Education is a powerful nation-state building tool. In 20th century Egypt, the British Occupation asphyxiated Egyptian state education; reducing funding to remarkably low rates making it near impossible for the state to adequately fund schools. Missionaries, like many foreign institutions, established schools in this time of hindered state competition. Private missionary groups funded from international entities challenged state resources and sovereignty. In Upper Egypt, the state’s leading competitors were American Protestant missionaries who had established large networks of girls’ schools for Copts and Muslims of diverse socio-economic standings. This paper examines the socio-political consequences of American missionary and state competition to govern girls’ education during Egyptian nation-state formation (1930s-1950s). I unpack how this competition shaped and reflected constructions of female citizenship in semi-colonial Egypt, representing state notions of national identity and women’s place in society. Girls’ education reinforced gender ideology, encoding beliefs of femininity while asserting difference in gendered citizenship. Private American missionary groups with international funding built girls’ schools combining Christian beliefs with American values exported into an Egyptian setting. This contested site couched prescriptive gendered norms while exposing nationalist aims to shape the nation by fashioning the ideal female citizen, policing girls’ minds, bodies and roles in public and private domains. Offering a gendered analysis of Egyptian nationalism through the lens of education, I explore how social constructs of gender inform national identity. Amongst the different missionary schools discussed, I focus on the leading girls’ school in Upper Egypt, the Asyut Pressly Memorial Institute, during Egypt’s transition from pre-independence to nascent nationhood. Using a novel source composition from Egypt, the USA and UK including oral histories, colonial archival sources, missionary accounts and uncatalogued education material, I argue in Egypt’s nationalist milieu, foreign and domestic struggle to control girls’ education aimed to fashion the ideal female citizen in accordance with nationalist ambitions. This education race produced a unique climate giving space for students to influence their own education. Girls were not just subjects of gendered nationalist discourse, but actors who contested prescriptive gender norms and carved out new sites for participation in civil society that reflected their own ambitions and career goals. By focusing on Upper Egypt, and decentering Cairo, this paper demonstrates the ways in which nation-state formation developed in regions marginalized from central state services. This paper also contributes to an understanding of Coptic history in contemporary Egypt amidst state endeavors to nationalize education.