HOW ONE TOUGH BROAD FROM THE BRONX FOUGHT JIM CROW AND JOE MCCARTHY, PISSED OFF JIMMY CARTER, BATTLED FOR THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN AND WORKERS, RALLIED AGAINST WAR AND FOR THE PLANET, AND SHOOK UP POLITICS ALONG THE WAY

An oral history by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom

A BIOGRAPHY OF AND TESTAMENT TO ONE OF THE GREAT POLITICAL ACTIVISTS OF OUR TIME.

"I’ve been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prizefighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I’m impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I’m any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am—and this ought to be made very clear—I am a very serious woman. "

For more than fifty years, Bella Abzug championed the powerless and disenfranchised, as an activist, congresswoman, and leader in every major social initiative of her time—from Zionism and labor in the forties to the ban-the-bomb efforts in the fifties, to civil rights and the anti–Vietnam War movements of the sixties, to the women’s movement in the seventies and eighties, to environmental awareness and economic equality in the nineties. Her political idealism never waning, Abzug gave her final public speech before the United Nations in March 1998, just a few weeks before her death. Presented in the voices of both friends and foes, of those who knew, fought with, revered, and struggled alongside her, this oral biography is the first comprehensive account of a woman who was one of our most influential leaders.

Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom are both nationally recognized authorities on women’s issues. Most recently, Levine is the author of Inventing the Rest of Our Lives and Thom is the author of Inside Ms.