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At the turn of the nineteenth century, a small number of women whose lives are made visible from archives managed to carve out a place for themselves in scientific production. Integrated into scholarly collectives in astronomy, natural history or chemistry, their work for the collective, like that of their male colleagues, was remunerated in multiple forms – work contracts, annuities, pensions, and gratuities in kind financed by political institutions such as the Maison du Roi, or scholarly institutions like the Academy of Sciences, in addition to private funds or even public subscriptions. Invested in a more autonomous practice, some of them benefited from occasional contracts, negotiated their rights as authors or posed as scientific entrepreneurs, developing a commercial activity from their scholarly skills. They could enjoy successively, or even simultaneously, these varied forms of contractualization and legitimization of their scientific work.