The interwar years were a period of profound transition for Algerian society. As in other Middle Eastern spaces, rapid and large-scale urbanization blurred many of the distinctions which previously separated Algerian public life. Yet settler colonialism rendered Algeria irreconcilably different from other interwar Middle Eastern spaces. The colonial economy continued to restrict opportunities for both rural and urban Algerians and they had little political representation beyond a small number of local council members. Yet within this stifling climate, many Algerians were inspired by the rapid modernization underway across the Middle East. They saw women’s advancement as a key feature of the progress Middle Eastern nations enjoyed. Against this backdrop, debates about women animated Algerian society within the pages of the rapidly expanding Algerian French- and Arabic-language press. This paper considers how references to professional women in the Mashriq were deployed in a range of press articles written by Algerian men and women. Algerians were impressed by how women from the Mashriq, especially Syria and Iraq, participated in the workforce as professionals. They were inspired not only by the fact that large numbers of women were educated and working in these spaces, but also that women held important positions, and contributed to the national economy in meaningful ways. For them, the successes of working women illustrated that the Mashriq could be a space of inspiration in the arena of women’s advancement, alongside Western spaces. Their multidirectional references demonstrate everything that was at stake within these discussions about women—the moral health of Algerian cities, Algeria’s status as a quasi-extension of the metropole, Algeria’s place with a rapidly modernizing Middle East, the state of Muslim civilization broadly, and Algerians’ intellectual work to make sense of these questions. Most centrally, the way press commentators looked inward at their own settler-colonial society and outward to developments in the Middle East enabled them to push back against French colonial claims of Islam’s inherent misogyny and inferiority.