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

Becker, Sascha O.; Woessmann, Ludger

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1281378

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

CESifo Working Paper Series No. 2414

42 Pages Posted: 13 Oct 2008

See all articles by Sascha O. Becker

Sascha O. Becker

Monash University - Department of Economics; University of Warwick

Ifo Institute for Economic Research; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research); University of Munich - Ifo Institute for Economic Research

There are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: October 1, 2008

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 Classification: I21, J16, N33, Z12

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Becker, Sascha O. and Woessmann, Ludger, Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia (October 1, 2008). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 2414, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1281378 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1281378