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Overview
FOR THE PAPERBACK RELEASE: The prominent political women of today stand upon the shoulders of those who spent the last two hundred years building a foundation for women's political participation. Jo Freeman brings to us the rich story of how American women entered into political life and party politics—well before suffrage and often completely separate from it. She shows that women's early political involvement was focused on the Republican party, very different from the situation today. And she builds up to the explosion of women's political activisim of the 1960s and 1970s, connecting past to future by tracing the roots of key political strategies still being debated in the early 21st century. Now for the first time in paperback, A Room at a Time is considered a landmark of original research into women's political history as well as party politics.
Editorials
Journal Of American History
A compendium of useful facts and many keen formulations. Freeman's book is conscientiously researched.Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture & Society
In A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics, prizewinning feminist scholar Jo Freeman follows the drama of women's participation in mainstream politics from the early nineteenth century up to the 1960s, with special attention to the period since the 1880s when the neglected political players she calls the "pary women" those largely volunteer Democratic and Republican party workers-came into their own.Women's Review of Books
Splendid.Women's Review Of Books
Splendid.American Review Of Politics
The book clearly marks a massive research effort and is thoroughly documented. It provides a comprehensive overview of women's political history integrated with that of American political parties. Freeman has a mastery of how politics works in America and accurately describes the historical development and operation of six different party systems.Journal of American History
A compendium of useful facts and many keen formulations. Freeman's book is conscientiously researched.Women and Politics
Jo Freeman's masterful A Room at a Time shares many of the good qualities of her earlier The Politics of Women's Liberation. Freeman has an amazing ability to gather enormous numbers of facts from varied and sometimes obscure places. Even more important, by simplifying and clarifying multifaceted phenomena she provides the reader with frameworks to make sence of complex processes. A Room at a Time develops a compelling argument about the ways that women's involvement in electoral politics developed out of moral reform and women's rights activities.Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture & Society
In A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics, prizewinning feminist scholar Jo Freeman follows the drama of women's participation in mainstream politics from the early nineteenth century up to the 1960s, with special attention to the period since the 1880s when the neglected political players she calls the "pary women"-those largely volunteer Democratic and Republican party workers-came into their own.Signs: Journal of Women In Culture & Society
In A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics, prizewinning feminist scholar Jo Freeman follows the drama of women's participation in mainstream politics from the early nineteenth century up to the 1960s, with special attention to the period since the 1880s when the neglected political players she calls the "pary women"-those largely volunteer Democratic and Republican party workers-came into their own.Arthur Schlesinger
This comprehensively researched and cogently written book is the best account we have of the invasion of American politics by women—a process that has extensively influenced our past and may very likely transform our future.Gloria Steinem
Jo Freeman uncovers the hidden facts of women in this century's party politics--whether feminists, reformers, or party women--and so creates an inside, readable, adn non-partisan history of how politics really works. Every voter, politician, women's studies course, and American history student needs this book. A Room at a Time is a landmark.Publishers Weekly
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, Freem (The Politics of Women's Liveration) 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 fastion an insightful, fascianting portrait of the ongoing fight for women to partake fully in U.S. political life.