[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 45 (Wednesday, April 22, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H2216-H2217]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               TRIBUTE TO THE LATE HONORABLE BELLA ABZUG

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, along with the gentleman from New York (Mr. 
Nadler), I am due later to cosponsor a special order for Bella Abzug, 
who died last week. I will need to be in my district for an event, and 
wanted to offer these 5 minutes of commemoration at this time.
  When I heard that Bella was dead, I immediately said something close 
to, ``Well, she can't die. She doesn't die. Bella doesn't do things 
like that.''
  I think this was my spontaneous reaction, because Bella seemed to 
many of us incapable of dying. There was so much life there, we felt 
that by the time she was to die, there would simply be leftover life. 
In the permanence of the memory of her life and times there, of course, 
is leftover life.
  Feminists will compete with the other great causes of Bella's time 
for entitlement to her energetic legacy, for Bella's feminism owed as 
much to her universal sense of justice as to her gender.
  Bella has been called, ``The bravest, smartest, brightest progressive 
of our generation,'' and I think that the vote in the House where she 
served would not be close on that one. Civil liberties and the antiwar 
movement, civil rights and the environment, economic justice and the 
labor movement, Bella did not simply taste the great social movements 
of her time; she drank deeply, more often than not after being among 
the first to pour the energy into them that started their growth in the 
first place.
  Every new movement needs a Bella. Few get them. The second feminist 
revolution got Bella, and Bella is just what feminism needed then. 
Women had been patronized and placated for so long in this country, 
they needed a woman who could not be ignored.
  Bella of the Bronx, in case you had not noticed; Bella, daughter of 
the live-and-let-live meat market; Bella, who learned to live by the 
opposite credo; Bella was a force that spread through this House and 
has made it never the same since.
  Then there were 10; now we are 55. Today we celebrated three new 
women

[[Page H2217]]

who bring us to 55 strong. Bella so filled the place, there must be 
some who cannot even tell that our numbers have grown since she left; 
so large was her impact that those three short terms beginning in 1970 
seemed not to have ended.
  After Bella left, she showed she did not need this House to have 
impact. While she was here though, she brought her causes to the House 
floor, and often made them law, from the resolution to withdraw from 
Vietnam introduced on her first day in the House, to her place as the 
first to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
  Make no mistake, Bella was a legislature par excellence and a 
procedural expert in this House. She coauthored the Freedom of 
Information Act and the Privacy Act, bringing into law her lifelong 
crusade against the excesses of the FBI and the CIA, and the prominent 
battle for which she will always be remembered, of course, the Equal 
Rights Amendment.
  Once Bella got in, they could not get her out, so they redistricted 
her out. Her State came within 1 percent of getting her in the Senate, 
however.
  For many women who serve in the House, Bella's place will always be 
in the House and in our hearts.
  If the truth be told, however, Bella, the outsider, never came fully 
into this House or any part of the establishment. For public officials 
today, this capacity not to take your official self so seriously that 
you lose sight of the outside causes that sent you here in the first 
place may be the most valuable legacy of her service in this place.
  If we remember only that part of her fact legacy, all of us who serve 
here will serve better, and all of us who seek to be better public 
servants shall have found in her an important guiding principle left 
over from Bella's abundant life.

                          ____________________