  At large N_c the nucleon can be viewed as a soliton of the effective chiral
lagrangian. This picture of nucleons allows a consistent nonperturbative
calculation of the leading-twist parton distributions at a low normalization
point. We derive general formulae for the transverse spin quark distribution
h_1(x) in the chiral quark-soliton model. We present numerical estimates and
compare them to the results obtained in other models.
