This article reconstructs women's entry into the architecture classrooms of Germany's "Technische Hochschulen," which were, and remain, the nation's primary institutions for training architects. Created in the 1860s and '70s to supply an industrializing nation with well-educated engineers and building officials, these elite colleges resisted opening their doors to a "non-productive" population. The story of their integration begins at the end of the nineteenth century, when women first demanded permission to attend lectures. The schools' protectionist response to these efforts sought to limit women's access to general studies, keeping disciplinary programs, including architecture, a male domain. The foothold women gained in the general studies departments was, nonetheless, an important first step, and the means by which this was accomplished as well as their reception is considered. The author then turns to the integration of architecture departments proper, from the admittance of female auditors at the turn of the twentieth century to the struggles for full matriculation and the awarding of the first architecture diplomas to women. Into a larger institutional framework, the essay interweaves individual stories that serve to put faces on government policy and to emphasize the human effort behind the "firsts" of history. In addition, a statistical analysis of forty women who completed an architectural education at the THs during the Imperial period enables construction of a broad profile of the first generation of women architects. This collective profile, together with the individual biographies, provides a more textured account of who these women were and how they managed to secure an education for a profession then considered the rightful and exclusive preserve of men. (Contains 3 figures and 126 footnotes.)