Defence date: 28 October 2019 ; Examining Board: Prof. Corinna Unger, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Laura Lee Downs, European University Institute; Prof. Rebecca Rogers, Université Paris Descartes; Dr. Alicia Schrikker, Leiden University ; So far, the history of Indonesian girls’ education in the colonial period has mainly been explored by historians who have focused on governmental policies, and by those interested in theories of emancipation and modernity. This has often resulted in narratives about education as either a pathway to anticolonial activism and the birth of the Indonesian nation state, or as a gateway to ‘modernity’ and women’s emancipation. This thesis, by contrast, argues that a focus on girls’ education can help us to shift the perspective away from such teleological frameworks. This research project reconsiders the topic of girls’ education by taking the diversity of the late-colonial Dutch East Indies as its starting point. In doing so, the thesis integrates four widely diverging regions – the sultanate of Yogyakarta, West Sumatra, Flores and Minahasa – in one comparative framework. This allows for a kaleidoscopic view on girls’ schooling from modernist Islamic initiatives to nationalist organizations and Christian missionary schools. The comparative framework enables an interrogation of the importance of local factors, while also doing justice to broader societal developments, such as the growing popular support for nationalist movements and the increasing labour market participation of Indonesian women. While the importance of the new colonial ideology represented by the early-twentieth-century ‘ethical policy’ should not be underestimated, this research supports the argument that this policy was far from the only driving force behind developments in female education. Throughout the chapters, the strikingly diverse and highly gendered educational landscape of the Dutch East Indies is moved into two recently developed historiographical fields. In the first place, ...