BELLA VS. BETTY.(The Talk of the Town)

In a year of all-too-public reconciliations (ranging from Tom and Brooke to Paris and Nicole), word of a rapprochement between the followers of the late Betty Friedan and those of the late Bella Abzug has been relatively slow to spread. It all started, inauspiciously enough, with Friedan's death, in February. "The family wanted the funeral to be a family ceremony," Sidney Abbott, the founder of a group called Women's Rights Are Human Rights, explained recently. "But there were many frustrated feminists there who wanted to hear what Kate"--Kate Millett, the author of the 1970 manifesto "Sexual Politics"--"and others had to say."

Abbott, the co-author of the 1972 book "Sappho Was a Right-On Woman," decided to plan a proper sendoff. Having set a date--Women's Equality Day, the eighty-sixth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment--she prevailed upon N.Y.U. to lend space at its law school. Coretta Scott King, who passed away the same week as Friedan, would be remembered, as would Abzug, who died in 1998. Millett would at last deliver her eulogy, but the event would not be a wake: it would be forward-looking, with workshops, awards, and calls to action.

Abbott set about enlisting old acquaintances, some of whom were wary of a Betty-Bella doubleheader. "Feminist lore has it that the National Women's Political Caucus was Betty Friedan's brainchild," Abbott said. "But then Bella and Gloria Steinem came in." As Judith Hennessee wrote in her biography of Friedan, "Bella and Betty were like the North Vietnamese and the Americans fighting over the shape of the table at the Paris Peace Conferences." In her column for McCall's, Friedan called Abzug and Steinem "female chauvinist boors." A typical Abzug retort: "Once again Betty Friedan is exercising her right to be wrong." In the weeks leading up to the event, the two camps remained divided. Abbott said, "Each side was saying, 'That's a Bella person!' or 'That's a Betty person!' "

But on the day of the conference peace prevailed. There were crudites ...