For the first 128 years of our country's history, not a single woman served in the Senate or House of Representatives. All of that changed, however, in November 1916, when Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress--even before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women across the U.S. the right to vote. Beginning with the women's suffrage movement and going all the way through the results of the 2012 election, Ilene Cooper covers more than a century of U.S. history in order to highlight the influential and diverse group of female leaders who opened doors for women in politics as well as the nation as a whole.