[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