Not that she needed a gimmick to get attention. During five decades of public life, Bella Savitzky Abzug, who died on March 31 at 77 following heart surgery, was a fearless advocate for civil rights and women's liberation and her native New York City—for which she once proposed statehood. Her outspoken opinions, accompanied by raspy-voiced speeches and bone-cracking handshakes, were not for everyone: On learning that she was attending a 1995 women's rights conference in Beijing, George Bush quipped, "I feel somewhat sorry for the Chinese." But Abzug was beloved among liberals. "In a just country," says Gloria Steinem, "she would have been President."
As it happened, her achievements were considerable. The daughter of a Russian immigrant butcher, she studied law at Columbia University and married stockbroker Martin Abzug in 1944. They raised two daughters while Bella worked as a civil rights lawyer in the South and, later, as a peace activist in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and across the country. First elected to Congress in 1970, she passed up a fourth term for an unsuccessful Bicentennial run for the Senate. Martin died in 1986, and health problems forced her to occasionally use a wheelchair in her final years, but Abzug worked full-time on women's rights and environmental campaigns until the end.
Few would begrudge her in death what she so often claimed in her clamorous life—the last word: "There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing," she wrote in her 1972 autobiography, Bella! "But whatever I am...I am a very serious woman."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
