THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Hon. Elizabeth Holtzman

“I have to tell people, don’t give up. Even if you get knocked down, don’t give up, because there’s so much you can do.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, March 2024

EH:  My name is Elizabeth Holtzman. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941, in August.

JW:  And would you tell us a little about your ethnic background, your parents, your siblings, that sort of thing?

EH:  I have a twin brother. My parents were both immigrants. My mom’s family were refugees from fleeing from pogroms and the communist takeover of Ukraine in 1920. I, and my twin brother, are the first members of our family to be born in the United States. And I’m Jewish.

JW:  I know that affected some of your activities as you move forward, but also, I understand you were a leader in high school.

EH:  Yes. Well, in those days, a woman took second place. So, my twin brother was the president, and I was the vice president of the student body.

JW:  I see. So, it seems like you always had some interest in leading. Would you say that’s true?

EH:  I guess if you look back at that, yes. But there was a long desert period of time before I was in elective office. I can’t say that that was a pressing part of my life for my whole life.

JW:  You did go to law school when girls didn’t really go to law school. What was that like? You must have been in a very small minority at Harvard at that time.

EH:  Yes. Women were not welcome, really, at Harvard Law School. There was a tiny handful of us, maybe about 20 some odd women among a class of over 500. So, we were a tiny handful. And the dean told us we weren’t really, he didn’t say we weren’t welcome, but he said, “You’re taking a man’s place.” One of the professors we had refused to call on us, except he had a lady’s day where women had to stand up in front of the class and present. It was really a humiliating experience.

So, Harvard Law School wasn’t really welcoming to women, but somehow those of us who were there, made our way. I was in the same class as Liddy Dole. She became a senator from North Carolina. We were in the same section with the professor who refused to call on women. So, we had a lot of bruises and scars, but we made it through. Actually, my experience at college also, when I was at Radcliffe College, which was part of Harvard College, Harvard University, the undergraduate library was not open to women. Only the Radcliffe library, which was pretty small.

So, if we needed books or we needed to study, many of us went to the graduate library, Widener library. It was a discriminatory place, but still, I got a great education. I can’t really complain about that. I suffered discrimination as a woman, but I didn’t really recognize that until later, because I was told by my parents, my grandparents, that as a woman, I could do what I wanted and I could reach for the stars. Maybe more important that there was no limit to my ability to achieve.

JW:  Do you think that comes from Jewish ethnicity, Jewish thinking about women? I’m just curious about that.

EH:  I don’t know, because there are Jewish families where girls are not encouraged in the same way that boys are. But in my family, when my grandfather made us go through the arithmetic tables, I don’t know who he went to first, but we both had to recite them.

JW:  No discrimination there, which you might have preferred.

EH:  No discrimination.

JW:  So, after law school, what did you do?

EH:  Well, my law school experience actually shaped me. As a result of a white civil rights lawyer who came to talk to us in my first year at law school, I went down to the south in the summer of 1963 – the summer between my first year and second year at law school. And that changed my life because I saw things I never expected to see in the United States. Got down there, and it was dangerous for civil rights workers. We were followed by the police.

We saw people arrested for peaceful protest. We saw people arrested for trying to have children enter the swimming pool that was segregated. Black children couldn’t go in the swimming pool. It was unbelievably hot, and little white kids were in the swimming pool and little black kids were looking through a chain fence. They couldn’t get in. It was beyond.

And then, of course, the violence that took place. Peaceful protest resulted in police violence. The FBI provided no response to that. It was only after the next summer when Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were killed in Mississippi, that the policy of the United States government turned around and protection was afforded to civil rights workers. But that summer also, there were a number of people who were the victims of cattle prodding.

In the next town over, a place called Americas, Georgia, there was a very peaceful protest for voting rights, and cattle prods were used against the leaders of the march. They were beaten up, cattle prods were used, and they were charged with insurrection against the state of Georgia. This is just a peaceful walk for voting rights. They [were] charged with insurrection against the state of Georgia, and that was a capital crime.

So, my first press conference, I was sent down to, or I should say sent up to Washington, DC, to hold a press conference in front of the Justice Department because nothing was done to protect these workers. And I held up the bloody shirts. I was sent by the student nonviolent coordinating committee to DC to do that. That initiated me into my political career, because I saw, ultimately, the courage of people to stand up to the violence and segregation and dehumanization and humiliation and discrimination. And I saw that ultimately, it could achieve amazing results. I mean, when I was down there in a place called Dawson, I think, in Baker county, when a white person walked down the street; I saw this happening to me, I was walking down the street and a black person had to get off the sidewalk.

JW:  I know all this happened, but hearing it again, it’s something.

EH:  Yes, I mean, it was shocking. So, it changed my life, and I knew that it was important to try to do something about making the world a better place. I can’t say that my path was direct. I think I got to a place where I could make some difference. Not enough. Nobody can do enough, but it’s a road that I had to travel.

JW:  So, you did decide to run for Congress in 1972 against someone who’d been there a long time. Emanuel Celler, right?

EH:  50 years.

JW:  50 years. He was the longest serving congressman, I think, then. Wow, that was brave of you. Tell us about how that got going.

EH:  Well, I first ran primarily because of the Vietnam War and my own experience in city government. I worked for the mayor of New York City as an assistant. I’d never really seen political people up close, and I got to see a lot of council members, state assembly members, Congress members. And I said, “You know, if they can get elected, I can get elected.” So, I had negative inspiration. But the only position I was able to run for at that time, was a state committee position of the democratic party. It’s a party position, but it was assembly district wide, and I had to run against the democratic machine in Brooklyn. And I won.

And walking around the district and serving as a state committee woman, I realized that my opponent was nowhere to be seen. The existing congressman had no office in the district. He never came to the district. He had a law office in Manhattan. If you wanted to see him, you had to go to his law office. There was a scandal about that, that had been written up by the New York City Bar Association, in any case; and he was a big proponent of the war in Vietnam. I won. I ran on an anti-war platform, on a civil rights platform, and I won by 635 votes. We had no money, but aside from that, it was an amazing victory, and it was very exciting.

And then I was also launched into history because I was put on the House Judiciary Committee against my will, because my opponent had been on the House Judiciary Committee, I think, for 50 years. I said, “Well, maybe the constituents deserve something different.” I tried very hard to be on another committee, but the powers that be in the House of Representatives paid no attention, and I was put against my will, on the House Judiciary Committee. Which is a testament to the fact that in November 1972, the year that Richard Nixon won his reelection by a landslide, nobody had any inkling that there was going to be an impeachment proceeding against Richard Nixon. Because if they knew that, I, who had no powers behind me, would never have been put on a committee that was going to be in the middle of history.

JW:  That’s so, great. Before we go on, I do want to say at the time, you were the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, right?

EH:  Right. It was a record that I held for 42 years. When I was elected, there were, I forget, a handful of women, maybe 16 or 17 women, and I thought for sure that there’d be kind of a tsunami of women being elected behind me. But that wasn’t the case. It took a long, long time. I didn’t even realize that I was the youngest woman elected at the time, and I was kind of shocked to find that, in fact, I was. It took 42 years for someone younger than I was to be elected, which was also shocking. Now, it’s easier for women. It’s more accepted that women can run for office and hold office. Although we still don’t have a woman mayor in New York City, we still don’t have a woman president. So, those are still big barriers. But, yes, women have absolutely made huge strides in the political arena.

JW:  Right. And we have a ways to go, as you point out.

EH:  Yes, huge. We still do.

JW:  You were 31 at the time. I just wanted to put that in the record.

EH:  Right. The minimum age is 25, and so there were plenty of men younger than I who’d been elected over the course of centuries, but no women. So, it was still very hard. My election was a fluke because we had no money, and no endorsements, no unions, no PACs, no political action committee, nothing. No move on, no organized effort, nothing. It was just a local effort by me. And as the boss of the Brooklyn democratic machine said, “Holtzman and her squaws.” But it wasn’t only squaws – we had plenty of men helping out in the campaign.

JW:  Well, you didn’t run on women’s issues, it sounds like, but then once you were on the judiciary committee, you were active in putting forth bills that affected women, right?

EH:  Definitely. Actually, I do remember when I was campaigning for the state committee position that a woman came up to me, she was holding a young child, but she had a very wrinkled face. You couldn’t really tell whether she was the child’s mother or grandmother. And she came up to me and she said, “I’m glad to see you running for office. You have to know that women are slaves, and I hope you’ll do something about it.” This is a white woman. I’ll never forget that. As I proceeded in life, I realized that there was a lot of truth in what she was saying.

First of all, at that time, abortion was illegal in New York and so women’s bodies were being controlled by the government. What’s that? So, things were difficult. We had anti-discrimination laws, but they weren’t being enforced. And we still have discrimination in employment, in pay scales and so forth. That’s being addressed, but not completely. Sexual harassment, domestic violence, rape, sexual assault. These are still issues that plague our society. So, we still have a long way to go but I learned more about them, and I took up the cudgels.

And when I was in Congress, one of the things I’m very proud to have done was to have created, along with my republican colleague from Massachusetts, Margaret Heckler, the Congresswomen’s Caucus, which was a bipartisan group. Ultimately, every woman in the House of Representatives joined. Sometimes there were no women in the Senate, but whoever was in the Senate also joined us when there were women there. We focused on issues that affected women and improved their status. And we operated on a consensus basis because this had never happened before, and women were a little concerned about how the public would react to having a caucus on women’s issues. But we got a lot done in many, many areas.

Federal work on rape privacy laws, and federal work on credit and women’s credit in banks; you couldn’t open up a bank account without your husband’s approval if you were married. I mean, it was demeaning, humiliating, but we realized that we were such a small group that if we joined together, we had a lot of clout. In fact, we had so much clout that we got the deadline for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment extended in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and signed by the president. Unfortunately, it still didn’t get ratified in time, and there’s a big question now about whether enough states have ratified it.

But women working together changed practices and laws in so many ways. And one of the areas I think it’s most important is the fact that in terms of health for women, drugs were never tested on women. They were tested in those days just on men. So, you know, that wasn’t a good thing. That got changed. The Congresswoman’s Caucus changed that. Those are things that nobody could really argue about, but that we made a difference in. And so that was important. And we also made sure that not all the hurricanes were named after women.

JW:  A good one. I thank you for that, and all the other stuff. I looked up some of your bills. I saw pension protection for surviving spouses, fixes to Social Security and Medicare that would help women, a whole bunch of things.

EH:  Yes. Getting breast cancer screening covered under Medicare, I was no longer in Congress when I proposed that, but I worked with Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and we got that bill through. She proposed the bill and it got through. You know, once you see the problem, or for me, once I see the problem, I can never let go. And so, there’s still so much to be done. In fact, most recently, a year and a half ago, I ran for Congress because I was so enraged at what the Supreme Court was planning to do. The leaked opinion got me furious. Not just the fact that they were ending Roe, but the language of the opinion. They were going back to the time before the founding of the country. Even in some cases, citing lawyers, and scholars, so called, who were writing in the 1600s, 1700s.

And Justice Alito, it’s hard to use those two words together because justice and Alito do not coincide in any productive way. What they were saying in those old days was that women, first of all, couldn’t vote. They had no say in the government at all, or the laws that affected them, and they were the property of their husbands. They could be beaten at will by their husbands. I mean, it was a setting that was totally demeaning to women, totally dehumanizing to women. And we were supposed to be guided, bound by, not just guided, bound by that outlook. I mean, how stupid, how ignorant, how backwards that kind of thinking is. And I said, “That doesn’t belong in the Supreme Court” and I was going to fight it. And we still have Alito there. We still have Clarence Thomas there. We still have those who fought this, and I’m still very troubled about that.

JW:  Well, I talk to a lot of audience of younger women, and I say, “We will get these rights back, but we are going to have to work hard, and we will get them back.”

EH:  Yes, but they’re always going to be threatened. I think that’s one of the things, because what I’ve discovered is that this is one of the deepest, deepest, deepest feelings in human beings. What’s the word? The need to dominate another human being. And that’s what abortion rights are about. That people want to tell women what to do with their bodies, as though women can’t make decisions for themselves.

Justice Alito or un-justice Alito, or injustice Alito. He knows what to tell me? What to do, how to live. He knows how to tell the women of America how to live? He can live his own life. I’m sure he doesn’t tell his wife to do everything. She probably makes him do a few things, too. But we don’t see that. We see where he’s giving all the orders and dictating all the rules. Well, that’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to American women, it’s not acceptable anywhere in the world.

JW:  And that is true. It’s not acceptable throughout the world. Before we leave your time in Congress, though, something that is very important to me is you also created a number of historic sites for women. The Women’s Rights National Park in New York, Eleanor Roosevelt’s historic Park, the Susan B. Anthony coin, you were involved with that?

EH:  Oh, the coin, yes. But when I was controller in New York City, I pointed out that there were no monuments to women, no statues to women in the city’s parks. But if you say I did that when I was in congress, great. I do remember the coin though.

JW:  Well, you introduced the bills. I found that you introduced those.

EH:  Okay, great.

JW:  Maybe they didn’t pass at the time, but they have passed since.

EH:  Right. But, yes, the symbolic things, and the real things were really very important. I think the other thing that we did, by the way, in the Congresswoman’s Caucus, was that we met with cabinet members privately, so that all the women, Republicans and Democrats who were in the caucus – at that time was only women – we would sit down with a cabinet official and talk about issues within that cabinet official’s purview that we were concerned about. And it was important because it was a consciousness raising session for them. And it was really important because otherwise nobody might have had the guts, or the interest, to tell them what needed to be done.

There were only a couple of women cabinet members when the Congresswoman’s Caucus was formed, so it was a vital thing. There’s still a lot to be done. Women working together can make a difference. Men who share these points of view can make a difference working together. Because this is not just a fight for women only, as was said way back then, “It’s a fight for families.” It’s a fight for the whole society. Because when anybody is subject to discrimination, deliberately, intentionally, then no one’s rights are free. And particularly if you say you can take rights away from more than half the population, then for sure no one’s rights are free, or secure.

JW:  When you left Congress, you had other important jobs. District attorney, then comptroller in New York. Were you able to continue to fight for women’s issues through those jobs?

EH:  Oh yes. As district attorney, first of all, when I came to the office, there was none, and there had never been, a woman to head a bureau. You had bureaus, for example, sex crimes, or homicide, or things like that, economic crimes. No woman had ever headed one of those bureaus. But that was one of the nice things about being DA. I can make that kind of change. And I did right away. We had fabulous women who joined my office or were promoted. Who’d been bypassed for promotion for years and years and years, and who were fabulously qualified. So, yes, I made that change right away.

And then also fought to change the rape laws in New York. Used to be that a woman’s word was not acceptable as evidence in a rape case. It had to be corroborated, because the woman was untrustworthy, inherently untrustworthy. So, the legislature changed that because there was a lot of outcry about that. But then it was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

They made it just as bad because they said, “Well, there’s no rape” unless the woman puts up what’s called, “earnest resistance,” which meant she had to fight back no matter what. If he put a gun to her head or a knife or said, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t,” she had to fight back. Well, no one should have to risk her life to prove a rape. And so, I got that changed. And then we also fought in the court to change the laws on rape and marriage.

In New York state, a husband could not be prosecuted for raping his wife, and no bodily autonomy was recognized. And we were the only prosecutor in the state to file an amicus brief before the court of appeals saying this was unconstitutional and wrong. And guess what? The court agreed with us and thank goodness, found that that statute was unconstitutional and that husbands could be prosecuted and had to be. So, yes. Did I ever stop? No.

JW:  I heard you talk about how you’re still involved and thought, “I have to run again because of what’s happening today.” Is there anything else you want to talk about in terms of activities that you’ve been involved in since then?

EH:  Well, after I was DA, I was controller, and I was the first woman elected to that position. I was the first woman ever elected DA in New York City and only the second in New York state. So, breaking those barriers was important. It took a while for other women to get there, but now we have a woman DA in New York City, in Bronx County and Queens County for the first time. So, that’s great. And we’ll see more women, and that’s important.

But when I was a controller, one of the things I also did was to put women in top positions, which is important. It creates a model for other offices, and it also shows that women can do the job. Complex jobs, financial jobs, and auditing jobs, and policy jobs. So that was one thing I did. I tried to create a caucus of women on the city women, but that didn’t work out, unfortunately. There were some women who didn’t like the idea. I don’t know why, but I tried to do that. But I fought also on other issues affecting women.

We did studies showing that the incidence of breast cancer detection was related to poverty, and also that New York City municipal hospitals were not doing screening mammograms. You actually had to have a lump before they would do a mammogram if you walked into a municipal hospital, that was wrong. So, we got things changed. We’re still not there. But if everybody keeps working at it, yes, we’ll make a difference.

JW:  That’s wonderful. So, it sounds like your interest, starting early on in civil rights, women’s rights, has carried through your lifetime that’s affected your whole life. And you’d say that. Do you have any comments you’d like to add, summing up?

EH:  Well, the comment I’d like to make is that one person can make a difference. Even one person. And so, you may say, “Oh, the problem seems so daunting. What can I do about it?” Well, you can. If you speak out, if you contact your elected official. I’ll give you a good example of how one person can make a difference both when you speak out as a private citizen, and when you speak out as an elected official and become an elected official.

I once had a constituent who called my office because there was a clogged sewer in her neighborhood. My office was very helpful and got the sewer unclogged. And she called back and she said, “You know, I have a serious problem. I have a very rare disease and there’s no medicine for it.” And she complained about that. So, my staff talked to her at length, and finally, it turned out that she had a rare disease and no drug company would make the medicine because there’s so few people who had it, they could never recover their costs. So, her doctor had to hand make it. And I said, “Really, the drug companies aren’t doing this?”

So, I called her doctor, he was at Mount Sinai, and we discussed the problem. He said, “Yes, this is a serious problem.” So, I said, “Would you come down to Washington? I’m going to try to set up a meeting with the Food and Drug Administration to see what we can do about it.” And so, he came down to Washington and we met with the Food and Drug Administration, and they said, “Yes, it’s a real problem.” Not just for the disease she had, but there are many, what’s called, rare diseases that the drug companies simply won’t investigate, won’t do research on, and won’t develop, because they’re too few people and they can’t recover their costs. So, I said to my constituent, “Would you come down to Washington, I’m going to introduce a bill on this subject, and would you testify about it?” And so, she agreed.

She came down to Washington; there’s a wonderful picture. I have a book I wrote about my experiences in Congress and in government called, Who Said it Would be Easy? And so, my constituent came down to Washington. She testified. She’s wearing a brace around her neck. The disease was so debilitating that if she didn’t have the medicine, she was flat on her back and immobile, and if she got the medicine, she could walk around and live basically a normal life.

We had the hearing. It was at the end of my tenure in the house, so there wasn’t really enough time to get a bill passed, but it was the first bill introduced on this subject. And within about a year and a half, the person who held that hearing; he ultimately became chair of the whole committee dealing with medicines and drugs and so forth, and the bill was passed, creating a whole program for orphan drugs.

Not only was she helped by that, but there have been hundreds of orphan drugs now approved for research and funding by the federal government. And so, it’s made a difference in an enormous number of people’s lives. This is one person in my district who called me, and I’m one person, and I said, “We’ve got to do something about it” and it got done. So, I have to tell people, don’t give up. Even if you get knocked down, don’t give up, because there’s so much you can do. Speak out about problems. Alert people who are in government about problems. You think everybody in government knows everything that’s going on, they don’t. And so, explaining the problem, and how it hurts you, and how it affects you can make a difference.