Using a biographical approach, Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman explore and celebrate the aims, visions and actions of six little-recognized British women educational activists within nineteenth- and twentieth-century history: Sarah Austin, Jane Chessar, Margaret Cole, Mary Dendy, Elizabeth Hamilton and Shena Simon. As individuals, these women were very different personalities; as a group, they show how organized women made a contribution to changing philosophy, policy and practice in the field of education.