This article presents the autobiographical profiles of two pioneers in the history of women and gender in Spanish historiography, Rosa Maria Capel Martinez and Gloria Nielfa Cristobal. Their personal trajectories, recovered from the answers given by both to an identical questionnaire, matter to the extent that they help to make sense of the decisions that led them to wager decisively from the dawn of their research career on the barren and undervalued field of study of women, gender and feminism. Their careers are totally intertwined with the path that their discipline has completed, so that the obstacles they faced, the achievements they achieved and the challenges that still challenge them are largely those of the field of study to which they have dedicated their professional lives.