This article examines the way in which Irish American women teachers used education as a platform to extend the reach of their social and cultural capital, enabling them to subvert patriarchal and imperialist ideologies and, embracing subjectivity, assume key leadership roles in a range of associations fundamental to organised feminism. Drawing on a tapestry of primary sources, it interrogates how these gender transgressors successfully resisted the patriarchal ideology of nineteenth century American society, subverting essentialised notions of womanhood. Two women are examined over the course of this article, Margaret Haley (1861-1939), teacher and labour leader and Julia Harrington Duff (1859-1932), teacher and educationalist activist. Focussing on the ways in which Irish American women teachers enhanced their social mobility in and through education allows for a re-reading of the historiography of diaspora, establishing the educational and historical record within diasporic spaces as deeply gendered as well as women's role therein inherently agentic.