In the late 1930s, Salwa Nassar, a Lebanese-born graduate of the American University of Beirut and by the 1940s the Arab World’s first female PhD in physics, traveled to Iraq as a teacher. There she joined luminaries such as Alice Kandaleft (later Kosma), who would go on to represent Syria at the United Nations, Najla Abu Izzeddin, a historian and likely the Arab world’s first female PhD overall, and Rose Ghurayyib, author and Arabic linguist. None of these women were born in Iraq. From the 1920s and into the early 1940s, nearly all of Iraq’s female secondary school teachers had journeyed from other corners of the Arab world. A lack of Iraqi women able, trained or willing to be educators drove the Iraqi government to hire outside its borders. Drawn by high salaries, adventure, and a dearth of local opportunities, the first generation of women in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Palestine to gain higher degrees came to Iraq to teach. The years in which foreign women made up the bulk of Iraq’s female educators coincided with a global heyday of domestic science. Governments and curricula, educationalists and popular culture, colonial officials and anti-imperial nationalists linked women’s education to their new role as modern homemakers. Worldwide, teaching allowed women professional opportunities within single-sex milieus. Iraq’s non-Iraqi female teachers however traveled hundreds of miles to teach, without husband or family. Schoolmistresses’ transnationalism was essential for the creation of expertly trained housewives, meant to bring about the modernization and development of their people. But, their lives went against those ideals. Analyses of globalization have linked women with domesticity, and men with economics and travel, thereby distorting our understanding of these processes. Reckoning with the impact of gendered understandings of the local, national and global, I argue that foreign female teachers in Iraq suffered through the disjuncture between the gendered expectations they lived and those they taught. Nevertheless, they expanded possibilities for women by forging transnational pathways: their students would follow in their footsteps. Using official documents, educational journals, memoirs and newspapers in Arabic and English, this paper demonstrates how women’s travels helped solidify Iraq’s place as a regional center of schooling.