"Jo Freeman brings us the very rich story of how American women entered into political life and party politics - well before suffrage and, in many cases, completely separate from it.".

"Freeman shows how women carefully and methodically learned about the issues, the candidates, and the institutions, put themselves to work, and made themselves indispensable not only to the men running for office but to the political system overall.

She describes how women slipped inside the political house in the half century between the two great waves of women's political activism - a room at a time - and thus laid the foundation for the accelerated progress of the 1960s and 1970s, all the while building toward the monumental elections of 2000."--BOOK JACKET.