Shana Penn assembles material from ten years of interviews with the women behind the Polish Democratization movement - women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts. Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, ""Tygodnik Mazowsze"", while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women, then, went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland.