The Political Life of Bella Abzug, 1976–1998: Electoral Failures and the Vagaries of Identity Politics

The Political Life of Bella Abzug, 1976–1998 is the second part of the first full biography of Bella Abzug. Alan H. Levy explores the political life of one of the most important woman in politics in mid- and late-twentieth-century America. This second part takes up Abzug’s life from the point in 1976 when she narrowly lost her bid for the N.Y. Democratic Party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate. The biography follows her subsequent failed effort to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for Mayor of N.Y.C. in 1977, her leading a controversial National Women’s Convention in Houston in late 1977, her failed attempt to return to the U.S. Congress in 1978, and her conflicts with President Jimmy Carter and his administration. The biography then traces the efforts in which Abzug was engaged to regain political prominence, and her work on behalf of women at both national and international levels. Through the events in Abzug’s life, Levy explores tensions that surrounded the contrasts between political principles, which idealized a world in which gender posed no barriers to any human effort, and political views, which sought to extol and develop notions of gender and of ideas about its special meanings in human affairs and politics