This article examines the extent to which women were nominated by the major parties to run for the House of Representatives in contests they had little chance of winning. The findings indicate that between 1916 and 1978, a larger proportion of women than men was nominated for "hopeless" contests, but the difference, while significant at times, is not as great as might be expected. Republican women fared better than Democratic women during the first 50 years, but that pattern was recently reversed. Nevertheless, Democrats were not much better off in the 1970s than they were in the 1930s, and Republicans were decidedly worse off. A steady increase in the number of women nominated for House seats suggests that the number of women Representatives will grow, in spite of continued gender-related differences in the nominating process.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Comparative Legislative Research Center is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Legislative Studies Quarterly.A systematic examination of the backgrounds of women who were elected to the House between 1916 and 1976 reveals that a sharply decreasing proportion were widows of congressmen who died in office. There was also a discernible decrease in the percentage of congresswomen whose families possessed either extraordinary wealth or a history of political activity. In the meantime, there was a significant increase in the proportion of female House members who had legal training, who had elective experience, and who had a living spouse at the time of their initial election. A decrease in the average age of congresswomen was also reported. These findings suggest that the resources once found useful by female House candidates are no longer relied upon as fully as they once were and that the proportion of American women who have access to the effective political opportunity structure and who are available for public office has increased. Both of these developments have important implications for a democratic political system. The current surge of interest in the role of women in society has brought with it a corresponding increase in books and articles focusing on women in politics. Many of these works concentrate upon the recruitment of women to political and public office and deal with the incidence of women in office, the pathways they took to get there, and the political, social, economic, and personality characteristics of women who have secured or unsuccessfully sought public and partisan leadership positions.1If there is a single set of themes characterizing these works it is that women are significantly underrepresented in positions of political leadership, that the recent membership gains they have experienced in selected institutional settings have been barely perceptible (and in some arenas they have suffered important declines in membership-see Brichta, 1974/75), and that the future promises more of the same for all but the most blithely optimistic observer.Studies concentrating on women who run for Congress state or imply that they are not securing the number of seats that either the size of the female population or recent gains of the feminist movement might suggest.

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