Women who worked in the fields of social welfare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been understood by historians as performing a form of affective labor that enabled their inclusion in nationalist, modernist or progressive movements. By working as nurses and social workers, women were thought to not only have fulfilled roles as “mothers of the nation,” but also to have engaged in sectors of public life in ways that did not violate social ideas of gendered spheres and gendered roles. This paper complicates that image of women’s work by focusing on the layered modes of expertise enacted by Palestinian Arab women employed in health and welfare industries during the Mandate period. It argues that while these women worked in positions that might have recalled maternal roles, their work in fact reflected the contradictory nature of gendered labor under Mandate Palestine’s system of colonial governance. By exploring the careers of nurses and social workers employed in the field of child welfare, this paper challenges our notions of women’s work in the social realm as a form of public motherhood. Instead, it uncovers the ways in which these women embodied professional expertise, both in spite of and because of their gender. Nurses and social workers were integrated into the labor systems of colonial welfare governance as professionals with scientific knowledge and specialized training that met modern standards of professional education. At the same time, the colonial government relied on them to be representatives of local populations and assumed that they had particular knowledge of and connections with Palestinian communities. In the arenas of child welfare, where many of these women were employed, the workers' gender itself became a form of expertise that simultaneously relied upon and defied simple gender dichotomies. Drawing upon employment records and reports from the health, prisons, and welfare departments of the Mandate government, this paper also highlights the unique roles that these women occupied in the structure of colonial governance, as both objects of colonial rule and interlocutors in the production of a certain twentieth-century vision of social progress.