[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 120 (Monday, July 24, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1504-E1506]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                 BELLA ABZUG: AN INSPIRATION TO US ALL

                                 ______


                        HON. CAROLYN B. MALONEY

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, July 24, 1995
  Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, on August 26, 1920, 75 years ago, American 
women finally won their century-long struggle for their constitutional 
right to vote. That new birth of freedom empowered women to bring into 
Congress and into public discourse their legislative and political 
demands to end pervasive discrimination against women and girls, a 
struggle marked by notable victories and continuing challenges.
  As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of women's suffrage, we also 
celebrate today, July 24, the 75th birthday of one of our Nation's most 
outstanding woman leaders, Bella S. Abzug. In her all-too-brief 6 years 
in Congress (1971-1977) as a Democratic Representative from a Manhattan 
district in New York City, she emerged as a dynamic leader, creative 
legislator, and a pioneer in broadening legal, economic, social, and 
political rights for women.
  When Bella first ran for office in 1970, there were only nine women 
among the 435 members of the House of Representatives, including Martha 
Griffiths, Edith Green, Patsy Mink, and Shirley Chisholm, the first 
African-American woman elected to Congress. There was only one woman 
Senator, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. Bella was the first woman to 
run and be elected on a women's rights and peace platform. Today, some 
20 years later, the numbers have increased significntly--47 women in 
the House, eight in the Senate--but as Bella would be the first to 
remind us, American women, who are more than 51 percent of the 
population, deserve more than an average of 10.3 percent representation 
in our Congress.
  Bella was elected to the House while United States military 
intervention in Vietnam, now admitted by Robert McNamara to have been a 
frightful and costly mistake, was at its height and was drawing mass 
protests around our country and in Washington. After being officially 
sworn in as a Member on the House floor on January 21, 1971, Bella took 
another oath on the Capitol steps, administered by Congresswoman 
Chisholm before a thousand supporters, in which she pledged ``to work 
for new priorities to heal the domestic wounds of war and to use our 
country's wealth for life, not death.'' Then as her first official act 
in Congress she dropped a resolution into the hopper calling on 
President Nixon to withdraw all American Armed Forces from Indochina by 
July 1, 1971.
  Bella's concern for the human victims of war made her an adored 
champion of returning Vietnam veterans, who camped out in her office 
during the protests they held in the Capital. Her staff included a 
fulltime aide who dealt exclusively with veterans health and 
readjustment problems and she played a leading role in strengthening 
education benefits for veterans in VA legislation.
  Bella also impressed her colleagues as a thoughtful and creative 
legislator with a firm knowledge of parliamentary rules and precedents, 
negotiating skills and an awesome capacity for dawn-to-midnight hard 
work. In her last term in Congress, she served as a member of the whip 
system operated by House Speaker ``Tip'' O'Neill, a friend and admirer, 
and was chosen by her congressional peers in a U.S. News and World 
Report survey as the ``third, most influential'' Member of the House. 
She was described in a 1977 Gallup Poll as 1 of the 20 most influential 
women in the world.
  One of the earliest votes Bella cast was to approve the Equal Rights 
Amendment. She also introduced a resolution proclaiming August 26 
Women's Equality Day, in honor of the suffrage victory. The resolution 
was approved and signed into law by President Nixon. Nationally and 
internationally, Bella became known as a champion of women's rights and 
reproductive freedom and initiated what later became the Congressional 
Caucus on Women's Issues. She wrote the first law banning 
discrimination against women in obtaining credit, loans, and mortgages, 
and introduced precedent-setting bills on comprehensive child care, 
Social Security for homemakers, abortion rights, and gay rights.
  Chairing the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation, she 
authored legislation bringing more than $6 billion to New York State in 
public works, economic development, sewage treatment, mass transit--
including sidewalk ramps for the disabled and buses for the elderly--
and antirecision assistance. She created the Interstate Transfer Law, 
which allowed New York City to trade-in highway funds for mass transit 
improvements.
  Bella's remarkable accomplishments as a legislator came as no 
surprise to those who knew her personal history. Born on July 24, 1920, 
to Esther and Emanuel Savitsky, Russian Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, 
Bella has put her prodigious energy, brains, organizing skills, and 
idealism to work for a better world, especially for women and victims 
of racism, prejudice, greeds and militarism.
  Along the way, she has never accepted the tired view of ``that's the 
way it is, so that's the way it has to be.'' As a child growing up in 
the Bronx, she started breaking rules--playing ``immies'' in the street 
with the boys--and usually winning--collecting pennies and making 
speeches in the subways for the Jewish homeland, which later became 
established as the State of Israel. She attended both public and Hebrew 
religious schools.
  Early on, Bella was recognized as a natural leader: she was elected 
class president at Walton High School and president of Hunter College's 
Student Council. One of her fondest memories is of speaking at an 
assembly addressed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.--They both wore 
hats.
  At Hunter, her last year at law school, she married Martin Abzug, a 
businessman, World War II veteran and budding novelist who proved his 
love by typing her schoolwork. Their mutual admiration marriage ended 
with his death in 1986. They had two daughters, Eve and Liz. Eve is an 
artist, has worked in city government and holds a master's degree in 
social work. Liz, active in the women's movement, is an attorney 
specializing in economic development and women's concerns. In the early 
years of her career, Bella worked as a lawyer, specializing in civil 
liberties and labor law. She has been a lifelong advocate of civil 
rights and a ``nut'' about the first amendment. In the early 1950's, 
she defended several Hollywood actors caught up in the McCarthy witch 
hunt, and also took on the controversial case of Willie McGee, a black 
Mississippian sentenced to death on a framed-up charge of raping a 
white woman, with whom he had a long relationship. Although she could 
not save him from execution, Bella's courage in going to the South to 
defend him despite threats to her safety was a harbinger of courage 
displayed by thousands of civil rights activists in the Sixties. During 
the McGee trial, Bella wasn't even able to get a hotel room and had to 
sleep in the local bus station, and she was pregnant.
  In 1961, Bella helped organize Women Strike for Peace to campaign for 
a nuclear test ban, going on to lead thousands of women in lobbying 
expeditions to Congress and the White House. During the Sixties, she 
came into her own as a rousing public speaker, anti-Vietnam war leader 
and political strategist, working in the reform Democratic and peace 
movements and election campaigns.
  At age 50, she decided it was time to run for office herself, and run 
she did, in 1970, with her slogan: ``This woman's place is in the 
House--the House of Representatives.'' She conducted an unorthodox, 
attention-getting congressional campaign, mostly in the streets of 
Greenwich Village, Little Italy, the Lower East Side, and Chelsea, 
backed up by hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers. She scored an upset 
primary victory over a longtime Democratic incumbent and went on to win 
the general election.
  While in Congress, throughout the Seventies, Bella was also 
organizing women. The first planning sessions for the National Women's 
Political Caucus were held in her office and in 1971 she became its 
first co-chair. She was chief political strategist for Democratic women 
in a successful campaign for equal representation--equal division--for 
women in 

[[Page E1505]]
all elective and appointive posts, including representation at 
Presidential nominating conventions. She now serves as a New York State 
representative on the Democratic Party National Committee. She was an 
active policy adviser and organizer of women voters in the Democratic 
Party's 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992 Presidential campaigns.
  After trying for the U.S. Senate in 1976 and losing a four-way 
primary race by less than 1 percent, Bella was named by President 
Carter to head the National Commission on the Observance of 
International Women's Year, presiding in November 1977 over the 
landmark federally-funded National Women's Conference in Houston.
  While still in the House during the Ford administration, Bella and 
other Congresswomen succeeded in getting a $5 million appropriation for 
the conference, which included several thousand women delegates elected 
at public meetings in every State of the Union as well as First Ladies, 
past and present. The delegates adopted a 25-plank National Plan of 
Action, making specific recommendations on a broad range of issues 
affecting the status of women. Bella played a major role in the U.N. 
Decade of Women international conference in Mexico City and as an NGO 
observer and speaker at the 1980 Copenhagen and 1985 Nairobi U.N. 
women's conferences. At the parallel NGO Forum in Nairobi, she 
organized a panel, titled ``What If Women Ruled the World?'', attended 
by more than a thousand women, including conference delegates and 
parliamentarians.
  In 1978, President Carter appointed Bella co-chair of his National 
Advisory Committee for Women, on which she served for 2 years. After 
the advisory committee publicly protested funding cuts in women's 
programs, Bella was dismissed by President Carter as co-chair and a 
majority of the committee members resigned in protest. Nevertheless, 
Bella supported Jimmy Carter in his unsuccessful 1980 Presidential 
reelection bid.
  In the 1980's Bella Abzug worked on women voters education programs 
and also served as a strategist for the growing pro-choice reproductive 
rights women's movement. She also became involved in efforts to 
organize women to help save the planet from worsening environmental 
threats, pollution and poverty, resulting from unregulated 
technologies, the social irresponsibility of multinationals, 
governments, international financial institutions, war machines and 
other factors. From this concern, shared by women worldwide, came the 
formation of the Women's Environment & Development Organization [WEDO], 
co-founded with Mim Kelber, a longtime associate, and women U.N. 
activists. As co-chair of WEDO, Bella presided over the World Women's 
Congress for a Healthy Planet, held in Miami, FL Nov. 8-12, 1991. The 
widely acclaimed Congress, which drew 1,500 women participants from 83 
countries, produced and approved the Women's Action Agenda 21--a 
blueprint for incorporating women's perspectives, demands and equal 
participation into local, national and international environment and 
development decision-making.
  The women's agenda became the focus of activities organized by Bella 
and WEDO leaders from every region of the world in connection with 
preparations for the U.N. Conference on Environment & Development and 
at the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. She also 
served as senior adviser to UNCED Secretary-General Maurice Strong and 
was the women's sector representative on the non-governmental 
organizations (NGO) facilitating committee for the Rio summit.
  Based on the model she developed for the Earth Summit, Bella and the 
WEDO network have continued to work at the UN, organizing women's 
caucus meetings at subsequent major international conferences of 
particular concern to women. The work of the caucuses has been 
recognized as crucial to including women's perspectives, demands and 
participation in policymaking in U.N. platforms for action and 
programs.
  Bella also served as a private sector representative on the U.S 
delegation to the International Conference on Population & Development 
[ICPD] in Cairo, Egypt last September and played a key role in winning 
recognition of the centrality of women's concerns and roles in 
population and development policies. She will also be an active 
participant in the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women and its 
parallel NGO forum which will meet in China this September. She will 
co-chair a WEDO-initiated Women's Linkage Caucus at the official 
conference and will also preside over the Second World Women's Congress 
for a Healthy Planet at the NGO Forum.
  Bella believes that the United States should act speedily to ratify 
the U.N. Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women [CEDAW] 
before the 75th anniversary of women's suffrage--The United States is 
the only major power that has not ratified CEDAW.
  Bella's work at the United Nations has led her to other areas of 
participation, including serving as a moderator at the conference on 
financing of the United Nations held by the Society for International 
Development. She also serves as part of the U.N. Development Program's 
Eminent Advisory Panel for the 1995 Human Development Report.
  While volunteering most of her time to the U.N., Bella Abzug 
continues to devote her energies to a wide range of women's issues. 
Breast cancer became a focus of her attention in March 1993, when WEDO, 
together with the New York City Commission on the Status of Women, 
which she chaired on breast cancer and the environment. Testimony was 
presented by physicians, scientists, women's health specialists, 
activists and women with breast cancer on the links between the breast 
cancer epidemic and environmental pollutants.
  Three months later, Bella discovered that she too had breast cancer. 
This only strengthened her commitment to focus more research and 
government and public resources on cancer prevention, emphasizing the 
identification and prevention of environmental causes of the disease. 
Under Bella's leadership, WEDO has launched a campaign in partnership 
with Greenpeace USA and grassroots women's cancer groups, entitled 
``Women, Health and the Environment: Action for Prevention.'' The 
campaign is sponsoring public hearings and action conferences in cities 
throughout the United States.
  In whatever spare time she has, Bella supports her pro bono 
activities by working as a lawyer. She also lectures at colleges, 
women's meetings, legal and other professional groups, synagogues and 
churches. She was a news commentator on Cable News Network for 3 years, 
has appeared on hundreds of TV and radio programs, is the author of 
several books and writes a column for Earth Times, a newspaper that 
covers the United Nations.
  Over the years, Bella Abzug has received numerous honorary degrees, 
awards and other honors. On August 6 in Chicago, she will receive from 
the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession its 
highest honor, the Special Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement 
Award.
  In September 1994, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of 
Fame. There in Seneca Falls, NY, where the first women's rights meeting 
was held in 1848, she joined other influential women and leaders of the 
women's rights movement as one of the most admired women in American 
history.
  On behalf of women Members of Congress, I salute the 75th birthday of 
this remarkable woman, my close friend whose dedication and courage 
helped pave the way for our presence here.

[[Page E1506]]


                       SENATE COMMITTEE MEETINGS

  Title IV of Senate Resolution 4, agreed to by the Senate on February 
4, 1977, calls for establishment of a system for a computerized 
schedule of all meetings and hearings of Senate committees, 
subcommittees, joint committees, and committees of conference. This 
title requires all such committees to notify the Office of the Senate 
Daily Digest--designated by the Rules Committee--of the time, place, 
and purpose of the meetings, when scheduled, and any cancellations or 
changes in the meetings as they occur.
  As an additional procedure along with the computerization of this 
information, the Office of the Senate Daily Digest will prepare this 
information for printing in the Extensions of Remarks section of the 
Congressional Record on Monday and Wednesday of each week.
  Meetings scheduled for Tuesday, July 25, 1995, may be found in the 
Daily Digest of today's Record.

                           MEETINGS SCHEDULED

                                JULY 26
     9:30 a.m.
       Appropriations
       Interior Subcommittee
         Business meeting, to mark up H.R. 1977, making 
           appropriations for the Department of the Interior and 
           related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 
           30, 1996.
                                                            SD-138
       Armed Services
         Closed business meeting, to discuss certain pending 
           nominations.
                                                            SR-222
       Commerce, Science, and Transportation
       Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Subcommittee
         To hold hearings on proposed legislation authorizing 
           funds for the Maritime Security Program.
                                                            SR-253
       Finance
         To continue hearings to examine ways to improve the 
           Medicare program and make it financially sound, 
           focusing on the modernization of Medicare and giving 
           senior citizens more choice in the kinds of plans that 
           are available to them.
                                                            SD-215
       Governmental Affairs
       Post Office and Civil Service Subcommittee
         To hold hearings to review the Annual Report of the 
           Postal Service.
                                                            SD-342
       Judiciary
         To hold hearings to examine punitive damages reform.
                                                            SD-226
       Special on Special Committee To Investigate Whitewater 
           Development Corporation and Related Matters
         To continue hearings to examine issues relative to the 
           President's involvement with the Whitewater Development 
           Corporation, focusing on certain events following the 
           death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster.
                                                            SH-216
     2:00 p.m.
       Select on Intelligence
         To hold closed hearings on intelligence matters.
                                                            SH-219

                                JULY 27
     9:30 a.m.
       Commerce, Science, and Transportation
         To hold hearings on proposed legislation to reform the 
           Federal Communications Commission procedures in their 
           use of auctions for the allocation of radio spectrum 
           frequencies for commercial use.
                                                            SR-253
       Energy and Natural Resources
         To hold hearings on the nomination of John Raymond 
           Garamendi, of California, to be Deputy Secretary of the 
           Interior.
                                                            SD-366
       Finance
         To hold hearings on the Federal Medicaid matching 
           formula.
                                                            SD-215
       Governmental Affairs
         To resume hearings on S. 929, to abolish the Department 
           of Commerce.
                                                            SD-342
       Judiciary
         Business meeting, to consider pending calendar business.
                                                            SD-226
       Labor and Human Resources
         To hold hearings on proposed legislation to authorize 
           funds for programs of the Substance Abuse and Mental 
           Health Services Act.
                                                            SD-430
       Special Committee To Investigate Whitewater Development 
           Corporation and Related Matters
         To continue hearings to examine issues relative to the 
           President's involvement with the Whitewater Development 
           Corporation, focusing on certain events following the 
           death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster.
                                                            SH-216
     10:00 a.m.
       Judiciary
         To hold hearings to examine prison reform, focusing on 
           enhancing the effectiveness of incarceration.
                                                            SD-106
     3:00 p.m.
       Appropriations
         Business meeting, to mark up H.R. 1905, making 
           appropriations for energy and water development for the 
           fiscal year ending September 30, 1996, and H.R. 2020, 
           making appropriations for the Treasury Department, the 
           United States Postal Service, the Executive Office of 
           the President, and certain Independent Agencies for the 
           fiscal year ending September 30, 1996.
                                                            SD-192

                                JULY 28
     9:30 a.m.
       Appropriations
       Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education 
           Subcommittee
         To hold hearings to examine family planning issues.
                                                            SD-138
       Labor and Human Resources
         To hold hearings on health insurance relative to domestic 
           violence issues.
                                                            SD-430

                                AUGUST 1
     9:30 a.m.
       Commerce, Science, and Transportation
         To hold hearings to examine the future of the Department 
           of Commerce.
                                                            SR-253
     2:00 p.m.
       Judiciary
         To hold hearings on pending nominations.
                                                            SD-226

                                AUGUST 2
     9:30 a.m.
       Judiciary
       Administrative Oversight and the Courts Subcommittee
         To hold hearings on proposed legislation authorizing 
           funds for the Administrative Conference.
                                                            SD-226
       Labor and Human Resources
         Business meeting, to mark up S. 1028, to provide 
           increased access to health care benefits, to provide 
           increased portability of health care benefits, to 
           provide increased security of health care benefits, and 
           to increase the purchasing power of individuals and 
           small employers.
                                                            SD-430
       Indian Affairs
         Business meeting, to consider pending calendar business; 
           to be followed by oversight hearings on the 
           implementation of the Indian Tribal Justice Act (P.L. 
           103-176).
                                                            SR-485
     2:00 p.m.
       Commerce, Science, and Transportation
       Aviation Subcommittee
         To hold hearings to examine proposals to reform the 
           operation of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
                                                            SR-253

                             CANCELLATIONS

                                JULY 26
     9:30 a.m.
       Labor and Human Resources
         To hold hearings to examine emerging infections and their 
           impact on society.
                                                            SD-430
     2:00 p.m.
       Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
         To resume hearings to examine the Chechnya crisis, 
           focusing on prospects for peace.
                                             2200 Rayburn Building