Batting Bella: Becoming a Blueprint for Jewish Feminists

Shoes squeaking a little too loudly and eyes flitting to and fro, the young woman steps into the office and finds her fear come to life. The loud chatter comes to a grinding halt as hundreds of eyes turn to her, appraising her from head to toe. 

“It’s a woman,” they all seem to whisper.

 “Is that even allowed?” another seems to respond. 

She keeps moving forward; this is her job, and she will not back down. Yet, they stop her, eyes ever unblinking in shock. 

“Will your boss be here soon, miss?” She is the boss, and she says so. Yes, they know; they mean the real lawyer. She is the real lawyer, and she says so. That’s why they seem truly shocked.

This experience was felt time and time again by Bella Abzug as she worked in civil law in the mid-20th century, starting as early as 1945. The experience is much older than her and not nearly dead yet. 

As I go on to complete my senior year of high school, side glances and whispers as I walk into a male-dominated room are not an abnormal occurrence for me. I am often selected for a leadership role, taking on the greater burden and workload, only to earn equal credit. Or, I am subjected to male shock that I know what I am talking about in a male-dominated field. To get to the same place as a man, women have to run the same race but face hurdles unknown to their male counterparts. However, hope is not lost when we have inspiration from activists like Bella Abzug. 

Bella Abzug was born in 1920 to Russian immigrant parents and was known as “Battling Bella” almost immediately after birth. Growing up in the Bronx, she worked her way into every spot she ever had. She worked her way into becoming a speaker at her synagogue, worked her way to Hunter College—where she was student body president—and worked her way to get a full scholarship to Columbia University. Growing up, her father attended synagogue twice a day, bringing her along as much as possible to solidify a strong Jewish identity. However, when he passed away when she was 13, and Bella wasn’t even allowed to recite the mourners' kaddish in front of her temple because of her gender, she decided to change the game for all of womanhood, and specifically for Jewish women. 

Many people saw her as overly emotional, yet she argued that it was incredibly necessary to care about the work one does. In a speech that Abzug gave at the United Nations, a few years before her death, she stated, "In the face of so much pain, I remain an incurable optimist. I am fueled by the passion of the women I have been privileged to meet and work with, buoyed by their hope for peace, justice, and democracy." 

In a world that is severely lacking women in civil rights, she made her place known. For twenty-five years, she fought for her right to be in every room she was in. However, in the field of law, she was rarely welcomed or accepted as the head lawyer due to her gender and religion. Often, she would walk into a case, and her client wouldn’t believe she was the lawyer; they expected her to be the assistant and would wait until someone else showed up. 

Over time, Abzug realized that people would only take her seriously if she took herself seriously. She would enter every office wearing hats and gloves, an emphasis on her femininity and professional status. As she moved from her 25 years of civil law towards politics and earned herself a seat in Congress, she never gave up this habit. She argued with many people who begged her to remove the hats since the men didn’t wear them, as they were “unfitting,” yet she refused. She would not let her position subjugate her in any way. 

She continued this fight as she worked her way through politics, from fighting against the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee to starting the nationwide Women Strike For Peace (WSP), in response to U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing, all the way to founding Women USA and co-founding the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), an international activist and advocacy network. While doing all of this, she fell in love and raised two children. She laid the groundwork for the feminism we know today, one that takes women around the world into consideration and not simply the white, Christian ones.

Feminism is the fight for equality for all genders. It is the freedom to let a qualified woman work her way up the corporate ladder in the same way a man does, and the freedom to be a stay-at-home mom and raise children if she so pleases. Feminism is the freedom of choice. Bella Abzug fought for her right to be both a “career woman” and a mother and wife, because that was her choice. These were the rights that Abzug spent her entire life working towards, hoping to bring a voice to the voiceless. 

Abzug spent her life being known as “Battling Bella,” “Mother Courage,” and “a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy” to people who insulted her without saying it to her face. In fact, she herself knew that people called her “impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing.” However, she took that to mean that she was a “very serious woman” rather than a politician. She lost many battles, but she never backed down from the fight. She is who we, as modern feminists, must aspire to be, as her awareness of herself and the world she lived in didn’t weaken her but rather strengthened her. Bella Abzug contributed to the causes that she was passionate about, not afraid to connect her passions and “womanly emotions” to the impacts she made. This, to me, is the mark of a strong Jewish feminist: a passionate fighter.