The Iraqi education system under the monarchy (1921-1958) is often seen as aiming primarily to unite Iraqis across their differences in order to produce a new generation of loyal national citizens. But while public schooling in this period did aim to submerge certain kinds of difference, especially those related to religious sect, it also worked to produce, intensify or redefine other kinds of difference, such as those marked by divisions of urban/rural, Arab/Kurd and male/female. My paper examines the increasing differentiation of Iraqi public education on the basis of sex from the 1930s to 1958. It also explores the interplay between gender and other kinds of difference central to the discourses and practices of national education in the twentieth century, including family/nation, public/private, adult/child, literate/ignorant, modern/backwards and developed/underdeveloped. In the years leading up to and following World War II, a new generation of Iraqi educators, supported by international development experts working in Iraq, pushed for the re-orientation of public education around the needs of national economic development. Part of this re-orientation was an emerging criticism that the Iraqi public school curriculum was not sufficiently differentiated by sex and thus did not train future mothers in skills necessary for successful development. These educators recommended that female students from the primary through the college levels be required to take courses in home economics, a field developed in the United States during the late nineteenth century. The recommendations were implemented through revisions to curricula, textbooks, teacher training programs and paths of education. In what might seem to be a paradox, the differentiation of the curriculum by sex was paralleled by the expansion of coeducation in Iraq at the primary and postsecondary levels during this same time period. An Iraqi girl entering the public education system in 1926 was certain to study in a school populated only by other girls, but she was almost equally certain to study the same material and follow the same course of schooling as a boy at her grade level. A girl entering the system in 1956 might or might not attend a coeducational primary school, but either way she would follow a girls-only curriculum for perhaps 20% of the time she spent in that school. It seemed that the more girls mixed with boys, and women with men, in the public sphere, the greater became the impetus to produce differences in their learned modes of being and thinking.