Ms.Cellaneous:
- What?
- Women to Watch
- Word: Crossover
- Just the Facts

NEWS:
-Good News, Bad News for East German Women
- Rules of Engagement--Vermont Style
- Bedouin Women Take Charge
- Out in Africa
- Newsmaker: Rebecca Gomperts
- Women Flex Their Union Muscle
- Opinion: Beyond Sanctions
- Exporting Anti-choice
- Beijing +5: From Words to Deeds
- Clippings

YOUR HEALTH:
-Breast Cancer: The Environmental Link > by The Breast Cancer Fund
- Profile: La Shawn Woodward
- Healthnotes

Freeman makes the case that through the first half of the twentieth century, women with political power usually either belonged to a powerful political family, like Eleanor Roosevelt, or proved themselves through loyalty to men. Things were changing by the 1960s, but not much. Freeman tells how Liz Carpenter, soon to be one of the founders of the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), helped get women jobs in Washington. Lyndon Johnson, partly to bring in new appointees who would make the administration his own after John Kennedy was assassinated, vowed to end what he called "stag government." Carpenter, who as Lady Bird's press secretary hardly held a position of great power herself, was pulled into Johnson's office and told to identify suitable women candidates for administration posts. Because Johnson insisted that agency heads report directly to him, he achieved impressive results in his effort to increase the role of women in his administration: 150 new appointees and many more promotions.

Harriett Woods's political memoir takes up where Freeman's history leaves off. The opening scene of Stepping Up to Power depicts a radically changed atmosphere in Washington at the beginning of the Clinton Administration. The president had promised that his administration would "look like America," and an organized coalition of women's groups, chaired by Woods as NWPC president, came up with 700 high-powered resumZs. The group kept a careful, very public count of the percentage of women named to key posts. The new president branded the women "bean counters," but in the end, 40 percent of his appointments were women, including six at cabinet level.

Woods's first political action grew out of a domestic problem: a manhole cover in front of her suburban St. Louis home that rattled so noisily it woke her children from their afternoon nap. Stepping Up to Power describes the incident and her subsequent political career in the Missouri state legislature, which included a holding action Woods reluctantly managed when her state refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Her two campaigns for the U.S. Senate, though unsuccessful, changed the way women run for federal office--particularly the way they raise money nationally. Woods candidly admits her campaign mistakes, and with equal bluntness reports on what she sees as political blunders by National Organization for Women leaders. She also sharply criticizes the Beltway mentality that seemed to infect everyone she encountered in D.C. Woods fears that younger women are not entering the political pipeline in sufficient numbers. "The challenge is how to nurture a willingness to lead" in a complacent world, she writes. Her answer is a very practical guide to the kind of risk-taking demanded of women in the political arena.

--Mary Thom