Five ways Bella Abzug opened up politics to women and fought for social change

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer.

New York Representative Bella Abzug was the most recognizable woman in politics in the 1970s.

Even so, she is largely forgotten today. Known for wearing flashy hats, she was a spitfire personality and charismatic orator closely covered by the press. She became an overnight political celebrity with fans lining up to gain her autograph. This cultural cache has obscured focus from her substantive work as a self-described “very serious woman” who sought broad societal and legal change in Congress. Here are five reasons her legislative work and political career should be remembered.

1. The Ms. who challenged the “boy’s club” in politics

In 1970, Abzug ran a change-maker campaign to move women from the backroom of politics out front. Her campaign slogan said it all, “This woman’s place is the house, the House of Representatives.” A leader in the anti-war movement and active in reform Democratic politics, she had advised male candidates like John V. Lindsay and Robert F. Kennedy. She advocated to promote women from canvassers to campaign positions, asking one advisor pointedly, “Where are the Women?” Unsatisfied, Abzug ultimately posed the same question to herself, got up the courage, and ran and won.

Her unusual inauguration signaled she would not “go along to get along,” the usual encouragement for newcomers in Congress. As a “freshwoman,” she took a separate oath on the Capitol steps administered by Representative Shirley Chisholm as cheering supporters stood by with signs like, “Give ‘Em Hell, Bella.”

And that she did. Abzug brought a feminist edge to a Democratic New Politics insurgency that shook up Congress, conveying the spirit and concerns of 1960s social movements. She modeled a different kind of congressional office that was majority women and also designed to be a flexible workplace, applying an ethos carried over from her campaign headquarters that had free drop-in childcare. She made waves, literally, when she jumped into the pool at the congressional gym, sex-segregated because some male congressmembers preferred to swim nude.

Other interventions were more systemic, such as promoting a Ms. bill to change the language in federal publications to be less tied to marriage and more gender neutral. She did all this as one of twelve women elected to Congress during her first term, a number she had helped grow by four in an early Year of the Woman.

2. “A minor folk heroine” for gay liberation

Abzug’s campaign was among the first nationally to pursue a “gay vote.” Doug Ireland, her first campaign manager, drew on his personal connections in the gay community to channel this energy. Abzug’s headquarters was a stone’s throw from the Stonewall Inn – the gay bar where a police raid spurred historic protests that helped launch the gay rights movement. This location, more than strategic, signaled a genuine commitment to gay rights as human rights.

As an ally, Abzug sponsored the first federal gay civil rights bill, the Equality Act of 1974. The legislation, still not law, would augment the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include protections for LGBTQ people in the workplace and other areas of public life. Only a few dozen congressmembers supported the Equality Act when first introduced in the 1970s.

With municipal action more promising, Abzug privately urged New York City Mayor Lindsay to support a gay civil rights ordinance, an outcome she committed to when running for mayor in 1977. The night anti-gay activist Anita Bryant succeeded in her campaign to overturn a similar ordinance in Dade County, Florida grieving New Yorkers marched spontaneously to Abzug’s home and awakened her to come out and console the crowd. For these reasons, Abzug became, as one letter writer characterized, “a minor folk heroine.”

3. Watergate and its aftermath would have been different without her

As a lawyer, Abzug had once defended workers, racial minorities, and dissenters who were targeted because of their identities and politics during the McCarthy period. She too was under surveillance, her FBI file spanning from the early 1950s through her time in Congress. She first encountered Richard Nixon when defending clients before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a committee on which he served. Abzug’s long view of President Nixon’s “dirty tricks” alongside her anti-Vietnam War stance led her to call early on for Nixon’s impeachment. As the facts about Watergate unfolded, Abzug maintained her position that Americans had a “right to know.”

Abzug had a knack for procedure and used legislative rules to her advantage. She and staff discovered an obscure device, the Resolution of Inquiry, which members of Congress could use to compel the executive branch to produce documents. She brandished this tool most effectively when President Gerald Ford issued Nixon a pardon. Responding to a nation in shock, Abzug issued a Resolution of Inquiry to seek answers. Ford acquiesced, agreeing to come before Congress if a few conditions were met: “no oath, two hours, and no questions from Bella Abzug.”

Thereafter, as Madame Chairwoman, Abzug led the Government Information and Individual Rights Subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee tasked with oversight of all federal agencies’ record-keeping practices. Abzug played a part in the headline grabbing “Year of Intelligence” probes into clandestine intelligence operations alongside the more known Pike and Church Committees. More lasting in impact, she and her staff taught Americans how to file requests under the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act when these laws were still new. This process is now seen as a basic tool of democracy.

4. The force behind the 1977 National Women’s Conference defining women’s rights as human rights

Abzug sponsored all major legislation now remembered as the biggest achievements of the 1970s women’s movement. Some bills were ultimately not successful such as the Comprehensive Child Development Act, vetoed by President Nixon. Some have changed the gender landscape irreversibly. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act is the reason women today can have their own bank accounts and home loans. One of Abzug’s most grandiose and final legislative victories, the National Women’s Conference law, is among her most important accomplishments. A bipartisan Congress appropriated $5 million to host the first and only federal women’s conference, the U.S. response to the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year meeting in Mexico City. This gathering of American women was more diverse than Congress is today.

The National Women’s Conference held in 1977 started with a symbolic spectacle. Hundreds of young runners passed a torch in a relay race that stretched from Seneca Falls, New York—the site of a historic women’s rights conference in 1848—to Houston, Texas, where “women on the move” were about to make history. There, presiding officer Bella Abzug, joined on stage by three First Ladies, led nearly 2000 diverse delegates elected at lead-up state and territory meetings to pass an expansive National Plan of Action delivered to President Jimmy Carter in 1978 as The Spirit of Houston report. With nearly as many reporters as elected delegates on the scene, this widely covered exercise in democracy displayed its promise and inherent tensions. Some issues considered such as disability and gay rights were ahead of the times, and others such as abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment have returned to the center of national politics.

Abzug spent the next two decades trying to keep the spirit of Houston alive, having more luck in international circles than in the U.S. In 1991, she co-founded the Women’s Environment & Development Organization, a global advocacy group that helped popularize the idea that women’s rights are human rights.

5. She tried to become “one in one hundred” in the U.S. Senate

One of the reasons that Abzug is not readily remembered is because she faced a string of campaign losses. She gambled her House seat to participate in the New York Senate Democratic Primary of 1976, tempted by the chance to break through the Senate glass ceiling. At the time, not one woman served in the all-white, all-male chamber.

This historic Senate campaign exposed the polarities that had developed in the Democratic Party. She ran for a further expansion of equality, while her opponent, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, touted a return to liberty as the party’s governing principle. Abzug lost this race by less than one percent. She lost all future races—a mayoral run in 1977 followed by multiple attempts to return to the House of Representatives—because she was unwilling to temper her principles and unable to convince voters that she had.

These losses should not detract from what Abzug tried to accomplish as a legislator and an advocate for gender parity in politics. There are thousands of campaigns women have attempted since gaining the constitutional right to vote in 1920 that have been forgotten. As Abzug said in her 1984 co-authored book, Gender Gap, “Trying to achieve political power without electoral power is like unlocking a door and then failing to open it.”

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