◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Do Not Get Quiet I am Bella Abzug. Battling Bella, they called me, and worse. Bronx-born, daughter of Russian Jews who ran a butcher shop called the Live and Let Live Market. And I am going to talk fast, because I always did, and because you do not have time to be polite anymore. Let me start when I was thirteen. My father died, and I went to the synagogue and said the Mourner's Kaddish for him, every morning, for eleven months. That prayer was for sons. Not daughters. Nobody gave me permission. I did it anyway. Remember that, because it is the whole of me in one story: they tell you where your place is, and you decide for yourself. I became a lawyer. And when I walked into offices they said, sit down, dear, the lawyer will be with you shortly. They thought I was the secretary. So I started wearing hats — big ones — so they would know a professional woman had entered the room. People made a joke of the hats for fifty years. Fine. It's what's under the hat that counts. Now what I did with my time bears on the fear you are living in. As a young pregnant lawyer, I went to Mississippi to defend a Black man named Willie McGee, who was going to be executed on a lie. White supremacists sent me death threats. I stayed. I defended people Senator McCarthy had marked as dangerous, when everyone else ran for cover. I learned early that the measure of you is whether you will stand next to the person everyone has agreed to destroy. Then I went to Congress, the first Jewish woman ever to sit in that House. My slogan was, this woman's place is in the House — the House of Representatives. And I did not go there to be liked. I wrote the sunshine laws. The reason your government must hold its hearings in the open, where you can see them, is me. I wrote the Freedom of Information Act, so a citizen could pry the government's files out of its hands. Because I understood the one thing a corrupt power cannot survive, and it is daylight. They do their worst in the dark. So I spent my life throwing open the shutters. And when I brought the head of the CIA in to testify, I found out they had been spying on me since the 1950s. Because a loud woman who wanted the government to answer to the people was, to them, a threat to national security. I took that as a compliment. I stood up for gay Americans in 1974, when it was still a crime to be one in most of this country. I wrote the first bill in the history of the United States to protect them. It got almost no votes. I wrote it anyway. You do not only fight the fights you can win this afternoon. Now let me be honest about the cost, because I will not sell you a fairy tale. They called me abrasive. Shrill. A man-hater. A prizefighter. Difficult. And I was difficult. I made enemies I did not need to make. And it cost me. I lost my seat. I lost a Senate race. Being the loud woman is not free, and I will not pretend it is. But here is the only thing I came back to say. They need you quiet. That is the whole game. The strongman, the boss, the man behind the big desk does not need you to agree with him. He needs you to lower your voice. To be reasonable. To wait your turn. To decide the hat is too much, the demand too loud, the fight too tiring. Do not give him that. Put on the bigger hat. Say the prayer they told you was not yours to say. Stand next to the one they are trying to destroy. Throw open the shutters and let the daylight in. And whatever it costs you, do not get quiet. That is the one thing they cannot survive.