Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-Century Prussia
@article{Becker2008LutherAT, title={Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-Century Prussia}, author={Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann}, journal={Labor: Human Capital eJournal}, year={2008} }
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…
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