Christine Ladd-Franklin spent the first forty years of her life becoming one of the best-educated women in nineteenth-century America. She spent the rest of her life devising fellowship programs designed to enable educated women to have the same opportunities as men in their academic careers. The difficulty women had in becoming professors had a profound effect on women who taught at lower levels. Because women were "thought to be not worthy of being college professors," it was "impossible for them to receive equal pay with men in the secondary schools." The solution to the problem of inequality in schools and colleges, Ladd-Franklin believed, lay in proving that individual women could perform as well as men; this "entering wedge" would prop open the door for future women. But as Ladd-Franklin's life and work show, there were limits to a strategy that focused on individuals in institutions. Indeed, the German-influenced structure of higher education in America, combined with male prejudice and changing gender roles in the early twentieth century, continued to keep women out of professorships until well after World War II. (Contains 107 footnotes.)