Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia

Citation

Becker S & Woessmann L (2008) Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia. Stirling Economics Discussion Paper, 2008-20.

Abstract
Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, 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 codes

• I21: Analysis of Education
• J16: Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
• N33: Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: Europe: Pre-1913
• Z12: Cultural Economics: Religion