Pilgrimage
by Pramila Jayapal > Seal Press > $22.95

Pilgrimage chronicles the two tumultuous years, from 1995 to 1997, that author Pramila Jayapal spent traveling through India with the help of a grant from the Institute of Current World Affairs. Journeying through villages, meditation retreat centers, ashrams, cities, and a hospital (where she gives birth prematurely to her first child), Jayapal records the challenges of living in a society struggling to balance tradition and modernity.

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A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics
by Jo Freeman > Rowman & Littlefield > $35

While the stories of suffragists and reformers such as Jane Addams of Hull House are better known since the advent of women's studies, the history of party women has been neglected until now. In A Room at a Time, feminist Jo Freeman puts on her political-scientistÐhistorian hat to tell us how women were active politicians in the United States long before they voted for the first time nationally in 1920. Some nineteenth-century women, for example, were highly prized political orators. Republican Anna Dickinson, at age 22, was hailed as the American Joan of Arc in 1864; journalist Ida B. Wells went stumping for GOP candidates in the 1890s; and Jane Addams seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt at the Progressive Party convention in 1912. Ironically, after winning the vote, suffragists were first courted by the major parties and then, having achieved enough leverage to make demands, squeezed out. Although valued for their organizing talents and for their votes, women were discouraged from even taking sides in a primary contest. Freeman concludes that women who remained party loyalists must have found the work its own reward, since male leaders held the reins of power so tightly. Eleanor Roosevelt said as much in 1928 when she publicly urged women to organize as women and choose their own bosses.

Stepping Up to Power: The Political Journey of American Women
by Harriett Woods > Westview Press > $25

The opening scene of Stepping Up to Power depicts the 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 resumes. 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.

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Blue Angel
by Francine Proses >Harper Collins> $25

Francine Prose is a novelist of manners, a lampooner of lifestyles. As such, she targets not so much characters as contemporary mores and situations. In Blue Angel, the target would appear to be hard to miss: political correctness and sexual harassment on campus. A middle-aged male writing professor develops an infatuation for a punkish pupil whose own emerging manuscript, a brilliant coming-of-age story, has triggered both envy and desire. These lead where they always do, to sex and the undoing of a man.

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