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Simone Ben Amara was born in colonial Algeria in 1924 and died in Paris in 2011. Her trajectory seems to articulate several lives, during which her gender, class and “race” identities were troubled. The daughter of settlers, she became an anti-colonialist and Marxist activist. A Jew and a French citizen, she chose to identify as an Algerian and to struggle for national independence. Raised in normative femininity, she became a feminist lawyer, specializing in Muslim law in post-colonial Algeria. This article is based on her private archives, which enable us to analyze the construction of dissonant identities in colonial Algeria and provide new perspectives on the history of women in Algeria after independence.