Choosing to Lead explains why women's leadership is vital to reweaving the moral fabric of American life, and reveals why this resource is still largely untapped. Historian Constance H. Buchanan traces the long religious history of the idea that women's authority extends only to the home, and explores how this formulation continues, in often unrecognized ways, to shape modern "secular" values.

She shows how black and white women reformers in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America were able to challenge moral barriers to their leadership, changing communities and the national agenda with their public achievements. Contemporary women, Buchanan suggests, can learn from this tradition as they face similar barriers to their leadership and articulate their own public vision.

1. Buchanan argues that women must play a larger role in national affairs, but not as scapegoats for deep-seated problems. Women's fresh viewpoints on both the norms of the public world and the realities of the private one can be ignored only at great cost to the nation. Choosing to Lead makes an important contribution to understanding the crisis of American values and what - and who - can help solve it.