The Arabian Mission was an American Protestant organization, employed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM) beginning in 1889 to conduct evangelical activities throughout the Gulf Arab states, including Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. This paper examines the role of missionaries of the Arabian Mission in the socialization of gender differences and the promotion of American values through education in Basra, Iraq between the 1910s and 1940s. It seeks to understand how the mission schools for boys and girls in Basra inculcated American notions of masculinity and femininity, and how Iraqi students negotiated these American gender norms to suit their own needs. By analyzing the Arabian Mission’s reports, British archives, and memoirs of American missionaries and Iraqi statesmen through the lens of gender and class, this paper argues that American missionaries propagated gender norms to boys and girls at the High Hope Schools through lessons and extracurricular activities, mediated by the different social classes of Iraqi students as well as the changing political atmosphere of Iraq. While the High Hope Schools succeeded in attracting a number of students from elite families in Basra before the First World War, they turned from being an elite institution to charity schools that provided education as welfare for poor students due to lack of funding and the implementation of the Iraqi nationalist educational policy in the 1930s. This changing nature of the school’s operation and the characteristics of the student body shaped the ways American missionaries inculcated gender and social norms among Iraqi students. Moreover, these boys and girls negotiated these norms in ways that defied the expectations of American missionaries. While some of the High Hope Schools’ alumni became successful scholars, the political events in Iraq led others to join the Communist party and the anti-colonial movements that led to the precarious position of American missionaries in Basra. By analyzing the experiences of male and female missionaries who shaped and were shaped by their interactions with Iraqi people in the early twentieth century, this paper destabilizes the Orientalist discourse of missionary enterprise and observes how gender affects the way missionaries and Iraqi students understood the notions of manhood and womanhood in Basran and Iraqi society. More importantly, this paper also contributes to the ongoing research on social and cultural relations between the US and the Arab world by examining American-Iraqi relations in an educational space in Basra.