Investment in girls' education is offered as a salve to the Global South that will alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence. Rather than treat this thesis and its evidentiary basis as axiomatic, we examine some of the conditions for the intelligibility of this crisis, prevalent in much international development and education reform discourse today. Archival study of transnational school reforms in Kenya Colony--specifically the Jeanes School in the 1920s and 1930s and Mau Mau prison camp reeducation in the 1950s and 1960s--makes visible how domesticity has offered a shifting biopolitical strategy, wherein acceding to one's properly gendered roles was made a condition for economic and political maturity for racialized populations. We explore how residues of colonial domesticity persist in the exceptionalism of the girl, yoking the performance of "proper" notions of modern girl and womanhood as conditions for social progress and economic development.