Following worldwide trends of change in the realms of schooling and citizenship-building that were geared towards making education more accessible, nineteenth century Ottoman rulers sought to implement similar policies. Reformers of the Porte aimed to realize this objective through the establishment of a centralized school system for all children of the empire. This evolution of the state as educator hypothetically enabled it to assume and wield enormous power, as the state declared its right to intervene pedagogically in the life of every child within its domains. The Ottoman reformist elite came to view universal education as both an essential service and an indispensable strategy in dealing with dilemmas of modernization, social unrest, and territorial loss. The Ottoman state launched this campaign of reform with the 1869 Education Act, a law that made schooling compulsory for both boys and girls. In this context, Istanbul became the site for experimenting with many of education-related initiatives that the empire would attempt to institute subsequently in its peripheries. Various institutions, from primary to post-primary, industrial, and teacher-training schools, were established specifically for the education of girls and women. Drawing on recent scholarship that explores the governmentality of education, this paper addresses Ottoman intentions and methods, as well as their outcomes. The actual results of these policies were reflected not only the empire's attempts to extend governance to its populations but also the limitations of the empire in terms of its citizenship-building ideologies, constraints imposed by internal and foreign competitors, and the fiscal restrictions in its political economy. Confronted by these limitations, schooling and vocational training also came to be viewed as essential steps towards the wider industrialization that the Ottoman economy needed to foster in order to compete effectively with both domestic and foreign rivals. In this sense, education was sometimes viewed almost as the panacea that might render the empire an opportunity to socialize its children at early ages so that they would become loyal citizens who would be integrated with other community members and so they eventually could also make vocational and fiscal contributions that would enhance the empire's developmental and economic health. Identifying girls' and women's educations as central components within this educational agenda, this paper examines Ottoman reformists' rationalizations of such interventions, the methods that they employed to bring girls and women into the folds of modernization, and the effects of such reforms in terms of gender, family, and nation.