Luther and the girls: religious denomination and the female education gap in 19th century Prussia

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 2414

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Analysis of Education ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination ; Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: Europe: Pre-1913 ; Cultural Economics: Religion
• Subject: Gender gap ; education ; protestantism ; Frauenbildung ; Protestantismus ; Geschlechterdiskriminierung ; Bildungschancen ; Preußen

Contributors, Location and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Becker, Sascha O. ; Woessmann, Ludger
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2008

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/26459
• Last update: 20.09.2024, 8:25 AM CEST