In honor of Women's History Month and our Women's History Month sale, today's excerpt comes from a book published in 2008, Mayor Helen Boosalis: My Mother's Life in Politics by Beth Boosalis Davis:

"An unfamiliar voice at the other end of the phone asked, "Is this Mary Beth?" Immediately the question engaged my Nebraska self—Nebraska, where I was known for eighteen years as Mary Beth before going off to college, where I was M.B., and eventually dropping Mary altogether by the time I married. Mary Beth had always sounded southern to me anyway, though I liked being named after my grandmothers, Mary and Bertha (Beth and Bertha are the same in Greek: Panayiota).

This disembodied phone voice was calling me by my familial, familiar, Nebraska name—and not my grown-up name, Beth. Who was it? "You don't know me. My name is Neil Oxman and I'm working with your mother's campaign."

"Oh hi," I managed to interrupt the increasingly emphatic, eastern-accented caller.

"Look, you don't know me. I don't know you. But everyone I've talked to here in Nebraska agrees that you need to come home. Your mom needs your help and people say you'll know what to do. Besides, you're the only child, so it's up to you."

I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by stacks of unread memos for my Evanston City Council meeting that evening, feeling both assaulted by and drawn to this stranger's insistent tone. I don't remember the rest of the conversation, just that I hung up with a vague promise that I'd see what was possible at my end.

A week later, I stepped off the United plane in Lincoln with Christopher and all the baby paraphernalia that accompanies a two-year-old. Christopher's older brother, Michael, stayed home with his dad to go to kindergarten. As Chris and I heaved ourselves out of the jetway into the waiting arms of my dad, I didn't know that this would be the first of many commuting trips between Chicago and Lincoln, and that my life for the next seven months would be bifurcated.

As we arrived in Lincoln that blustery March day in 1986, I still felt torn about leaving home but clung to my husband Max's parting words: "Of course you have to do this for your mom . . . it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime things . . . you don't question, you just do it."

In Lincoln I had to race to catch up with the status of the governor's race. Mom hadn't had a moment to fill me in on her campaign. All I knew was that it had ejected from the launch pad at the eleventh hour, just like all her earlier campaigns."

Beth Boosalis Davis is an attorney and the daughter of former Lincoln mayor and Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Helen Boosalis. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, where she served for ten years as an alderman. Most recently Davis was executive director of the National Lekotek Center for children with disabilities and is on the boards of Carleton College and Steppenwolf Theatre.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Mayor Helen Boosalis, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Mayor-Helen-Boosalis,673947.aspx. Save 25%! Use discount code XWM9.