It is difficult now to imagine: in 1974, when Jeane Kirkpatrick and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) conducted their groundbreaking research on female state legislators, Kirkpatrick (1974, 3) could write: “Half a century after the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, no woman has been nominated to be president or vice president, no woman has served on the Supreme Court. Today, there is no woman in the cabinet, no woman in the Senate, no woman serving as governor of a major state, no woman mayor of a major city, no woman in the top leadership of either major party.”

There were a few female political elites in 1974, but only a very few: women comprised about 6 percent of all state legislators (Kirkpatrick 1974) and less than 4 percent of members of the House of Representatives (CAWP 2006). At the mass level, however, the news was more promising: the gender gap in turnout was just 2 percentage points in men's favor in 1972, almost all of which was attributed to older women (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980).

Clearly, great strides have been made in the past thirty-some years. In 2007, women hold sixteen percent of seats in both the House and the Senate, and almost a quarter of state legislative seats. U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was recently elected madame speaker of the House. Women serve as governors of nine states and are mayors of seven of the fifty largest U.S. cities (CAWP 2007a).