The story of how American women entered into political life and party politics - well before suffrage and, in many cases, completely separate from it. Jo Freeman shows how women carefully and methodically learned about the issues, the candidates, and the institutions, put themselves to work, and made themselves indispensable not only to the men running for office, but to the political system overall. In Freeman's own words, this volume describes how women slipped inside the political house in the half century between the two great waves of women's political activism - a room at a time -and thus laid the foundation for the accelerated progress of the 1960s and 1970s. The prominent political women of today stand upon the shoulders of those who spent the last 200 years building a foundation for women's political participation. Freeman shows that women's early political involvement was focused on the Republican Party, very different from the situation today. She builds up to the explosion of women's political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, connecting past to future by tracing the roots of key political strategies still being debated in the early 21st century.