Bella Abzug How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Aga

Excerpt There was standing room only at the Riverside Memorial Chapel on April 2, 1998, as friends and admirers gathered to celebrate the life of a woman who believed she could nudge, inveigle, and wrangle the world onto a path of social justice. The speakers evoked a heady era of political possibility as they told "Bella stories"; they implored each other to preserve her legacy and carry forward her agenda. They began asking each other, as colleagues and admirers still do today, nearly a decade later, What would Bella do? One of the first speakers was Geraldine Ferraro, the only woman to appear on a major party presidential ticket, as Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984. "If there had never been a Bella Abzug, there would never have been a Gerry Ferraro," she said. Bella "didn't knock lightly on the door. She didn't even push it open or batter it down. She took it off the hinges forever. So that those of us who came after could walk through." Marlo Thomas told how happy Bella was to hear that she was finally getting married and then began to push her to have children. "I said, 'Bella, I got married. Make Gloria [Steinem] have the babies!' " Marlo's husband, Phil Donahue, recalled a gathering of intellectual luminaries at which he sat next to Bella. Minutes into each presentation, she would mumble, "Good. Sit down." The historian Amy Swerdlow marveled at Bella's "brilliance as a strategist" and recalled her appearance impersonating Marlene Dietrich, dressed in a tuxedo and singing "Falling in Love Again." Jane Fonda wore a hat to commemorate Bella's signature symbol. Shirley MacLainetrue to her faith in channelingspoke "directly" to Bella, and the microphone mysteriously jumped to one side. Speakers recalled the pride she took in her two daughters and the "great love affair" with Martin, her husband of more than four decades, who had died twelve years earlier. Gloria Steinem, one of the last speakers, tried to sum up this larger-than-life, braver-than-any leader. She described how frightened she was the first time she encountered Bella's outsized voice and aggressive conviction. Then she took note of Bella's independence and unremitting passion and pointed out that she had "come up through social justice movements, not through a political party." In other words, she was beholden to no institution with traditions, trade-offs, and party lines; she was guided by her commitment to the ideas and the groups she believed were working to make society more responsive to the needs of the people. As a lawyer and a congresswoman, Bella Abzug was an activist and leader in every major social movement of her lifetimefrom socialist Zionism and labor in the forties, to the civil rights, ban-the-bomb, and antiVietnam war movements in the fifties and sixties; the women's movement in the seventies and eighties; and, in the years before she died, global human rights, as, along with her lifelong collaborator, Mim Kelber, she founded the Women's Environment and Development Organization to promote an international agenda of economic equality and environmental sanity. She began her life's work as an advocate and organizer, developing policy and legal arguments, making connections between ideas and constituencies. Then in 1970, at age fifty, she ran for office for the first time and was elected to Congress, representing a progressive district in Manhattan. Being on the inside was a new experience for her, but Bella became one of the most respected strategists in the Congress. Friend and foe alike marveledLevine, Suzanne Braun is the author of 'Bella Abzug How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Aga', published 2007 under ISBN 9780374299521 and ISBN 0374299528.