A Woman in the House (and Senate): How Women Came to the United States Congress, Broke Down Barriers, and Changed the Country

For the first 128 years of our country's history, not a single woman served in the Senate or House of Representatives. All of that changed, however, in November 1916, when Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress-even before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women across the U.S. the right to vote.

Beginning with the women's suffrage movement and going all the way through the results of the 2012 election, Ilene Cooper deftly covers more than a century of U.S. hist...