This work identifies the first women graduates of the Harvard Business School and asks why this group of white, middle-class women selected graduate study in business administration in an apparent contradiction of existing societal expectations. Beginning with the nineteenth century it examines the historical evolution of business and education for business, the availability of graduate education for women, opportunities for middle-class women who wished to work, political events affecting them and the continued influence of a nineteenth-century ideology that dictated the domestic and working roles of women. The evolution of these factors are seen as the constraints and opportunities that form the environment in which 29 women grow up, attend college and focus on graduate work in business administration, taking an untraditional path in the 1950's to become self-supporting.

Oral histories provide the data regarding their early history, high school years, their experiences and accomplishments in college and decision to pursue graduate study in business administration initially at the one-year Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration and subsequently at the Harvard Business School when that opportunity arose in 1959. Their histories are the record of a time of transition as the Harvard Business School faculty and male students adjust to their presence. The study follows these women as they pursue careers in the public and private sector and grapple with the choices that marriage, family and career demand. It concludes with their retrospective on how they have conducted their lives, whether in the pursuit of a career or the responsibilities of marriage and family and a commitment to volunteer work. They relate what they consider their accomplishments have been and what differences they perceive between their attitudes and expectations as they entered graduate education in business administration and those they see nearly half a century later.