There’s a new Gloria Steinem biopic in town — and based on the trailer, it’s pretty much indistinguishable from the last. If you couldn’t get enough of “Mrs. America,” the FX series that chronicles the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment and the rise of anti-feminist archvillain Phyllis Schlafly, you’ll probably want to devote two…
“Mrs. America” begins with a cake. It’s a fluffy, gorgeous dome of meringue, left isolated and static on the screen before being shuttled into a crowded political fundraiser. At the fundraiser, the wives of the local elite put on a fashion show; backstage, they chat unhappily about the threat of “women’s libbers.” That housewives-versus-libbers clash…
Bella Abzug, the legendary New York congresswoman whose career in Washington, D.C. heralded the arrival of the women’s movement into the nation’s halls of power, could get a street corner named after her in the West Village neighborhood where she spent much of her adult life. “She was ardently committed to the people and the…
There’s possibly no better evidence of the lack of female role models I had growing up than the fact that I wasn’t even aware of their absence. It took me until my late 20s to realize that all the people I admired, the ones after whom I was somewhat foolishly modeling my life were all…
Ever wonder what Detroit Tigers’ slugger Hank Greenberg really had to say about anti-Semitism? Or how Congresswoman Bella Abzug felt about sexual discrimination? From the late 1960s to 1990, some 2,000 people were interviewed for the American Jewish Committee’s William E. Wiener Oral History Library. Recorded on audiocassette, these interviews comprised more than 6,000 hours…
“Big Hats and bigger opinions, she knew ‘This woman’s place is in the House—the House of Representatives,’” Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder tweeted on May 2, the launch day for Jewish Women’s Archive’s “#jwapedia: Tweeting the Encyclopedia” project. By doing so, she sent a link to the article about Bella Abzug in the online “Jewish Women: A…
As fellow Sisterhood blogger Chanel Dubofsky wrote here, today marks the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, which gave American women the right to vote. And we have a great Jewish woman, Rep. Bella Abzug, to thank for making this day a holiday. Back in 1971, at Abzug’s urging, Congress declared August…
I’ve been loving the coverage of Elena Kagan’s youthful challenge of her rabbi over her right to have a bat mitzvah. I love it because it confirms what I’ve always believed — that the chutzpah of young girls is not just pre-teen attitude but a sign of inner strength and a harbinger of great things…
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