As an educational and research center concerned with increasing the contribution women can make to the American political system, the Center for the American Woman and Politics decided to hold a series of conferences for women already in public life, who could address themselves to questions about women’s political participation on the basis of personal experience. This report deals with the first such conference, which was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Conference for Women State Legislators brought together fifty women officeholders from twenty-eight states. At the time, out of a nationwide total of