24 Years of House Work ... and the Place is Still a Mess.

• Author: Bingham, Clara

By Pat Schroeder Andrews McMeel, $24.95

Until recently, whenever I tuned into CBS on Saturday to find Susan Molinari presiding over the pastel banality of the "Morning News" set, I couldn't resist thinking that her decision to quit Congress had been a cop-out. But that was before I read the memoir she has written with Elinor Burkett, Representative Mom. Now I know that taking the morning anchor job was her first real act of independence. Susan Molinari's grandfather, father, and husband were all politicians. Before she inherited her father's Staten Island congressional seat at the age of 32, Molinari had previously held just one job outside of politics, as a cocktail waitress one summer in college. For Molinari, entering politics was, as she puts it, the "path of least resistance" Television is her first real breakout.

As for Pat Schroeder, I still do a double take when I see her quoted as president of the Association of American Publishers. Protecting intellectual property rights and encouraging parents to read to their children hardly seems the encore I had expected from feminism's most valuable player in Congress. But Schroeder's new memoir makes it clear that she chose to bail out for just the opposite reason Molinari did. While Molinari needed to rebel against her upbringing, Schroeder needed to take a break from a long career of rebellion. At 55, she had grown tired of the fight.

The congresswomen from Staten Island and Denver left the Hill within six months of each other in 1997, and in less than a year have turned out books to tell their stories. Schroeder served in the House for 24 years; Molinari, seven. Schroeder, a liberal Democrat, is 18 years older than Molinari, a moderate Republican. Yet the two women have striking similarities. Although they belonged to different political parties, they both worked hard for many of the same women's issues: family leave, child care, violence against women, sexual harassment, and abortion rights. They were the most colorful, high profile, quotable women on the Hill in the 1990s. Both brought a refreshing amount of energy, humor, and irreverence to their jobs. In their absence, Congress is a noticeably blander place.

As masters of the sound bite, Schroeder and Molinari are good communicators. If they are deep thinkers, they aren't sharing their thoughts, only their complaints. As Molinari writes of being a blonde female politician: "We seem to get pigeonholed as lightweights.... There I'd be, in a war zone in Bosnia, and some reporter -- usually female...