02/11/2026
Dismantling the boys club. Starting with a hat.
In 1971, one of the few women in Congress arrived in Washington, D.C. Male lawmakers looked at the fifty-year-old attorney and told her to take off her hat.
They cited a House rule passed in 1837. She was a seasoned labor lawyer who had spent decades defending civil rights workers. They treated her like a schoolgirl violating the dress code.
There were 435 representatives in the House. A dozen were women. There were 100 senators. Only one was female. The committee chairs were men. The floor managers were men. A political boys' club protected by a century of parliamentary procedure.
The rule was enforced against a woman who had spent a lifetime refusing to sit in the back.
She was born Bella Savitzky in the Bronx. Her father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who ran a butcher shop. When he died, she was thirteen years old. Orthodox Jewish tradition reserved the mourner’s Kaddish strictly for sons. She went to the synagogue anyway. She stood by herself each day for a year to say the prayer.
Decades later, she carried that same defiance into the legal profession. During the McCarthy era, she defended clients targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. She went south to represent civil rights workers.
The hat was not a fashion statement. It was armor. Bella Abzug started wearing wide-brimmed hats when she was a young lawyer in the 1940s. When she visited offices, opposing counsel and clients would often tell her to sit and wait for the attorney to arrive. They assumed any woman in a law office was a secretary.
Professional women of the era wore hats to signal they were not there to take dictation. By the time she won her New York City congressional district, the hat was her signature.
In January 1971, she asked to wear her hat on the House floor. The leadership said no.
She appealed the decision. The House rejected the appeal.
She asked for an exception. They refused.
At the time, House Rule VII prohibiting covered heads during sessions was strictly enforced, but its origins had nothing to do with decorum. Records show the 1837 ban was passed simply to break the British parliamentary custom of members wearing hats during debates. A century and a half later, the institution weaponized the antique rule to regulate the visibility of a woman they found too loud, too liberal, and too unyielding.
She took the hat off when she crossed the threshold of the House floor. She did not quiet down.
If they were going to strictly enforce the rules of 1837, she was going to dismantle the boys' club of 1971.
She spent her first day introducing a resolution to withdraw American troops from Vietnam. It went nowhere. She kept moving.
For the next six years, Abzug fought the institution from the inside. When veterans of the House advised her to lie low, respect the seniority system, and build relationships quietly, she ignored them.
She co-authored Title IX, forcing universities to fund women's education and athletics equally. In 1973, she introduced the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Before the law passed, lenders could legally refuse to issue credit cards or mortgages to single women. Married women were routinely required to secure a husband's signature to open a bank account.
In 1974, she introduced the Equality Act, the first federal gay rights legislation in American history.
She was not universally loved. The congresswoman cursed like a longshoreman. She routinely lost her temper in committee meetings. Staff members were pushed to exhaustion. She was considered abrasive by colleagues who preferred quiet compromise.
The legislative boys' club was forced to concede legal and financial independence to half the American population. Banks had to print new forms. Universities had to build new locker rooms. The system absorbed the shock, and the men holding the gavels had to share the room. The women in Congress had forced a permanent shift.
They made her take off her hat. In return, she made it illegal for banks to deny women credit cards without a man's signature.
Abzug gave up her House seat in 1976 to run for the Senate. She lost the Democratic primary by less than one percent.
The House rule she challenged remained strictly in place until 2019, when it was finally amended to allow religious headwear. Her wide-brimmed hats are now preserved in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.
The Capitol building where she was told to uncover her head now sells postcards with her picture on them.
Bella Abzug: the woman who dismantled the boys' club.
Source: Andrew Szanton; Official Congressional Records.
Verified via: U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Historian, Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress.
(Some details summarized for brevity.)
