Abstract

The essay examines the development of the concept of leadership by the American women's movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a context where women were excluded from citizenship, the concept acquired a meaning very different from the Weberian one of charismatic leadership. Indeed, the movement conceived leadership as an essentially relational and "non-political" phenomenon which bore numerous similarities to the concept elaborated by the social scientists and management thinkers who sought to identify the distinctive features of a "true" leadership in the 1920s and 1930s.