As they confronted a growing national revolution in Algeria in the late 1950s, French military leaders turned to a new tool to reestablish order: development. Framed around a broad program of social, economic, and political integration, the French Army’s counterinsurgency campaign sought to intervene heavily in Algerian society, not only to root out revolutionary elements, but to effect deep structural changes that could bind Algeria more durably to France. Central to this campaign stood a set of vocational training programs for women and girls. For French policymakers, women’s labor, mobility, and consumption constituted key sites of intervention. These policymakers believed that by integrating Algerian women into the French consumer economy as workers and shoppers from an early age, they would be able to erase Algerian socioeconomic difference, loosen the imagined stranglehold of Muslim men over the family, and push Algeria rapidly down the path of economic modernization. From 1958 until independence in 1962, the French Army taught domestic and professional skills to rural women and girls in hundreds of informal workgroups and Youth Training Centers across Algeria with the aim of effecting such transformations. But as this paper will argue, the women’s labor envisioned by these vocational programs was often far less emancipatory than it appeared. Colonial planners struggled to imagine economic roles for Algerian women beyond artisanal production like handweaving or embroidery, and often excluded girls from the types of professional training afforded to boys, favoring instead a focus on domestic and childrearing skills. This gendered division of labor, I argue, reflected the close link between gender order and social order in the minds of French officials, and betrayed the programs’ underlying aim to shore up French authority. Drawing on the archives of the French Army’s Psychological Warfare Bureau and the Algerian Youth Training Service, this paper aims to historicize and interrogate the persistently close links between women’s work and social control in counterinsurgency.