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This article explores the diversity of institutions that offered vocational education for poor girls in the 1860s in Algeria and metropolitan France. By examining together Saint-Simonian societies, Catholic workhouses, schools with training workshops, as well as vocational schools, it highlights the emergence of a widely-shared discourse, despite evident ideological differences, about the need to develop professional training for women. In Algeria, Mme Luce’s school-workshop was an example for other colonial schools, which sought to modify gender relations within indigenous society. In France, teaching orders ran similar institutions, albeit with a more moralizing objective. Scholarship has until now focused primarily on the Professional Society for Women’s Education created by the Saint-Simonian Elisa Lemonnier. This article uses the results of the survey about professional education organized in 1863-64 to argue that many similar schools existed to prepare poor girls for the working world. By analyzing both the public debates about this training with educational practices on the ground, the goal is to highlight how class, gender, and race intersected within these institutions with differing impact for the women concerned, be they adolescents or adults, French or indigenous students.