Biographical Dictionary of Congressional Women

by Karen P. Foerstel

Overview

This comprehensive reference guide to women who have served in Congress provides detailed biographies of each of the 200 women who have held office on Capitol Hill over the past 80 years. Along with statistics on their congressional service, the biographies contain first-hand interviews and personal anecdotes.

An introduction outlines the history of women in Congress, the obstacles they faced early in the century as well as today, and their slow but steady rise to power within the congressional hierarchy. The introduction also looks at how women campaign for national office and how the sexual scandal surrounding President Bill Clinton played a role in women running for Congress in 1998. There are also two reference charts showing every woman who has ever chaired a congressional committee, and the number of women serving in each congressional session since 1917.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313302909
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/30/1999
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Lexile:	1290L (what's this?)

About the Author

KAREN FOERSTEL is a reporter with Congressional Quarterly Magazine. She is the co-author, with Herbert Foerstel, of Climbing the Hill (Praeger, 1996).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Biographies
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

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).--Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A biographical reference guide to women who have served in Congress, providing detailed biographies of each of the 200 women who have held office on Capitol Hill over the past 80 years. Along with statistics on their congressional service, biographies contain first-hand interviews and personal anecdotes. An introduction outlines the history of women in Congress and their slow but steady rise to power within the congressional hierarchy. The author is a reporter with . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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