The saying "An uneducated woman is the weak link between a family and nation" is attributed to Queen Effat al Thunayyan wife of the late King Feisal of Saudi Arabia. Their names have been associated with the beginnings of women's education in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s. Arriving from cosmopolitan Istanbul to a newly formed Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s, Effat al Thunayyan(of Saudi Circassian lineage)married Prince Feisal in 1930 and settled in the Kingdom. She opened the first girl's school in Jeddah in 1955 and with King Feisal spearheaded major efforts in the education of women from primary to university education and paved the way that has allowed for the current project of the largest women's university in the world. The Princess Noura bint Abdulrahman University which when complete by the end of 2010 will accommodate 44,000 female students. The Kingdom's commitment to education is underscored in its allocation of twenty-five percent of total expenditures of the 2009/2010 national budget. Unlike the early schools which aimed at eradicating illiteracy among women, today's education system is training women to enter the workforce in occupations that were previously considered "unsuitable" for women, such as engineering, architecture and law. This will have significant implications for the public role of women who form a meager 16% of the work force despite equal numbers of male and female university graduates. The government's licensing of the first private women's colleges in 1999 and their adoption of American based educational programs are major changes in a system that has been hitherto supervised by the conservative male religious establishment. The inauguration in November 2009 of KAUST (King Abdullah University for Science and Technology) represented a turning point as the first Saudi co-educational institution in the country. Decades ago Queen Effat (with her husband's support) challenged the Conservative population and religious establishment by opening the first school for girls. Today the boundaries are being pushed again beyond literacy requirements to address the needs of the market and the issue of integrating women into the workforce in a country with the lowest female employment level in the world. Based on original research, including interviews with close associates of the late Queen, my paper will examine the origins, development and transformation of women's education in the Saudi Kingdom and the dynamics of change in a society where gender roles are constrained by culture and tradition.