STANDING PAT 24 YEARS OF HOUSE WORK...AND THE PLACE IS STILL A MESS My Life in Politics By Pat Schroeder Andrews McMeel 244pp $24.95 At a 1972 press conference to announce her candidacy for Congress, Pat Schroeder was asked: ''Do you expect support from women?'' Schroeder all but rolled her eyes before replying that she anticipated support from men as well as women. Twenty years later, when she tested the Presidential waters, the questions weren't any better. But Schroeder's retorts were sharper. Queried about why she was running as a woman, Schroeder responded: ''Like, what are my other choices?'' In 24 Years of House Work..., a lighthearted look at her tenure in Washington, ex-Representative Schroeder (D-Colo.) writes that she battled the ''wimps of war'' over defense cuts and the old-boy network over programs to benefit minorities, women, and children. She forced the government to make changes in medical-research allocations after she discovered that almost all federally backed studies--including those for breast cancer--used men as subjects. (Even the lab rats were male, she found.) But it was her legislation to make federal pensions part of community property in divorces that generated the most enemies--and a brick through her car window. Her tears, produced when she pulled out of the Presidential race in 1987, brought her the most notoriety. Despite placing third in Time magazine's poll of Democratic candidates, Schroeder couldn't raise sufficient funds. She appeared before a huge crowd in Denver to announce her withdrawal. In response, supporters groaned and chanted: ''Run, Pat, run.'' Overcome, Schroeder began to cry. ''Those seventeen seconds were treated like a total breakdown,'' she reflects. Overlooking the fact that Presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan had cried openly, pundits said her weeping showed she was unfit to be President. One wrote that he wouldn't want the person with a finger on the nuclear button to be someone so emotional. Counters Schroeder: ''I wouldn't want that person to be someone who doesn't cry!'' Schroeder, now head of the Association of American Publishers, was an unusual politician. In two dozen years of service, she sent out only one newsletter and never commissioned a poll. She was also an unconventional mother. Her children, Scott and Jamie, tagged along everywhere, even to the Nixon White House, where on one occasion Billy Graham was holding a religious service. They were turned away because ''children were not included.'' At a later White House event, little Jamie took Rosalynn Carter to task over the refreshments: ''And we told you we don't like nuts in our brownies.'' Schroeder ends her book by urging others to take up the fight. ''Consider this a postcard from the front,'' she writes. ''Wish you were here.'' BY SANDRA DALLAS RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``24 Years of House Work and the Place Is Still a Mess''

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