This biography of the first woman to be elected to Congress from the state of Georgia is more than the story of one woman's challenge of the political establishment. It also covers professional women in the modern South, southern liberalism in the New Deal era and beyond, and the gathering forces of racial change in the era immediately preceding the civil rights movement.

A courageous and high-spirited woman, Helen Douglas Mankin drove an ambulance in France in 1918, made a daring cross-country motor-car tour with her sister in 1922, and was one of the first women to practice law before the state bar. Her political career began in 1936, when she was elected to the state legislature from Atlanta. During her four terms in office she worked for progressive legislation in the areas of child welfare, education, electoral reform, and women's rights. In 1946 when a special election was called to fill the unexpired term of Fifth District Congressman Robert Ramspeck, Helen Mankin left the legislature to seek the office. Of the seventeen candidates in the race, only Mankin actively sought the support of the black community, and she won the seat by a margin smaller than her vote in the heavily black Ashby Street precinct of Atlanta. Talmadge dubbed her "the Belle of Ashby Street" and belittled "the spectacle of Atlanta Negroes sending a Congresswoman to Washington."

She was renominated in the no longer all-white Democratic primary of July 1946, winning more popular votes than her nearest opponent, but the entrenched political forces in the state unified to orchestrate her defeat and her opponent claimed victory. Although her tenure in Congress was brief and she never again held office, her legacy is one of courage and conviction in an era that saw many changes in the South and the nation.

No history of the civil rights era in the South would be complete without an account of the remarkable life and career of Grace Towns Hamilton, the first African American woman in the Deep South to be elected to a state legislature.
A national official of the Young Women's Christian Association early in her career, Hamilton later headed the Atlanta Urban League, where she worked within the confines of segregation to equalize African American access to education, health care, and voting rights. In the Georgia legislature from 1965 until 1984, she exercised considerable power as a leader in the black struggle for local, state, and national offices, promoting interracial cooperation as the key to racial justice. Her probity and moderation paved the way for the election of other black women, and by the end of her political career no southern legislature was without women members of her race.

Lorraine Nelson Spritzer and Jean B. Bergmark examine two generations of African American history to give the long view of Hamilton's activism. The life spans of Hamilton and her father, an Atlanta University professor who was her greatest mentor, encompassed the best and worst of the African American experience, inevitably shaping Hamilton's outlook and achievements.