Momentum: Women in American Politics Now, written by Ronna Romney with Beppie Harrison (1988: Crown Publishers Inc., NY) is a book that doesn’t lose credibility with time. Eight simple chapters cover all the essential topics that we saw as recently as the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2007-2008. We still register astonishment at the challenges she faced, showing that we have not yet understood the lessons and insight contained in Romney/Harrison’s book.

1. Banners, Bunting, and All That – why women (just like men) love the political process.
2. Hitting the Hurdles – you thought this would be easy?
3. The Campaign Trail – politics, legislation, and sausages, none of them pretty
4. The Money Game – essentials, dearie, essentials
5. Women Among Men – what it’s really like on the inside
6. Other Women – sometimes, even more brutal
7. Where Do We Get To From Here? – more quo vadis: learn, baby, learn!

Romney/Harrison (p. 214) describe three stages to women’s political development:

"the first being the hopeless, stubborn races where the woman is jeered at as a fool and as a shame to her sex,

the second being the stage in which a very few women are accepted as anomalies in the system, but always as the exceptions to the normal rules, and

the third being the nirvana in which a woman candidate expects, and gets, matter-of-fact- acceptance as a candidate depending on her qualifications…."

Where are we and where are we going? In 1988, they said that we probably were "somewhere between stage two and stage three..." On today’s campaign trail, we can see evidence of all three stages spread across the nation because not all communities have demonstrated the same levels of education, social or political maturity. The difference in 2009 is the sheer number of women being named to extremely responsible positions of leadership where they are acquiring the right experience and qualifications to take on the very top leadership positions.