UC San Diego

Education is liberating and confining. It is assumed that increased access to education enables women’s socio-economic mobility, improving their civic participation and social benefits. Gendered education, however, reinforces ideologies that demarcate concepts of femininity, circumscribing women’s place in society. In twentieth-century Egypt, missionaries, the state, and Egyptian nationals claimed that to educate a woman was to edify, shape, and alter the nation, beginning within the individual home. Girls’ education, therefore, encoded beliefs of womanhood that couched prescriptive gender norms and policed girls’ minds, bodies, sexuality, and roles in public and private domains. Educate a Girl, Educate a Nation takes education as a contested site of nation-making and examines the struggle between American missionaries and the state to govern girls’ education, and inevitably, fashion the ideal Egyptian woman citizen.

Though current literature often positions missionaries as part of the colonial project, I demonstrate that missionaries, whether intentionally or not, served a critical purpose in Egyptians’ nationalist post-colonial identity formation. Girls’ schools were sites of transnational pedagogical exchange and citizen-making that developed new notions of womanhood as an amalgam of American and Egyptian ideals, customs, and contexts. The struggle to control education consequently elevated girls’ choices in and quality of schooling which facilitated a thriving, unprecedented, educational boom; in this unique moment, girls transformed themselves from subjects into citizens.

Despite its significance, virtually no literature examines Upper Egypt’s premier girls’ school, the Asyut Pressly Memorial Institute (PMI), mainly due to source inaccessibility and scarcity. Using the case of PMI, this dissertation tells a larger story of power, womanhood, feminism, Copts, and the transnational dynamics in the development of Egypt’s national education system. Missionaries and the state used schools analogously to construct the ideal woman as an educated wife and mother loyal to the nation; missionaries inculcated Egyptian patriotism into girls with hopes to build an indigenous cohort with Protestant values to evangelize throughout and alter the nation. Using a novel source composition of archival records, periodicals, oral histories, and missionary and colonial records collected throughout the USA, UK, and Egypt, this study centers Upper Egypt within the discourse on nation-state building.