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… 
View on SSRN
doi.org
134 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
10
Background Citations
47
Methods Citations
9
Results Citations
7

134 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Lux Lucet in Tenebris: the Role of Waldensian Culture in Reducing the Gender Gap
Do religiously driven cultural norms contribute to the gender gap? Focusing on Italian municipalities in the Piedmont region, we study the long-run cultural effect of medieval Waldensian Christian…
The Protestant Legacy: Missions and Human Capital in India
We study the long-run consequences of Protestant missionary activities in colonial India on present-day literacy rates and gender equality in literacy. Following the principle of Sola Scriptura,…
Protestantism and Education: Reading (the Bible) and Other Skills
During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and…
Protestant Missionary Education and the Diffusion of Women’s Education in Ottoman Turkey: A Historical GIS Analysis
Abstract A significant literature demonstrates that the presence of historic missionary societies—especially Protestant societies—during the colonial period is significantly and positively associated…
The minority ethic: Rethinking religious denominations, minority status, and educational achievement across the globe
Social constraints and women's education: Evidence from Afghanistan under radical religious rule
Women, Medieval Commerce, and the Education Gender Gap
Missionaries and female empowerment in colonial Uganda: New evidence from Protestant marriage registers, 1880–1945
Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning their support of women's education in Africa. Using a novel dataset of 5,202 Protestant brides…
In God We Learn? The Universal Messages of Religions, their Context-Specific Effects, and the role of Minority Status
We test whether major religious denominations have a uniform impact on education across the world. Using individual data from the World Values Survey for 77 countries, we find that no denomination…
Religion and Educational Ideals in Contemporary Taiwan
The relationship between religion and educational ideals in Taiwan is explored using the Taiwan Social Change Survey (1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005). Religion seems to influence the overall level of…
...
1
2
3
4
5
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 68 REFERENCES
Jewish Occupational Selection: Education, Restrictions, or Minorities?
Before the eighth–ninth centuries CE, most Jews, like the rest of the population, were farmers. With the establishment of the Muslim Empire, almost all Jews entered urban occupations despite no…
The Education of Women in the Reformation
The importance of universal education to the emergence of today's world is obvious to anyone, but its history is often unknown. For example, the story of how large parts of modern society made the…
Schooling and society : the politics of education in Prussia and Bavaria, 1750-1900
This monograph is on the social and political history of Germany in the 19th century, with particular reference to the role played by the educational system in shaping society.
FROM FARMERS TO MERCHANTS , CONVERSIONS AND DIASPORA : HUMAN CAPITAL AND JEWISH HISTORY
From the end of the second century CE, Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring fathers to educate their sons. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this change had a major influence on…
Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestantregions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading…
Fertility decline in Prussia, 1875-1910: a pooled cross-section time series analysis.
TLDR
Marital fertility decline in nineteenth-century Prussia is better predicted by increased women's labour force participation in non-traditional occupations, the growth of financial institutions, the development of a transport-communications infrastructure, reduction in infant mortality and improvements in education.
The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family
Women’s increased involvement in the economy was the most significant change in labor markets during the past century. Their modern economic role emerged in the United States in four distinct phases.…
Printing and the Growth of a Protestant Movement in Germany from 1517 to 1524
The Reformation was the first religious movement which had the aid of the printing press. It was the first intellectual movement in which the printing press had a popular effect. The importance of…
Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History: A Comment on Becker and Woessmann
This comment makes a contribution to Becker and Woessmann?s paper on a human capital theory of Protestant economic history eventually challenging the famous thesis by Max Weber who attributed…
Financing Bologna, the Internationally Mobile Students in European Higher Education
Despite the importance of the Bologna process for the mobility of students, and the further mobility of graduates, as well as for peace, growth and welfare in that area, nothing has been decided so…
...
1
2
3
4
5
...