This paper, focusing on public education in general and school textbooks in particular, analyzes the successive configurations of gendered nation-state identities in Turkey. It is argued here that in the early twentieth century Turkey, state-endorsed production of an imaginary middle-class nuclear family was part and parcel of the making of a modern nation-state. The nation was imagined through an analogy of family. With the nuclear family constituting the micro-cosmos of the nation, public identities were attached to and realized through family identities. In this civilizational project of the Republic, the textbooks focused on the middle class husband-father as the citizen ideal. The middle class wife-mother has been narrated in a dependent, at best, in a helpmate position in relation to the husband. This construct has been modified in the later years such that the class base has been broadened. Women, within time, came to be presented in less dependent roles in the public sphere; however the emphases on the familial identities and family-nation analogy have not ceased to exist, but in fact increased towards the end of the century. Public mass education, besides being a mechanism for socialization and disciplining of populations, has also been used worldwide as an instrument for creating social change and realizing the process of nation-building. It has historically been state-sponsored and regulated. National curricula and textbooks, as the transmitters of selected and organized knowledge, are the result of these state-imposed guidelines. In countries such as Turkey, where state-centric curriculum development, and textbook production or authorization is the practice, textbooks are the major carriers of the state's discourses. They are one of the sources that can be used to analyze the political and social order, as well as the formation of the body-politic and selves. Thus this paper focuses on the analysis of the schoolbooks that have been officially designed and authorized for primary education, which by virtue of being compulsory reflects mass education in Turkey. The research covers the Turkish language, life sciences, and social studies textbooks; it begins with the year 1928 and is carried into the current times.