Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug

by Leandra Ruth Zarnow

Overview

Bella Abzug’s promotion of women’s and gay rights, universal childcare, green energy, and more provoked not only fierce opposition from Republicans but a split within her own party. The story of this notorious, galvanizing force in the Democrats’ “New Politics” insurgency is a biography for our times.

Before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, or Hillary Clinton, there was New York’s Bella Abzug. With a fiery rhetorical style forged in the 1960s antiwar movement, Abzug vigorously promoted gender parity, economic justice, and the need to “bring Congress back to the people.”

The 1970 congressional election season saw Abzug, in her trademark broad-brimmed hats, campaigning on the slogan “This Woman’s Place Is in the House—the House of Representatives.” Having won her seat, she advanced the feminist agenda in ways big and small, from gaining full access for congresswomen to the House swimming pool to cofounding the National Women’s Political Caucus to putting the title “Ms.” into the political lexicon. Beyond women’s rights, “Sister Bella” promoted gay rights, privacy rights, and human rights, and pushed legislation relating to urban, environmental, and foreign affairs.

Her stint in Congress lasted just six years—it ended when she decided to seek the Democrats’ 1976 New York Senate nomination, a race she lost to Daniel Patrick Moynihan by less than 1 percent. Their primary contest, while gendered, was also an ideological struggle for the heart of the Democratic Party. Abzug’s protest politics had helped for a time to shift the center of politics to the left, but her progressive positions also fueled a backlash from conservatives who thought change was going too far.

This deeply researched political biography highlights how, as 1960s radicalism moved protest into electoral politics, Abzug drew fire from establishment politicians across the political spectrum—but also inspired a generation of women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674737488
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	1,106,625
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Leandra Ruth Zarnow is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston. Winner of the 2010 Judith Lee Ridge Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians, she has received many grants and fellowships and previously taught at Stanford University. She dates her interest in exploring the links between social movement organizing and power politics to her earliest internships at the White House and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Editorial Reviews

09/30/2019

University of Houston professor Zarnow debuts with a dynamic exploration of the political career of New York congresswoman Bella Abzug. Born in the Bronx in 1920 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Abzug earned a scholarship to Columbia Law School in 1942. As a young lawyer, she convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution of a black Mississippi man convicted of raping a white woman. During the 1960s, she served as the director of Women Strike for Peace, turning the grassroots organization into a “decisive lobbying powerhouse” that, according to Zarnow, helped to push Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 presidential election. Running as a “leftist urban populist” in the 1970 midterms, Abzug “attempted to connect emerging identity politics with the bread-and-butter issues that mattered most to the Democratic Party’s blue-collar base.” Zarnow writes that Abzug found herself “quickly isolated” in Congress, but managed to pursue her antiwar and feminist agenda through the “savvy” use of procedural measures. After losing back-to-back bids for the Senate and New York City mayor, Abzug became the presiding officer of the 1977 National Women’s Conference. Zarnow sketches a vibrant picture of Abzug’s tumultuous era and draws apt comparisons between her firebrand subject and the latest crop of progressive congresswomen. This well-researched biography will appeal to liberal activists and students of political history. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

[Should] be required reading for every freshman. Every politician. Every woman and, of course, every man…A tightly focused story about the political contributions of Abzug, who devoted her life to making American society less sexist and racist. It is a story that, in its selflessness and heroism, is unimaginable today…Zarnow offers such a rich history.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Rachel Shteir

Reading about how the mostly female volunteers steamrollered the traditional New York Democratic machine, feel free to think of [Abzug] as a middle-aged, Jewish, Vietnam-era version of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. That would please Zarnow, who sees a whole lot of similarities between our era and the 1970s, when Democratic progressives were going head-to-head against establishment moderates for control of the party’s agenda.

Gail Collins

Bella Abzug speaks to our times from this well-wrought biography by historian Leandra Zarnow. Abzug knew progressive change is a not a sprint but a lifetime struggle in which racial and gender equity, economic justice, and peace belong together. From the hard times of the red scare to the glory days of left liberalism in the 1960s and ’70s and right through the reaction that followed, she marshaled grassroots energy to embolden her liberal colleagues with her signature flair, modeling the kind of courage we so need now.

Nancy MacLean

In telling Abzug’s story, Leandra Zarnow gives us a cogent re-evaluation of how progressive social moments brought their energy and ideas into the Democratic Party and the Congress during the 1960s and 1970s. Readers struggling against the current subversion of freedom and democracy in the U.S. and abroad will find in ‘Battling Bella’ a member of the resistance worthy of rediscovery.

Jane Sherron De Hart

Engagingly written, Battling Bella places Abzug firmly in the context of her time—the contentious politics of the 1970s—as well as positions her as a trailblazer whose brash style anticipated the personality-driven culture of the 21st century…With her big hats and her beaming smile and her short temper and her blunt honesty, she becomes in Zarnow’s handling an intensely admirable flesh-and-blood character.

Christian Science Monitor

Battling Bella is political biography at its best. Meticulously researched and exciting to read, the book fully acquaints readers with this passionate, pragmatic, and polarizing champion of social justice and her lasting impact on the women’s movement, the Democratic Party, and the history of the United States.

This riveting biography could not be more timely. Bella Abzug’s career provides a crucial link in the histories of radicalism, feminism, and electoral politics from the 1930s to the 1990s. Through deep research, thorough historical grounding, and a lively writing style, Zarnow has produced a compelling account of a powerful female politician who fought for peace, racial justice, and gender equality.

Estelle B. Freedman

[Abzug’s] five-decade political career, reconstructed beautifully in a new biography by Leandra Ruth Zarnow, reveals the peregrinations of American leftism during the twentieth century…[This] impressive political biography ultimately raises crucial questions for our own time.

Gotham - Dylan Gottlieb

One of the most beloved and derided politicians of the late twentieth century. She was as famous for her anger (nicknames included ‘Battling Bella’ and ‘Hurricane Bella’) as she was for her unwavering commitment to a set of political principles, among them pacifism, racial equality, and grassroots organizing…Abzug’s career, Zarnow argues, helps us understand the course charted by female politicians today.

New York Review of Books - Maggie Doherty

Engaging and deeply researched…Because of the wide sweep of Abzug’s life and Zarnow’s masterful contextualization, it offers an insightful overview of American political history from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Canadian Journal of History - Tamar W. Carroll

Battling Bella is political biography at its best. Meticulously researched and exciting to read, the book fully acquaints readers with this passionate, pragmatic, and polarizing champion of social justice and her lasting impact on the women’s movement, the Democratic Party, and the history of the United States.

Marjorie Spruill

09/13/2019

An emblem of mid-20th-century feminism, Bella Abzug (1920–88) is unforgettable for her dramatic flair in politics, even as she approached her work as a lawyer tenaciously and pragmatically. Most of her political career took place during the 1970s, and while the majority of this book concentrates on those years, Zarnow (history, Univ. of Houston) examines her early legal career and the precedents it set for her future as a feminist politician. What emerges is a compelling portrait of a woman who pursued her goals with a single-minded intensity that is inspiring, perhaps all the more so owing to the focus on Abzug's home life and marriage, which was equal in a way that is unusual even today. Zarnow states the intention of critiquing Abzug's politics where they fail from an intersectional point of view, but there is a limited case made for her being overly pragmatic except in the case of her not backing Shirley Chilsom's presidential run.

VERDICT A fascinating ride through some of the fastest-paced politics of the 1960s with a larger-than-life character and well suited for feminist history readers.—Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.

Library Journal