New York City firefighter Adrienne Walsh was blown to the ground by a billowing cloud of black smoke and barely escaped into a nearby basement as the first twin tower collapsed on Sept. 11.

Her colleague, Regina Wilson, was racing toward the scene through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when it felt as if the underwater roadway had suddenly exploded.

Emerging from underground, Ms. Wilson and her fellow firefighters groped their way shoulder to shoulder into a world turned completely dark. She considers herself fortunate: Six firefighters from her unit, who had arrived only minutes earlier, died in the attack.

"This whole experience has been a reality check on the seriousness of my job," says Wilson, one of 27 women on a force of more than 11,000 firefighters.

In the nearly three months since, all New York firefighters have struggled to return to normal life while searching for the bodies or attending the funerals of 343 missing colleagues.

Female firefighters, however, now have additional challenges on the job: fighting for equal recognition and remaining loyal critics of hiring practices in a fire department suddenly beyond reproach.

Nationwide, 5,600 women work as full-time firefighters, accounting for as much as 15 percent of the departments in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Miami-Dade County, according to Women in the Fire Service, a Madison, Wisc. nonprofit research group. Another 40,000 women volunteer with local fire departments.

But New York lags far behind. Its first woman firefighter, Brenda Berkman, fought her way onto the department nearly two decades ago through the courts.

"It's a great job," says Ms. Berkman, explaining why she switched from practicing law to fighting fires in 1982. "You help people when they really need you."

Berkman says she and other early women firefighters had to endure harassment when they first arrived in firehouses. Some male colleagues would vandalize the women's boots and peer into their dressing rooms through secret peepholes.

The women also had to prove themselves anew every time they switched to a different firehouse that had never hosted female workers before.

"Firehouses or fire departments with extremely traditional occupational cultures tend to be pretty unwelcoming to the first women," says Carol Chetkovich, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who has studied firehouse culture and women firefighters.

And unlike most jobs where the shift eventually ends, firefighters live in the firehouse 24 hours at a time, drilling, cooking, and sleeping in close quarters. It's a boisterous environment, Dr. Chetkovich says, filled with practical jokes, verbal sparring, and constant testing to make sure you're ready when the fire call comes.

Having more women in a firehouse, though, can change the culture, firefighters say. For example, at the Lynbrook, N.Y., volunteer rescue company, 15 of 28 people in the medical company, including the captain, are women. Flowers often adorn their desks. "It's not like going into a man's firehouse," says volunteer EMT Angela Owens.

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