Reviewing the process during which work asserts itself as a consistent and essential category for the understanding of society leads us to revisit the most conventional sources of social history. Occupational records can be regarded not only as a more or less distorted reflection of social realities but also as a key aspect of individuation.Within the framework of an approach that aims to shed light on the singular more than on providing a thorough picture,the focus of attention has been necessarily directed at the role and visibility of women in identification and census systems. The tax and corporative documentation of the French Old Regime highlights the overwhelming pre-eminently feminine domesticity in urban areas as well as the plurality of possible jobs available not only for widows but also for a number of married ladies despite a persistent awareness of an essentially community-based society at the end of the eighteenth century.What has been observed in Toulouse bears out the results of recent historiography in respect of the relative autonomy of women’s work. However, the main issue here is to grasp how the systematized census systems set up after the French Revolution modify the perception of women’s occupational identities. Thus, there seems to emerge an incipient vocational sphere for women in which a domestic service now turned feminine and very much prevalent operates alongside a world replete with seamstresses and laundresses although most occupations are still the prerogative of men. Nonetheless, while the occupations held make them stand out, women, as from the nineteenth century, manage to secure in this way social recognition outside the family sphere and the convent enclosure where traditional society used to confine them.