In biography, autobiography, and other documents, this volume offers portraits of seven women who were the first of their sex to work as faculty and deans at coeducational universities in the United States and Canada. Most historians of higher education for women have focused their attention on women's colleges where the critical mass of faculty and students allowed communities of women to develop. Here, thanks to the recent research of seven scholars, we have stories of pathbreakers, pioneers, models of achievement, loneliness, isolation, and solitary triumphs recorded in journals, letters, and memoirs. The group of women includes an engineering graduate, two physicians, and an economist. The "woman question" loomed large in their lives and work: several were active in the suffrage movement, others worked on gender in research, or for such improvments as the 10-hour work day.