Bella Abzug

To go back to Judaism a little bit or actually just Yiddish.

right? Bella Abzug, right? Politician from New York back in the day, women's rights advocate used to say, listen, right? What is feminism? What is equality in this situation? The star women are going to do as well as the star men.

She said, equality is when the schlemiel women do as well as the schlemiel men, right? The people who are not very good at anything.

That's where equality should be, right? So in the same way, sure, the star neurodivergent people who really do have that brilliance have a difficult in all kinds of ways.

And it was shortly after 1970 that the pro-abortion movement began to gain steam.

There were people like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan Magazine.

Now, here's my point.

that I honestly believe where we are has been the coalescence of several decades of Satan trying to destroy constitutional America.

[laughs]

Um, so Marlo, let's talk about the, the movement because it was this kind of gathering of so many people, and as you've said, quote, "What was bubbling," this is in the mid-'60s, "what was bubbling under the earth with Gloria doing what she was doing in New York, what Betty Friedan was writing about, what Bella Abzug was fighting for, what Erica Jong was writing about, what I was doing, we were all doing it at the same time, and that's what created this thing called the movement.

It became a tsunami.

It became this wave that everybody rode." I'm so jealous because it sounds like-

Yep.

Uh, even Bella Abzug, if you can believe that.

Betty Friedan.

Um, Janet Reno was a spokesperson at the time when she was attorney general.

Hmm.

In any case, we had the interesting line of Bella Abzug, Ruth Messenger, and Elizabeth Holtzman.

Three very bright, strong women who are interesting historical figures.

Elizabeth Holtzman was least on the left.

And honestly, she was so iconic because she used that as a driving force.

Yeah, because then she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971 with Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug.

Together, they led the multi-partisan grassroots organization in the United States dedicated to getting female candidates elected and appointed to public office.

Within a year, the caucus was mobilizing women at the Democratic National Convention, pushing women's rights onto the national stage.

And that was so helpful to me, because we can only live in the present.

When you look back on the movement, you had great friends like Bella Abzug, who almost seemed like a sister to you.

Is that what it felt like? Yes,

well, I used to tell her that she was the mother I wished I had.

Like she fucking hated Nixon so fiercely.

She has a very kind of famous friendship with Bella Abzug, who was a very famous, influential feminist political activist for sure.

And they had a lot of fights about like whether abortion should be on the Democratic, you know, panel, whatever their list of things they want to do.

Plank.