cover image A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics

A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics

Jo Freeman. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., $57 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-8476-9804-2

You've come a long way baby--or so say the cigarette ads. In reality, the journey from 1920, when women won the vote, to Hillary Rodham Clinton's overt influence on her husband's presidency in the 1990s, and from conservative reform movements like the Women Christian Temperance Union of the early 1900s to today's Concerned Women for America, is far longer and more twisted than popular history accounts for. Dispelling such commonly held myths as that women engaged in more political activism before suffrage and that there is a secure ""bloc"" of women voters, Freeman (The Politics of Women's Liberation) focuses on how women's political groups enabled them to move into mainstream party politics by many routes. While the WCTU and YWCA promoted ""social purity"" ideals, providing the opportunity for some women to gain the political know-how to engage in the electoral side of the game, hard-line political and social reformers like Florence Kelley and Molly Dewson, working closely with Eleanor Roosevelt, brought average women into the Democratic party and into the New Deal and national politics. Freeman deftly weaves together the many intricate political, moral and social complications in her story--such as that the highly influential General Federation of Women's Clubs essentially banned the participation of African-American women--to fashion an insightful, fascinating portrait of the ongoing fight for women to partake fully in U.S. political life. (Feb.)