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

Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann

No 2008-20, Stirling Economics Discussion Papers from University of Stirling, Division of Economics

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-edu, nep-his and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (151)

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http://hdl.handle.net/1893/515

Related works:
Working Paper: Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia (2008)
Working Paper: Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:stl:stledp:2008-20

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