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- Title
Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth-century Prussia.
- Authors
Becker, Sascha O.; Woessmann, Ludger
- Abstract
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. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.
- Subjects
LUTHER, Martin, 1483-1546; GENDER differences in education; WOMEN'S education; EDUCATION of Protestants; ADULT education; SCHOOL building design &; construction; SEX differences (Biology); DEMOGRAPHIC surveys; EDUCATION &; society; POLITICAL attitudes
- Publication
Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2008, Vol 110, Issue 4, p777
- ISSN
0347-0520
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-9442.2008.00561.x