From Library Journal
This compendium of brief biographies of the 200 women who have served in Congress since 1917 adds little to available biographical resources. Though a handful of entries exceed 1000 words, most of the women receive annotations of a few hundred. (Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-MD, for example, gets about 700 words.) Foerstel (Climbing the Hill, LJ 3/15/96), a reporter at Congressional Quarterly, includes only 252 citations to books, journal articles, etc., for the 200 entries; approximately 30 percent of these citations rely on only three secondary sources. The final bibliography is fewer than two pages. The entries themselves are consistently positive, with only a modicum of context or critique. A 16-page introduction provides well-known generalities about women members (and a few mistakes, e.g., National Women's Party instead of the Civil Rights Act of Woman's Party, 1968 when the 1964 act is meant). Foerstel supplements the introduction with only two charts: one of women who have chaired full committees and one of the number of women in each house by party from 1917 to 1999. Much fuller information is available on the web, especially from the Center for the American Woman and Politics (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/cawp).ACynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The introduction to this volume provides a good overview of the role the 200 women who have made it to Congress have played and of the political trends that have made their presence there noteworthy. Prejudices of voters and colleagues, challenges of fund-raising and establishing seniority, and blatant sexism in the House and Senate have kept the women of Congress from capturing most of the powerful positions but not from influencing the direction our lawmakers have taken.
In addition to the political sketches, which range from a few paragraphs to several pages in length and are alphabetically arranged, the volume includes a chart listing all the women who have chaired full congressional committees, a chart that shows the number of women and their parties in each Congress, and a selected bibliography to direct those who want to know more. The index uses bold type to indicate main entries.
The title is a bit of a misnomer in that the entries are not full biographies. They do capture the essence of the women's political lives and activities but rarely provide background information that would help explain political development. For that, the researcher needs to use other sources, including Marcy Kaptur's Women of Congress: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey [RBB F 15 97]. Biographical Dictionary of Congressional Women might be a useful addition to high-school, public, and academic libraries not owning Kaptur.
