The stories of six women for whom a career in education serves as leverage to live their lives as agents of change. By profiling women as educational activists, the book challenges historical interpretations that have cast women as passive in the face of educational change.

In this book, you will meet women who resisted the conventional wisdom of their day -- including gender roles -- to make education and society more equitable and humane: -- Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, and Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching advocate, who worked together in Chicago to enact their own vision of democratic education -- Two New Jersey women: Elizabeth Almira Allen, who proposed a plan for the first statewide teacher pension system in the country, and Marion Thompson Wright, who promoted school integration -- Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds, both of whom advocated the child-centered approach of progressive education for all children in California.