Winifred Boys-Smith (1911-1921), Helen Rawson (1921-1924) and Ann Gilchrist Strong (1921-1941) were part of the academic diaspora of educated women who ventured to New Zealand for new career opportunities. Located in the newly created Department of Home Science at the University of New Zealand (1870-1961) and appointed to professorial roles, these three women were in a profoundly ambiguous position; as intellectuals, they were officially insiders within the Academy, yet as women they were unofficially outsiders in this almost exclusively male domain. As a ‘woman professor’ each had to simultaneously secure her position within the intellectual hierarchy, exercise a level of professional expertise, authority and independence as well as promote the expansion of opportunities for women academics. Their everyday lives were marked by exclusion and gendered expectations. Consequently, each woman directed her energies to strategies of resistance, transgression and accommodation in order to create an intellectual community of women who modelled new ways of thinking about women’s intellectual work and accomplishments. In this paper, I examine the individual career trajectories of the three women professors to highlight ways in which each woman transgressed the gendered boundaries of her life and agitated for reform from within the Academy in order to secure recognition for women’s scholarly work and expertise.