This article describes a comparison of two groups of women, one German and one French, who were able to use the expanding educational opportunities for women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to forge a new path to public influence. The comparison highlights the different socio-political and institutional contexts of Imperial Germany and Third Republic France, in order to explain the very different career patterns of women with similar research interests: national economists who trained in Berlin and lawyers who trained in Paris. Although the greater emphasis is on the German case, I explore the possibilities for (and limitations to) women's claims to public influence in both contexts.