In December 1837 the French education minister, Count Achille de Salvandy, named Eugénie Chevreau-Lemercier to the July Monarchy's newly created post of “general delegate” for nursery schools (déléguéé générale pour les salles d'asile). Chevreau-Lemercier later termed this “the first time that a woman was offcially charged with a task of this nature,” presumably unaware of a different precedent set before the Revolution of 1789 by “the king's midwife,” Angélique Le Boursier du Coudray, paid by the royal government to instruct midwives throughout France. Although not the first woman school inspector, Chevreau-Lemercier was the first one who served the national government and had responsibility for more than a single city or department. Her thirty-year career begins the history of women holding the type of administrative post ofresponsibility treated in this study: a post requiring extensive knowledge of laws and decrees regulating a public institution, and often entailing supervisory or regulatory authority over other persons. These positions were significant because they long represented the most prestigious professional employment available to French women at a given moment. As state-sponsored efforts to define suitable activity for women in the public sphere, such jobs were also focal points for disputes over changing gender roles. Several generations of professional women figure in this history of women administrators' careers and relationship to the French state and larger society between 1837 and post-Second WorldWar decades.