Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-century Prussia

Citation

Becker S & Woessmann L (2008) Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-century Prussia. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 110 (4), pp. 777-805. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9442.2008.00561.x

Abstract
Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby evoking a surge of building girls’ schools in Protestant areas. Using county and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county’s or town’s distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.

Keywords
Gender gap; education; Protestantism; JEL classification: I21; J16; N33; Z12; Prussia (Germany) Economic conditions 19th century; Protestantism; Church and education Prussia (Germany)

Journal
Scandinavian Journal of Economics: Volume 110, Issue 4