Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling - Hardcover

At least things have gotten better since the chair of the House Armed Services Committee F. Edward Hebert suggested his Democratic colleagues Pat Schroeder and Ron Dellums share a chair because in his view "a girl and a black" were, as Schroeder remembers him saying, "worth only half of one 'regular' member." But things still aren't exactly great for women in politics. At the rate the United States is going, it will take another 250 years to raise to parity the number of female senators and representatives from the current 9 and 65 respectively.

Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling begins with a quotation from Hillary Clinton's predecessor and spectral interlocutor Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote in 1940: "In government, in business, and in the professions there may be a day when women will be looked upon as persons. We are, however, far from that day as yet." Though veteran Washington journalists and pundits Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis note that women make up more than 25 percent of state legislators and hold three governorships and 18 lieutenant governorships, Roosevelt's words still ring true. When the abortive non-run of Elizabeth Dole and the production of Barbie President 2000 (available in an assortment of races) are held up as role models, you know that the fight for women to be taken seriously as political candidates is still very much in play. Similarly, a shudder of recognition is still caused by the old feminist joke about how the first woman president is standing on the stage about to be sworn in--her hand on a Bible held by her husband--and her mother nudges the person seated beside her in the audience and declares, "You see that woman up there? Her brother is a doctor."

This book makes great use of the access Clift and Brazaitis have to the busy and powerful in D.C. It is a terrific overview of the situation of female elites in electoral politics, full of the anecdotes, tidbits, and commentary that years on the political scene can bring. It looks at women in federal office and in the upper echelons of state politics. And it keeps asking what one male political consultant facetiously suggested for a campaign slogan for the first female presidential nominee from a major party: "Why not the broad?" If--as polls show they do--90 percent of Americans say they could support a woman for president, the question this book prompts is: So, where is she? --J.R.

Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor for Newsweek and a weekly panelist on "The McLaughlin Group." She is widely recognized as one of the country's most accurate political predictors.