 Good afternoon, and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for this afternoon's program, whether you're here in the theater or joining us on Facebook or YouTube. And a special welcome to our C-SPAN audience. Before we hear from Professor Leandre Zarno about her new book, Battling Bella, the protest politics of Bella Abzug, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up next week here in the McGowan Theater. Actually, tonight is the first one. At 7 p.m. we'll have a special program celebrating the U.S. Bill of Rights as an inspiration to the world. In anticipation of Bill of Rights Day on December 15, a panel of scholars and authors will explore the unique history of the U.S. Bill of Rights and the ways in which it has influenced national constitutions around the world from 1791 to this very moment. Tomorrow at noon, author Tammy R. Vigil will tell us about her new book, Melania and Michelle, First Ladies in the New Era, which explores how each woman has crafted her public image and used her platform to influence the country, while also serving as a paragon of fashion in American womanhood. To keep informed about these events and others throughout the year, check out our website at archives.gov or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also get information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports our education and outreach activities. Check out their website, archivesfoundation.org, to learn more about them and join online. Today's discussion is part of a series of programs related to our recently opened exhibit, Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote. Rightfully Hers commemorates the centennial of the 19th Amendment and tells the story of women's struggles for voting rights as a critical step toward equal citizenship. The exhibit explores how American women across the spectrum of race, ethnicity and class advance the cause of suffrage and follows the struggle for voting rights beyond 1920. The decades-long fight for the vote in the 19th and early 20th centuries engaged large numbers of women in the political process. Once the national vote was won, women continued their civic engagement by running for seats on county boards, state houses and the United States Congress. In the first Congress, after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, three women sat in the House of Representatives. When Bella Abzug took her seat 50 years later, she was one of 13 women in the House. Although part of a small minority in the chamber, Abzug made herself heard. Like the women who fought for the right to vote in the first decades of the 20th century, Abzug also was the target of criticism and derision. Her vocal support for controversial causes caused friction not only with the opposition but within her own party. She acknowledged that, that many might call her brash and overbearing, but she was always a very serious woman. She was a true heir to the suffragists and through her own actions paved the way for other women to take their place in the political arena. Professors Zarno is here launching her book here with us at the National Archives. We're honored for that. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Affiliated Faculty in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Houston, she is a specialist in modern U.S. women's political, legal and intellectual history with additional interests in media history and transnational women's activism. Winner of the 2010 Judith Lee Ridge Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians, her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Woodrow Wilson Foundation among others. A government major at Smith College, 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 Immigration Women's Project of the now Legal Defense and Education Fund. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Leandra Zarno. Thank you so much and good afternoon. I want to thank Douglas Swanson here at the National Archives as well as David Ferriero for such a wonderful opportunity to speak and to share my book today and for such a warm introduction. And I want to show you a picture of Bella Abzug and certainly I love this cover because she's so joyful and also exuberant and, you know, really on fire. And basically, New York representative Bella Abzug is currently enjoying renaissance. Not quite at the level of her contemporary Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, notorious RGB, but I would say that actually in her time Bella Abzug was the more notorious. She really, Bella Abzug is on her way to have that level of focus. Recently actor Harvey Firestein wrapped up his play Bella Bella off Broadway in New York City. And he appeared on stage in All Black to accentuate his red hat, her famous red hat. And he really became a canvas on which Bella Abzug appeared. He channeled her exuberance and her humor and delivered some of her best lines and played to a full house throughout the play's run. Now in the third season of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a beloved show about a quick witted 1950s housewife turned comic it's fitting that Bella Abzug also makes an appearance. Episode five, I will say no more. Abzug would have loved this posthumous attention for she brought a touch of showbiz pizzazz to Washington. And she also would have loved the fact that New Yorkers since 2018 can now walk down Bella Abzug's way in Greenwich Village and she would have loved that they can also have their children play in Bella Abzug Park that opened alongside the new Hudson Yards renovation in New York City. It's quite fitting that the Hudson Yards subway entrance is right there in her park. For she treated as sport, stopping commuters in their tracks at these spots to debate the issues and possibly win their vote. So I'm heartened by these recent gestures that signal a reappraisal of the trailblazing work of Bella Abzug. She was after all the most recognizable woman in politics in the 1970s. In fact, Abzug was selected to be on the cover of Life magazine in 1972 for an issue that predicted perhaps for the first time that this midterm election just might be a year of the woman. More than a congresswoman, she's a symbol, this article noted, of Bella Abzug casting her as a larger-than-life figure and political force. She was both, but in the refracted historical memory of today, Abzug as a cultural feminist icon has outlived Abzug the resolute, clever parliamentarian. And as you heard from David's opening remarks, Abzug liked to tell reporters at the time, I am a very serious woman. So today I will bring attention to this very serious woman explaining what fired Bella Abzug's progressive politics and the energy that she brought to Washington where she tried to take on what she and others called the system during her three terms in congress between 1971 and 1976. After I explain a bit more about why she's been winnowed down to a folk-like cultural symbol, I'll explain why her political work is instructive in our times. Indeed, Abzug was a harbinger of change, working out front, as she liked to say, on controversial issues that now feel commonplace. Her story is newly relevant. As we face complex social problems, deep economic stratification, heightened partisan polarization, and corruption in government. For in this climate of 24-hour news, I expect Abzug would have had a lot to say about the Me Too movement, the progressive challenge on display in the Democratic presidential primary, and the current impeachment hearings happening down the street today. After all, as one of the first commentators on CNN, she signed off each segment saying, this is Bella Abzug, and I'm not talking through my hat. And so here we must begin with her beloved hat so memorable, the Smithsonian has one in their collection. A consummate performer with lots of celebrity friends, Abzug knew how to put on in her words my whole regalia. She recognized that political reporters focused on women politicians dressed in demeanor first, and their ideas second. She really wanted to capitalize on this bias. So she began wearing hats regularly when she was a lawyer in the mid 1940s. And she kept being mistaken for being a legal secretary when she went into court. So her husband Martin actually encouraged her to start wearing hats, to distinguish herself as a professional. Her hats also reflected her practicality. You see, in the 1970s, there was only one ladies room in the capital building, and not near the house floor. So she was frustrated that there was nowhere to fix her rumpled hair. Finally, she simply loved hats. She made time in between all of her congressional appointments to go see milleners, especially when she was traveling. And she also traveled with hat boxes on wheels. So this was very important to her, and this is why on one occasion she coaxed her nemesis, Representative Ed Koch, to fetch a hat she had forgotten at her congressional office, that she would really miss over that weekend back in New York. So as Koch remembered it, and you can imagine his exasperation here, I said, of course, Bella, and the staff roared. I brought up her hat, carried it on the goddamn plane in a box very careful, brought it to my house, and Martin, her husband, picked it up. But if Bella Abzug's hats got attention, it was her witty, sharp shooting, an impassioned speaking style, and commanding physical presence that kept people's focus. I mentioned Abzug was the most recognizable woman in politics in the 1970s. She was also the most revered and the most reviled. She was sister Bella to some, and a lot of constituent letters start with that. And for others, however, she was called every name you could possibly think of in the book. These extreme reactions, I argue, in my book, is that really gives us a sense of 1970s politics, and we can read her constituent letters historically to understand the tenor of extremes that really motivated people to speak out to Congress members. Whether you loved her or you hated her, you tuned in when she was on the radio or television, and that was often. Abzug was such a good sport. For instance, one nighttime talk show host asked her if she could actually toot her own horn. And lo and behold, outcomes from the backs of the stage a bugle, and she toots perfect notes, because actually when she went to camp as a Zionist when she was growing up, a Jewish camp, she was in charge of the bugle. So Abzug gave reporters inordinate access, in part, because she was a former civil liberties lawyer, and she was deeply committed to defending the First Amendment and really specifically focused on freedom of the press. Yet privately, she lamented being exhibit A, and her weight especially was lampooned by reporters and political foes and in copycat hate mail. So in fact, one of the most surprising letters that I found in her section of her archive that's marked abusive mail was someone who called her a bed bug and basically drew a very large form. So despite this negative response, Abzug loved public attention. She became such a phenomenon that the visitors that would come to Washington would stand outside her office in the Longworth building. And the line was known to go all the way down the hallway and out the door. And this was just so that per chance they could get a sighting of Bella Abzug and her autograph. So she was a sensation on Capitol Hill. Yet this kind of publicity and fandom made it easy to dismiss her political actions as ineffective, as mere spectacle. To be sure, women did stand out on Capitol Hill. There were actually, when she came to Congress in 1971, there were 15 women in Congress total. And she called herself a fresh woman specifically to demonstrate that this was a minority position to be. Yet as Abzug gained stature and power, she was harder to disregard. By her third term, she had emerged as an influential member who could rally the Progressive Caucus. And for this, she was named an at-large whip. She was the first woman in history in the House of Representatives to hold such an office and really helped pave the way, ultimately, for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 1975 as well, Abzug gained the title Madam Chairwoman, selected to lead the Government Information and Individual Rights Subcommittee of the Powerful House Government Operations Oversight Committee. Quite a mouthful, but a really important subcommittee. These accomplishments led US News and World Report to characterize Bella Abzug as the third most influential member in Congress in that period. Still, resistance to Abzug within and outside Congress remained fierce. As reporter Mary McGrory observed, Abzug is called Madam Chairwoman with pained correctness by government officials who, like her colleagues, once hoped to ignore her out of existence. And Abzug, I would contend, became easier to ignore out of existence once she faced a string of electoral losses. And as political historians really like to focus on the winners. So sometimes we overlook someone like Bella Abzug who had three terms in Congress. Abzug hit an electoral wall as she tried to crack at that time what was the ultimate political glass ceiling which was trying to get a woman in the Senate. In fact, the pamphlets from her Senate run pictured the all-white, all-male Senate and noted, let's have one in 100. So I see this period of 1976 when she was trying to crack the Senate glass ceiling and one of her colleagues, Patsy Mink, also tried that year as a tipping point for women in Congress and also for progressives in Congress. And I think that we can really look back to this period as the centering point of the conservative political realignment in the US in the coming of the age of Reagan. But we often forget that a rightward turn happened in the Democratic Party as well at this time. And likewise, looking back to the 70s reminds us that ours is not the only polarized time in this period. In fact, the 70s was one of the most highly divided periods in which Americans of all backgrounds and political persuasions exhibited alarm and rage. Think about this, the oil shocks, doubling divorce, urban unrest, stagnating wages, political corruption, and unwinnable war. These were difficult times with no easy solutions and little agreement on the way forward. But a heightened sense of urgency to do something. So often the 1960s are seen as the social unrest moment, the epic moment of our history in the 20th century, but I would argue the 1970s was that too. At mid decade, however, New York Democrats were more comfortable with the moderate Daniel Patrick Moynihan's way forward in this Senate race. He called for a return to liberty and robust national security. And his embrace of the multinational corporation and promise to put white male blue collars first resonated. Bella Abzug on the other hand, when she ran for Senate against Moynihan argued for the expansion of legal equality to promote demilitarization and to provide a diverse workforce, a greater safety social net. Essentially, Abzug's vision was toward a greater social democratic future unrealized. And Moynihan's toward a new liberal future achieved. And really, this is such a turning point in a tense race that Bella Abzug lost by less than 1% in this particular primary. But it was watched throughout the United States as a tipping point for the Democratic Party. So unwilling and unable to rebrand her principal politics for what became the law and order and family values and to America's ahead. Abzug lost a string of races, Senate in 1976, New York City mayor in 1977, and multiple tries for the House in later years. So I think that if we focus only on these losses we miss what Abzug attempted, what she accomplished and also why she galvanized resistance becoming as one constituent letter writer put it, the conservatives double. So she really became this incredible symbol for everything rotten with liberalism in this period. Abzug was not always or even often successful. She came in raring to go, thwarting convention on her first day when she held her own inauguration ceremony on the Capitol steps. Representative Shirley Chisholm administered the oath as a crowd chanted two, four, six, eight, Bella set the date. Earlier inside on the House floor she had introduced a resolution to set the date for withdrawal from Vietnam, her first congressional act. Coming out of the anti-war movement, this was expected. As Abzug promised the crowd outside the Capitol and you'll have to imagine her incredible New York drawl here, I just can't do it as a Californian, but here she goes. I pledged to devote my time, my energy and my abilities in and out of Congress to help end the war in Indochina to work for new priorities, to heal the domestic wounds of war and to use our country's wealth for life, not death. She ran in this moment of 1970 on the slogan, this woman's place is in the house, the house of representatives. And she sought to break up the boys club as she called it in Washington. She would not go along to get along. She came to Washington to, in her words, push and push and push. Instead she found Congress to be frustrating. She couldn't believe that it was, in her words, a slow moving behemoth. She faced great resistance because of her gender, her Jewishness, her leftist politics, her seniority, or actually lack thereof and her bullheaded confrontational style. She aimed to be, and this is what her staff hoped, so these are their words, a maverick without becoming a pariah. Where her congressional peers would place Abzug as a maverick or a pariah depended most on their partisan allegiances and comfort with women in power. However, it was undeniable that Abzug effectively mastered the house rules to augment her impact. She learned how to achieve more speaking time and to get her issues up for debate and she discovered long buried strategies to exert congressional power on the executive. Actually in these days, the WIP office did these cheat sheets that were basically the size of a man's wallet. And she went one better and had her staff create a large cheat sheet the size of her purse. So she often used her gender to her advantage in that particular way. So essentially, Abzug worked within the body of Congress in an attempt to fundamentally reorganize its makeup, its conventions, and its policy agenda. These were years that there was a democratic majority. And yet, she believed Congress was off track, run by what she called very little men, which basically were the Southern Democrats and the Cold War liberals in her party. Only by drawing focus to its racial and gender on representativeness in Congress and by shifting the policy agenda to be more aggressively progressive, she believed only then would the nation write its wrong course. She worked in the company of others. Shirley Chisholm and her friend, Pasi Tutakimoto-Mink, are among the most. They were basically that day's squad. And I think that she really can be seen as the most left-leaning woman in Congress her days AOC or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We're seeing a lot of parallels here. Throughout her life, Bella Abzug participated in movements before they reached a critical mass. Civil rights before Selma. Peace activism before the Vietnam War. Feminism before the United Nations called for a decade of women. And she championed issues that have emerged as central concerns in the 21st century. Green energy, privacy rights, affordable healthcare and education, LGBT rights, universal childcare, and criminal justice reform, and that's to name a few. However, Abzug did not work alone in Washington. With each election from 1968 to 1974, there were changed politicians calling for new politics and new priorities that were elected. This progressive wing of new politics Democrats challenged their party's long-standing establishment. And Abzug was very self-aware that she was leading ahead of even this pack of progressives. She was often out of step with social norms and to the left of America's center. She thought if she pushed from the left that the center would shift actually with her. And she was quite optimistic. She noted actually in her last term the following. I come out of the peace movement and women's rights. They thought I was a lunatic. Now these causes are being supported by a majority of the people. I've been out front, everybody has caught up. So to give you a sense of her forward thinking reformist vision, I wanted to now zero in on her work in the area of gay rights, which I think has become a more newly relevant peer aspect of her legacy that hasn't gotten that much attention actually. Bella Abzug was among the first candidates to cultivate actively a gay vote. Her 1970 campaign headquarters was actually located right across the street from Stonewall Inn where bargoers resisted a police raid in 1969 and called for gay liberation. Once in Congress, she made good on her promise to represent this constituency. In 1974, she introduced the Equality Act, the first attempt at the federal level to achieve a gay civil rights bill. This act really ended before it started. It gained very little traction and at its peak, a few dozen sponsors. She urged her colleagues, however, and all Americans to summon in her words their fair mindedness and their concern for human rights when considering gay rights. And this advocacy made her a legend really between within LGBT circles. For instance, when she showed up at a Castro Street eatery when fundraising for her Senate bid, camera shop owner, turned politician Harvey Milk, made sure to snap a shot. And it's just a really endearing picture. And during Abzug's 1977 run for mayor, news dropped that gospel singer Anita Bryant was successful in her mission to overturn a gay civil rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida as part of her anti-gay Save Our Children campaign. And so in New York, LGBT protestors staged a late night march, really a very somber, solemn march to contest the decision. And lo and behold, they ended their march at Bella Abzug stoop late into the night. And so she's hearing this crowd gathering below and she's wakin' from her slumber and she wants to go see what it is. And they're chanting Bella Bella and she puts on her bathrobe and goes outside and consoles the crowd. So Abzug was not an advocate on all LGBT issues. For instance, while in Congress, she did not support gay sex education in schools and she did not support gays in the military. And these were two issues that gay activists really pushed her on and did so unsuccessfully. But she became a natural ally because of her deep commitment to human rights and her intersectional understanding of identity and power. As her first campaign manager, Doug Ireland, who was not out in these years, observed about his boss the following. Bella was a veteran of the civil rights movement and had an instinctive response to the need for gay rights. When gay people stood up and said, we're not gonna take it anymore, she understood that they were applying to their own human condition the lessons a lot of us learned in the struggle for black civil rights. So I wanna draw attention back now to Bella Abzug before Congress. She was what we call a cause lawyer for 25 years before she became a member of Congress and she early in her career got involved in civil rights. To explain how she became involved in the civil rights movement, I wanna draw attention to her religion and her education. Abzug's politics were fired by the Jewish ethical commitment to tikkun olam, which basically means to pursue justice, to repair the world. And this is a guiding light for a lot of social activists. In fact, one of my colleagues, Jane DeHart, in her recent biography that's excellent on Ruth Bader Ginsburg draws attention to tikkun olam being important to Ginsburg as well. So Bella Abzug was a devout conservative Jew and labor Zionist who I am convinced would quite possibly have chosen to become a rabbi instead of a lawyer if that option had been available to her in the early 1940s. She moonlighted each night working on a education degree at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is the flagship institution for conservative Judaism. And she did this while working towards a political science degree at Hunter College. And during World War II, she received a full scholarship to attend Columbia Law School where she was one of nine women in her class. And she and others at Columbia Law were grateful to be there. But these women knew, they were quite aware that they had been reluctantly admitted for the duration of the war. And I've verified this by reading the law deans annual reports where he's very clear about this. And so this was the entrance to her professional career. And likewise, Abzug endured workplace discrimination when forging a path as a young lawyer. On occasion, as she entered a courtroom, she heard attorneys around her whispering, there goes the menstruating lawyer. And she often mistakenly received professional mail directed to Dear Mr. Abzug and Dear Sir. And this personal experience with sexism really attuned Abzug to the discrimination of others and compelled her to become involved in racial civil rights. So I just want to spotlight really quickly one case that is perhaps the most devastating and profound of her early legal career. Spurred to conviction in 1948, she boarded a plane to make her first trip to the South. She was in her late 20s at the time. And she was traveling to Mississippi to represent Willie McGee, an African-American man who had been accused of raping a white woman that there was known in a whisper campaign that they had a relationship. So Bella Abzug helped him find local representation for his retrial and co-led his defense during his appeal. At his initial trial in 1945, he was found guilty after a few minutes of deliberation, which in Mississippi in those days meant death by electric chair. Abzug believed the Southern Criminal Justice System was a charade of justice. And she's certainly coming from outside the South's perspective here. During McGee's appeal, Abzug very innovatively brought attention to what she saw as the core of this case and actually argued this openly in the legal record. In this case, Southern rape law was misused not to protect women as it was meant to, but to police the most intimate color line that monitored interracial sex. Abzug's argument is an early call for criminal justice reform, but McGee's appeal had little chance. McGee was executed in 1951 three years before Brown versus Board of Education was decided. And it wasn't an extremely risky case for Bella Abzug to take on. In fact, the most harrowing point for Abzug occurred one night when she arrived the day before court hearing in Jackson and the hotel where she had a reservation would not house her. She went from hotel to hotel and no one would house her. They were very much afraid to do so. So she had no choice but to spend the night in a bathroom stall at the bus station and she was eight months pregnant at the time and miscarried shortly thereafter. The next day on deterred, Abzug showed up in court and defended her civil rights alongside that of her clients. When McGee was executed, Abzug was devastated. She later reflected, I realized that there was something so terribly, terribly wrong with our democracy. Most of the cases Bella Abzug took on during the McCarthy period were losses. She represented unionists on strike, immigrants with precarious status, racial minorities experiencing discrimination and political dissenters facing blacklisting. But the work made her a bare knuckles fighter for the underdogs. Even if deepening her sense that courtroom change moved slowly, so you can see over the course of the 50s she gets more interested in legislative action through this experience. Also, I would say she was painted red in these period even though she wasn't a communist herself. She was a staunch civil libertarian and this especially occurred because she forged her career as a member of the National Lawyers Guild which is a very left legal bar at least at that time and the House on American Activities Committee characterized it as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party. So most of its members like Abzug were not party members but many were and most of its members including Bella Abzug were under surveillance and her surveillance starts actually her FBI file which is very thick starts with the Willie McGee case. Indeed, actually at one point Director Jagger Hoover himself intervened to keep Abzug's file active because he reserved a special wrath for guild lawyers. These were the lawyers that were representing everyone that were seen as dissenters and on Americans and her file goes actually through the time she was in Congress which I found quite remarkable. This history is important because it informed Abzug's work as a civil libertarian in Congress and compelled her to press for Americans and Congress's right to know. She was a lead sponsor of the 1974 Privacy Act which provided Americans with a chance to request and expunge records the government kept on them. And during the 1975 year of intelligence which was a real important check on executive privilege after Watergate, she participated with her subcommittee, the government information and individual rights subcommittee in this process and she, her committee which is a standing committee was directed to oversee the executive's record keeping practices. And she and her staff drew focus into the government's covert domestic intelligence gathering. In a sense, Bella Abzug as Madame Chairwoman used her committee to lodge a redemptive campaign to as she put it, harass back. Critically evaluating government surveillance of Americans during the McCarthy period as well as in the civil rights movement, in the peace movement, in the women's liberation movement, et cetera. And in her proudest and most confrontational moment that gained lots of headlines she called CIA director William Colby before her committee to explain why the agency had monitored the international bound male of thousands of Americans since 1953, including her own. And with cameras rolling, Abzug admonished the tampering of my male are a violation of privacy, my individual rights and the law. In this game, lots of support on the progressive side and lots of wrath on the conservative side and was dismissed certainly by the intelligence community at the time. More impacting than this dramatic moment, however, was the daily oversight of the implementation of the freedom of information and privacy acts still in their infancy in these years. Abzug and her legal staff put pressure on agencies intervening on individual FOIA cases and more importantly, schooled Americans on how to file requests for information under these laws. In a sense, the Abzug committee guided Americans to see the freedom of information act request mechanism as a basic tool of democracy. And they worked a lot with lawyers and with reporters in these years as well. So in my view, Abzug civil liberties work in Congress is her most overlooked and among her most consequential. As her collaborator, Senator Edward Kennedy noted, she understood the whole penchant for secrecy. This was a passion that she had. If we got an openness in government, that was truth to power. So this brings me to my final focus today, women and Watergate. And Bella Abzug really offered leadership in both areas. As a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, she emerged as a leading feminist power broker who helped solidify a sustained feminist block in the Democratic Party. And certainly at the 1972 DNC, where the number of delegates tripled due to a negotiation very effective one that happened with the National Women's Political Caucus, we could see this. We could see this also in the Republican Party because this was a nonpartisan group. So women. And let's get to Watergate. As one of the presidents, Richard Nixon's most eminent critics, she was among the first in the house to call for the president's impeachment. Certainly, she did this because of the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, but even before that happened, Abzug adamantly advocated for Nixon's impeachment because of secret bombings in Cambodia. So in the spring of 1973, before the Watergate scandal had reached at Zenith, Abzug and her staff deliberated over how to nail Nixon. And so this was one of the more interesting and entertaining, I would say, as a historian, not entertaining in those years, memos that I found. But basically her staff really thought about how to, in their words, move Congress onto the offensive and recoup some of the programs Nixon knocked out. So they're really interested not only in Vietnam, not only in the Watergate scandal, but thirdly in the Nixon budget and impoundment of social programs. So Abzug had an impeachment resolution ready to go, but she sat on it until she would be part of a chorus instead of delivering a lone siren call for impeachment. And so she issued her resolution in October of 1973 as one of over 50. So all kinds of Congress members were presenting their resolutions and their reasonings for high crimes and misdemeanors, a little bit different than what's happening right now. And Bella Abzug saw Nixon's high crimes and misdemeanors and the surrounding constitutional crisis as part of a longer and wider pattern of presidential subterfuge. Watergate, Abzug contended, was a shorthand for political espionage, wiretapping, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, lawbreaking, subversion of the democratic process and other criminal actions. So she had a long list of reasons there. Abzug also had a very gendered perspective of this early political crisis facing the nation in the 70s. She believed that the nation's problems were foremost a failure of male leadership. The Vietnam War, it was a product of what she called male military megalomania. The Watergate scandal involving all the president's men. It was naturally what happens when the nation is governed by, in her words, male power and potency. One of the more revealing and entertaining archival finds I had actually during researching this book was actually just an offhand note. She liked to write on these yellow legal pads that lawyers love. And this one was just kind of cast away. And basically it was an imagined scenario in which Bella Abzug cast First Lady Pat Nixon as a stealth agent of women's liberation. So her, this is her words, she said, converted to women's lib after having to sit and smile bravely through too many speeches of honor of America. Abzug playfully saw Pat Nixon as my insider informant and envisioned that she, Pat Nixon, might report the following back. The White House believes the president can be impeached. So when I saw this, I thought, oh my goodness, is this the beginning of a speech? Is this Bella Abzug's greatest and wildest fantasy? What is this? And I still don't know exactly how it was used or if it was used or if she really just had a bad day and sat at her desk and decided to crank out this fantasy. So it's really fun. And what it reveals, however, I think is really important. It reveals Bella Abzug's view that women had a stronger moral compass than men and her belief that they would operate differently in the White House. This notion that women are the moral guardians of our nation is deeply ingrained in the United States. This was not new to the 20th century, let alone the 1970s. And the idea that politics would be more civil, governance would run more smoothly, and the US would be more peaceful and just if women were equally represented all areas of government remains yet to be fully tested as we know. During the 1974 midterms, the National Women's Political Caucus promoted the idea that women were not part of the Watergate problem and thus best suited to clean up the mess. And Ms. Magazine, Abzug actually predicted in this election, if 1973 was the shattering year of Watergate, 1974 can be the unifying year of the new political woman. So that election season of 1974, I think is a really interesting one to compare to the 2018 midterms. In 1974, over 2,000 women ran for office and this was historic. But the outcome of this election was very disappointing for the National Women's Political Caucus and women throughout the US. Progressives generally gained big, bringing in a group that the media dubbed the Watergate babies and a Bella Abzug fan club. But the number of women in Congress overall only increased by three actually, to 19 total in 1974. So clearly the 2018 midterms was a different outcome with women cast as changed candidates receiving the largest bump in a single election in US history and women now at a quarter in the Senate and nearly that in the House of Representatives. In a sense, what we are now witnessing in this me too moment is the continuation of a halfway revolution that Bella Abzug and her allies started in the 1970s. Abzug and her feminist allies in Washington exposed and challenged how patriarchy, patriarchy or the structures of male power defined the physical spaces, social practices and policy objectives of government. Congresswoman, government staffers and outside feminist organizers collaborated to change the language of politics. They changed or advocated to change and successfully achieved government publications to be rewritten, rewritten with gender neutral language and introducing the new title Ms. Also they worked to integrate sex segregated spaces. Abzug is an avid swimmer, was an avid swimmer and really took this interest to Capitol Hill. She demanded lane times at the congressional pool and really dismissed the lame excuse that some male members like to swim in the nude and so therefore a woman couldn't use the pool. So she just, you know, she just splashed her way and plunged right in, or plunged right in. Women in Congress pushed for better less gendered committee assignments for it was assumed all women wanted to serve on committees pertaining to children and families. And these Congresswomen also compelled their majority male colleagues to join them in passing landmark women's rights legislation. And so when I teach women's history, I talk about this period as basically the shifting points in women's rights and civil rights as was the 1960s for racial civil rights. And so for instance, Title IX transformed the world of sports for women. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act enabled women to have for the first time their own bank accounts, credit cards and student and home loans. So these are huge, these really changed the economic independence for women as well as their physicality, their opportunity in physical sports. However, the reason I call this a halfway revolution is because the sexualized culture on Capitol Hill persisted. And major goals from ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment into the US Constitution to Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm's main goal of universal childhood, sorry, childcare ultimately failed. That one at President Nixon's veto. And this is a real kicker. It may come as a surprise that at the end of the 1970s, a decade of women, there were less women in US Congress than there were at the beginning of the 1960s. So that's really a sobering revelation that I just one day discovered after years of working on this project, it just came to me, wow, this is huge, that this is the decade of women and that's where we are at the end of it. Still, as we reflect on the 2018 midterms and look to the 2020 election and suffrage centennial, I think there is reason to be optimistic that a turnaround for women in politics is upon us. And this was something that Bella Abzug had hoped for her entire life. Her biggest dream was to be back in Congress and to witness a woman delivering the State of the Union address. She also liked to say the ultimate sign of gender justice would be for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel. I love that one. But as much as Abzug advocated gender parity in politics, she was not unconditional with this advocacy. And sometimes she was a bit foolhardy in seeing, a little bit too rosy, shall I say, in seeing the ideological difference among women as inconsequential. She believed women lean progressive. She dismissed the political independence of conservative women and she thought if more women were in government, it would steer the nation quite naturally towards the progressive future. She also did not endorse everyone. So for instance, perhaps most tragically, she did not support Shirley Chisholm for president who was a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus. And instead calculated that Georgia McGovern had a better chance to win. So she thought about that electability question very strategically. Also in this same election, ironically, she received, she lost the Democratic primary to incumbent William Fitz Ryan and received a second chance at office only after he died before the general election of cancer. And so, you know, initially, basically she had to run against Ryan or someone because her district was dismantled during redistricting. So basically this issue of taking on incumbents and this measure of electability is a very difficult hurdle for women in politics then and now. And Bella Abzo's own electoral viability was short in part because of her unwillingness to compromise her convictions. She set her sights squarely on building a more perfect democracy which she saw as a progressive democracy that prioritized economic parity and human rights and greater democratization of power. So today we are witnessing the most sizable progressive challenge since this earlier period, since this 1970s period when a lot of Democrats called for open conventions and new politics. And so this call was happening in third parties but also within the Democratic party. And the jury is still out if the progressive wing of the Democratic party today will make a sizable impact on the outcome of the presidential primary in 2020. But in the tradition of Bella Abzo, they continue to try. Thank you very much. So I think we have some time for questions which I'm very happy to take and will do my best to answer. So if you would like to ask one or tell us a Bella Abzo story because a lot of us have them, you're very welcome to go to one of these mics on the side. Did she have any relationship with Gloria Steinem? Yes, very good question. So she met Gloria Steinem in the late 1960s and Gloria Steinem was very involved in all of her campaigns. And basically Bella Abzo was probably the most influential mentor to Gloria Steinem that she had. Gloria Steinem often encouraged her not to run for various offices. She was really worried about how Bella Abzo would be treated in the press. And so often told her that and presented that particular perspective. And so it was usually Martin Abzo, Bella Abzo's husband and Gloria Steinem saying, just don't do it. And usually it was because of the concern for what would prevail. But she always went for it anyways. Thank you, that's a great question. Others? I live and vote in the last colony of North America, also known as the District of Columbia. I don't know if you follow our electoral politics. We currently, the mayor is named Muriel Bowser. My council member, I'm a big fan of in Ward three, Mary Che. The first time she was sworn in, she used Ruth Bader Ginsburg for swearing her in because they'd been on a committee together for women in the law, whatever. But it's not just we have taxation without representation, which was a cute slogan in the 1770s when we had Mad King George making our decisions. But it's also, we shouldn't have to depend on the kindness of other people, senators or MCs in the house. And I was wondering if you've thought about that. And particularly if you've spent time in Massachusetts, I would hope that we'd be grounded in that. My ancestors were in Northampton and Hadley for hundreds of years. So I was wondering, how do you connect this with we have no voting rights at the white man feels bound to respect? And does this infuse your thinking and your life? And we will start doing that. Absolutely, thank you very much for your question. And having spent some time in Northampton myself, I definitely have a soft spot for Massachusetts. The issue of taxation without representation was key to Bella Abzox's thinking. And one story that I didn't tell today, but I think is important is her work in Women's Strike for Peace, which was the organization that she was involved in that really catapulted her into politics. And it was a mother's disarmament group, not unlike Code Pink for today. And they recognized that because there was lack of representation of women in elected office in the 1960s that they should make light of this issue of no taxation without representation. And so actually in the late 1960s, they had an anti-tax movement or campaign where they brought up this issue and they encouraged all the women in the United States to go out and throw tea or have teas and throw tea. And they brought tea bags to Washington and would give them out as kind of a gimmick when they were lobbying to demonstrate that there really needed to be more attention to this issue of no taxation without representation. And specifically they were arguing against and challenging President Nixon's and then before that, Johnson's military budget. So this has really been, I think, a very important theme for women organizers in our nation's history, but even in our present, more recent past as well. I think it's a key way of thinking for how the whole country is colonialized and national debt and why are we in Afghanistan? How do we change it? It begins at home, but we won't change unless 300 million other Americans figure out why it's their issue too. Code Colonials, like being co-alcoholics. So I keep looking. The answer's closer than you think, but everybody gets attention to this disorder. Why is that? Thank you very much for your contribution, yes. Other questions or comments? I have really clear memories of Bella at the National Women's Political Convention, the International Year of the Women in Houston in 1977. Do you talk about that in your book at all and what do you think is the lasting significance of the National Women's Conference? Thank you so much for that question. So the last meaty chapter in my book does deal with the 1977 National Women's Conference, which I would say Bella Abzug saw as her crowning achievement in Congress. And so this conference brought together over 150,000 people in the United States that met at 50 state meetings and six territorial meetings and elected 2,000 delegates to come to Houston in November 1977 to create a 26-plank national policy agenda that was, you know, by law, you know, presented to President Jimmy Carter. And so this was the brainchild of Bella Abzug and others, a whole group actually, of women in Congress as an answer to the United Nations International Women's Year meeting in Mexico City. So it may come as a surprise or maybe not that the United States did not have a national women's conference before the Mexico City meeting. And so it was somewhat of an embarrassment, actually, that we hadn't led the way in that way. And so the way that this was pitched was we need to get on board and lead, you know, defining human rights, women's rights as human rights, you know, for the post-Mexico City moment. And so this was a very contested fight actually to get the U.S. Congress to appropriate $5 million, but they did. And I think that is a testament to the influence of, you know, a feminist block in Congress in these particular years. But this also goes back to Bella Abzug's days at Hunter College in New York City, which is an all-women's predominantly working-class college in the 1930s and 40s. And there she was the president of student government and they led an all-women's, you know, model legislative event. And so I think that she was trying to realize at a national scale what had been a college girl's dream, you know, event. And so her role in Houston as a presiding officer was really, really important. And actually myself and another faculty member, Dr. Nancy Beck Young at University of Houston, are launching a digital humanities project to create a website that will capture all of the stories, oral histories, and ephemera, archival ephemera of the woman that went to the National Women's Conference as well as think about all of the ways in which the legislation, you know, that was basically imagined that this conference has and has not, for the most part, been realized. So it's a very, you know, kind of mixed legacy because President Carter felt like the National Women's Conference in Houston was the apex, was the accomplishment. And there wasn't much of a follow through afterwards. So thank you very much for that question. Well thank you so much for coming out today and I guess I'll be available for more questions and if you'd like to talk and sign, purchase and sign my book, that would be amazing afterwards but I really appreciate the great questions and the great crowd today.