In the 1929-30 annual report of the Tripoli Girls’ School (TGS), the principal wrote the following of the four graduating students for that year: “One of the four won the respect of all who knew her…one of the class expects to sail in the early fall to take a position in South America; one may enter the Junior College; and a third is hoping to arrange for secretarial training.” While girls’ education has typically been framed, both at the time and in much of the scholarship since, as a project of modernity aimed at creating good wives and mothers for the nation and of the nation’s men, the above quote complicates that narrative, showing the multiple futures available and of interest to the school’s graduates: esteem among classmates, world travel, further studies, and professional endeavor. Using the TGS as a case study, this paper asks what this apparent discrepancy can tell us about how girls’ education shaped women’s professional, educational, and personal opportunities during and immediately following the French mandate period in Lebanon. Further, by centering schools as sites where various forms of knowledge production, the interaction of diverse actors, and the seeming divergence of the “foreign” and the “local” contexts come together, this paper interrogates how these opportunities shaped conceptions of nation and citizenship in this period of nation-state formation and colonial occupation. Based on yearly reports, curriculum, and publications of the American mission in Syria, this paper makes a twofold argument. First, it argues that girls’ education as the creator of good wives and mothers of the nation was not the only, and possibly not even the main goal. Instead, professional and educational development, civic participation, and personal and social uprightness are highlighted. Second, this paper argues that girls’ education facilitated the movement of women, and the ideas they learned in school, around the region, from rural areas to urban, and between schools, cities, and countries. Thus, as the students, alumnae, and teachers of girls’ schools moved around Lebanon and the larger Middle East, in the very fact of their movement and in their professional and personal choices, they shaped discourses on nation and citizenship and women’s place in both. Such an analysis forces us to rethink the meaning and purpose of girls’ education in the modernization and national projects to which it is so often tied.