As new models of schooling and education spread globally during the 19th and 20th centuries, the image and expectation of who would stand at the front of classrooms took different forms. While male teachers in the United States, and most of Europe wrestled with “historical and cultural frameworks that defined most teaching as women’s work,”1 in the Arab world, teaching did not conjure up images of women. Instead, women performed men’s work rather than vice-versa. This paper focuses on the Arab population of Mandate Palestine, arguing that although teachers faced expectations based on their gender, the profession of teaching coded both masculine and to a lesser extent elite feminine, rather than clearly feminine. Historians of the Middle East have focused on the feminization inherent in curricula, and also in women’s growing role in politics and feminist movements. However, they have focused less on teachers’ gender, or on the slippage between ideals of womanhood and that of the teaching profession. Policies and discourses relating to education, from local, missionary as well as colonial perspectives, sought to femininize women. These encouraged an ideal woman who would be a modern mother and homemaker. However, teaching necessarily postponed this ideal, often indefinitely. A continued scarcity of teachers, the segregation of schooling after kindergarten, as well as different pedagogical and even feminine ideals, preserved teaching as an elite rather than a feminine profession. This paper also follows Arab Palestinian teachers beyond Palestine. The acceptability of teaching as a profession, even as it came up against ideals of womanhood, allowed women to circulate, in increasing numbers, across the Arab World, creating pockets of similar educational backgrounds, sentiments, fashions and worldviews. Memoirs, official documents, newspaper articles and literature equated female teachers, to an even greater degree than their male colleagues, with the advent of modernity. Their dress, their travels, their leisure activities and their profession defined them as, if at times unwillingly, a pioneering elite. 1. Christine Skelton. The Sage Handbook of Gender and Education. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009.