There are those who say I’m impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing…. But whatever I am—and this ought to be made very clear at the outset—I am a very serious woman.

Bella Abzug’s line is best understood against the backdrop of her early public career as a feminist lawyer and newly prominent political figure, when she was routinely characterized in gendered terms—“pushy,” “rude,” “overbearing”—for the same bluntness and combativeness that were often praised in male colleagues. The quotation functions as a preemptive rebuttal to that media and establishment caricature: she lists the epithets she expects to hear, then reframes them as distractions from her purpose. It reads like an opening declaration meant to set the terms on which she would be judged: not by tone-policing or stereotypes, but by the seriousness of her political commitments and the urgency of the causes she pursued.

Abzug turns a familiar catalogue of gendered criticisms—labels often applied to outspoken women—into a declaration of purpose. By reciting the insults (“impatient,” “uppity,” “overbearing”) and then insisting on being “a very serious woman,” she reframes style as secondary to substance: urgency and bluntness are presented as rational responses to injustice, not personal defects. The line also works as a preemptive defense against attempts to dismiss her politics by attacking her temperament. In effect, Abzug claims authority on her own terms, asserting that seriousness is measured by commitment and moral clarity rather than by conventional femininity or polite demeanor.