This publication reconstructs the beginning and development of women's involvement in public teaching in the 19th century. The teaching woman, who is now taken for granted, has a professional history that is closely linked to socially normative gender roles since its institutional beginnings. On the other hand, various paths were taken in the training of female teachers, which testify to an initially heterogeneous professional genesis of women teachers. This is related to the diverse interests of the actors in teacher education, who assigned different roles to teaching women in the establishment and expansion of a liberally oriented public education system. The integration of women into the public education system as teachers in the 19th century navigated the tension between gender norms and various educational policy interests. It was not until the end of the 19th century that these different models of teacher training began to converge.