Here is a fact that didn't come up during my lifelong education as a feminist and a Democrat: For quite a time, Republicans led the fight for gender equality. And here is a case in point: In 1965, the Michigan Republican Party appointed its first female chair, a full 14 years before the Michigan Democrats would do the same.

The woman who was known as “Elly Peterson: 'Mother' of the Moderates” (University of Michigan Press) had caught young teenager Sara Fitzgerald's eye the year before, when the now-biographer recalled that she'd been startled to see a network political correspondent interviewing a woman — a woman! — who was “the party's assistant chairman, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, and, even to my youthful ears, clearly a woman who knew what she was talking about.”

A word of warning: If today's polarized political culture is in danger of making you crazy, this book may make you actually weep with longing. "Elly," as her campaign literature branded her, was one of the members of the Greatest Generation. She fought World War II in the Red Cross, then settled in Charlotte, Mich. with her husband as he commuted to Lansing for his job as a Standard Oil salesman.

But there was never really any “settling” to be had with Elly — she just burbled with the kind of energy that poured into every volunteer effort that crossed her path, from the American Cancer Society to the church she and her husband were peer-pressured into joining to the local Republican Party chapter. The last one hooked her.

Sara Fitzgerald spent 15 of the years between Peterson's RNC appearance and the publication of this biography as an editor for The Washington Post, and her chronicle of Peterson's transformation into one of the first women to hold a national party leadership position is unrelentingly sharp.

Party organizing first suited Peterson's formidable administrative talents, and indeed she got the “mother” moniker from a state chairman who had hired her to be his secretary. But a funny thing happened on the way to the ballot box: Her political strategy of reaching out to all citizens in order to win elections solidified into a belief that the Republican Party should be broad enough to represent all citizens' interests after they arrived.

Soon she was working her way up the ranks with signature ideas like her “action centers,” the first of which opened in 1967 to connect Detroit residents in need with services that might be able to help them. This was not the direction her party was headed, however.

“'The hardest thing to sell to our politicians,' Peterson recalled, 'was the idea that (1) it would have to be an ongoing program for perhaps 8 to 10 years before we picked up much benefit in the way of votes and (2) it required a deep, personal commitment to the idea of brotherhood and equality. Strangely and sadly,' she concluded, 'the latter was harder to sell than the former.'”

She maybe was not as surprised about this cavalier attitude toward equality as her statement suggested. Her own chairmanship nomination had come after leaders from all over the state called Governor George Romney to insist that current chair Art Elliott be ousted and replaced with Peterson, because she was the only strategist with the skills, knowledge and connections to “lead the party out of the wilderness.”

Romney himself had offered her the job. But minutes before Peterson walked onstage to accept it, a congratulatory aside from oil magnate and Romney “moneyman” Max M. Fisher ended with, “But of course, we can't pay you what we paid Art — you are a woman.” The $21,000-a-year job was now worth $15,000, and Elly Peterson had just become a feminist.

This is what the literature likes to call a “click moment,” usually an instance of discrimination so overt and distasteful that it causes fatal injury to one's illusion that gender equality is unnecessary or has already arrived. (Peterson's response was so marvelously stoic and agile that I won't wreck it for you here.)

But changing an entire worldview is laborious — not to mention bewildering and gut wrenching — and Peterson fought all the way up to the Nixon White House before retiring to Hawaii in early 1971.

And it was only after that that she really got started on making the world a better place: realizing that the “women's lib” movement was gaining steam under the Democratic banner and unwilling to cede that representation too, she joined up with longtime Democratic journalist and spokeswoman Liz Carpenter to co-chair ERAmerica, a PR blitz designed to get four final states to ratify a constitutional equal-rights amendment.

I think that's as far as I can take you without a spoiler alert, but we've already ventured into crazytown a little. Wrap your head around this scene, courtesy of Fitzgerald's “What Would Elly Think?” blog: “In 1977, First Ladies Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter, Democrats Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Liz Carpenter and Republicans Elly Peterson and Jill Ruckelshaus all joined upraised hands together in front of a banner supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. One could not possibly imagine Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann doing the same thing together today.”

As it turns out, Fitzgerald's own click moment was Michigan's gain. Accepted to both Stanford and the University of Michigan, her father pragmatically informed her that “he wasn't willing to pay the cost to go to Stanford because he figured that if I wasn't married by the time I was out of college, I would be soon afterward.”

She took her profound note of the difference in expectations between men and women with her to U-M, where her attendance coincided with the founding of its women's studies program, and she became the first female editor-in-chief of The Michigan Daily.

She still loves our town so much that she cites the chance to visit from her home in Virginia and spend time at the Bentley Historical Library, where Peterson's papers are located, as “one of the pluses” in taking on this book.

Fitzgerald's perspective as a political journalist is particularly acute as she examines the role of press coverage in Peterson's campaigns.

“She was working at the national level and stepped down in 1970 as assistant chairman, so that was before women were allowed membership at the National Press Club,” explained Fitzgerald.

“If you were a woman covering lunches, they required you to sit up in the balcony rather than on the main floor. So she was not only successful as a politician at a time when there weren't many women in in politics, but also at a time when there weren't many women in journalism.”

There was not much coverage of Peterson's Senate race because it was seen as a long shot, and reporters dotted what little they did give it with images of endorsements “tucked in handbags,” the “dainty” slipping off of gloves and even “the rustle of political petticoats.”

“I'm sure that some of them would be embarrassed to write that today,” said Fitzgerald. “(Peterson) said that it didn't bother her at the time, but as she went on and got to thinking about the ways in which men and women are treated differently, then it did. But as she said, there was nothing you could do about it at the time, so she just didn't let it bother her.”

Actually, Peterson herself wasn't above a good girdle joke.

“You know, in any project you only have so much space, and one of the things I was sorry that I couldn't include more of is Elly Peterson's humor. I did try to sprinkle it around.”

Since Peterson's ERAmerica co-chair, Washington roommate and good friend Liz Carpenter was the kind of woman who took “I’ve always lived as outrageously as my family, friends, and the law would allow” for a motto, Fitzgerald thinks “it might be fun to write a two-character play about them and their friendship.” I sure hope she does.

“Elly Peterson: 'Mother' of the Moderates” is available now from University of Michigan Press, and Sara Fitzgerald blogs at sarafitzgerald.wordpress.com. Two books I happened to have read recently really enhanced my enjoyment of this one by telling other facets of the story of this era: Lawrence Glazer's “Wounded Warrior: The Rise and Fall of Michigan Governor John Swainson,” which details some of the political skirmishes Peterson fought from the Democratic perspective (and which I wrote about last month here); and New York Times editor Gail Collins' “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present,” which painted a clear, vivid picture of the mind-boggling quickness with which the right and left switched positions on many social issues during the 1970s. If you think you might enjoy this book, I think you might like those too.

Leah DuMouchel is a freelance writer for AnnArbor.com.