lars, theorists and intellectuals. The first section, the Introduction, is written by Rhode herself and serves as a general background introduction to the purpose and development of the book. The book grew out of the 2001 Women's Leadership Summit and was originally done act as a companion to three other projects being done by Rhode. The majority of the book is made up of nineteen essays of various lengths authored by twenty participants of the 2001 Women's Leadership Summit.
             According to the introduction, the premise of the book goes back to an article Rhode wrote in 1988, entitled "Perspectives on Professional Women". In this article, Rhodes says she "offered a fuller understanding of gender-related problems in professional setting." Thus, this book further investigates the unique issues related to professional women. It is from this essay that Rhodes takes two of the major sections that comprise the introduction portion of the book. For starters, Rhode examines the historical foundation that creates the problem of occupational inequality. Here Rhode challenges such institutions as discrimination assessed limitation of conventional legal responses to gender disparities. More so, within the introduction Rhode posses such guiding questions as "whether more changes will occur in professional cultures, or in the women who enter them?"
             According to Rhode, the nineteenth century was exemplified by an "almost negligible" presence of women in public life, besides playing the roles of "royal mistresses and actresses". Utilizing a statistical analysis, Rhode shows that, despite the many changes that have occurred since the nineteenth century, "women are still grossly under represented at the higher levels in almost all fields of public life in America." To demonstrate this fact, Rhode provides the example that only thirteen percent of all congressional rep...