Associated Press article by Edith Lederer celebrating the life of WEDO Co-founder, Bella Abzug.
Bella S. Abzug, New Yorker, feminist, antiwar activist, politician and lawyer, died yesterday at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 77. She died of complications following heart surgery, said Harold Holzer, who was her spokesman when she served in Congress. She had been hospitalized for weeks, and had been in poor health for several years, he said.
Ms. Abzug represented the West Side of Manhattan for three Congressional terms in the 1970’s. She brought with her a belligerent, exuberant politics that made her a national character. Often called just Bella, she was recognizable everywhere by her big hats and a voice that Norman Mailer said ”could boil the fat off a taxicab driver’s neck.”
She opposed the Vietnam War, championed what was then called women’s liberation and was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon. Long after it ceased to be fashionable, she called her politics radical. During her last campaign, for Congress in 1986, she told The New York Times, ”I am not a centrist.”
Bella Abzug was a founding feminist, and an enduring one. In the movement’s giddy, sloganeering early days, Ms. Abzug was, like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, an icon, the hat bobbing before the cameras at marches and rallies.
Read the full article here: Bella Abzug Left Global Vision of Women’s Equality (pdf)
