Bella Abzug Quotes

Ever since my youth I've been a Zionist, and I worked hard for the cause of a Jewish homeland too. I've visited Israel and I raised my kids with a very strong background in Jewish culture. Besides that, I spent a couple of years of my life as a Hebrew teacher! To try to make me out as anti-Israel was nothing but rotten and vicious. (p 70)

Without getting scientific or psychological or historical about it, it's long been my judgment that women have been at the forefront of social change. When we first got the vote, we used it to clean up the sweat shops, to clean up the horrors of child labor, and so on. Then we got sidetracked. Instead of carrying forth Carrie Chapman Catt's notion that women should organize as a political movement, the movement became nonpartisan and followed the League of Women Voters route. So between their nonpositions and Madison Avenue's assigned stereotype of women as flowers in the home who can be sold all kinds of products to beautify themselves, and Hollywood with its awful stereotypes, women were sunk. Up until now, we've been laboring under the concept of women as appendages to men and children and subjected to constant brainwashing by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, TV-and the descendants of John Adams who know when they have a good thing going. We now see the concept changing because the women's movement, which renewed itself several years ago as an intellectual revolt of the bored middle class housewife, has grown into a broad movement seeking complete economic, social and political change in all arenas. It's like the black movement, which started out over the right to a seat in the front of the bus and then extended itself to pursue for the black people their rightful piece of the whole system. The women's movement, like the black movement and the movement of the young people, comes at a time when the system is not responding to the largest numbers of its people. This puts all these movements in a very critical perspective, because out of all this ferment the last thing we can realistically expect is for things to remain the same. (p 202)

When I was a young lawyer, working women wore hats. It was the only way they would take you seriously.

Women are participating in large numbers at the grassroots levels, but in the overwhelming majority of nations, we still lack effective political power. And that is also true in the United Nations—in the Secretariat and in the member nation delegations.

I want to bring Congress back to the people. If that proves to be impossible to do by working from within, then I'm prepared to go back outside again-to the streets-and do it from there.

People are desperate for help, for leadership. There's no place else to go but to me, they say, and the sad thing is that very often they are right. That's what I want to help change.

Then up gets Carl Albert to tell us he supports Bolling's resolution because he wants to see us work together with the Republicans to end the war. I was appalled! Here was the Speaker of the House-a man in that kind of position-giving us more old-fashioned, desperate, moldy garbage from the past. Since World War II the Democrats and the Republicans have been "joining hands" to fight international communism, and where has it gotten us? We've created a nuclear monster and a vast, uncontrollable military machine. We've inspired guys like Joe McCarthy and Spiro Agnew to level all the opposition. The military and the industrialists and the munitions-makers have moved in to take over our power structure, influencing it, manipulating it and dominating it. All for the sake of good old bipartisanism; all for the sake of good old anticommunism. (p 93)

I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prizefighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing. Whether I'm any of these things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am-and this ought to be made very clear at the outset-I am a very serious woman. I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business. It's no joke to me that women in this country are terribly oppressed and are made to suffer economic, legal and social discrimination. I am not evoking a wild fantasy when I claim that I'm going to help organize a new political coalition of the women, the minorities and the young people, along with the poor, the elderly, the workers and the unemployed, which is going to turn this country upside down and inside out. We're going to reclaim our cities, create more jobs, better housing, better health care, more child care centers, more help for drug addicts; we're going to start doing something for the millions of people in this country whose needs, because of the callousness of the men who've been running our government, have taken a low priority to the cost of killing people in Indochina. To some people all this may sound a bit grandiose, but let me tell you something: This is the only thing we can do and still survive.

When I went to represent my law firm anywhere—I was a young kid just out of college—I said, “How do you do? I'm Bella Abzug from the law firm of such and such,” and people would say, “Yes, fine, fine, sit down.” So I'd wait and nothing much would happen, so finally I'd clear my throat and say, “I'm Bella Abzug from the law firm of such and such,” and they'd say, “Yes, we know, but we're waiting.” I'd say, “What are we waiting for?” And they'd say, “We're waiting for the lawyer.” They thought I was the secretary. So I had this identity crisis. I went home and discussed it with my husband, Martin. In those days professional women wore hats—and gloves, so I put on gloves and a hat. And every time I went anywhere for business, with the hat and gloves, they knew I was there for business. And I jokingly often say, as you can see, I've taken off the gloves. But I like wearing hats and I continue to wear it. When I ran for Congress and got to Washington, they made such a fuss about the hat instead of what was under it that I didn't know whether they wanted me to take it off or keep it on. I decided that they wanted me to take it off, which made me determined to keep it on.

Women are both affected by and effectors of the environmental crisis. We must be part—a central part—of the solution. Our views on economic justice, human rights, reproduction and the achievement of peace—all elements of the environment/development crisis—must be heard at local, national, and international forums wherever policies and decisions are made that can affect the future of life on our planet.

This moment in history requires women to lead the movement for radical change (p 203)

Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Congress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?

I felt if we are going to get anywhere, Congress has got to begin to reflect in its composition the great diversity of this country.

Some of you may have been at the UN Decade of Women conferences in Nairobi in 1985. That was where global feminism came of age—a symbol of sisterhood, of international women’s networks, of our hopes for a better, fairer, safer world. Nairobi was the birthplace of the “Forward-Looking Strategies” document, the most comprehensive historic statement of our agenda, encompassing peace, equality, human rights, sustainable development and environmental protection. Now we must move on and expand our vision. The women’s movement is strong and continues to grow. We are everywhere, and we will be heard . . . or else we—women, men and children—will all hear from Mother Nature. Remember, hell hath no fury like a woman—or an Earth—scorned and despoiled.

All I say is that anybody who thinks he can take me lightly because I'm fresh and colorful had better watch out. (p 49)