals of female empowerment and equality. She declared it was all too easy to say “Down with men” or “I won’t shave under my arms” and claim one is being empowered. Beyond a point about the potential cul de sac of luxuriating in symbolism for its own sake, Friedan asserted that the outlook “denies the power of love [and] of relationships” which she felt to be far more fundamental to the standing of women than were the possible results from any conferences, academic constructs, or bureaucratic manipulations. Such variations of philosophy were there for all to behold and be guided by in any number of ways. Present, as well, were the egos that were ever

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clashing as to who was to be regarded as a high priestess of the women’s movement. Each held hopes that the conference could prompt forms of women’s activism in China. Otherwise, there were gaps. One was more the intellectual who had been writing brilliantly on how the women’s movements have stagnated and how they could overcome their torpor. One was essentially a politician who, more or less independently of the intellectual nuances within the many issues, was brilliant at organizing and insinuating herself and others into posts of bureaucratic significance from which she hoped to use power to her chosen ends. Friedan felt it was best for both men and women if the gender wars would end. Abzug saw far more the need to be armed and ready on all fronts. Her various bureaucratic hopes—for “gendersensitive” government intervention, for programs for “gender-impact analysis,” for “affirmative action,” and for “centers for women’s studies”— amounted to new and potentially lucrative bureaucracies, a kind of militaryindustrial complex of the gender wars. The questions of who was ultimately right over matters of ideas, power, prestige, influence, and historical legacy came down to personal opinions that could never be resolved. 40 In addition to such arguments over moral positions about the logical future of feminist consciousness and action, the official pronouncements of the conference were hotly debated. The Vatican’s delegates took exception to many points of language, as did representatives from various Islamic states. Feminist critic Camille Paglia went to China, and she chided the general Western white liberal biases of the conference. Referencing Abzug specifically, Paglia noted how “Western feminist ideology does indeed ride roughshod over the concerns of delegates from the third world.” At issue again was the conference’s “Draft Platform for Action.” Noting that Abzug had indeed lobbied rather fiercely here, Paglia criticized the push for the inclusion of stands speaking in favor of abortion and lesbian rights. (And unlike Abzug, Paglia was a lesbian.) Such issues were indeed hardly points of great international accord, and to Paglia the Western feminists who gathered in Beijing appeared rather imperious in their smug righteousness over these matters. Some statistically debatable claims also peppered the draft, including, as Paglia noted, the old claim that in the United States “one in five adult women has been raped.” Thankfully, no single American community, much less the whole nation, showed any such crime statistics. A variety of lesser crimes and offenses were conflated to generate the sense that 20 percent of Americans had been victims of a most violent crime. (Meanwhile, any concerns for male victims of rape were apparently of no consequence.) Other claims also lay the conference draft open to obvious rejoinders: The gathered feminists claimed that 92 million women have unsafe drinking water and that 133 million lack proper sanitation. To this there was the undeniable point that similar numbers of men in the very same impoverished regions shared those very same deprivations (unless some poor nations per-

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versely maintained gender-based “separate but equal” water spigots). Such searing problems of poverty are functions of class, not gender, and to use poverty to promote gender issues merely exploited poor women and men in yet another manner. There was a gap of sensibility between the wealthy and poorer nations’ representatives, the latter cared mightily about such things as clean water but did not care to use the problem merely as a way of enhancing feminist rhetoric. Some, however, were wealthy enough to be able to ignore the poor and use their suffering in yet another way in order to luxuriate in a rhetoric that invested gender into such wider phenomena as polluted water. Yet another questionable statistical claim lay with regard to concerns about war refugees being predominantly women, children, and the elderly. This claim conveniently overlooked the undeniable point that, at precisely the same time as war refugee numbers rose, the number of combat-killed, wounded, and missing rose too, and those figures were overwhelmingly male, as it was generally the young men who were engaged in actual combat. 41 It was not only Camille Paglia who was critical of the statistical distortions and the wealthy, white, Western feminist biases in evidence in the conference activities and documents. Nor was it just conservative journalists who raised questions. At Abzug’s NGO meetings, women would read the “gender” language of the convention’s Platform for Action statements and, as journalists observed, harangue one another over matters of meaning and significance. 42 For many women, to have the deconstructed notion of gender thrust at them as if it was some deeper truth they must have neither known nor understood was hardly a construct they to which they were going to acquiesce passively. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, likely the most significant national official at the entire conference, gave a speech on the first day of the gathering. She was not naive about any supposedly sophisticated notions of “gender.” Affirmatively, emphatically, and not ignorantly, she declared that the Platform for Action was “disturbingly weak on the role of the traditional family.” The platform did indeed contain largely negative references to motherhood, portraying it as an impediment to women’s self-realization. Simone de Beauvoir may have been happy with such an outlook, but others, including many who considered themselves feminists, adamantly maintained different views of motherhood as anything but an impediment to self-realization. Paglia wrote that among the leaders of the Beijing conference “a genuine multiculturalism would recognize that delegates from the Third World have a right to define women’s lives in their own terms.” Multiculturalism, however, was not to operate in manners that were inconvenient to many Western feminist leaders. It was a concept only to be used when criticizing an opposition. 43 The general hopes of Abzug and others that the conference would stimulate a vigorous feminist movement in China encountered bad signs from their

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hosts during the very weeks they gathered in Beijing and Huairou. China’s news agency Xinhua put forth a harsh commentary aimed at those who had been critical of their nation and culture: “They calumniated China as a ‘new evil empire,’ a temperamental emerging superpower with belligerent behavior. We would like to advise those Americans with an anti-China mentality to give up their anachronistic way of thinking and hegemonic psychology so that Cold War II can be avoided.” Xinhua added the confident assertion that “the position and conditions of Chinese women are in no way inferior to the situation of the women in the United States and are indeed much better on the whole.” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Chen Jian added: “We take note of the fact that some people from some countries made some indiscreet remarks or criticisms. . . . We would like to caution these people to pay more attention to the problems prevalent within their own countries.” 44 Other nations’ politicians would react similarly to any who tried to assert that any UN-based resolutions out of a Beijing conference, or any other, should prompt changes in existing patterns in which there were alleged gender issues. While Abzug was hardly the only American who had raised criticisms of her Chinese hosts, she was among the most visible. Aware of the possible impact of Bella Abzug’s presence, former President George H. W. Bush happened to be visiting China at the time of the UN conference. He attempted to use Abzug’s name in a joking manner to ingratiate himself to his hosts. Seeking to establish a positive tone in general American-Chinese relations for the sake of trade and diplomacy, and possibly ignoring human rights matters at the same time, Bush gave a speech in Beijing in which he mused that he “felt sorry for the Chinese, having Bella Abzug running around in China.” Here he added: “Bella Abzug is one who has always represented the extremes of the women’s movement.” Now seventy-five years old, Abzug had clearly remained a kind of bête noire to many politicians, to the degree indeed that an individual like Bush could feel it appropriate to use the image of her as a point of humor. As many international businessmen know, humor is often a risky thing to use when speaking to an audience whose culture is decidedly different. Beyond the ways the Chinese may or may not have received Bush’s comments, his words certainly got back to Abzug. They were widely quoted in the media. Abzug shot back, naturally, panning that “Bella-bashing may be [but] a good old boys’ sport.” Recalling her friend, former Texas Governor Ann Richard’s attack on Bush at the 1988 Democratic Convention, Abzug also noted that the former Vice President “has still got the silver foot in his mouth.” She commented further on the appropriate symbolism that lay in the fact that Bush had made his comment while speaking before a group of “fertilizer” producers (which was true, although the meeting the former President was attending was more generally concerned with food production and trade). Bush’s remark was akin to Donald Regan’s

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gaffe ten years before at Geneva. It was uncouth, yet, paradoxically, it helped give Abzug greater visibility. It also allowed her to ignore some of the genuinely liberal and humanitarian criticisms of her work China, especially the point that it was serving few if any women in genuine need while merely aiding already comfortable bureaucrats. Reacting further to Bush, Abzug intoned, that he “stands frozen in what used to be,” embellishing that his words were “part of a right-wing effort to diminish what we’re doing here.” 45 While it may have been pleasurable to cast one’s opposition as “right wing,” it was actually hard to find evidence of any concerted effort by journalists or anyone else on the political right that was working against Abzug. There were certainly plenty of commentators, left and right, praising and critical, just as there had been in regard to Ronald Reagan. When Reagan was President, his defenders had regularly complained about ongoing left-wing efforts to diminish his accomplishments. The conspiracy-mindedness Abzug revealed here had no more basis than did the Reaganites’ older fears and complaints. For either political wing, it has always been easy to feel picked upon and to see critics comprising a coordinated, ideologically driven “effort.” Beyond the similarities with Reagan’s defenders, Abzug’s notions of efforts against her were ironically not unlike some of the thoughts of the political right some forty years before that had been directed at those who had criticized established political tenets in the McCarthy era. Matters had changed; in the 1950s Abzug had been a defender of free speech against those prone to see evil conspiracies afoot, now she was the one on the political inside seeing the conspirators and showing impatience with alternative views, be they from the press, from George H. W. Bush, or from delegations from such places as the Vatican. Bush’s remarks did give her more visibility, and the criticisms from the former President or anyone else hardly “diminished” Abzug’s status at the Beijing gatherings or anywhere else. As at Nairobi and other conferences, she was a celebrity among so many people in China that month. Thousands simply wanted to shake her hand. At Beijing and elsewhere in the world, Abzug’s persona was successful. Hillary Clinton once commented that in so many places in the world where she traveled she would meet women who would introduce themselves to her by calling themselves “the Bella Abzug of _____.” This could mean many things, but it usually entailed the sense of being a person who was not going to accept any established ways of doing things that did not make sense and which were hurtful to people. 46 This would be Abzug’s national and international legacy. Those ideologically on her side praised her highly, sometimes glossing over or excusing various embarrassing contradictions. Those opposed to her criticized greatly, claiming among other things that she spoke not for all women but only for some feminists. Amidst the unresolvable exchanges over politics and philosophy, an important question at Beijing, as

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well as at other UN conferences, continued to concern, not merely matters of hypocritical intolerance of opposing views, but whether anything pragmatic would or could come from the work of such conferences after the delegates had gone home. Could there be something practical that would ensue, aside from formal statements, more meetings, more dinners, and more paid trips and perquisites for already wealthy bureaucrats? At the Beijing meeting, Alice Miller, an American attorney specializing in international human rights, brought forth a most compelling story of a Costa Rican woman who had contracted uterine cancer. The woman’s doctor had recommended she undergo a hysterectomy, but her husband had refused to allow her to have the operation because he wanted her to bear him more children! Few, if any, could learn of such a story and not be moved. Beyond the obvious senses of outrage, however, the telling of the story raised several points. On the one hand, those who favored the resolutions of the conference could seize upon such a situation and attempt to shame those who appeared not to share their political desires to the effect that any perceived to be in opposition must not feel sympathy for the Costa Rican woman. On the other hand, there was the question of how any of the work in Beijing or at other such UN conferences would ever do anything to alter such situations as that of the unfortunate woman in Costa Rica. How would the holding of further conferences or the paying of various feminist nomenclatura doing “gender impact analysis” at nicely funded women’s centers in comfortable locales ever give help to any such women? The bureaucratizing of such a limousinefanaticism gave license to the bureaucrats’ senses of righteous entitlement, but it did little if anything for actual human justice. Indeed through such feminist enthusiasts, the Costa Rican woman was being exploited in yet another way amidst efforts to expand bureaucratic purviews and perquisites. Such points were not idle thoughts of journalists and academics. Delegates at Beijing asked that very sort of question—what would any of the wonderful resolutions from Beijing and elsewhere mean when delegates returned home? At best, at both private and public levels, reactions to any of the convention’s suggestions would amount to a disingenuous “very interesting.” Abzug’s homily here about “no change happens anywhere until you fight for it” hardly seemed helpful, and no less disingenuous. 47 Over and over, questions and comments came forth as to what specifically the women’s conference in Beijing, and so many others like it, could ever actually do for poor people. On September 15, at the very end of the meetings, one delegate from Egypt, Mona Zulficar, noted with frustration, “without specific commitments and specific resources, we might as well go to see the Great Wall. Why bother staying here?” At yet another UN conference about the environment in 1997, “Rio + 5,” Abzug would complain “the problem we face all the time is that there are terrific consensus agreements among nations and then they go home.” She then hoped the UN would move

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in the directions of economic sanctions, fines, and losses of voting privileges, but she got nowhere with the idea. 48 Meanwhile in Beijing she was not so disposed to hear such criticisms from Zulficar, as they reflected negatively on her own work and undermined any such notion as a “terrific consensus.” When convenient, Abzug could hear such criticisms and go on asserting the need for the funding of more such meetings, never considering how their own ways were accentuating the very problems such a delegate as Zulficar was noting. Preferring to note no problems, Abzug blissfully declared that the meeting was a “jump start” for the twenty-first century. Such euphemistic euphoria was to wash over any minor details and exceptions that “lesser” people raised. Hillary Clinton’s dramatic assertion in Beijing, “that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all” did leave some in a state of ecstacy. Columnist Molly Ivins proclaimed: “It made me proud to be an America.” 49 In itself, such euphoria was all well and good, but any notion that women’s rights issues comprise all that need be of concern to all human rights activists could be disturbing. Were there no human rights issues worth considering that were not gender matters? Moreover, was it gender-hostile even to raise such a point? Was Mrs. Clinton’s assertion not a slap in the faces of many deeply impoverished people whose suffering extended from dynamics that had to do with political issues beyond just those of gender? And did the hailing of such exclusivity of domain in regard to human rights not work as a means by which feminism could merely serve as a convenient vocabulary for bureaucrats needing to posture that their ideologically driven work had the morally righteous base? The bliss from meetings like that of Beijing appeared to give empowerment to a McCarthyism that flippantly dismissed any who held views which prompted troubling questions, such as those inherent in the thoughts of Mona Zulficar. The conference produced a half-inch-thick document full of lofty ideals. Independent of the debates that Vatican delegates and representatives from Islamic nations raised about such matters as abortion and lesbianism, many like Zulficar, repeatedly raised the issue of resources. Sally Ethelston, a member of the Washington, DC, organization Population Action International, sighed emphatically: “We have a document 360 paragraphs long with no mention of resources.” At previous UN conferences the same point had repeatedly come forth. The Earth Summit in Rio had produced a series of recommendations about environmental matters. An Asian Development Bank had independently approximated the costs of implementing the Summit’s recommendations at $625 billion per year. Obviously, no poor nation had any such funds, and richer nations in Europe and North America allocated little but their existing obligations to the UN, and even these allocations sometimes came forth with strong political resistance. The question of what could come financially from all the recommendations from the Beijing con-

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ference was equally troubling, and even where there were hints of funding, the prognosis was not necessarily positive. In the United States, for example, the Clinton administration announced (already assuming he would serve a second term apparently) that the Justice Department planned to spend $1.6 billion over six years to combat domestic violence and other crimes against women. They also created a special task force, comprised of many of the Beijing delegates, to implement a Platform for Action. The Clinton administration announced this within twenty-four hours of the close of the Beijing conference. No one in the White House needed to read the 360 paragraphs. Much of the conference work had indeed been pre-scripted. Further, there was the matter of how this money would amount to anything more than the mere creation of more bureaucracy, staffed by people, whose qualifications were defined by their political views, to monitor chosen subjects, compile statistics of varying reliability, and hold further meetings. It all came back to the points that many non-Western women and various critics had been raising of so many gender enterprises all along. 50 Repeatedly the questions appeared: Where would the lives of women in impoverished nations change in meaningful ways, and how would all the initiatives put in place by wealthy, white, Western feminists do much for anybody but themselves? Independent of what Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon called feminism’s combination of a “sour attitude toward family life, its rigid party line on gay rights and abortion, and its puzzling combination of sexual anger with sexual aggressiveness,” there was the growing awareness of how gender activism had become largely a means through which activists could garner comfortable bureaucratic posts and seek wider purviews of authority. Glendon wrote of how initiatives from such meetings as that of Beijing could seed elements of international law “with ideas [like ‘the deconstruction of gender’] that have been repudiated in all but a handful of countries.” She was troubled about the outlook of feminists who appeared to hold that they knew what was best for women, no matter the criticisms that arose from people of various diverse cultures worldwide. Puckishly, Glendon went on to chastise “those who want to lace all women into the corset of outdated feminism.” She predicted that the UN documents emanating from the Beijing conference would “gather dust on library shelves” unless they “can be reoriented toward the real concerns of the majority of women in the spirit of universal human rights.” 51 In 1948 the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights had asserted that marriage was a fundamental human right and that motherhood and childhood were entitled to special care and assistance. For Abzug and subsequent generations of feminists there was little patience with such views, no matter the role such an esteemed individual as Eleanor Roosevelt had played in the formulation of the 1948 document. The impatience assumed a self-entitlement through feminists’ notions that their newer views were, without any

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doubt, so much more advanced and à la page and that all who took exception could be consigned at least as intellectually deprived and out of date or possibly as conservative, sexist, and even misogynist. With such righteous certainty, hopes thus enlarged to use the Beijing resolutions to leverage posts in the International Monetary Fund or in the World Bank, or in offices within the task forces of the Clinton administration. They could all be staffed by “correctly thinking” bureaucrats who would ignore all earlier UN declarations about human rights and engage in, as Abzug had called for, “genderimpact analysis, . . . affirmative action, . . . [and] centers for women’s studies.” 52 These were some of the emerging goals from Beijing. The implicit assertion was that the lives of women in the world would improve through such ideology-driven bureaucratic texturing. Many women and men, politically right and left, did not share such optimism. They could readily detect a set of self-serving motives at work. In regard to the point that the resolutions of conferences like those in Rio and Beijing had no legal force, Abzug asserted that the platform adopted in China “may not be legally binding, but we can make it politically binding. It represents a contract with the world’s women.” The notion of making it “politically binding” was a matter of mere cheerleading. The fact was that indeed no “legally binding” authority was at hand in any of her work through the UN. As an attorney, Abzug knew what a contract was, and was not. The assertion that something “represents a contract” smacked of euphemistic obfuscation. Who are the legally bound parties to the contract at hand? Her clear goal was of course to generate sufficient political pressures to bring about changes in the customs and laws of nations where the status of women was lowly. While there could be plenty of debates here over such matters as the morality of abortion or whether lesbianism should be discussed, the essential idea that women’s lives should be improved was not something any humanistic individual would dispute. The questions here were whether Abzug and others’ work through the UN could ever really change anything, or whether creating and thickening more politically charged bureaucracy would serve anyone but the relevant bureaucrats. It was hard not to see mere wheel spinning in the offing, with many more meetings and resolutions, all to no pragmatic ends. In 2005, the eminent historian Eric Foner of Columbia University edited and published a two-volume documentary history entitled Voices of Freedom. In it he presented readers with a series of important speeches, articles, resolutions, and book selections which spoke to various efforts in American and world history on behalf of human freedom. For one of his pieces in a chapter entitled “Globalization and its Discontents, 1989–2000,” Foner presented portions of the text of the 1995 Beijing Declaration on Women. After the text, Foner asked the reader to consider two questions: “1. What kind of rights for women does the declaration emphasize; [and] 2. What changes on

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the part of men would be required to implement the recommendations of the declaration?” While each was certainly a good question for readers/students to consider, nowhere in the prescribed discourse was there any invitation to consider, for example, how not just “men” but men and women of wealthier societies may have to change to implement various matters. Perhaps even more significantly, there appeared no room for any ideas about such bureaucracies as those of the UN regularly producing such declarations and repeatedly embracing verbiage about freedom and other such noble concepts, not merely out of principle but also out of desires to maintain pleasant lifestyles as well-financed nomenclatura who serve their own needs far more than they may be actually helping the lives of those they outwardly recognize to be in need. The fact that well-regarded academic volumes embraced selected, psychologically gratifying concepts from such organizations and people as the UN and Bella Abzug, while ignoring a diversity of views on the subjects at hand, may reflect the degree to which some in academe have joined with the UN in the defining (and excluding) of acceptable views and people on many key subjects of human inquiry. The vocabulary has changed, but the sense of righteous certainty on such subjects has not been seen in academic and wider discourse since the days of Joe McCarthy, nor have the ensuing sanctions against critics been as high-handed, self-righteous, and even vicious. 53 One of Professor Foner’s predecessors at Columbia, Charles Beard, once dared to take on the altogether positive, nationalistic image of America’s Founding Fathers. In his classic book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Beard debunked notions that the writers of the Constitution could only be seen as saintly patriots. For this blasphemy he was vilified in many professional quarters, and it took many years for his views to gain recognition as worthy of attention and inclusion in secondary and university history texts and curricula. In the late twentieth and well into the early twenty-first century, most educational and other institutionally established perspectives on feminism and its Founding Mothers continue to regard the movements and their leaders much as pre-Beardian historians and text book writers cast the nation’s Founding Fathers. Just as it took time, and a lot of political fallout, for Professor Beard’s views to lose their character of untouchability, the scholarly and text-book orthodoxy about feminism remains steadfastly snared in modes of self-celebration with little room and decided contempt for challenges. As with Beard, when challenges come forth, those defending the established party line are often less than generous or willing to accept any notion about a diversity of ideas. Additionally, while most who took exception to Beard and others were unashamedly conservative in their politics, the defenders of feminist orthodoxies are often people who adamantly, and oddly, think of themselves as liberal minded, or even radical. When confronted with the illiberalism inherent in their intolerance of

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criticisms, such entrenched feminists regularly react with utter consternation or anger, revealing a narcissism that may be a key point enabling both the hypocrisy and the inability to see it. Bella Abzug once proudly proclaimed: “I haven’t been a club person. That’s not my constituency. I come from movements of change, the labor movement, the peace movement, the human rights movement. Those are the people I bring into campaigns all the time. And they want their own candidate.” 54 When Bella Abzug was representing people like Pete Seeger and Willie McGee, she fought against established power and against “clubs” that imperiously defined righteousness very much on the basis of who was and was not an acceptable “member.” In her later years, she came to represent not insurgents but established groups that often acted like the very exclusionary and bigoted clubs she had once fought in the name of justice. The idea that she could be falling into such paradoxical patterns, be it out of ego or out of bureaucratic inertia, was not something to which she or her many associates appeared to be open. The closed outlook only exacerbated the ironies at hand. As Professor Foner acknowledged, along with many journalists on hand in Beijing, such a large gathering as that which met in China in 1995 made inevitable debates over specific issues and over questions of the applicability of various ideas to different cultures. Indeed, details over divisive issues like abortion and lesbianism prompted criticisms from people even in nations like the United States, even some already disposed to be supportive of feminist efforts. Asserting that Bella Abzug and her colleagues “don’t speak for me,” one writer in the Midwest, begged to point out that while the National Organization for Women (NOW) had 200,000 members, the more socially conservative Concerned Women for America (CWA) had 600,000. Other newspapers echoed such points. 55 Who was right or wrong about the pertinent issues here could never be resolved, but noteworthy was the fact that, as the US certainly showed an obvious diversity of thought on feminist issues, at least as much could be expected from other nations. How then could an ensconced set of feminists expect to hold the floor even in the context of UN gatherings much less in governments and cultures more generally? Many saw a certain willingness to claim to speak for women while paradoxically discouraging views that ran counter to a party line. When Simone de Beauvoir haughtily noted to Betty Friedan that, if given free choice, most women would opt for the “wrong” ways of traditional motherhood, she revealed a point about feminism that remained problematic, and that others noted with Abzug—that they felt they stood for the needs of women, that they felt they knew what was best for women, hence that free expression was best not indulged to too great a degree, for the political insiders had the right solutions in mind and should be trusted, with all others best acquiescing to their alleged superiors. At another UN conference in

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1997 in Istanbul in which Abzug participated, critics indeed noted her highhandedness. “In Istanbul,” wrote one participant, “you did not talk unless Bella gave you permission.” 56 An irony here of course lay in the parallels that could easily be drawn with the old ways that traditional wives were expected to defer to their husbands in all matters of importance. Abzug could be no less truculent in her demanding of obedience. Her claims to the contrary notwithstanding, she was “a club person,” as long as the club was hers to run (and wield). It was this controlling outlook that inhibited a free expression of ideas and so tinged some feminist discourse by the mid-1990s, so much so that it helped prompt a consciously cast new “third wave.” It was part of what even Naomi Wolf, anything but an anti-feminist, had pointed out in 1995 as she noted why fewer numbers of younger women were identifying themselves as feminists. Even Abzug conceded along similar lines that many “existing women’s organizations . . . have gotten really stale.” 57 She saw meetings like Beijing as forces of “regeneration.” She was never specific as to what exactly this could mean, but she never lost her optimism. Still, the “stale” concession was revealing of what many others knew but did not care to air. What Abzug seemed unwilling to consider was how her controlling intolerance of opposing views was part of the ongoing stale patterns that were leaving aspects of feminism in a certain torpor. As a consequence of this torporous state, fewer and fewer young people appeared interested in feminism, or the “f” word as Naomi Wolf had chided. Many were then starting to use the term “post-feminist” to describe the state of many social and gender issues. It was very much in conscious response that some feminists continued to develop and popularize the notion of a feminist third wave. Third-wave proponents sensed a hardening of feminist outlooks and the diminished appeal of feminism among younger people. They were concerned with the limited roles feminism continued to play in many Hispanic- and African-American communities, and they were uncomfortable with the implications and, even more, the popularity of the term “post-feminist.” The third wave’s agenda was even less unified and clear than that of the now-called second wave, and the third wave’s distinction between itself and its predecessor was far less distinct than what had distinguished the second from the first. Notions of greater ethnic and racial diversity hardly denoted new ideals absent from the best of the previous generations. There was also no obvious five-decade gap of time that unmistakably marked the chronological divide between waves one and two. All such examples of intellectual incoherence, however, were part of the richness that the new wave’s proponents considered a positive. The sense of newness, even if not altogether clear in its intellectual tenets, also had importance in regard to psychological and marketing appeal. Even if only a matter of verbiage, the “third wave” was a way to cast feminism to a new generation who otherwise

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saw feminism and people like Bella Abzug much as Bella Abzug and the 1960s New Left saw the Old Left of the 1930s. And just as intelligent Old Leftists allowed the generation of Bella Abzug to carry on as they wished, Abzug looked at people like Naomi Wolfe, and her own daughters, and ultimately knew it best to let them take the movement(s) where and how they would. She was still quite busy anyway. While the China conference was a climactic moment for UN meetings about women’s issues, in the years after Beijing, Abzug would continue to push for more conferences. She would continue to travel, and despite her battles with breast cancer and her dependence on a wheelchair, her capacity for work and travel at age seventy-five was astounding. Elsewhere in politics, she continued to be a presence. Naturally, she supported President Clinton’s reelection in 1996. 58 The issues of the President’s philandering were not yet major issues. Like most feminists, Abzug had been quiet in 1992 when accusations of extra-marital activities came forth from Gennifer Flowers. In contrast, that same year Abzug and her colleagues had been very loud in support of Anita Hill and her accusations of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The contrast here was striking, and it would grow as allegations about Clinton gathered pace in 1998. In 1996, the matter was relatively dormant, and in general there appeared little need for much activism on behalf of Clinton, as his party nomination was without contest and his race against Republican Bob Dole seemed virtually foregone. In her ongoing political messages, Abzug repeatedly turned to rhetoric about the need for women to achieve 50/50 parity in Congress, in state legislatures, and in other elected assemblies. This was a comfortable spot of common ground for feminists, as the call appeared to be inclusive of all women, no matter their ideologies. Yet the presence of women who took exception to major feminist issues like lesbian rights and abortion, or who commented on the intolerance of feminist organizations over such issues, continued to reveal hypocrisy and confound the ability of feminism to gain greater political traction. Here lay further bases for “third-wave efforts,” as few younger Americans found much appealing in such perceived rigidity. Abzug would not show any affect over such criticisms. She continued to emphasize that the world was “suffering a nervous breakdown, a global nervous breakdown” and that it was “out of balance because all the decision making is done only by one part of the population.” While the debates over evidence and over social, psychological, and medical theories at hand here could fill volumes, Abzug was conspicuous in the complete aplomb with which she stated such a simplistic point about how gender was both the cause and solution to the world’s troubles: Women can be relied upon to settle disputes amicably, a lot more than men, because men are used to the rough and tumble of violence. . . . Women have

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been trained to be more specific. We’re brought up differently. We’re not involved in war games from the day we’re born. Even though we play all kinds of games now, including baseball, we’re not into the culture of violence. Women have the capacity to bring about peace, as a matter of survival. 59

It had always been pleasurable for Abzug to assert such things. It may have been an extension of the comfort she recalled, since the age of thirteen, of an all-female household, as well as of all-female schools. Whatever the psychological roots, and no matter the myriad of ways that academics, psychiatrists, and many others may have argued about assertions about gender-based exceptionalism, Abzug maintained a pose of joyous and absolute certainty. There was also no doubt that she believed that such confident words could prompt more political organizing and efforts that were to her liking. Intellectually, she was capable of debating all the relevant issues with anyone, but to her intellectual debate was not the point, indeed it could be disruptive to her political goals, so open debate was not something to which she would always be terribly accommodating. The hopes for greater numbers of women in politics would continue to be a mantra that Abzug voiced repeatedly. She wanted 50/50 women and men in Congress and in state and municipal legislatures. 60 Would she would then advocate that people vote against such liberal men she had known as Bill Ryan, Barney Frank, or Thomas Duane and support women of markedly contrasting views like Louise Day Hicks, Paula Hawkins, or Phyllis Schlafly (or those of later times like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann)? This remained a question she and others apparently preferred not to address. She took part in several more UN conferences where she pushed a gender agenda to expand the purview of women in the drafting of the organization’s resolutions, all with the hope of eventually altering ensconced gender biases and hurtful social and political patterns throughout the world. Her capacity for work was incredible, and the point that she may have been “spinning her wheels” was something no one cared or dared to raise. 61 On March 3, 1998, Bella Abzug gave another of her many speeches before the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York. The occasion that day involved the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights (the very document that announced positions regarding the family which Abzug’s positions in Beijing had decidedly opposed). From the UN dais she returned to her wheelchair and had her friends take her to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Liz Abzug said that her mother’s doctor expressed utter amazement that she did not collapse from the strain of the forty-five-minute UN presentation. In her last decade of life, Abzug had become wheelchair dependent. There had been no single injury to any lower joint that had disabled her ability to walk. Rather, it was her battles with weight gain over the years that had proven steadily taxing on her heart. She

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could still walk, but her heart would not permit too much walking or general physical exertion, hence the wheelchair. One friend attended a movie with her in her last months and noted that she could not even walk up two stairs without needing to stop and rest. 62 The need for the wheelchair never appeared to slow down her tireless work. Her mental energy never abated, although friends did note how one person, Susan Davis, who was the primary caretaker in the context of her wheelchair needs could be disquietingly gruff, even abusive with her. With a touch of consternation, Faye Wattleton recalled that Abzug made Susan Davis the Executive Director of WEDO. Wattleton thought this “was really an unfortunate decision. [For] this young woman,” she felt, “was so disrespectful; sometimes it was almost as if she had something on Bella.” Others reacted similarly. “They had a strange relationship,” noted Brownie Ledbetter. “It’s the only time I’d ever seen Bella that vulnerable.” Martha Baker called it “one of these weird relationships where they used one another. . . . Sometimes I thought she was abusing Bella and at other times that Bella was abusing her.” Many seemed to feel that Davis was taking advantage of the Abzug’s circumstances rather than selflessly helping as they felt so many others would and should. Outwardly joking, and perhaps revealing more than she realized, Susan Davis herself once quipped, “I’m the only person alive who really got to push Bella Abzug around.” 63 Whatever the psycho-geriatric issues that may have been at work in the Davis relationship, Abzug ultimately kept them to herself, persevering despite the imposed compromises she obviously had to face in old age. Meanwhile she also faced the point that she could try to resolve her cardiac problems. This is what she attempted to do in March of 1998. She underwent major surgery to repair a failing heart valve. Any operation of that magnitude performed on a seventy-seven-year-old is going to be risky. To Abzug the risk was worth taking, as success could yield her more healthy years of activism which she dearly wanted. There was still so much to do. The operation yielded complications, however, and they proved insurmountable. She could not recover, and on March 31, 1998, she passed away. NOTES 1. Interview with Liz Abzug, July 28, 2004; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 230. 2. Long Island Newsday, December 11, 1995, p. A 27 3. Quoted from Gail Collins, “When Politics Had Passion,” in New York Times, January 3, 1999, Sunday Magazine, p. 31. 4. Intimate Portrait: Bella Abzug, directed and narrated by Lee Grant © 1999 Lifetime Entertainment Services, all rights reserved, courtesy of Lifetime Television, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 268–70; interview with Faye Wattleton, November 2, 2005; interview with Martha Baker, October 7, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug pp. 268–70. 5. Long Island Newsday, February 4, 1994, p. 29.

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6. Boston Globe, October 15, 1993, p. 23; New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 16, 1993, p. A2, San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1993, p. A7; Seattle Times, October 18, 1993, p. A4; St. Petersburg Times, October 16, 1993, p. A7; Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 16, 1993, p. A13; Salt Lake Tribune, October 16, 1993, p. A5; State Journal Register (Springfield, Ill.), October 16, 1993, p. 10; Arizona Republic, October 16, 1993, p. 13; Bangor Daily News, October 16, 1993; Houston Chronicle, October 16, 1993, p. 18; Orange County Register, October 16, 1993, p. 11; Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1993, p. 7; San Antonio Express-News, February 23, 1994, p. 8. 7. The Record (Bergen Co., NJ), February 20, 1994, p. I 5. 8. www.mauricestrong.net/2008072115/strong-biography.html. 9. Washington Post, April 21, 1992, p. A19; April 27, p. D1; Toronto Star, May 3, 1992, p. F1; Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1992; Montreal Gazette, June 9, 1992, p. A11; San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1992, p. A17; June 9, p. A6; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 7, 1992, p. D1; June 25, p. A4; Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1992, p. 6; Boston Globe, June 10, 1992, p. 1; June 28, p. 1; Northwest Florida Daily News, June 13, 1992, p. A4. 10. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 25, 1992, p. A4; Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1992, p. 6; Montreal Gazette, July 13, 1992, p. B1. 11. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 15, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 266. 12. Interview with Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg, Peace Magazine, March–April, 1992, p. 8, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 265–66. 13. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27 and November 15, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 267; Vancouver Sun, February 7, 1995, p. B 2; New York Times, March 12, 1995, p. 6; Washington Times, August 10, 1995, p. A 1; September 6, p. A 8. 14. Interview with Jane Fonda, by Robin Morgan, September 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 268. 15. Washington Post, April 212, 1992, p. A 19. 16. Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 10, 1994, p. A 7; Washington Times, August 10, 1995, p. A 1. 17. Boston Herald, November 10, 1994, p. 45; San Antonio Express-News, November 14, 1994, p. ED 1; Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 18, 1994, p. C 2; Greensboro News Record, May 29, 1994, p. F 3; State Journal Register (Springfield, Ill.), September 7, 1994, p. 4. 18. Interview with Amy Swerdlow, March 9, 2005; interview with Robin Morgan, January 30, 2003; interview with Gloria Steinem, January 30, 2003 and August 26, 2006, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 270; Houston Chronicle, September 13, 1994, p. 12. 19. Houston Chronicle, September 13, 1994, p. 12; Peoria Journal Star, September 18, 1994, p. A 9; Long Island Newsday, August 6, 1992, p. 103. 20. Peoria Journal Star, September 18, 1994, p. A 9; Vancouver Sun, February 7, 1995, p. B 2. 21. San Antonio Express-News, November 14, 1984, p. ED 1. 22. Toronto Star, March 8, 1995, p. A 12; Chicago Tribune, March 8, 1995, p. 2. 23. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., [1938] 1963), pp. 69–70. 24. Vancouver Sun, February 7, 1995, p. B 2. 25. New York Times, September 17, 1995, p. E3; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 27, 1995, p. A8; Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, September 11, 1995, p. 1. 26. The Independent (London), May 7, 1995, p. 16; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1995, p. A2; July 24, p. A2; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 10, 1995, p. F1. 27. Long Island Newsday, July 18, 1995, p. A 26, Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 3, 1995, p. F 7. 28. San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 1995, p. A 19; Dallas Morning News, August 20, 1995, p. J 5; Washington Post, April 21, 1992, p. A19. 29. Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1992, p. 16; New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26; Sacramento Bee, September, 1995, p. B 7.

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30. Wall Street Journal, August 23, 1995, p. 6; Seattle Times, August 26, 1995, p. A13; New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26. 31. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, August 23, 1995, p. 6; USA Today, August 24, 1995, p. A 16; Seattle Times, August 26, 1995, p. A13; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 8, 1995, p. B 7; New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26. 32. New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26. 33. Houston Chronicle, May 2, 1995, p. 1; on the various “waves” of feminism, see, for example: Maria Braden, Women Politicians and the Media (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996); Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space and Feminist Activism (Radical Perspectives) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Stephanie Gilmore ed., Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second Wave Feminism in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917–94 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Nancy MacLean, The American Women’s Movement, 1945–2000: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture) (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2008); Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2000); Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Anne Valk, Radical Sisters: SecondWave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 34. Abzug, Oral History, session four, p. 73; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 69. 35. Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 3, 1995, p. F 7; Washington Times, August 28, 1995, p. A17; September 6, p. A 8. 36. Tampa Tribune, August 29, 1995, p. 9. 37. The Independent (London), May 7, 1995, p. 16; London Times, September 16, 1995, p. 1; Vancouver Columbian, September 15, 1995, p. 1; New York Times, August 6, 1995, p. 6; August 11, p. 4; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1995, p. A2; July 24, p. A2; Pittsburgh PostGazette, September 10, 1995, p. F1; San Diego Union-Tribune, August 1, 1995, p. 1; New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 19, 1995, p. B7; Albany Times Union, July 19, 1995, p. A11; Los Angeles Daily News, August 11, 1995, p. N17; Washington Times, August 28, 1995, p. A17; September 1, p. A1; Tampa Tribune, August 29, 1995, p. 9. 38. Wall Street Journal, European edition, September 8, 1995, p. 2; Washington Times, August 28, 1995, p. A17; September 1, p. A1; Washington Post, August 31, 1995, p. A25; Tampa Tribune, August 29, 1995, p. 9. 39. Seattle Times, September 19, 1995, p. B5; Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 1995, p. A3; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 10, 1995, p. F1; Houston Chronicle, September 10, 1995, p. 1; Sept. 12, p. 17; Boston Globe, September 10, 1995, p. 22; Long Island Newsday, December 11, 1995, p. A27; Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1996, p. 3. 40. New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26; Washington Times, September 1, 1995, p. A1. 41. New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26; Sacramento Bee, September, 1995, p. B7. 42. Tampa Tribune, August 29, 1995, p. 9. 43. Washington Times, September 6, 1995, p. A19; New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26; Sacramento Bee, September 5, 1995, p. B7. 44. Wall Street Journal, European edition, September 8, 1995, p. 2; San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 1995, p. C1; Washington Times, August 28, 1995, p. A17. 45. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 12, 1995, p. 3; New York Times, September 11, 1995, p. 1; September 12, p. 3; September 13, p. 22; September 17, p. E3; Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1995, p. 2; Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1995, p. 2; Sept. 12, p. 4; Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 12, 1995, p. A2; Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 12, 1995, p. A2; South China Morning Post, September 12, 1995, p. 11; San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 1995, p. A11; Houston Chronicle, September 12, 1995, p. 8; Washington Post, September 12, 1995, p. A12; Dayton Daily News, September 14, 1995, p. A14; Buffalo News, September 12, 1995, p. A4; Vancouver Columbian, September 15, 1995, p. 1; see also Maria

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Braden, Women Politicians and the Media. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 81. 46. Hillary Clinton, Address at the National Women’s Political Caucus memorial service, National Press Club, Washington, DC, April 9, 1998, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 284. 47. New York Times, September 17, 1995, p. E3. 48. Seattle Times, March 19, 1997, p. A6. 49. Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1995, p. A7; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 17, 1995, p. A7; London Times, September 16, 1995, p. 1; Atlanta Constitution, September 16, 1995, p. A14. 50. Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1995, p. A7; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 17, 1995, p. A7. 51. Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1995, p. B7; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 8, 1995, p. B7. 52. New York Times, September 1, 1995, p. 25; September 8, p. 26. 53. Eric Foner, Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, third edition, volume 2 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., [2005] 2011), pp. 326–32. 54. Abzug, Oral History, session 4, p. 31; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 86. 55. Omaha World Herald, September 21, 1995, p. 24; Dayton Daily News, October 2, 1995, p. A8; Salt Lake City Tribune, March 2, 1997, p. C1. 56. Salt Lake City Tribune, March 2, 1997, p. C1. 57. Houston Chronicle, May 2, 1995, p. 1; Long Island Newsday, December 11, 1995, p. A27. 58. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 27, 1996. 59. Long Island Newsday, December 11, 1995, p. A27. 60. Albany Times Union, April 23, 1996, p. B2. 61. Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 21, 1997, p. E4. 62. Interview with Faye Wattleton, November 2, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 277–78. 63. Interview with Brownie Ledbetter, May 27, 2005, November 15, 2005; interview with Martha Baker, October 7, 2005; interview Faye Wattleton, November 2, 2005; interview with Susan Davis, October 14, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 272, 275.

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue and Legacy

Bella Abzug’s death prompted media coverage all over America and much of the world. Her fame had been extraordinary. Eulogies and obituaries focused on her indomitable spirit and on the many doors she had opened for women (with many making the point that many of the doors she could not readily open she busted off at the hinges). Themes of equity feminism received great emphasis in the eulogies, as they always embodied the righteous concerns she and others had championed. Abzug had been the leading women’s rights advocate in the decades in which women achieved many of their most significant gains in modern history, indeed in all history. The cliché fit: the right person at the right time. The economic context that lay beneath the many changes in the status of women was also undeniable—the forces of inflation had eroded the ability of most families to live on a single income, with the breakdown of many traditionally gender-defined roles and barriers then a natural consequence of these shifting economic circumstances. With such a markedly changing economic situation, the status of women did not just inexorably evolve, however, and Bella Abzug was a, if not the, leader in grasping what could and had to be explicitly altered, politically and legally, amidst changing economic conditions. She did this with a most impressive intellectual grasp of both the issues and the procedural operations of the pertinent institutions, private and public, most notably in the U.S. Congress, where the quality of her work impressed all, including even her most ardent ideological opponents. By 1974, after her third Congressional election, Abzug became a fixture in the House of Representatives. Quite likely she could have remained there as long as she wanted to, but she desired to move beyond the House. This led her to run for office in several elections in which she lost by painfully close margins, leaving the judgments as to what she could or should have done 313

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forever debatable. Unable to return to elected political office, her previously wide political horizons then narrowed onto more exclusively feminist matters. The narrowing of her political purview coincided with feminism’s own shifting balances, away from equity issues and toward increased attention on matters of gender differentiation and exceptionalism and of gaining comfortable bureaucratic posts. Contrasting elements of gender and equity had always been present in modern feminism. The shifting balances came in the wake of many successes in the areas of equity by the late 1970s, the very time that Abzug left elected office, a fortuitous coincidence. While “gender feminist” ideas had always coexisted with the goals of equity, a tension was always present as well. There were always the ideals of a world in which women would be treated fairly in their pursuits regardless of their gender. This contrasted with ideas that dwelled on women’s uniqueness and on the preference to emphasize such points of exceptionalism over the ideals of equity, both in service to the gender ideals as well as to provide significant support and perquisites for the gender-based nomenclatura who infiltrated a myriad of institutions and bureaucracies. These equity/gender contrasts never disappeared; indeed they could not. Amidst the contrasts and contradictions, feminism’s lasting humanistic appeals continued to rest on notions of equity. And it was in the accomplishments in those areas of equity where the political world most respected and remembered Bella Abzug and so much of her work. It was no accident that the many obituaries and memorials to Bella Abzug focused on her triumphs for women in areas of equity and human fairness. When pressed on the contradictions between equity and gender issues, feminists invariably turn to the principle of equity as a mantra. Equity has always been the ideal, with gender theories generally coming forth in piggy-back formation. With Bella Abzug, her champions fondly recalled how she opened many pathways. Meanwhile, ideas about gender exceptionalism maintained a presence, and the many contradictions they prompted had a visibility as well. With the contradictions came many controversies. Here feminists’ reliance on McCarthyistic attacks would exert a presence to the effect that any critics of gender feminism must be against equity. Along any such lines of conflict, Abzug often relied on simple force of personality. Her infamous, neverflinching aggressiveness which often came to the fore with criticisms was a great part of her legacy. For some those aspects of Abzug were points of great fondness; for others they marked something a bit less tender. There could be truculence and even tinges of violence in Bella Abzug that readily bullied situations where rational arguments could not work terribly well. At the very time of Bella Abzug’s hospitalization and passing in late March of 1998, a major point of controversy was beginning to fester for American feminists. It was a point that encapsulated some of the political dilemmas that surrounded feminist politics of the late twentieth century and

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beyond, one in which force of personality and assertiveness would indeed attempt to eclipse matters when logic could not carry the day. In March of 1998, the political fallout from the exposés of President William Clinton’s sexual philandering was reaching new levels of media coverage and public scrutiny. That very month the news media was full of stories concerning Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky, each of whom had alleged sexual harassment and other points of gross misconduct by the President. For many people, these allegations recalled the furors which, just a few years earlier, had surrounded charges of misconduct by Republican Senator Robert Packwood of Oregon and by President George H. W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In the context of the earlier scandals involving Packwood and Thomas, the nation’s leading feminists had been most outspoken. Repeatedly they emphasized that there was no longer any place for such activity in public life and that the nation’s customs and mores had now passed the point where any mere “boys will be boys” shrugging or looking the other way was acceptable. Feminism had purportedly been a major factor in the progress here. Then came the allegations about William Clinton. A previous extramarital affair between Clinton and Gennifer Flowers had been the first such story to reach the general public in 1992. As that had been a consensual affair, it was a somewhat different matter. While it certainly generated bad publicity for Clinton, as well as cause his family a lot of pain, it crossed no line of potential illegality involving anything like sexual harassment or worse. Subsequently publicized matters concerning individuals like Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broderick, and Monica Lewinsky raised vastly more troubling implications involving sexual harassment and even assault. Here, however, some feminists’ reactions were a bit surprising. Just eleven days before Bella Abzug’s passing, Gloria Steinem published what was for some a shocking op-ed piece in the New York Times in which she asserted President Clinton to be completely innocent of sexual harassment. With some rather remarkable rationalizations, Steinem appeared to attack and disparage the President’s accusers, ironically employing the repulsive approaches of defense attorneys in such cases, ones to which many feminists had long taken umbrage. With a clear tone of derision, for example, Steinem saw fit to underscore the point that one of Clinton’s accusers, Kathleen Willey, had tried to sell her story to a book publisher, casting suspicions upon Willey’s motives in raising charges against Clinton. In regard to Paula Jones there had been claims of psychological damage. To this Steinem sweepingly opined, despite never having even met Jones, that “there appears to be little evidence to support those accusations.” Such curt dismissiveness was surprising, given the total support previously expressed for Anita Hill, the accuser of Clarence Thomas. As for the matter of White House Intern Monica Lewinsky, Steinem further declared that “there is no evidence to

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suggest that Ms. Lewinsky’s will was violated,” and in regard to Paula Jones’s accusations of Clinton’s misconduct, Steinem held that when the President “asked her to perform oral sex and even dropped his trousers, she refused.” Steinem’s view was that, with Jones and the other two women, “Mr. Clinton seems to have made a clumsy sexual pass, then accepted rejection.” Her conclusion: “It’s not harassment, and we’re not hypocrites.” 1 Gloria Steinem’s assertion of not being a hypocrite may have jarred memories of Richard Nixon denying he was “a crook.” The “we” to which she referred here obviously meant her community of feminists, the title of her article—“Feminists and the Clinton Question”—leaving no room for doubt here. Her piece constituted a frank admission that many feminists were indeed wrestling uncomfortably with the issue of what to do with this political figure, a man politically on their side, who was under attack for sexually based allegations which, when involving any prominent Republican, had always prompted feminists to take the strongest offense to the effect that “under no circumstances can such things be tolerated.” Steinem’s advocacy notwithstanding, more than a few Americans felt President Clinton to have been guilty of repeated sexual harassments. Fully grasping the transparent political motives in back of Steinem’s apparently interchangeable postures of outrage and rationalization/denial, many continued to point to the obviously contrasting anger that she and other feminists had shown in regard to Robert Packwood and Clarence Thomas. Here Steinem’s argument referred to the matter of how the latter two did not appear to take rejection as Clinton did. To that alleged distinction many simply guffawed. Had Packwood or Thomas exposed himself, asked for sexual favors, and accepted “no” would Steinem have stepped forward and denied any charges of harassment? Without question, she would have expressed outrage. Her defensive assertion that “we’re not hypocrites” in regard to Clinton merely underscored the point that many feminists clearly knew they were. 2 The fact that Steinem could assert such a blatantly hypocritical position, while somehow believing in what she was saying, reinforced such troubling notions that she may have been not so much a feminist as a narcissist for whom feminism merely served as a convenient vocabulary to act out political desires and garner psychic gratification. She may have convinced some of her followers, but one did not have to be ideologically opposed to her positions to see the obvious contradictions at hand. One liberal writer for the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, was one of many who took strong exception to Steinem’s embarrassingly maladroit contortions, and he did so rather pointedly, with evidence that was more than merely hypothetical. Rosenthal explained how his sister, Bess, then twenty years old, had once been walking on a cold December evening near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx when “a man emerged from the bushes and exposed his genitals to her. She screamed and she ran,” remembered Rosen-

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thal. Later, “she arrived home shivering but drenched in sweat and that night developed a cold and fever that swiftly became pneumonia,” from which, several days later (New Year’s Eve) she died! “That man,” said Rosenthal, “killed her as surely as if he had stabbed her.” Yet, he exclaimed, “now we are told by Gloria Steinem, an old friend of mine who helped build the feminist movement, that even if Bill Clinton . . . dropped his trousers before Paula Jones, exposed he genitals and asked her for oral sex, . . . he was not guilty of sexual harassment because he had accepted her ‘no.’ Gloria, Gloria, what are you saying?” 3 The outrage that Rosenthal and many others expressed here underscored the clear point of how feminists appeared to harbor a disingenuously varying set of standards when it came to dealing with men accused of sexually related crimes. People like Bob Packwood, Clarence Thomas, and others had been vilified, and the vilification came with language to the effect that “women tell the truth” and that “under no circumstances” can such behavior be tolerated. This posture was supposed to underscore what Bella Abzug and others had long emphasized—how the women’s movement had moved legal proceedings and humanity’s general discourse on such subjects onto a morally higher plane. This was a sensibility that had always undergirded Abzug when she asked women at a myriad of gatherings how the world would be different if women ruled. With the sexual harassment issue, notions of a higher morality were conveniently lost when a person like Bill Clinton, politically desirable to feminists, was being accused. Now it suddenly seemed that not all women told the truth, and that their word or their character could be discounted or attacked in any number of ways. Undeniably, the determining circumstance appeared to be whether the accused man met the political favor of feminist leaders. “Under no circumstances” was thus a phrase to be uttered only under certain circumstances. Clinton had indeed done much for Bella Abzug and for feminists. He had expanded health services. He maintained affirmative action for women against pressures to restrict it. He nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. In 1994 President Clinton had given feminists a Crime Bill which they very much desired. The bill strengthened plaintiffs and their lawyers’ positions in litigation over sexual harassment matters. Among other things, it legalized widely ranging investigations into the accused persons’ personal and sexual histories, while not allowing the same with regard to the plaintiffs themselves. (Ironically, that very element of Clinton’s Crime Bill empowered investigators to unearth some of the major sexual harassment allegations against him, with investigations of Paula Jones’s allegations indeed uncovering the matter of Monica Lewinsky and the resulting evasions, lying, and impeachment efforts that ensued.) Perhaps most significantly for such feminists as Gloria Steinem, Clinton had done a great deal in regard to their agenda concerning abortion rights, what Steinem called “preserving

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reproductive freedom.” The fact that Steinem directly referenced the reproductive freedom matter while writing in the Times in defense of Clinton made the frankly political motives behind her contorted opinions that much more obvious. Someone that helpful on the abortion issue had to be given a pass on sexual harassment. Steinem was treating Clinton’s victims as political objects, no matter how she and other feminists had objected to various Republicans treating women as objects of other sorts. When it came to Clinton and sexual harassment, feminists were clearly hedging. The disingenuousness at hand was not theirs alone. Having been miffed about the ways that their side of the political ledger came to look badly in the media and elsewhere as a result of the furors over people like Packwood and Thomas, some Republicans now appeared to relish the situation. Often “judicious” over the allegations about Clarence Thomas, various Republicans leapt at the Clinton matters and showed a perverse glee in an allegedly liberal Democratic President now running afoul of a media feeding frenzy over sexually based offenses. It was hardly surprising to find that, no matter anyone’s gender, hypocrisies lay on all sides, but a salient point here was that for years feminists like Bella Abzug had been arguing that they stood on morally higher ground and claimed they would behave decidedly better if placed in positions of power and responsibility. Such postures of superiority were so obviously fraudulent and self-indulgent, as Abzug’s good friend Gloria Steinem was actually claiming that Clinton, while he had been “gross, dumb, and reckless,” was not guilty of any form of sexual harassment, and that his accusers should be held in various levels of suspicion and disrespect. It was not just Gloria Steinem making such arguments. Other feminists were, at best, circumspect about Clinton’s misdeeds. Marie Wilson, head of the feminist “Ms. Foundation for Women,” while acknowledging that the allegations against Clinton had to be taken seriously, emphasized that “we feel like there needs to be some cooling-down time.” Former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder warned similarly against any rush to judgment over the allegations concerning Monica Lewinsky: “Somebody may be overstating the case,” she held. “A week from now we could find out this was a fantasy.” (Had a Republican speculated anything to the effect that Anita Hill’s accusations of Clarence Thomas may be a fantasy, feminists would have expressed extreme outrage.) Schroeder and NOW President Patricia Ireland did acknowledge that Kathleen Willey’s accusations (of physical groping and coercion), if true, did amount to sexual assault, but such careful caveats as “if true” were conspicuous. They had been conspicuously absent from feminists’ comments at the time of the Anita Hill versus Clarence Thomas matter. 4 No feminist had ever raised such a notion that Anita Hill’s accusations may prove to be “a fantasy” or a product of some sort of “overstating.” Indeed any man who hinted, as did members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992,

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that Ms. Hill may in some way be distorting, exaggerating, or fabricating matters had drawn tremendous ire from feminists, and back then feminists were anything but open to suggestions of a need for “some cooling-down time.” At the time of the Anita Hill hearings, Bella Abzug had been among the champions of rhetoric to the effect of “women tell the truth.” She participated in a conference/rally at her alma mater, Hunter College, where organizers invoked that very phrase as a title. Abzug had been conspicuously silent about various accusations made about Clinton and, not coincidentally, always enjoyed good relations with the Clinton White House. By the time of the 1998 firestorms, and Gloria Steinem’s piece in the Times, Abzug was too ill to offer any comment or advice. How she may have reacted amidst such a media event can yield merely idle wondering, of course, but the question merits serious consideration. Since Abzug’s passing, various feminists have indeed noted a recurring thought that crosses many of their minds amidst perplexing situations that come before them. They ask what Bella Abzug may have done. In their oral history on Bella Abzug, Suzanne Levine and Mary Thom wrote the volume’s preface which they explicitly entitled: “What Would Bella Do?” The theme was a centerpiece of their volume’s entire introductory discussion. The critical issues that were at stake with the Clinton sex scandals indeed show that the question of what Bella would do may have actually become part of her legacy even before she was gone, albeit just before. At Abzug’s funeral, actress Shirley MacLaine also eulogized about how Abzug’s political instincts were always unerring. Her minions always felt she was the one who knew best in any key situation. 5 Without question, Abzug presented a towering shadow that loomed over many aspects of various women’s movements, and because she was so powerful among feminists, she certainly exerted considerable political influence, especially in the Democratic Party, and did so for almost thirty years. Few other Democrats have ever been so influential for so long. Her strengths here were so significant that it has been easy for her champions to invest in her auras of purity and perfection. Wonder would often arise then as to what her sage advice may have been at various junctures. With Clinton, or with other thorny issues, there remained a sense that she would know what best to do. Even before her death and immediately after, nostalgic essays about how great political leaders do not seem to be with us any more cited Abzug as an example of the supposedly grander times of yesteryear. 6 Indeed it was not just feminists who so lionized her. Abzug was as intelligent, aggressive, and savvy as any politician of her day. But her skills were not infinite, and the contexts in which they operated could reveal problematic patterns which touched upon the distinction between equity and gender feminism that grew amidst her evolving and devolving career. Abzug and her many feminist followers had sets of principles which showed some internal conflicts. Their

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selective outrage about male politicians’ sexually based transgressions was only part of this picture. The basic liberal notion that all people, no matter their gender, should be allowed to rise where and as far as their ambitions and abilities can take them is a fundamental feminist and humanist principle. For many feminists this ideal constantly contrasted, and often collided with ideas rooted in the notion that women needed and deserved special treatment and consideration. Hence gender should and did matter. Accompanying was an often self-serving need to develop enclaves of bureaucratic power for a nomenclatura, outwardly to support the agenda of feminists, but also to provide comfortable incomes, in government, academe, and elsewhere, to some of the party-line faithful. This had been a dimension of Abzug’s years of work through the UN. Within the political give-and-take that such efforts always entail, there were critical lines to be drawn when various principles needed to be compromised in the name of practicalities, self-serving or otherwise. The curious responses to Clinton’s sexual philandering were an example of principles conveniently discarded. Clinton was good for the feminists’ agenda, and their reactions to his behavior around women showed patterns of decidedly selective outrage. Bella Abzug had encountered many such sensitive issues before, and she could readily sacrifice principle, though not with quite the same extreme ironies and intellectual clumsiness as came forth from Gloria Steinem in March 1998. At various UN conferences Abzug always had to deal with women who considered themselves ardent feminists yet who asserted views that clashed with various ideas and agenda items that Abzug and her elite colleagues had developed. She could usually make a good show of inclusiveness, but she seldom changed her mind or yielded on any important points. On the matter of the personal behavior of a leading politician, Abzug showed a clear willingness to sacrifice principle for politics. In 1980 she worked in support of Edward Kennedy for the Democratic Presidential nomination against Jimmy Carter. Here she chose to be mum about Mary Jo Kopechnie and the infamous Chappaquiddick incident. She was also furious with some feminists, like Robin Morgan, who felt that the Senator should be taken to task via the same standards of conduct as all feminists would obviously voice with regard to any Republican clouded by such an allegation. (And with Kennedy the issues involved not just sexual harassment but philandering and someone dying.) Abzug first persuaded Gloria Steinem to join her in silence on Kennedy’s transgressions. Steinem would later switch her view. Robin Morgan had persuaded Steinem’s switch here, and that prompted Abzug’s fury. 7 With regard to Clinton and his oral sex demands of Paula Jones and others, had Abzug had more months of health (or even weeks), she may have advised Steinem that it would be better that she keep her big mouth shut. Such words would have been befitting of Abzug’s Bronx roots, double-

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entendre included. Abzug’s followers always loved stories of her coarse New Yorker language and forcefulness, and how it unnerved many an opposition. (When she died, the fiction of her 1971 “Go F___ Yourself” profanity to the House of Representatives’ Doorkeeper was repeated with delight in many obituaries.) The key was the sense that the receiver of the verbal abuse was usually an opponent whom Abzug’s supporters felt deserved it. When any such tonality, no matter from whom it came, appeared to affect someone on the feminists’ political inside, the responses were far less comfortable, a variation on the same pattern of feminists’ selective umbrage that came forth with regard to Clinton’s and Kennedy’s affairs. Abzug’s coarseness was very much part of her legacy. Taken in the abstract, her manner was nothing terribly unusual for people of her era with roots in places like the Bronx. With Abzug such New Yorker tonality and manners just happened to be attached to an individual who accompanied them with intellectual brilliance, lawyerly thoroughness, and great political savvy. Always one possessing a sense for “the larger prize” at stake in a political battle, Abzug could have seen that keeping silent about Clinton’s escapades would compromise the larger political sense of that vague notion for which she felt women needed to fight, as she put it many times: “to change the nature of power.” With Clinton she may have been unwilling to come out and criticize as feminists did when Clarence Thomas was in the media’s crosshairs. In light of her choice to be mum with regard to Edward Kennedy’s transgressions, she would have likely felt it best, not only to advise against the publication of anything so provocatively embarrassing as Steinem’s Times piece, but to engage in a bit of quiet accommodation, recommending her friends and colleagues remain mum on the Clinton issue in exchange for continued political support from the White House. With Abzug the bigger focus would always be on the questions of ongoing legislative issues that affected feminism and, in 1998, on the matter of the next Presidential election in 2000. Abzug would have obviously favored Al Gore over George W. Bush, as well as enthusiastically back Hillary Clinton for the New York Senate that year, at last getting into the hands of a woman the seat that Daniel Patrick Moynihan had snatched from her amidst her 1976 quest to crack the barrier of an “all-male Senate.” In any such contexts Abzug would have likely regarded the minimization of publicity over a political ally’s untoward escapades as an intelligent strategy. In such a strategic pose, however, some would be critical, since the stances of Abzug and other feminists in regard to the sexual transgressions of other accused men had been so moralistically strident. The derision over perceived hypocrisies may have then been something she saw best merely to ignore and weather. Beyond such specifics as the politics surrounding President Clinton’s behavior, feminism has shown variations in their viewpoints and ideological balances, as have most large and complex political organizations and move-

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ments. Feminism’s various developments since Bella Abzug’s earliest days of political activism are striking in that regard, as is the major role she played in these evolutions. The tension was always at issue among feminists between the ideals of a gender-blind culture and a contrasting sense that women, per se, need and deserve special considerations in matters economic, political, and social. In the early stages of “second-wave” feminism matters of equity appeared to dominate. Circa 1970, there were still many equalaccess barriers to surmount, and the goals of breaking down those barriers seemed paramount so women could have the proverbial fair field and no favor to pursue their chosen goals. In that context, indeed, any verbiage about gender-based specific needs could easily smack of the old-fashioned forms of gentlemanly condescension to be adamantly opposed. Still, within the texture of early second-wave feminism lay strong elements of gender consciousness and exceptionalism. The advocacy of affirmative action for women was a clear political effort that clashed with ideals of gender blindness. A host of initiatives, books, articles, and speeches about women’s uniqueness also captivated (and cowed) the spirits of many. Thousands of women’s houses and women’s communal experiments since the early 1970s were predicated on such sensibilities, as were fundamental elements of many gay/lesbian movements. Back in Abzug’s time as a member of Congress and earlier, much of her work had been devoted to ideals of gender equity. Yet as far back as the early 1960s, amidst her anti-nuclear efforts with Women Strike for Peace, Abzug was drawn to arguments which held that women provide a unique outlook on armament and peace issues. An unresolvable tension was always there. On the one hand there was a matter of balancing scales of justice. On the other were gender-specific initiatives and self-celebrations/promotions. The nature of these initiatives and celebrations varied tremendously between the serious and the trivial. In a variety of meetings and conferences she attended, Abzug participated in many hold-hands-in-a-circle “gendertransformative” functions. Since the 1960s, such activities had regularly tinged a myriad of women’s political meetings. Some set great store by their alleged value as they often sought to highlight women’s uniqueness on the basis of gender, per se. Abzug usually enjoyed such gatherings. She favored anything that would build support and enthusiasm. How much credence she actually gave such work in terms of its intrinsic content is debatable. Some may have been silly and nonsensical. Others she may have likened to the significance playing poker had for her while in law school—a sidelight that was part of the culture on hand. Her goal in law school was to be good in every aspect of the competitive atmosphere of the profession into which she was entering, and she succeeded. Thirty years later, her goals with feminism were to maximize its political effectiveness, so she was not about to belittle the serious sides of a movement with any public commentaries about anything silly or trivial. Her focus was always on the serious issues at hand.

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Nonetheless, the element of providing sinecures for feminist nomenclatura was always on hand too. While she was campaigning for and serving in Congress from 1970 to 1977, Abzug’s many forms of advocacy for women blended with other issues and focused largely on matters of equity: equal access to financial credit, equal susceptibility to any military draft (if one were to come), gender neutral laws over housing, over institutional access, and over pay issues. The biggest of all equity issues was the Equal Rights Amendment, which she saw as an umbrella that could cover so many matters of gender discrimination in the country. Her stances were similar in regard to gay and lesbian rights, and Abzug was most conspicuous as an early and gutsy advocate of nondiscrimination toward homosexuals. Within both feminist and gay activism, independent of political leaders like Abzug, various emerging political themes did conspicuously focus not just on the equalization of legal matters but upon lifestyle-specific cultural dynamics in efforts to highlight matters of visibility and pride. Abzug staunchly defended all the connected First Amendment issues here, but she was decidedly firm in regard to her desire to have no commerce with the particulars inherent in any private activities. Her adamant words to an associate about the personal matters of gay and lesbian issues had been simple and direct: “I don’t want to hear what they do.” 8 It was not so much that Abzug was harboring some sort of Victorian prudery here, although that may have had more of a presence in her than she and others would have cared to admit. It was more a matter of her lawyerly instincts always being in control. Fundamentally she saw herself as an advocate for a constituency. She may have been in sympathy with her clients’ ways, but that was not the point. The issue was the clients’ civil rights. Free speech and equity advocates do not have to believe in the substance of the ideas of those whose freedoms they are defending. Indeed, they would have little standing as First Amendment supporters if they only defended the speech of those whose views they did like. Abzug’s adamant standing on this issue was unassailable. In the 1950s, Abzug and other defenders of the free speech rights of accused communists often found themselves accused of being communists, which Abzug was not. With similarly contorted logic, advocates of gay and lesbian rights in the 1970s and 1980s were suspected of being homosexuals themselves. Here it was actually not just some political and social conservatives but some lesbians themselves who raised such questions about Abzug, and she was no more a homosexual than she had ever been an agent of Moscow. Such gossipy associative proclivities never ceased, nor did any of the ironies that abound amidst the similar political and social labelingvia-suspicion that crops up among such outwardly different political activists as McCarthyists of the 1950s and some lesbian rights advocates of later decades. The latter often appeared to be more hyper-controlling and commu-

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nity conscious than any classically liberal-minded gesellschaftlichkeit ideals which leaders like Bella Abzug once sought to represent. Whether it was for women or for gay and lesbian issues, so much of the political activity in which Abzug was involved since the mid 1970s was full of identity politics. These identity matters often eclipsed some previously dominant equity issues. Many of the women’s conferences she attended and led were replete with panels, discussions, and advocacies of a myriad of speculative claims about gender-based points of distinctiveness in political, social, or economic contexts. To Abzug a few of these purportedly transformational ideas may have struck her as silly, and many more as simply peripheral to the political and constitutional thrust of what she was seeking to accomplish. Other ideas may have resonated with her quite strongly, especially as she was coming to terms with the fact that both her daughters were lesbians. Amidst these varying reactions, in Abzug as well as in other activists of the day, the balance between the equity and the gender identity focus of the work at hand did appear to go through a significant shift—away from equity and toward identity. Both elements were always present, but the balance was often in flux. Why the shifts occurred from gender-blind equity ideals toward identity politics has been discussed for years. One writer, Christina Hoff Sommers saw it as a kind of political piracy carried by truculent “gender feminists,” as she termed them, in contrast to those who had focused on equity issues. Sommers asked rhetorically of this shift, “who stole feminism?” Another writer, Rene Denfeld, also lamented the shift away from equity concerns. She contended that the failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment “left many feminists burned out with regard to political activism and eager to find new goals to take its place, something [which gender-based efforts like] moral crusades against men, pornography, and sex promised to do. The defeat also saw many mainstream women abandon the movement, leaving extremists to speak on behalf of feminism.” 9 Whether it was the ERA’s demise, per se, that caused this shift can be debated. Some could argue, apropos of one of the chief points of criticism of the ERA—that with the already existing Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the legal grounding for gender equity was already in place anyway, hence that much if not all of the equity battle was already won. Whether some women then disaffected in frustration or simply parted with a sense of tasks-completed can be debated as well. But it is possible that as the priority of passing the ERA faded, a shift in the core of the women’s movements regarding tactics, tone, and outlook did occur, activism turned in more identity-focused directions amidst the fallout from losing a key initiative. Occurring at virtually the same time as the demise of the ERA, the election of Ronald Reagan further marginalized feminists. The virtually simultaneous rise of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain had much the same effect on

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British feminism, and they had no failed ERA to mourn. (British feminists also had to contend with the obvious irony that their bête noire at #10 Downing Street was female.) With the Democratic Party of the 1970s, feminists had seen themselves having gained a major presence in national affairs. Abzug was very much part of this sense of visibility. With the election of Reagan, and with great Republican gains in both houses of Congress, this political presence and significance was gone. The perspectives and agenda of more radical and separatist feminists, who had never been completely comfortable with the idea of working within such systems as those of the Democratic Party, gained ascendancy in various feminist circles. Some of this shift in feminism may have started with Abzug’s falling out with the Carter administration. The election and reelection of Reagan, no matter the candidacy of Geraldine Ferraro and all the women’s votes she would allegedly garner, extended the marginalization, prompting shifts in tonality and outlook. This was the point when Bella Abzug turned increasingly away from a Washington political world that seemed no longer much concerned with her, and ever more towards such an organization as the United Nations. There she could have the appearance of making an impact, although to what practical ends was never clear. Her friends and colleagues noted the shift. They praised (and masked) it as “going global.” It was an institutional setting of largely symbolic political significance which accommodated her new and more narrow political focus. Accompanying the shift away from equity and toward various forms of gender exceptionalism, writers like Rene Denfeld, Christina Hoff Sommers, Katie Roiphe, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Camille Paglia, and others saw a decided change of tone in feminism, one that was much more uncongenial and negative, which appeared to seek and enhance gender hostility, and which appeared to be anything but open to opposing views be they from men or from other women. Abzug appeared very much part of this picture. Her machinations against opponents at the Houston Conference of 1977 and her agenda domination at various UN conferences reflected some of this illiberalism. To various critics, the resulting party-line atmosphere turned off many younger women who decreasingly found it useful or pleasing to be identified as feminists, more specifically as gender-focused feminists, as opposed to equity-minded people. The eclipsing of equity by gender priorities and tonalities was part of what led many younger women, as even Naomi Wolf noted, to eschew feminism and dub it “the ‘f’ word.” Younger women, Wolf said, had pulled away from feminism as they felt pressure to the effect that “you can’t be a feminist if you’re not a Democrat, if you’re deeply religious, if you’re not pro-choice or in the military or if you’re not a vegetarian.” 10 By the 1980s, many on the political left perceived and lamented the apparent loss of committed activists. Some of this lament exhibited bits of egotism, akin to people who perversely missed the anti-war movement after

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the Vietnam War had ended. Some, however, were sincerely concerned about older activists, including feminists, now appearing closed-minded and illiberal. Abzug never engaged in any sort of public laments. She was certainly concerned as to how women’s movements would evolve and continue in future generations. 11 But in her work she largely went on with what she saw as the next set of priorities, now in a decidedly more narrowed manner, one that did not always offer much openness in regard to ideological diversity. The enunciation of a “third wave” of feminism attempted to reinfuse some commitments here as “second wave” feminism’s legacy of illiberalism was uncomfortable as well as embarrassing. The shift away from equity issues and toward gender-specific concerns had occurred in feminism at the same time that Bella Abzug’s own political horizons had narrowed. While serving in Congress, her work had taken a thousand different forms and topics. Once she was out of office, the focus was more purely feminist, with this emerging as feminism was beginning to tilt its balances away from equity issues. Once out of Congress, after several election losses, and as the Reagan right disregarded her, gender matters came to occupy not just part of her previously wide political purview but practically all of it, and within the context of gender issues, identity matters were regularly eclipsing older topics of equity. It was a more exclusive world, one that offered a lot of camaraderie, but which always risked insularity and illiberalism in its operations. Feminism’s goals seemed less to break down all barriers that had impeded women, and more to ensure the bureaucratic stature of women in positions of authority, legitimized as much by notions of gender uniqueness as by ideals of equity. It was at the Houston conference of 1977, for example, that Abzug pressed, among other things, for the idea of a new Federal Government Department of Women and a Cabinet-level Women’s Commissioner. There was an obviously self-serving element here, as she saw herself a logical choice to head such a new department if created. The broader point here was that the initiative was predicated on bureaucratizing a sense of gender’s uniqueness and identity. Ideals of equity could dictate that any such office should not exist in the first place (or that, if such any such department were created, its chief goal should be to eliminate the need for its existence). Given overriding desires to capture institutional power, any such a humanist/ equity perspectives were to be shunned and silenced. Indeed, the chief reason some at the Houston convention voted against the idea was because of the possibility of a Reagan Presidency and conservative women like Phyllis Schlafly then running the department. 12 The idea of a women’s department was thus only acceptable if it could remain in the “right” political hands. Hence the real goal had been not for a women’s department but for a feminist department and all the patronage/employment that could accompany it.

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When serving in the Carter administration as the head of a Presidential Commission on Women, Abzug steadily pressed for a greater presence for women, hence for herself, in a variety of White House topics including budget and defense, with the claim that because the issues at hand affect women her presence and input were appropriate and necessary. In the context of such efforts, notions of women’s allegedly gender-driven special contributions were central to her arguments. Gender-blind ideals, or any such notion that particular male administrators (like President Carter) could be trusted to render justice for women and men were not politically useful to her and would not be heard. Older efforts in which she had been engaged, such as those to ensure that divorced women hold the same credit standing as their former husbands, had been based on standards of equity, with gender idealized as no obstacle to anyone. By the late 1970s and thereafter, Abzug’s political priorities dictated less that gender should not matter and more that it mattered very much. In 1984 she was instrumental in pressuring the Democrats to nominate a woman for Vice President. The fact that Presidential nominee Mondale was a foregone loser to Reagan that year made Abzug’s task much easier. Her genderdefined goals were clear, but she was outwardly succeeding because there was so little resistance. (And the election’s results that year, proved her gender-based predictions of a possible victory to be utter pipe dreams.) Elsewhere in her last twenty years, Abzug continued to ignore such lessons as those of 1984 and worked in efforts for women through the U.N. She was regularly involved in international initiatives that were gender specific, even though the battles in many poorer nations, whose women she claimed to represent, still involved many issues and principles which centered on principles of equity. As with her call for a Cabinet-level Department of Women, the bureaucratic texturings she sought in the UN and in connected agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were aimed at the creation of women-focused centers and offices to engage in advocacy and analyses supposedly on behalf of women and definitely on behalf of the financial security of gender-vocabularied bureaucrats. Identity politics was the driving force in her efforts here, and with this came many contradictions with respect to the ideals of equity. Many can debate the efficacy of such gendered ideas, as well as discount the objectivity and quality of some of the analyses that such funded bureaucrats have produced. Beyond this, key points steadily presented themselves amidst Abzug and her colleagues’ efforts. The ideal that gender was at best not an issue in regard to anyone’s ambitions was now to be ignored. Gender was to be given the utmost of emphasis. Unfortunately, many prominent examples continually dictated otherwise. When Dr. Barbara McClintock, a physician who happened to be female, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1983, she was asked on several occasions about issues

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relating to gender. She rebuffed all such lines of inquiry, as she felt herself professionally to be a scientist who happened to be a woman and not any sort of gender-identifiable object. In 2002 Time Magazine, clearly gendermotivated in their own choices, named three women as their co-Persons of the Year: Sherron Watkins, Coleen Rowley, and Cynthia Cooper, each of whom had “blown the whistle” on various points of corruption in their respective professions. ABC television eagerly gathered these three women for their Sunday morning “This Week” news program. When asked about the role of gender in their work, they calmly held that gender was not an issue to them, nor did they see it playing any part in any of the meritorious work they had done, adding that plenty of men had done and were doing similar work. 13 Fearful of McCarthy-like labeling, major elements of the media were devoted to feminist assertions that purportedly represented women. Meanwhile, many of the women supposedly being served did not corroborate. However they tried, feminist/sociologists like Bella Abzug could not force that many women to conform to their constructed visions. Gender-less, identity-blind views have always been present. It was the ideal that equity feminists had always pursued. In contrast, Abzug and her colleagues had grown concerned with advocating, and often casting as fact, a point of view that was decidedly against any such notions of genderblindness. It was not in their interests, and they could easily turn hostile when any opposing views intruded upon their outlooks and upon the bureaucratic/ financial gains they hoped to accrue from their advocacy. Because women and men of substance in many walks of life did not agree with them, those in the advocacy positions like Abzug grew steadily intolerant of ideas which did not support their chosen party line. There lay one of the bases of the illiberalism within feminism that soured so many younger women as they encountered it from older generations, be it from high priestesses like Abzug or from smaller level bureaucrats in a myriad of institutional settings, especially in education but elsewhere as well. The viewpoints about gender were, themselves, always debatable, but the ideological intolerance among gender feminists of any opposing views was clear and repulsive. Trying to reclaim the support and curb the loss of many younger people, feminism’s “third wave” at least sought a better image. It may have not been the ERA’s demise, per se, that caused feminism’s illiberalism. That was part of the picture, as was the emergence of Republican power (and British Conservative power) in the early 1980s. Significant as well was the office-seeking, bureaucratic texturing efforts of some feminists in many institutional contexts (especially in education and in the media) who saw themselves at odds with mainstream political trends and who then felt compelled to secure their own occupational enclaves. The collective and individual “in the bunker” mentality gave many feminists inducements to emphasize gender uniqueness over equity, as it supported desires to ensure

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the sustaining of well-paying jobs for feminists seeking to make a comfortable profession out of their fluency in well-rehearsed modalities of supposed consciousness. The intellectual narrowness, intolerance, and illiberalism often displayed here was certainly troubling to many younger people who witnessed and experienced it. Moreover, many such gender-driven nomenclatura showed clear elements of hypocrisy. In the 1990s they balked and hedged at applying clearly established, well-rehearsed modes of outrage over such inflammable issues as sexual harassment when the culprit was such a politically favored figure as Bill Clinton. With Clinton, the essentially cynical political motives of gender’ists was obvious. The hypocrisy here combined with intolerance of opposing views to form ever clearer illustrations of how elements of feminism had wandered far away from their essentially liberal-minded origins. Such an evolution and devolution was something Bella Abzug’s life and career encompassed. It was difficult for feminists to reconcile such matters as the hedging on Clinton’s behavior or the more general matter of gender-blind ideals versus various forms of identity politics. With Gloria Steinem there came only her “we’re not hypocrites” denials which actually reinforced what others already knew: they were hypocrites. The attempts at denial underscored it and sometimes even revealed a narcissism that enabled it. Feminists have often had to face such political dilemmas. While she was alive Bella Abzug had so often been the person to whom feminists deferred in such matters. Her instincts and judgments were always considered best, and there were very good reasons for this idolatry. Beyond the basic point at work here—that Abzug was an incredibly smart individual—some key features about her involved her phenomenally keen instincts, both politically and legalistically. As intelligent as anyone in any connected area, political or academic, Abzug was not fond of open, intellectual debate, per se. She was more than capable at such matters, but what concerned her more were questions of what would or would not bear political fruit. She had a fine feel for the gives and takes of political dealings—when to attack, when to make an accommodation, when to let something go. A vexing point here, one that regularly arose in her lifetime, concerned the limited toleration she could display for opposing views, especially when it came to matters of political strategy and tactics within her political fold. As she was more concerned with political results than with the intellectual nuances of an openly discussed topic, she could be impatient with ideas that did not appear to lean in the directions for which she cared. Amidst repeated usages of her favorite convention panel/group discussion theme—what the life would be like “If Women Ruled the World?”—little courtesy would be given to any notions, however sensible, that the world would likely not be very different. Abzug demanded conformity from those around her. Those who would not conform would not remain close for long. She would never suffer fools,

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but just as adamantly she would not easily endure dissent. As she was most concerned with political achievement and not with free discourse, the latter could be sacrificed, as could the libertarian principles that surrounded it. Abzug’s ways often led to success, but the legacy of intolerance was part of that history too. Television host Phil Donahue all too happily recalled the way Abzug would often interrupt loudly—“Good, sit down”—at people whose speeches or remarks she found boring or unappealing. 14 In regard to her favorite question of what the world would be like if women ran it, her own tendencies toward intolerance thus yielded her question an answer that painted a rather unhappy picture when it came to free speech issues. Like many insurgents who gained access to corridors of power, Abzug was a fine defender of freedom of speech and conscience when she and her friends were the outsiders. When in the role of political insider, her record was not always quite so pleasant. Abzug’s demand for conformity was what made Betty Friedan and other feminist critics such sources of irritation to the feminist mainstream for so many years. Friedan would seldom conform to any party lines. Thus to many feminist leaders, she was a virtual heretic. Several prominent feminists of the early 1970s did evolve in their thinking, noting especially certain devolutions among feminists that were not to their liking. Camille Paglia, Germane Greer, Susan Brownmiller, and Betty Friedan each confronted mainstream feminists with criticisms. To some feminists these works smacked of treason. Susan Faludi conspicuously used the term “recantation” when explicating such intra-feminist critiques. 15 “Recantation” appeared intentionally to recall some leftists of the 1950s fearfully denying their radicalism and shamefully betraying others amidst the pressures of McCarthyism. In the case of the forms of feminism which people like Faludi, Steinem, and Abzug maintained, the illiberal McCarthyist pressures and demands for adherence to a party line were clear. Betty Friedan and others were easily repulsed by any sorts of Stalinism, although Friedan’s own high-handed treatment of some, including a Mexican woman who dared to question her too pointedly in Nairobi in 1985, spoke sadly to the contrary. Friedan, Paglia, and others had the intellectual substance and the power of personality, as well as the ego, to be a force that no one, including Bella Abzug, could high-handedly dismiss. The clashes between Abzug and Friedan would never end while the two were alive. On the day of Abzug’s funeral, one of her friends, Judy Lerner, actually sought out Friedan in an overflow room which had been set up because of the numbers of people seeking to attend. Lerner took Friedan to the main room and found her a seat in front. Ms. Lerner remembered that someone then asked her, somewhat pointedly, “what are you doing that for?” Lerner responded: “Because that’s what Bella would have wanted.” 16 Abzug would have wanted it so, when she was in a liberal, equity mode. But there

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were many times when Abzug was not so liberal or open. Judy Lerner lent Abzug’s legacy a small favor. In many instances Abzug and her legions demanded conformity in political gatherings, such as those in Houston, Nairobi, Beijing, and elsewhere. This was a most striking part of her legacy because it flew so starkly in the face both of basic First Amendment instincts, as well as of basic feminist notions that women should not be unduly held back from asserting their ideas to anyone. The contradictions here involved the ways that Abzug’s work came to mirror some of the “illiberalism” into which many saw feminism falling by the 1980s and 1990s. Once a staunch civil libertarian, Abzug was very angry at Marlo Thomas for not getting her husband Phil Donahue to block Phyllis Schlafly from appearing on his TV program just at the time of a crucial Illinois vote on the ERA. She also engaged in occasional acts of actual violence when crossed with snafus by her staff. 17 Such things only underscored elements of her illiberalism. In the mid- to late 1960s there had been a great sense of unity and shared purpose among many liberal/left organizations, including feminists, devoted as they were to what was felt to be a mutually reinforcing set of causes involving peace, disarmament, environment, institutional reform, and civil rights for deprived minorities and women. Each cause usually appeared to augment the others. For various reasons, the points of unity among activists here grew progressively strained by the late 1960s and 1970s. Many individual movements proceeded more independently, sometimes with hostility toward one another, and often with the righteous sense that theirs was the Left’s true and righteous pathway. Abzug’s and feminism’s dedication to the ERA was a perfect example here. As those involved in such movements came to see themselves, somewhat smugly, as representing true liberalism, any who raised points of disagreement were simply regarded as wrongheaded or disloyal. Either they did not understand the issues, or they may have harbored prejudices like sexism. There was an obvious paradox in the intolerance displayed here, and the often adamant unwillingness to consider this may have further revealed an element of narcissism that enabled so much of the illiberalism and its many contradictions. The writer Albert Camus once observed that “every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.” Among feminists, Betty Friedan became a major heretic to the mainstream. Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and many of their colleagues showed signs of turning into oppressors, especially in the perceptions of so many young people who sensed a “we know best” high-handedness among their elders. Seeking to account for the lowered numbers of women who identify themselves as feminists, many older feminists fussily raised complaints about the youth’s lack of understanding or gratitude. Here they often retreated into equity issues, presuming young women, or other critics, not impressed with the narrowness of gender-

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feminism, must be against notions of equity. Journalist Linda Ellerbee, for example, attempted to excoriate younger women who appeared to her to be ungratefully disregarding feminism and decidedly avoiding the label. “Feminism,” she admonished, “means you believe in equality between men and women. Justice. Equal justice for all. And that’s all it means [emphases hers].” 18 The point was, and is: that was not all feminism had come to mean. Feminism had devolved away from notions of equal justice, and it was to those gender-feminist devolutions that many have reacted thoughtfully and negatively. Ellerbee’s inability to recognize this was part of the way that narcissism enabled some feminists’ illiberal contradictions. Members of the “third wave” sought to distance themselves from such legacies. Some of feminism’s defenders repeatedly attempted to assert that any who disagree with aspects of gender-based identity politics, or any who even take exception to examples of gender feminists’ intolerance of ideological diversity, can be charged with opposing straightforward issues of equity. Whether a person making such arguments against feminism’s critics is being genuine or not, the parallels with the era of Joe McCarthy are striking. Criticisms of any aspect of Sen. McCarthy’s many absurdities often invited charges that the critic must be some sort of communist sympathizer. Feminists readily fell back on universally-held ideals about equity and claimed that any critic must oppose equality. Through their anger and their nonresponsive ways, these feminists admit, in effect, that they do not care to recognize, let alone contend with the embarrassments that rest both in many of their own forms of discrimination and, even more, in their hostility and willingness to silence views for which they do not care. Criticisms of feminists’ illiberalism often come forth amidst wonders as to what happened to the movement’s older ideals. Gender and equity feminism always co-existed, albeit with a certain tension. As gender issues came to eclipse many equity matters, classic liberalism, and all the free speech ideals to which it was tied, ceased to have the guiding importance it once held. Aspects of Bella Abzug’s career reflect this tension as her earlier championings of free speech contrasted greatly with the controlling party-line atmosphere that came into many of the feminist efforts of which she was a part in her later years. This is part of repulsed such free thinkers as Betty Friedan. A feminist nomenclatura may have profited with comfortable bureaucratic posts, but the Feminist Mystique had displaced The Feminine Mystique as a barrier to many others. Other feminists have responded to critics by employing another form of McCarthyism involving a sweeping indictment that younger critics and others have been brainwashed by some sort of “backlash,” a catchall term that has been used to consign all unwelcome criticisms into a category deemed unworthy of respect. Susan Faludi’s book Backlash had popularized this term and the accompanying reductive thinking, which declared criticisms of femi-

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nism to involve an “Undeclared War Against American Women.” Pridefully believing she had fully debunked feminism’s critics, Faludi had, in effect, underscored a major point of the criticism—that many feminists claim to speak for women while they do not, and that some feminists blithely mark critics of feminism to be “against women” which they are not. Significantly, Faludi voiced a decided consternation toward Betty Friedan and her book The Second Stage. Friedan had called for an overhaul of gender roles and an end to the gender antagonisms that had grown in the 1970s. Because Friedan was in some ways as critical of feminism as she had been of traditional gender roles and sexism, Faludi huffed that Friedan was “yanking out the stitches of her own handiwork.” Like anyone of genuinely radical bent, Friedan was willing to go to the root of the matter and cut away any needless entanglements that interfered with the pursuit of a just cause. Meanwhile, Faludi and her colleagues revealed their essential non-radicalism, as they clung to their movement as a set of truths which could never be questioned and responded to any such critic as Friedan merely by deductively measuring the degree to which they had deviated from the proper party-line thinking. Such naive, even narcissistic presumptions supported a sense of entitlement that underlay some of feminism’s willingness to tolerate no diversity of thought and summarily cast aside criticisms. Bella Abzug often displayed such high-handedness. It was the basis of some of her conflicts with Friedan. Abzug was absolutely convinced that the ideas and the political pathways she had established on behalf of women could not be challenged, other than by those who were against women’s rights. Within various feminist efforts she could make a show of inclusiveness, but she could not tolerate any such challenges as presented by someone like Betty Friedan. Indeed she spent the last decades of her career seeking to ensconce adherents of her feminist party line into bureaucratic enclaves, from which the patterns of illiberalism could be perpetuated. 19 Consigning critiques of gender feminism as mere “backlash” constituted a McCarthyist method of setting up a category in order to huff at the category and condescendingly ignore any uncomfortable substance the actual criticisms raised. McCarthyists claimed that critiques against them constituted attacks on America and freedom; feminists claimed their critics were part of a war against women. Such outlooks augmented the sense of insult with which older feminists had regularly slapped younger women who were not behaving as they should. Any questioning was bad behavior, and all uncomfortable questions could be consigned to some sort of “backlash” or “brainwashing.” With both McCarthyists and older gender-feminists, a key issue involves the possibility that it may have been they who brainwashed themselves, believing that all the relevant questions had been asked, that all the correct answers had been given, hence that there was only for others to be

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dutiful and obedient. There lay an oddly ironic element of Victorian authoritarianism here. Beyond any ironies in the illiberalism at work, other elements of ego enter the picture as well. On the important question of feminism’s alienation of younger women, Gloria Steinem once opined: “I think that part of the problem is that there is a notion that younger women were feminists in the first place.” Her godchild, “third wave feminism” enthusiast Rebecca Walker, daughter of the writer Alice Walker, expressed a similar insularity when she angrily proclaimed “I hope I never have to hear the word[s] ‘post-feminist’ again.” 20 Such high-handed responses may have given people like Steinem a smug sense of superiority over any well-meaning feminists who were honestly concerned about why younger people were not being drawn to the movement as much as their elders had been hoping. It was also a way to maintain forms of denial in regard to how many feminists could have been more inclusive and honestly open to a diversity of ideas. Steinem’s outlook embraced an economically comfortable isolation, one where personal feelings of gratification could eclipse all desires to attain any political goals that required wide political support. This was something Bella Abzug would seldom do. She could certainly be inflexible, but matters of personal gratification would usually not override political priorities with her. Steinem’s restive perspective tersely implied that younger generations were never on their side in the first place. Hence they were and are not needed unless they behaved properly. At most such junctures, Abzug’s best answer would have been not to luxuriate too much in ego but to go out and recruit aggressively. Beyond the obvious matter that young people are always needed to sustain and strengthen any lengthy political movement, the deeper point at work, which was too inconvenient for Steinem to accept, was that many younger people were and are clearly on the side of feminism, but largely of equity feminism. Living exclusively in times when two incomes had become necessary for most households, women and men born since 1965 have always recognized not just the ideal but the simple fact that gender should be, and is, no barrier when it comes to anyone seeking a career as a doctor, lawyer, teacher, homemaker, or anything else. These are people whom Rebecca Walker may hate to see as post-feminists, and the term “third wave” does indeed cast the division more softly. However labeled, these young people have tended to reject, and see as terribly irrelevant and old-fashioned, any notions and rhetoric which demonize men and demand a kind of gender-based conformity for no purpose, it seemed, but to have more ego-boosting rallies and meetings for the mere purposes of further speeches, rhetoric, and demonizing, as well as to maintain bureaucratic sinecures for older feminists in education and in other institutional settings. Many of younger generations recognize mental cul de sacs and generally want nothing to do with them. It may be natural for

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some elders to feel that the youth who disregard them are ungrateful or just do not understand, but it is at least as likely in such situations that it is the elders who fail to understand, especially those driven by overweening needs to feel needed. Those drawn to narrower gender’isms may have any number of psychological reasons for their choices. For some there have also been financial rewards. Colleges and universities are replete with programs through which women can hope to make smooth careers as articulators of well-rehearsed feminist lines. Some points of statistical evidence about such key issues as salary inequities and frequency of violence can be, and have been, strongly questioned. The popularity of feminist mantras may wane, but the rewards for the wealthy self-casting one another as oppressed have remained significant. They continue because equally wealthy administrators fear feministvocabularied McCarthyism and because it is often so easy to indulge such feminist bureaucrats as they pose no deep social threats. While Bella Abzug may have been, in manner and style, as personally threatening a feminist as any, she hardly posed the United States or the world with any such threat as has come from truly impoverished people and their potentially radical challenges to national and international institutions and their wealth-filled bureaucratic pathways. Abzug’s work through the United Nations was successful in this regard, very much because it did not threaten any political order. Back in the 1960s African American leaders like Eldridge Cleaver noted such dynamics. He emphasized how latent fears of black males could turn liberals away to seek safer pathways, such as those of wealthy, white women. For years, feminists repeatedly employed rhetoric against their critics to the effect of “why do you feel so threatened by us?” A logical response was always there to be expressed, but which would seldom be heard was: “why do you need to feel as though you are so threatening?” The key answer here was that feminists were not threatening, while they dearly needed and loved to imagine they were. Bella Abzug was the one who exploited these wealthy, white gender pathways as effectively as anyone. She could be threatening in her highly belligerent and physically imposing manner, but in socioeconomic terms there was little for which she stood that was in any way threatening to any deep social and economic foundations of her world. In many respects, much of her success came because, with gender, she and her colleagues provided wealthy administrators and legislators with non-threatening, convenient points on which to train resources ostensibly devoted to social justice, with the results actually serving, as an old joke has had it, not justice but “just us.” From universities to the UN, gender nomenclatura exploit both equity issues and the ongoing sufferings of poorer nations’ women and men to sustain their livelihoods and perquisites. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of the world’s women, expressed goals of equity have little to nothing to do

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with the idea of enriching bureaucrats who purport to speak for them. For the majority of people, beyond equity come not ideas about gender but the struggles of life that men and women always have to face. Early in her public life, Bella Abzug did many important things to help women in these basic life issues. The work of her later years seemed more exclusively devoted to nomenclatura who sought bureaucratic tribute for one another and desired other women to hail them as their advocates and role models. As these demands came forth and as they were often accompanied by an intolerance of any who would dare question the postures at hand, the general popularity of the movement faded among younger people who saw older gender’ists embodying rather unattractive combinations of irrelevance, bitterness, selfishness, intolerance, arrogance, and narcissism. In the decade after Abzug’s passing, various signs of the disutility, and the narrow self-serving nature of gender-feminist causes and rhetoric have come forth in American politics. One of the clearest examples came in 2007–2008, with the varying sensibilities surrounding the political failures of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stood for a myriad of substantive issues, and she was as thoroughly informed and conversant in these issues as any candidate had ever been. In the months of her candidacy, however, an overwhelming preponderance of the rhetoric that came forth in the media and from her legions of enthusiasts focused on the simple matter of her gender and of it then being time for a woman in the White House. “Madam President! Madam President!” was a repeated chant one heard at rallies from her self-clubbed masses of true believers. The contrasting ideal—neither favoring men nor opposing women, but arguing that gender did not matter—was a liberal sentiment that was utterly foreign to all such gender enthusiasts, and that idea was simply not to be heard. Many Clintonists invested their campaign with a self-mythologizing notion that theirs was a historic quest—to achieve, at long last, the greatest of all gender breakthroughs in the history of the nation, or even the world. It appeared not to matter that by 2007–2008 there had been many female heads of state elsewhere, nor did it matter that the varieties of tone and quality among those leaders showed much the same range as had come forth with a variety of male leaders. Many Hillary Clinton enthusiasts were wedded to gender for the sake of gender. They needed to believe that much of their opposition was motivated by sexism, and they could not cope with any for whom gender was simply not an issue one way or the other. In losing the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton’s supporters found their candidate/gender-symbol to be ironically eclipsed by another form of identity politics. The nature of the identity politics that Obama presented to voters contrasted with that of Clinton, however, and this was a contrast that proved pivotal. Obama presented Americans with a very uplifting message—that we have now come so very far from where we have

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been with our problems regarding race. As they now seek, without undue obstacles, to become doctors, attorneys, engineers, and anything else they wish, younger women (and men) of the day had recognized the very same point in regard to gender. Many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters did not appear to agree with, and even resented, such positive thoughts. Obama’s positive equity message differed markedly from what many younger voters perceived as bitter, controlling, self-absorbed, self-entitled sensibilities of feminist elders who supported Hillary Clinton, with Gloria Steinem having underscored so much of this with her haughty, smug huff that younger women were never part of the movement in the first place; nor were they needed apparently, unless they behaved properly and obediently. Older gender’ists could not cope with the point that many younger women and men start with a different set of political assumptions, which also stand up to tests of classical liberalism. To the elders any notions that the gender issue was largely over were simply unthinkable. Elder feminists’ views and guidance had to be relevant. They very much needed to be needed as role models, and they were accustomed to being institutionally indulged in their expressions of established gender nomenclature. Institutional administrators were always easy to cow. Younger voters were another matter. They may have passively nodded through an endless series of classroom and workplace situations concerning “right thinking” about gender, but their private thinking remained independent. Reflexively, most young people did not concur with any sort of party-line thinking. They certainly did not disagree with any ideas that women should be free to pursue any of their dreams. The point was that they never felt otherwise, so they never saw the relevance in what had been so earnestly and haughtily advocated down to them about gender. In a million settings in schools and elsewhere, they had heard all the preachings many, many times. They were tired of the old sermons, much as a younger Bella Abzug resented hearing about the evils of communism from true-believing McCarthyists. Younger people resented anyone implying they held any sort of retrograde views that needed to be righted. They were not to be presumed guilty, and in the voting booth, their votes counted just as much. It was to these younger women, and men, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign then exuded a fundamentally alienating negative aura which said, in effect, that we are your superiors, that we know better than you, that you need to defer to us, and that whatever actions we subsequently take once in power, whatever restrictions may be imposed upon your freedom in the name of our unassailable, McCarthyism-protected ideas of justice, it will be valid because you deserve whatever it is we have in store for you. It was no accident that the base of Hillary Clinton’s support in the Democratic primaries was driven as much by age as gender. Women were not her base; generally older wealthy white women were. Most young people were not inspired, just the opposite in many cases. To label any major aspect of

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that opposition as sexist was as far-fetched as any notion that a Clinton supporter’s opposition to Obama was motivated by racism. A few feminists may have problems with race, but they hardly amount to much. The counterpoint was also true, as no one can legitimately charge that Obama supporters had trouble with any other candidate because of gender. Until trumped in their rhetoric of identity politics, gender feminists had regularly used the stigma of the McCarthyistic label “anti-feminist” for political gain. They ultimately hurt a mainstream equity feminism whose adherents neither recognized elder white female leadership nor sought their guidance in the first place. In enclaves in education and other bureaucracies, the surrealisms of gender feminist self-indulgences maintain themselves amidst labyrinthine academic verbiage and threats of feminist-vocabularied McCarthyism. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has moved on. In the political realities of the Presidential primary voting of 2008, selfprotective modes of intellectually distorting discourse proved unable to sustain themselves in the arena of general public opinion. At the levels of popular thought the enforcement weaponry of fear, guilt, gossip, and McCarthyism proved a paper tiger. Identity politics had trumped itself. It had snared feminism in its own limitations, as well as in its own negativity, in its untoward self-entitlement, and in its own alternatives. Without question, Bella Abzug would have been a Hillary Clinton supporter, and the ways that Clinton’s candidacy failed to gain support beyond its faithful base was an extension of many of the gender-identity initiatives, laced with the illiberal intolerance, that Abzug had helped to develop starting back in the late 1970s as her political purview narrowed and as equity feminism gave way to strains of identity politics and illiberalism. During Abzug’s long career, the contradictions were always present. Time upon time, she had advocated for the election of more women, yet she never preferred a Louise Day Hicks to a Bill Ryan, Paula Hawkins to Edward Kennedy, Jeane Kirkpatrick to Walter Mondale, Phyllis Schlafly to Phil Donahue, or Margaret Thatcher to almost anyone. Feminists’ disingenuousness and inconsistencies in calls for women, per se, to gain power would continue long after Bella Abzug. After Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2008, the failure of Sarah Palin to win any subsequent feminist support, and feminists’ utter disdain for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in 2011–2012, only reinforced the disutility that many younger people felt in regard to some of gender feminism’s contradictions. As long as Hillary Clinton was a viable candidate, gender-based claims came forth incessantly that it was time that a woman be elected President. Then, when the Republican Party presented the nation a female Vice Presidential candidate, while the Democrats did not, all expressions of gender-based political solidarity vanished. (How any Republican official ever thought that the selection of Palin would tap into the gender vote showed a complete lack of under-

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standing of the disingenuous selectivity that lay among gender enthusiasts in the first place.) There were marked and obvious differences of experience and quality between Clinton and Palin, as well as huge contrasts of ideology, but any emphases of such points of gender-blind quality and viewpoint contradicted the postures that had surrounded the many euphoric hopes about Clinton’s candidacy. The immediate disappearance of gender enthusiasm, as well as the decided disrespect for Palin in many circles, revealed the same consistency that Gloria Steinem had shown when she attacked Clarence Thomas on the basis of Anita Hill’s testimony, then cynically claimed that Bill Clinton was not guilty of sexual harassment, all while denying her own hypocrisy in saying so. Steinem was a hypocrite, and with the disdain for, as well as the outright abusiveness shown to Sarah Palin, feminists’ 2008 calls for gender solidarity revealed both a hollowness and a selfish cynicism. In 2011–2012, such patterns of hypocrisy continued. Conservative Congresswoman Michele Bachmann contended for the Republican Presidential nomination. She was the only female candidate in either party, yet there was absolutely no feminist support for her. In November 2011 when Bachmann appeared on the television program Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the show’s band played a raucous alternative rock number called “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” just as the Congresswoman had been introduced and was stepping onto the stage. 21 Feminists would have been absolutely livid had Hillary Clinton been subjected to any such snarky abuse. Likely, there would have been calls to throw Fallon off the air, accompanied by arguments to the effect that “under no circumstances should any woman be subject to such sexist treatment.” Yet with the trashing of Bachmann, feminist responses were virtually nil. The legacy of women of varying ideological stripes being able to run for top-level posts in government and elsewhere owes much to the early work of Bella Abzug and other equity-oriented feminists. The patterns of oppositionintolerant gender feminists, which Abzug also led in other stages in her life, mark another legacy that is not quite so positive. For many generations it was blasphemous to consider historical treatments of our nation’s Founding Fathers that did not involve idolatry. Similarly, American history’s treatment of feminism’s Founding Mothers has maintained patterns of veneration and worship, with McCarthy-like charges at the ready against critics. The inherent contrasts between equity feminism and gender feminism are significant, however, and, no matter any political pressures, they need not be ignored in history books. The political behavior of many younger generations proceeds very much in cognizance of them. Notions of gender feminism offer a paradoxical legacy, for they argue, in effect, that gender matters regardless of viewpoint—just as long as the woman in question holds the right viewpoints. Hence, to gender feminists, the nation needs a woman in the White House when Hillary Clinton is running, but no such words come forth when the

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candidate is a Sarah Palin or a Michele Bachmann. The obvious contradictions within the outlook, as well as the ongoing illiberal truculence toward the free speech rights of those who point out the flaws, has always been an embarrassment, a legacy which holds nothing of value, save for the thousands of secured positions of bureaucratic comfort that gender’ists have carved for one another in various institutions. When Hillary Clinton said that everywhere she goes in the world she runs into women who proclaim to her that they are “the Bella Abzug of _____,” she believed they were saying they were the sort of people who were willing to do whatever it takes to challenge barriers still thrust against women. 22 Equity feminism, human rights; these remain the leitmoif to which feminism always returns. Rhetorically it is a safe, comfortable ground. When one considers the many barriers that women still encounter when one gets away from the culture of the wealthy and white in Western Europe and North America, where gender feminism thrives, such calls for equity are impossible to dispute, as well as ennobling. Few intelligent people disagree. It is the non-equity, gender feminism about which many fundamentally liberal-minded people have always raised questions. Within the United States and other wealthy Western nations the legacy of Bella Abzug conjures many other images besides the pleasing ones that Hillary Clinton happily raised. Among the alternative images is that of one who condescendingly thinks she has a complete handle on the beliefs of those with whom she is in contention and who thinks she is then entitled to ride roughshod over any opposition, an entitlement which stems from a notion that any who disagree must be regarded as sexists and who are against equal opportunities for women— McCarthyism with a gendered vocabulary. From this comes an image of someone who feels she can delight in being coarse with all opposition while taking offense at any perceived coarseness or disagreement from others. There is also the image of someone who, despite relative wealth, believes she fully deserves what she is demanding in political dealings, who will defame the motives and the sensibilities of any who oppose, who demands utter conformity from those who wish to be part of her efforts, and who maintains that gender denotes a deprived class worthy of tribute and subvention, with available proceeds largely going to wealthy people who mouthe the correct platitudes. Such images are all part of the legacy left by the ways that feminism evolved and devolved beyond liberal notions of a fair field and no favor for all regardless of gender. In the generations that followed Bella Abzug’s heyday and passing, the political world sorted out many of the gender and the equity elements of her legacy. “Gender” remains an elusive set of ideals which often service the needs of some people driven at times by hostility and by the desires of others to maintain financially comfortable bureaucratic posts. Equity remains a legacy which democratic nations celebrate, and to which those who do not enjoy

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much real political freedom incessantly aspire. Bella Abzug was a significant leader in the mid- and late twentieth century in bringing a wider level of justice to democratic institutions. Her contributions there were considerable and impressive, an extension of a fiery passion in her for justice that was, at times, truly ennobling. For that much of the world is in her debt. NOTES 1. New York Times, March 22, 1998, section IV, p. 15. 2. Ibid, March 25, 1998, p, A22. 3. Ibid., March 27, 1998, p. A19. 4. Ibid., February 2, 1998, p. A22; March 22, 1998, section IV, p. 14. 5. Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. x–xi; Shirley MacLaine, Abzug Memorial Service, April 2, 1998, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx0ggmb2eaM. 6. “Oldies but Goodies,” New York Times, Sunday Magazine, November 26, 1995, p. 88; “When Politics Had Passion,” New York Times, Sunday Magazine, January 3, 1999, p. 31. 7. Interview with Robin Morgan, January 30, 2003, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 227–28. 8. Interview with Ronnie Eldridge, August 8, 2004; interview with Amy Swerdlow, March 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp. 100, 158. 9. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), passim.; Rene Denfeld, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (New York: Warner Books, 1995), p. 17. 10. Houston Chronicle, May 2, 1995, p. 1; London Times, July 8, 1992. 11. Houston Chronicle, May 2, 1995, p. 1. 12. Interview with Eleanor Smeal, June 9, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 212. 13. www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2022164,00.html. 14. Phil Donahue, Abzug Memorial Service, April 2, 1998, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, pp.19–20; www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv1Q_mQZe70. 15. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); Germane Greer, Sex and Destiny (New York: Harper Collins, 1984); Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Hunter Publishing, 1986); Susan Brownmiller, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991); Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (New York: Summit Books, 1981); Susan Faludi, Backlash, pp. 319–25. 16. Lifetime Intimate Portrait: Bella Abzug; Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 241. 17. Interview with Marlo Thomas, January 4, 2005, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 233; Washington Post, September 19, 2008, p. C1. 18. Linda Ellerbee, “The Feminist Mistake,” Seventeen Magazine, March 1990; quoted in Denfeld, The New Victorians:, pp. 3, 5. 19. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishing, 1991), p. 319. 20. Quoted in Denfeld, The New Victorians, p. 247; London Times, July 8, 1992. 21. www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3iyADAmd8Q. 22. Hillary Clinton, Address at the National Women’s Political Caucus memorial service, National Press Club, Washington, DC, April 9, 1998, Levine and Thom, Bella Abzug, p. 284.

Selected Bibliography

Abzug, Bella S., Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington. Edited by Mel Ziegler. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972. ———, with Mim Kelber, Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for American Women. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Albert, Judith Clavir, and Stewart Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade. New York: Praeger, 1984. Andres, Peggy, Sisters Listening to Sisters: Women of the World Share Stories of Personal Empowerment. Westport, CT: Bergen and Harvey, 1996. Armstrong, Louise, Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest. Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Auerbach, Nina, Romantic Imprisonment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Basu, Amrita, ed., The Challenge of Local Feminism: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Bender, Marylin, The Beautiful People. New York: Coward-McCann, 1967. Bird, Caroline, Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down. New York: David McKay, 1968. Bolen, Jean Shinoda, Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. New York: Harper Colophon, 1985. Braden, Maria, Women Politicians and the Media. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. Braudy, Leo, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Broner, E. M., The Telling. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. ———, Femininity. New York: Hunter Publishing, 1986. ———, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: Dial Press, 2000. Carabillo, Toni, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, Feminist Chronicles, 1953–1993. Los Angeles: Women’s Graphics, 1993. Carden, Maren Lockwood, The New Feminist Movement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974. Chafe, William H., The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

343

344

Selected Bibliography

———, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic and Political Roles, 1920–1970. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. ———, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Chesler, Phyllis, Women and Madness. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. Chisholm, Shirley, Unbought and Unbossed. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1970. Cobble, Dorothy Sue, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Cohen, Marcia, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Cummings, Bernice, and Victoria Schuck., Women Organizing: An Anthology. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Cummings, Richard, The Pied Piper: Allard Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream. New York: Grove Press, 1985. Davis, Flora, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Decter, Midge, The Liberated Woman and Other Americans. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., 1971. Denfeld, Rene, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order. New York: Warner Books, 1995. Dworkin, Andrea, Letters From a War Zone. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993. Echols, Alice, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Eisenstein, Hester, Contemporary Feminist Thought. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983. Eisenstein, Zillah, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, 2nd Edition. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993. Enke, Anne, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space and Feminist Activism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Evans, Sara, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. ———, Born for Liberty. New York: Free Press, 1997. Faber, Doris, Bella Abzug. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1976. Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991. Ferraro, Geraldine, and Linda Bird Francke, My Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. Ferree, Myra Marx, and Hess, Beth B., Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement Across Four Decades of Change, 3rd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2000. Firestone, Shulamith, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Freeman, Jo, The Politics of Women’s Liberation. New York: Longman, 1975. ———, A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000. Friedan, Betty, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement. New York: Random House, 1976. ———, The Second Stage. New York: Summit Books, 1981. ———, The Feminine Mystique. New York: Laurel, 1983. Fritz, Leah, Dreamers and Dealers: An Intimate Appraisal of the Women’s Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Gilmore, Stephanie, ed., Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second Wave Feminism in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Selected Bibliography

345

Gitlin, Todd, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. ———, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Gornick, Vivian, and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Women In Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness. New York: New American Library, 1972. Graham, Katharine, Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Greer, Germaine, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. ———, The Female Eunuch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. ———, Sex and Destiny. New York: Harper Collins, 1984. Harrington, Michael, Fragments of the Century: A Social Autobiography. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972. Harrison, Cynthia, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Heilbrun, Carolyn, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem. New York: Dial Press, 1995. Hewitt, Nancy, No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Hole, Judith, and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917–94. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Johnston, Jill, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. ———, Gullibles Travels. New York: Links Press, 1974. Jones-Terry, Ardenia M., In Search of Our Past: Women of Northwest Ohio. Toledo: The Roles and Achievements Committee of the Women Alive! Coalition, 1987. Kaminer, Wendy, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Kennedy, Flo, Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1976. Koedt, Anne, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, eds., Radical Feminism. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973. Langer, Cassandra, A Feminist Critique. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979. Lederer, Laura, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Lerman, Hannah, A Mote in Freud’s Eye: From Psychoanalysis to the Psychology of Women. New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1986. Levine, Suzanne Braun, and Mary Thom, eds., Bella Abzug. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Lovelace, Linda, with Mike McGrady, Out of Bondage. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1986. MacLean, Nancy, The American Women’s Movement, 1945–2000: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2008. Mahler, Jonathan, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Mason, Mary Ann, The Equality Trap. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1988] 2002. Meade, Marion, Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980. Melich, Tanya, The Republican War Against Women: An Insider’s Report From Behind the Lines. New York: Bantam Books, 1996. Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics. New York: Avon Books, 1969, 1970.

346

Selected Bibliography

Mitchell, Juliet, and Ann Oakley, Who’s Afraid of Feminism? Seeing Through the Backlash. New York: New Press, 1997. Mitchell, Susan, Icons, Saints and Divas. Sydney, Australia: Harper Collins, 1997. Morgan, Robin, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful: An anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Okin, Susan, Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. ———, Is Multicultural Bad For Women? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. ———, Vamps & Tramps. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Patai, Daphne and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women’s Studies. New York: Basic Books, 1994 Pollitt, Katha, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Polsgrove, Carol, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun?: Esquire in the Sixties. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Redstockings, Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Edition with Additional Writings. New York: Random House, 1975. Rhode, Deborah, Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Rosen, Ruth, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Rossi, Alice, ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir. New York: Bantam Books, 1974. Roth, Benita, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ryan, Barbara, Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism. New York: Routledge, 1992. Sayres, Sohnya, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson, eds., The 60s Without Apology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Schickel, Richard, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985. Schneir, Miriam, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. ———, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983. Sommers, Christina Hoff, Who Stole Feminism? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Springer, Kimberly, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Steinem, Gloria, The Beach Book. New York: Viking Press, 1963. ———, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: Signet, 1983. ———, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. New York: Little, Brown, 1992. ———, Moving Beyond Words. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Stoltenberg, John, Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. Portland, Ore: Breitenbush Books, 1989. Swerdlow, Amy, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Tanner, Leslie B., ed., Voices From Women’s Liberation. New York: Signet, 1970. Tavris, Carol, The Mismeasure of Woman. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Thom, Mary, ed., Letters to Ms.: 1972–1987. New York: Henry Holt, 1987. ———, Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and the Feminist Movement. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Threlfall, Monica, ed., Mapping the Women’s Movement. New York: Verso, 1996.

Selected Bibliography

347

Tobias, Sheila, Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Tolchin, Susan, and Martin, Clout: Womanpower and Politics. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1974. Tyrell, R. Emmett, Jr., The Liberal Crack-Up. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. United States President’s Commission on the Status of Women, American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965. United States Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Together with Additional Supplemental, and Separate Views. Books I, II, III, and VI. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976. Valk, Anne, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington D.C . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Vance, Carole S., ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Pandora Press, 1989. Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Troutdale: New Sage Press and Education Film, 1995. Willis, Ellen, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Witt, Linda, Karen M. Paget, and Glenna Matthews, Running as a Woman: Gender and Power in American Politics. New York, Free Press, 1994. Woods, Harriett, Stepping Up to Power: The Political Journey of American Women. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Index

Abrams, Robert, 247, 249, 250 Abzug, Bella : Aftermath of 1976 Election and Early Relations with Carter Administration, 5–7; 1977 Run for Mayor of New York City, 8–37; Aftermath of New York Mayoral Race, 41–44; National Women’s Convention, Houston, 44–62; Special Election for Congress, 1978, 65–76; Aftermath of 1978 Congressional Defeat, 79–88; The Carter White House and the Women’s Commission, 89–120; Breaking with President Carter and Supporting Edward Kennedy, 125–132; Issues of the Late 1970s: Women USA, Pornography, Military Conscription, ERA, International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, The Election, 1980, 133–155; Feminist issues in the era of Reagan, 159–177; The 1984 election and the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro, 177–186; Post1984 dilemmas, 191–205; International Women’s Conference in Nairobi, 1985, 206–214; Ideological issues of the 1980s and 90s, 217–225, 238–256; Attempts at Involvement at a ReaganGorbachev Summit, 1985, 225–228; Run for Congress, 1986, 231–233, 235–237; Passing of Husband, 233–235; Daughter’s Race of NY City

Council, 256–261; Issues of Lesbianism, 261–263; Political Activism through the United Nations, 267–284; International Women’s Conference in Beijing, 304–305; Final Years, 304–308; Intellectual Legacies, 313–340 Abzug, Liz (daughter), 9, 43, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 267, 307 Abzug, Martin (husband), 2, 72, 76, 83, 88, 145, 198, 201, 233–235, 262 Adams, Abigail, 45 Adams, John Quincy, 120 Ahrland, Karin, 147 Ali, Muhammad, 19, 79 Allen, Donald K., 74 Allen, George, 251 Alperin, Mimi, 212 Ambro, Jerome, 6 Angelou, Maya, 52 Anthony, Susan B., 52, 53, 54, 180 Aptheker, Herbert, 138 Arthur, Bea, 166 Assad, Hafez al-, 213, 214 Astrachan, Anthony, 239 Auerbach, Nina, 176, 222 Bachmann, Michele, 307, 338 Badillo, Herman, 13, 30, 32, 33, 34, 196 Baker, Howard, 111 Baker, James, 196 349

350 Baker, Martha, 28, 308 Baker, Russell, 22 Bakhtiar, Mahri, 148 Barnum, Phineas T., 199 Battalia, Dolores, 233 Beame, Abraham, 10–12, 13, 13–14, 15, 19, 22, 27, 31, 33, 34, 66, 72 Beauvoir, Simone de, 288, 291, 296, 304 Begin, Menachem, 66, 67, 96 Begun, Martin, 66, 67 Belafonte, Harry, 237 Bellamy, Carol, 12, 32, 37, 66, 86, 179, 198 Beard, Charles, 303 Bennetts, Leslie, 139 Bentzen, Lloyd, 246 Berkowitz, David “Son of Sam”, 17, 20, 26, 27, 31 Berman, Carol, 200 Berman, Richard, 233 Berry, Mary Frances, 205 Bhutto, Benazir, 296 Bick, Barbara, 61, 234 Biden, Joseph, 177 Bishop, Norman “Buddy”, 73 Bismarck, Otto von, 290 Blanchard, James, 173 Bloom, Max, 70, 71 Bonk, Kathy, 44 Bourne, Peter, 112 Boxer, Barbara, 225 Bozell, L. Brent, 253 Bradley, Bill, 246 Bradley, Thomas, 177 Breslin, Jimmy, 81 Briscoe, Dolph, 57 Broderick, Juanita, 315 Brown, Jerry, 246 Brownmiller, Susan, 136–141, 223, 330 Buchwald, Art, 17 Buckley, James, 2, 5, 84, 232 Buckley, William F., 31 Bunch, Charlotte, 167, 169 Burden, Carter, 67, 67–69, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 88, 150 Burke, Yvonne Brathwaite, 133, 142 Burris, Carol, 133 Bush, George H. W., 180, 236, 246, 255, 256, 280, 297, 298, 314

Index Bush, George W., 321 Byrne, Jane, 175 Califano, Joseph, 119 Carey, Hugh, 13, 15, 26, 29, 33, 35, 88 Carpenter, Liz, 61, 89–90 Carter, Billy, 111 Carter, Jimmy, 5–7, 8, 18, 45, 46, 57, 65, 72, 73, 75, 89, 90–91, 91–98, 100, 101–103, 104–106, 107–110, 111–118, 119–121, 125–127, 127–129, 130–134, 141, 143, 147, 150, 151–153, 153, 154–155, 159, 160, 170, 174, 176, 180, 194, 199, 209–210, 231, 246, 267, 268, 269, 320, 327 Carter, Rosalynn, 7, 45, 52, 65, 118, 154, 204 Carson, Johnny, 151 Chambers, Marjorie Bell, 116 Chassler, Sey, 95 Chavez, Linda, 238 Chisholm, Shirley, 179, 204–205, 213 Cicero, 260 Cisneros, Henry, 177 Clark, Ramsey, 34, 69, 84, 85, 249, 260 Clay, Henry, 128 Cleaver, Eldridge, 335 Clines, Francis, 8 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 235, 246, 256, 285–286, 291, 298, 300, 321, 336–340 Clinton, William, 127, 235, 246, 256, 257, 280, 281, 282, 300, 301, 306, 314–319, 320, 321, 328, 329 Collins, Martha Layne, 177, 179 Commoner, Barry, 153, 199 Connell, Noreen, 32 Coolidge, Calvin, 238 Cooper, Cynthia, 327 Coopersmith, Esther, 209 Costanza, Midge, 45, 76, 91, 96, 98, 101, 102, 105, 114 Costikyan, Edward, 13, 33, 69 Cox, Archibald, 112 Crisp, Mary, 112 Cuomo, Mario, 13, 15, 18, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33–35, 36, 37, 66, 72, 108, 127, 173, 235, 239, 246, 260 Dadey, Dick, 258

Index D’Amato, Alphonse, 239, 247, 249–250 Decter, Midge, 129–130 Delgado Votaw, Carmen, 46, 47, 52, 92, 95, 98, 109 Dellenger, David, 95 Del Mastro, Victor P., 257, 259 Denfeld, Rene, 324, 325 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 174 Dietrich, Marlene, 262 Dinkins, David, 252, 253, 258, 268, 269 DioGuardi, Joseph J., 232, 233, 235–236, 237, 239 Dixon, Sharon Pratt, 179 Dole, Robert, 236, 285, 306 Donahue, Phil, 143–144, 168, 330, 331, 338 Dornan, Robert K., 56 Dowd, Maureen, 237–238, 240 Dreyfuss, Richard, 77 Duane, Thomas K., 257, 258, 259–260, 307 Duggan, Joseph, 280 Duke, Robin, 66, 67 Dworkin, Andrea, 223, 234 Dyan, Moshe, 76 Eagleton, Thomas, 177 Edgar, Joanne, 49 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 184, 238 Eisenstat, Stuart, 92 Eldar-Avidar, Tamar, 61 Eldridge, Ronnie, 181–183, 253, 268, 282, 287 Ellerbee, Linda, 331 Elliott, Peter J., 293 Ethelston, Sally, 300 Evans, Rowland, 18, 95 Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr., 67 Fairchild, Morgan, 251 Fallon, Jimmy, 338 Faludi, Susan, 176, 330, 332, 333 Falwell, Jerry, 141 Farber, Barry, 13, 144 Farbstein, Leonard, 11 Feder, Donald, 280, 282 Feinstein, Diane, 177 Fenwick, Millicent, 5, 87

351

Ferraro, Geraldine, 178, 179, 180–182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193–196, 200, 203, 205, 231, 239, 247–248, 249, 250, 256, 258, 275, 325 Fields, Suzanne, 291 Fleming, Anne Taylor, 54, 55, 57 Flowers, Gennifer, 306 Fonda, Jane, 153, 201, 278–280, 280, 283 Foner, Eric, 302, 303, 304 Ford, Betty, 51, 52 Ford, Gerald R., 6, 7, 10, 44, 93, 119, 199 Foreman, Carol, 179 Fox, Michael J., 167 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 220–221, 223, 224, 242, 243, 253, 325 Fraiman, Arnold, 70 Frank, Barney, 307 Franklin, Benjamin, 17 Friedan, Betty, 32, 54, 82, 150, 153, 175, 176, 179, 206, 208, 210–212, 213, 222, 225, 238, 248–249, 288, 294, 295, 304, 330, 331, 332, 333 Friedman, Doris, 9 Gandhi, Indira, 174, 242 Gelder, Lindsy van, 59, 89 Gephardt, Richard, 246 Gifford, Frank, 262 Gifford, Kathy Lee, 262 Gingrich, Newt, 285 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 317 Giuliani, Rudolph, 254, 259, 269 Glendon, Mary Ann, 288, 301 Glenn, John, 177 Glick, Deborah, 258 Goldman, Emma, 83, 128, 162, 201 Goldwater, Barry, 116, 184 Goodman, Ellen, 76 Goodman, Roy, 13, 15, 36 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 225–227, 228 Gorbachev, Raisa, 226 Gore, Leslie, 258, 262 Gottfried, Richard, 253 Graham, Bob, 238 Green, S. William, 67, 69, 72–75, 75, 76, 79–80, 81, 82, 86, 88, 110, 132, 150, 167, 235 Greer, Germaine, 330 Gregory, Dick, 153

352 Griffin, Merv, 8 Gubbins, Joan, 56 Hallenborg, Linda, 204 Hamill, Peter, 34 Hanan, Tim, 14 Harnett, Joel, 13, 33 Harrington, Michael, 199 Harris, Patricia, 205 Harrison, William Henry, 128 Hart, Gary, 177, 178, 179 Hatfield, Mark, 111 Hawkins, Paula, 203, 238, 307, 338 Hays, Wayne, 27 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 194–196 Heinz, John, 254 Heinz, Teresa, 254 Helms, Jesse, 254 Henry, Alice, 84 Hicks, Louise Day, 307, 338 Hill, Anita, 255, 257, 306, 315, 318, 338 Hofstadter, Richard, 83 Holzer, Harold, 23, 66, 68, 74, 76 Holtzman, Elizabeth, 247–248, 249, 250, 256, 258 Hoover, Herbert, 119 Hoover, J. Edgar, 83 Horaday, Ann, 246 Humphrey, Hubert, 131 Humphrey, Muriel, 118 Ireland, Doug, 41, 42 Ireland, Patricia, 318 Ivins, Molly, 300 Jackson, Jesse, 177, 225, 227, 251 Jeffrey, Mildred, 113, 186 Jian, Chen, 296 John Paul II (pope), 281 Johnson, Lady Bird, 52 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 2, 42, 58, 95, 118, 144, 184, 247 Jones, Paula, 314–315, 317, 320 Jong, Erica, 136, 140 Jordan, Barbara, 62, 205 Jordan, Hamilton, 7, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 110, 209 Kassebaum, Nancy, 87

Index Kelber, Miriam “Mim”, 108, 171, 172, 174, 240, 241, 248, 267, 268 Kelly, Janis, 55, 60, 89 Kennan, George F., 228 Kennedy, Edward, 125, 126–128, 130–132, 139, 143, 153–155, 160, 161, 170, 231, 235, 269, 320–321, 338 Kennedy, Robert, 42, 67, 93 Kennelly, Barbara B., 179 Kerry, John, 254 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 221 King, Billie Jean, 51 King, Coretta Scott, 204 King, Martin Luther, 240 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 227, 338 Klein, Alvin, 71 Koch, Edward, 13–14, 15–16, 19, 22, 26–29, 30–32, 33, 34–35, 36, 37, 66, 72, 74, 86, 88, 105, 108, 127, 160, 167, 196–198, 201, 235, 252, 253–255, 260, 261 Koertge, Noretta, 242 Kopechne, Mary Jo, 126, 127, 139, 320 Kramer, Larry, 254 Krupsak, Mary Anne, 76, 88 Lance, Bert, 112 Landon, Alf, 184 Lasch, Christopher, 23, 75, 128–129, 130, 131, 224 Lasser, Louise, 36 Leary, Timothy, 201, 203 Ledbetter, Brownie, 47, 49, 92, 94, 99, 105, 106, 108, 120, 276–277, 308 Lekachman, Robert, 199 Lenin, Vladimir, 44 Lerner, Gerda, 224 Lerner, Judy, 330 Lessing, Doris, 242 Lewinsky, Monica, 314–316, 317, 318 Li, Ping, 292 Liddy, G. Gordon, 201, 203 Lieberthal, Kenneth, 285 Lindsay, John V., 10, 14, 25, 209, 236 Lipschutz, Robert, 109, 112 Llewellyn, Bruce, 18 Lowenstein, Allard, 67–68 Lyman, Joseph, 69–71 Lyman, Muriel, 70

Index Mackenzie, Ross, 256 MacLaine, Shirley, 22–23, 24, 36, 37, 76, 162, 169, 169–170, 175–176, 234, 237, 258, 319 Madden, Mary Helen, 112 Malcolm X, 13 Malthus, Thomas, 284 Mankiewicz, Frank, 192 Mann, Judy, 98, 113, 114, 141 Marshall, Ray, 199 Mason, Marsha, 76 McCarthy, Eugene, 93, 131, 161 McCarthy, Joe, 81, 85, 115, 137, 176, 180, 302, 332 McClintock, Barbara, 327 McClosky, Paul, 73 McEnroe, John, 201 McGee, Willie, 1, 137, 138, 138–140, 170, 223, 255, 273, 287, 304 McGovern, George, 20, 72, 93, 161, 177, 178, 184, 192 McGrory, Mary, 211 Mead, Margaret, 59 Meese, Ed, 197 Meir, Golda, 174 Messenger, Ruth, 18, 258 Mikulski, Barbara, 179, 238 Miller, Alice, 299 Miller, Arthur, 176 Mink, Patsy, 7, 45, 133, 142 Moe, Richard, 103 Mondale, Walter, 72, 103, 118, 177, 178, 179, 181, 184, 186, 186–187, 191, 192, 194, 205, 327, 338 Morgan, Robin, 29, 127, 194, 245, 262, 263, 320 Morris, Dick, 236 Moses, Robert, 50, 145 Moskowitz, Stacy, 28 Mostel, Zero, 36 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 14, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 66, 69, 72, 84–85, 105, 108, 132, 167, 197, 198, 235, 249, 253, 260, 321 Murdoch, Iris, 242 Murdoch, Rupert, 29, 31 Muskie, Edmund, 194 Myerson, Bess, 30

353

Nader, Ralph, 153 Nadler, Jerrold, 9–10, 14, 253 Natividad, Irene, 204, 205 Navarro-Vall, Joaquin, 293 Nieto-Ortiz, Patricia Orelinda, 86 Nixon, Richard, 2, 6, 42, 49, 58, 72, 80, 81, 93, 95, 107, 111, 112, 131, 178, 194, 199, 201, 209, 211, 236, 316 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 205 Novak, Robert, 19, 95 Nunn, Sam, 246 Oakar, Mary Rose, 179 Obama, Barack, 336–337, 338 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 219 O’Connor, Terry, 34 O’Dwyer, Paul, 34, 37, 69, 84, 85, 249 O’Grady, Florence, 235, 237 O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip,” 7, 75, 199, 214 Ottinger, Richard, 232 Ozick, Cynthia, 242 Packwood, Robert, 315, 316, 317, 318 Paglia, Camille, 242, 248, 295–296, 325, 330 Palin, Sarah, 307, 336, 338 Papandreou, Margaret, 208–210, 210, 212–213 Patai, Daphne, 242 Paul, Alice, 128, 162, 201, 255 Perkins, Frances, 87 Perot, Ross, 256 Plato, 89 Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 165, 175, 234, 247 Powell, Jody, 7, 92, 103, 104, 109, 110 Presley, Elvis, 33, 88 Procaccino, Mario, 14 Radner, Gilda, 8 Rafshoon, Jerry, 103, 109 Ravitch, Richard, 13, 33 Ray, Dixy Lee, 174 Ray, Elizabeth, 27 Rangel, Charles, 6 Reagan, Nancy, 154, 226 Reagan, Maureen, 208, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 58, 131, 153, 154, 155, 155–156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 167, 170, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179,

354

Index

180, 182, 184–185, 186, 191, 192, 194, 194–197, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209, 214, 219, 225–228, 232, 236, 236–237, 240, 267, 280, 298, 324–325, 326 Regan, Donald, 226, 227, 240, 297 Rehnquist, William, 219 Reimer, Ruby, 112 Richards, Ann, 116, 126, 297 Richardson, Elliott, 112 Robb, Charles, 173 Robb, Lynda, 118–119 Rockefeller, David, 76 Roiphe, Katie, 325 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 194, 301 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 194 Roosevelt, Theodore, 128, 185 Rosen, Ruth, 115, 221 Rosenberg, Dorothy Golden, 277 Rosenberg, Ethel, 95 Rosenberg, Julius, 95 Rosenberg, Rosalind, 221–222, 223, 224, 243, 246 Rosenthal, A.M., 316, 317 Rosenthal, Bess, 316 Rothstein, Polly, 235 Rowley, Coleen, 328 Rubin, Jerry, 167 Rubin, Leonard, 71 Ruckelshaus, William, 112 Rudes, Saul, 69 Rudolph, Wilma, 52 Russell, Mary, 145 Ryan, William, 197, 253, 307, 338 Sadat, Anwar el-, 61, 65, 96, 147 Sadat, Jihan el-, 147 Samuel, Frederick, 67 Sanger, Margaret, 128, 162 Schieffer, Bob, 109 Schlafly, Phyllis, 46, 47, 56, 57, 58, 89, 90, 91, 142, 143–144, 173, 200, 226, 227, 307, 326, 331, 338 Schoettler, Ellouise, 112 Schott, Marge, 198–199 Schroeder, Pat, 142, 164, 165, 178, 225, 318 Schwartz, Hilda, 69 Scott, William, 41

Seeger, Pete, 2, 304 Shalala, Donna, 193 Shanker, Albert, 19 Sharpton, Al, 247, 249 Shepherd, Cybill, 251 Shostakovsky, Steven, 27 Sinatra, Frank, 163 Skelos, Dean G., 200 Smeal, Eleanor, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57, 58, 82, 89, 91, 100, 104, 106, 112, 114, 142, 144, 178 Smiley, Martha, 48, 53 Smith, Margaret Chase, 87 Smothers, Clay, 56 Sobran, Joseph, 280 Socrates, 88 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 16 Sommers, Christina Hoff, 242–244, 246, 248, 253, 324, 325 Sowell, Thomas, 219–220, 221 Stalin, Joseph, 137 Stein, Gertrude, 88 Stein, Herb, 199 Steinberg, Cathey, 204 Steinem, Gloria, 32, 36–37, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57, 82–83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 93, 97, 127, 129–130, 139–140, 141, 144, 153–154, 161, 162, 163, 176–177, 192, 194–196, 204, 234, 258, 315–319, 320–321, 329, 330, 331, 334, 337, 339 Stern, Henry, 71 Stevenson, Adlai, 184 Stewart, Potter, 136 Streisand, Barbra, 8, 236 Strong, Maurice, 271, 277, 278 Sullivan, Elliott, 1 Sutton, Percy, 13, 14, 19–20, 22, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35 Taft, William Howard, 119, 128 Teicher, Oren J., 232, 233, 235 Tereshkova, Valentina, 209 Thatcher, Margaret, 174, 196, 203, 206, 241, 242, 324, 338 Thomas, Cal, 285 Thomas, Clarence, 127, 255, 306, 314–316, 317, 318, 321, 338 Thomas, Marlo, 144, 240, 258, 330 Tomlin, Lili, 237

Index Travis, Alice, 178 Tsongas, Paul, 247 Tyler, John, 128 Tyrrell, Emmett, 161 Udal, Morris, 7, 53 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 67 Wattleton, Faye, 308 Wagner, Robert, 35 Walker, Rebecca, 334 Warhol, Andy, 32 Watkins, Sherron, 327 Weddington, Sarah, 98–99, 102, 103, 114, 117, 119, 149 Weiss, Theodore, 253 Westmorland, William C., 203 Westwood, Jean, 53

Wexler, Anne, 92, 103, 114, 179 White, Mark, 173 Wicker, Tom, 26 Willey, Kathleen, 314–315, 318 Wilson, Kathy, 182 Wilson, Marie, 318 Winston, Harry, 95 Winthrop, Brian, 202 Wirth, Timothy, 280 Wolf, Naomi, 290, 305, 325 Woolf, Virginia, 283 Wright, Joan R., 200 Wu, Harry, 285–286, 291, 292 Yates, William Butler, 86 Young, Andrew, 119 Zion, Sidney, 88 Zulficar, Mona, 299–300

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About the Author

Alan Levy is professor of American history at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania where he has taught modern American history for thirty years. He has previously published books on various subjects in American politics, American sports, and American music.

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