Female education and social change

Abstract

Does access to education facilitate the emergence of a human capital elite from which social activists, and thus, social change can emerge? Assembling a city-level panel of the political, intellectual, and economic elite throughout German history, we find that the opening of schools providing secondary education for women increased their representation among the human capital elite. These elites challenged the status quo and developed critical ideas that resonated in cities with higher human capital, connecting women to form a social movement. We find no evidence of other city-specific indicators of economic and gender-specific cultural change affecting our results. Differential returns to education are also unrelated to the increasing representation of women among the human capital elite, as the opening of gender-specific schools has no impact on the opposite gender.

1 Introduction

Can access to education change societies? Historically successful attempts to change society often start with a small number of dedicated activists who develop and write about critical ideas that challenge the status quo (Wood & Tilly, 2012; Markoff, 2015; Della Porta & Mattoni, 2015). From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Susan B. Anthony, from Nelson Mandela to V. I. Lenin, early activists across all genders and nations were often considerably more educated than their peers. And while their education was arguably crucial for their success in promoting social change, educational opportunities also emerged alongside economic development and cultural change (Goldin, 2006; Duflo, 2012). Thus, it remains unclear whether increasing access to education can lead to societal change by facilitating the emergence of a human capital elite.

In this paper, we show how access to education facilitated the formation of a female human capital elite that critically engaged with the status quo. These women became recognized for writing about—and fighting for—the self-determination of women in society. Their ideas resonated in areas with higher human capital were more women could reflect on their role in society. Access to education thus fulfills two roles: It enables the human capital elite to formulate critical ideas (Morris & Staggenborg, 2004; Squicciarini & Voigtländer, 2015) and provides the grounds for these ideas to turn into a social movement.

In the empirical analysis, we compare trends in women’s human capital across cities, using a time-varying, city-level measure of the human capital elite between the year 800 and 1950. These data come from the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the definitive biographical dictionary of economic, cultural, and political figures in Germany (Hockerts, 2008; Dittmar & Meisenzahl, 2020). Our identification strategy leverages variation in the timing and location of Germany’s first institutions providing secondary education to women—i.e. finishing schools (Höhere Töchterschulen). We treat the opening of a finishing school as a positive shock to the availability of secondary education for women, since the first finishing schools were opened by foreign Catholic orders, Ursuline nuns (1626) and the Congregation of Jesus (1627).

The curricula of finishing schools did not include provocative thinking in terms of social change, but focused on religious teachings and manners, complemented by foreign languages, and writing. Parents either wanted to increase the marriage chances of their female offspring, or wanted to afford their female offspring similar opportunities that had been afforded to them. However, the opening of finishing schools had unexpected positive consequences on women social movements.

We find that access to secondary education increased women’s representation among the human capital elite. Cities with finishing schools are twice as likely to have a notable woman being born, and their representation in the human capital elite increased from 2.6% to 4.5% within 50 years. Female writers, women’s rights activists, and women participating in the labor force are more than twice as likely to come from cities with finishing schools. Access to secondary education created a female human capital elite that formed critical ideas about society.

Cities that established finishing schools may have endogenously responded to differential pre-trends, unobservable factors, increased local demand for education, or gender-specific changes in local culture. Such a selection process would be of concern to our interpretation if it correlates with women’s status in society or a city’s economic potential; then we would falsely attribute the increased representation of women among the human capital elite to increased access to education instead of these confounding factors. We address these concerns by establishing the absence of pre-trends; by employing an instrumental variables strategy; and, by exploiting a wide range of data to control for local non-linear changes in economic activity, the returns to education, and gender-specific changes in culture. We conclude that the availability of schooling increased women’s representation among the human capital elite.

Next, we show that these women migrated to places in which they can act as multipliers of social change. We find that after the opening of finishing schools, the probability that a notable writer is mentioned in another woman’s biography increased threefold.¹ Writers spreading critical ideas via books, journals and reading events require a high human capital environment to be effective multipliers of social change. We find that while 14.3% of cities without access to secondary education had a notable women, 53.8% of cities with finishing schools and active writers produced notable women.

Our results thus suggest that finishing schools produced a female upper-tail human capital elite that critically engaged with their status quo (writers and activists) who migrated to cities with higher human capital in which they could act as multipliers of social change. Access to secondary education thus provides a necessary (leading activists developing critical ideas about the status quo) and sufficient condition (an audience that can critically engage with the activists’ ideas).

Finally, we identify two potential outcomes of a crictical mass of women discussing their role in society at the city level. If independent female writers and activists succeeded in changing the role of women in society, we should observe more discussion of a women’s place in society and a greater female representation in parliament after suffrage had been achieved. First, digitizing letters to the editor of the first feminist newspaper (Frauen-Zeitung, 1849–1852), we observe a higher engagement with the critical discussion of women’s role in society in cities with finishing schools. Compared to cities without finishing schools, they are three times as likely to send a letter to Frauen-Zeitung in support of the women’s cause, indicating a more successful propagation of critical ideas in their city of origin. Women also started to organize in local chapters of the German women’s rights movement that challenged their role in society: By 1909, only 37% of cities without finishing schools established a women’s rights organization, compared to 78% of cities with finishing schools. Second, we analyze the complete record of German members of parliament and find an increased likelihood of a female parliamentarian coming from a city with finishing schools in all parliaments since 1919. As a case in point, in the first democratically elected parliament of the Weimar Republic (1919), at least 40% of female members of parliament had verifiably attended a finishing school and more than 50% had been a member of a women’s rights organization.

In sum, our findings indicate that educational institutions, which foster the exchange of critical ideas and provide the space to form networks, can function as important catalysts for the emergence of a new human capital elite. Then, leaders from this new elite can develop critical ideas and disseminate these ideas among a critically engaging audience. This way, they change their society into one where previously disadvantaged groups participate in social and political life.

Our results are highly robust. We find no evidence that finishing schools were established based on differential pre-trends or unobservable characteristics. Our empirical strategy also allows us to exploit idiosyncratic supply-side factors driving the establishment of finishing schools and isolate them from local demand drivers. We capture local demand for educational facilities by different population trends, the timing of the German Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the Enlightenment period. Our findings are inconsistent with the notion that cultural changes drove local demand for education. We conclude that finishing schools are the result of supply-side factors and idiosyncratic choices that led to establishment of a finishing school in a city.

We also find no evidence that finishing schools were established in response to other changes in (local) attitudes towards women. To distinguish the impact of education from other social changes, we test whether other important economic and cultural events predict a similar increase in the representation of women among the human capital elite. To this end, we employ a series of placebo exercises and test whether non-linear changes in (i) economic activity, (ii) the returns to education, and (iii) gender-specific changes in culture predict a similar increase in the emergence of notable women. First, using historical construction data, we find that the establishment of finishing schools did not coincide with a surge in economic activity. Second, we document that the staggered introduction of male schools does not predict women entering the human capital elite; similarly, finishing schools have no impact on men entering the human capital elite. Third, to alleviate concerns about non-linear gender-specific changes, we employ four markers of gender-specific cultural change as placebo treatments and find that none coincide with a rise in the female human capital elite. Finally, we show that our results are not driven by the Protestant Reformation arriving in cities.

We highlight the robustness of our results applying different weighting techniques (Callaway & Sant’Anna, 2021; de Chaisemartin & D’Haultfæuille, 2020) and the procedures outlined in Baker et al. (2021). We argue and provide evidence against negative treatment weights and effects in our setting: School openings would have to create fewer notable women. Aggregated treatment effects using (Callaway & Sant’Anna, 2021) and (Baker et al., 2021) produce similar results. We additionally replicate our main results in a classical difference-in-differences design, we define a set of cities based on whether they established a finishing school by 1850 (treatment group) or not (control group), and compare the shares of women entering the human capital elite after the opening of the first finishing school in 1626 (post period). We find no differential pre-trends, but a significant increase in women entering the human capital elite after the first finishing school was constructed.

Our paper expands upon a thriving literature in economics studying the increasing representation of women starting in the late 19th century (Bertocchi & Bozzano, 2016; Fernández, 2013; Galor & Weil, 1996; Goldin, 1990, 2006). First, by disentangling the availability of secondary education from other cultural and societal changes, we show that education was a key driver behind the increasing status of women in society and ultimately the women’s rights movement. Second, we extend this literature by studying how social movements, and their leaders, emerge in the first place. A prominent theory in sociology is that educational capital is the key resource for leaders, even when leaders arise from poorer segments of society (Morris & Staggenborg, 2004). By leveraging data spanning several centuries, we can study the emergence of social change from before its very beginning until it reached key milestones, such as the foundation of the women’s rights movement in the mid-19th century and women’s suffrage in 1919. Our findings support the notion that educational institutions that foster the exchange of critical ideas and network formation can serve as important catalysts of the emergence and success of social movements.

Our findings also speak to the literature studying the role of an emerging human capital elite in early-modern Europe and beyond. Here, the human capital elite constituted a herald of economic change in the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution (Galor & Weil, 2000; Diebolt & Perrin, 2013; Mokyr et al., 2015; Squicciarini & Voigtländer, 2015). The dispersion of this upper-tail human capital over space and time was shaped by the institutional environment such as welfare and educational policies (Dittmar & Meisenzahl, 2020; Squicciarini, 2020; Tabellini & Serafinelli, 2020). Countries with highly educated leaders showed higher rates of economic growth (Besley et al., 2011) and democratic participation (Glaeser et al., 2007). We extend these existing studies in two dimensions: first, we explicitly focus on the female human capital elite. Second, we show that in the context of the emergence of the German women’s rights movement, this female human capital elite through its impact on early activists’ efforts to disseminate critical ideas and institutionalize the movement constituted an important determinant of social change in and of itself.

The paper is structured as follows: In Sect. 2, we discuss the historical link between finishing schools and women’s role in society. We discuss our data sources and construction in Sect. 3, before discussing the identification assumptions of our empirical strategy in Sect. 4. In Sect. 5 we present our main findings on the finishing schools’ impact on female representation among the human capital elite. In Sect. 6, we conduct several placebo exercises to rule out confounding economic and cultural changes. In Sect. 7, we show that finishing schools facilitated networking and immigration of women. Before concluding, we replicate our finding using cross-sectional variation and discuss two potential outcomes of social change at a local level in Section 8: The dissemination of critical ideas, the organization of the women’s rights movement, and modern-day representation in parliaments.

2 Historical background

We begin by illustrating the links between social change and the emergence of religious finishing schools. In the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, foreign Catholic women’s orders began establishing finishing schools that focused on religious teachings but also included limited aspects of secular secondary education. At these finishing schools, students and teachers alike found access to critical ideas and a network of like-minded women. Several graduates eventually disseminated critical ideas as writers and activists and contributed to changing womens’ role in society. Religious finishing schools thus contributed to the formation of a group of pioneering women among the human capital elite, who acted as catalysts for social change.

2.1 Finishing schools

For the largest part of German history, only daughters from privileged families could obtain secondary education in the form of private tutoring. Access to secondary education for women improved when the orders of the Ursulines and the Congregation of Jesus, founded in Italy 1535 and Flanders 1609 respectively, expanded into Germany. In the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, these orders aimed to strengthen women’s adherence to Catholicism in religiously competitive areas of Germany: The Ursulines founded one of the first finishing schools in Cologne with the explicit goal of creating a “bulwark against emerging Protestantism” (Lewejohann, 2014, p. 57), while the Congregation of Jesus established their school in Munich to educate young women in “good Christian manners, virtues and other studies [Wissenschaften]” (Riedl-Valder, 2020, p. 2). Often these schools were supported by catholic monarchs such as King Max I. of Bavaria or Queen Katharina of Württemberg.

In response, two other types of schools were created: Protestant schools and private institutes. Pietists opened the first school in 1698, to combine biblical doctrine with a similar focus on Christian life and piety. Some ruling families took pride in sponsoring finishing schools in their territory, but compared to Catholic rulers of Bavaria and Wuerttemberg, “Prussian monarchs did not move as vigorously as others to support secondary schools for girls.” (Albisetti, 1988, p. 29). Similarly, schools created to educate the daughters of the human capital elite only started to appear in the early 19th century.²

Finishing schools’ primary goal was to strengthen women’s adherence to the respective faith, while parents sent their girls to finishing schools to improve marriage opportunities. This focus on religious teachings and marketable housekeeping skills emphasizes that religious finishing schools were not established with the explicit aim of empowering women. However, these finishing schools also included limited instruction in German, foreign languages, and arithmetic, and were among the first to provide education at the secondary level to women in German history. In contrast to the rollout of secondary education in the United States (Goldin & Katz, 2003), women generally received lower quality education than men as female teachers were denied the same quality of education as male teachers. By 1850, more than 200 finishing schools provided secondary education to thousands of young women.³

2.2 Female writers and social change

The impact of female writers on social change can be seen through three critical developments building on each other. First, female writers discussed the dependent and subordinate position of women. Second, female writers openly criticized this status quo and formulated demands for a more independent life for women. Third, and last, female writers organized in women’s rights organizations and connected with politics to change society.

First, female writers began to discuss their status quo and articulated a stronger, more independent, role of women in society. Publishing anonymously, female writers started to use independent women as their main protagonists (e.g., Sophie La Roche, “Geschichten des Fräuleins von Sternheim”, 1771) and proposed new and alternative ways for women to live their lives that contradict society’s expectations for women at the time (e.g., Caroline Auguste Fischer, “Gustav’s Verirrungen”, 1801).

Second, an increasing number of female writers openly criticized the subordinate status of women in the male-dominated society of the early nineteenth century (Gerhard, 1990, 2020). Writers demanded access to comprehensive educational opportunities for women, right to female employment, abolition of the convenience marriage and right to live their lifes more independently. With these far-reaching demands, they transcended the boundaries of the social structure of the early nineteenth century (Möhrmann, 1999).

Finally, female writers began to organize and connect with politics. Three central figures for changing women’s place in society were the writer and activist Louise Otto-Peters (1818–1895), the writer and teacher Auguste Schmidt (1833–1902), and the politician Clara Zetkin (1857–1933). Actively arguing for women’s rights since the 1840s, Louise Otto-Peters formulated her view on women’s place in society in her novel “Ludwig der Kellner” (1843): “the participation of women in the interests of the state is not only a right, it is a duty of women.”⁴, and in many journals and newspapers: “We hold the belief that the real solution [to the women’s question] can only be found by women themselves, by their own strength and will, and that any other solution is nothing but a makeshift that helps in the short run, but will have to be discarded soon after.”⁵

Together with Auguste Schmidt, a teacher and director of a finishing school in Leipzig, Louise Otto-Peters founded the first women’s rights organization in 1865. The “Allgemeiner Deutschen Frauenverein (ADF)” soon became the roof under which many local chapters organized and campaigned for women’s rights. An early member of the ADF, and student of Auguste Schmidt in Leipzig, Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) was ultimately instrumental in connecting the women’s rights movement to the Social Democratic Party (founded in 1869) and bringing equal suffrage into their party program, and thus into mainstream politics.

Thus, the increasing female representation of women among the human capital elite of cities stimulated a critical discussion among female writers about women’s role in society. While these discussions were descriptive at first, they soon proposed alternative ways for women to live their lives. Subsequent generations of women used these demands as the founding principles behind the first formal women’s rights organization in 1865. As this movement grew into organizing more than a quarter of million women of all socio-economic backgrounds, political parties could no longer ignore women’s rights and adopted many, though not all, demands of the earliest female writers and activists in their party’s programs (Evans, 1980).

In short summary, we argue that within two centuries, women’s status in society had improved significantly, thanks to the early efforts of independent women, writers and activists promoting a development of female personality free from societal demands. Without finishing schools, neither teachers nor students would have had comparable access to critical ideas and a network of like-minded women. Thus, they contributed to the formation of a group of pioneering women among the human capital elite, united by their opposition against women’s status as second-class citizens. Crucially, these pioneering women disseminated their ideas to the broader public, thus acting as catalysts for societal change.

3 Data

We assemble a novel dataset to study the role of secondary education in promoting the emergence of a female human capital elite. Our main outcome variable is derived from the biographies of all notable individuals born between 800 and 1950 CE within modern-day boundaries of Germany. Our explanatory variable “finishing schools” captures the availability of secondary education for women between 1626 and 1850 in all German cities. We combine these data to a balanced panel of cities in half-century periods, indicating the birth of notable women and the availability of secondary education at the nearest city.

Biographies of notable women

We obtain detailed micro data on the universe of notable German women and men for the period 800–1950 CE from the “Neue Deutsche Biographie” (NDB) and follow Dittmar and Meisenzahl (2020) to construct measures of women’s representation among the human capital elite.

The NDB is “considered the single most relevant biographic encyclopedia of the German language” and includes biographies detailing the professions and nobility of historically relevant men and women (Historische Kommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2019). It incorporates its direct predecessor, the “Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1912)”, and in scope is comparable to the “Dictionary of National Biography” for British notable men and women. It originated in the historical commission of the Bavarian academy of science in 1858 and never mentions the word women in its founding charter or any report thereof.⁶

It was designed to address and eliminate selective inclusion by networks or kinship and instead document the “thoroughly pluralistic foundation” of German cultural achievement (Hockerts, 2008, p. 238). The editorial inclusion criteria targeted everyone, “whose deeds or works contributed to the development of Germany in history, science, art, trade, or business, in short in every corner of political or cultural life” (von Liliencron & Wegele, 1875, p. V-VI).⁷ This precludes the inclusion of time-bound personalities in the realm of women’s education, and only includes individuals who shaped the course of women’s rights and society as a whole.⁸

We link 2172 non-noble secular women to cities of birth within in the modern-day boundaries of Germany after 800 CE, as well as 586 women from the nobility, who we use as a placebo to ensure our estimates are not affected by differential population growth between cities. Thus, for each city and period, our data records the number of women born who later became recognized for their achievements. Of all 2732 women, 41% became notable for being an artist, 31% for being a writer, 16% for being born into nobility, and 11% each for being a politician or Teacher (Table A.2). We use the place and date of birth of notable women alongside with the reported biographical information to trace women’s representation among the human capital elite across cities and periods. Our main dependent variables are (i) an indicator for whether at least one non-noble secular woman was born in a given city and period who became notable later in life, (ii) the log number of non-noble secular women, (iii) and the share of non-noble secular women among all non-noble secular individuals. These variables measure the extensive and intensive margin of women’s representation among the human capital elite.

Finishing schools

We link the birthplaces of all notable women to the historical emergence of finishing schools providing secondary education obtained from the “Data Handbook of German Education History”. This handbook covers all traditional female finishing schools constructed between 1626–1850. (Neghabian et al., 2005).⁹ We match finishing schools to our data on notable women based on their location and opening date. The first finishing schools were established by female orders of the Catholic church who, following an invitation by the ruling houses, settled near existing monasteries to educate and “protect the women’s mind from the falsities of their time”.¹⁰ Protestant or city schools only started to emerge after 1750. In total we record 209 school openings in 129 cities between 1626 and 1850, without a clear spatial pattern in location or timing.¹¹

An important limitation with these data is that we cannot link individuals to their school in a systematic way. However, 40% of the female members of parliament in 1919 and 60% of female entries in a compendium on the German educational system of the nineteenth century (Beyer, 1903) have verifiably attended a finishing school. We thus interpret the opening of a school as a positive shock to the probability of attending secondary education for women.

Cities

Since birthplaces of notable women and the location of finishing schools do not overlap perfectly, we utilize data from Voigtländer and Voth (2012) and construct a panel of 388 German cities that existed in 1300.¹² We merge the biographies of women and the emergence of finishing schools to the nearest city and period in our sample, thus covering all of modern Germany. This procedure has two advantages: First, it does not rely on any political or geographical boundary as the matching procedure is solely based on distance.¹³ Second, we can use the rich set of covariates from Voigtländer and Voth (2012) to flexibly capture economic, religious, and educational factors, as measured in 1300, in every period.

4 Empirical strategy

We study the role of expanding access to education in promoting the emergence of a female human capital elite, eventually promoting social change. We begin by descriptively assessing the effect of finishing schools on women’s likelihood of entering the human capital elite. We normalize each year of birth by the year the first finishing school opened in her city of birth, and for every city and period, calculate the likelihood that a non-noble secular women was born in that city and period. In this setup, we conduct an event-study exercise including city and period fixed effects, and plot the point estimates for each cohort in Fig. 1. A woman aged thirty at the time the first finishing school in her city of birth opened, would not have had the chance to attend the school during her formative years, and thus serves as our reference group (“50–25”). A ten year old women in the same year however (“25–0”), had the chance to attend a finishing school and is thus 7% points more likely to appear in the record of all notable individuals in German history, than her thirty-year old counter part.

Fig. 1

Event-Study: Impact of finishing school establishment on notable women.Event study results for non-noble secular women and women from the nobility. For each woman, we normalize the opening of the finishing school in her city of birth relative to her year of birth. A woman that was ten at the time of the finishing school is coded as the group (25–0), and thus has the chance of attending the school. A women that is born 50 years after the construction of the finishing school is coded as ‘-50’. The outcome is an indicator equal to one if a notable woman was born in a given city and period 90%-confidence intervals shown only for non-noble secular, the impact of nobility is indistinguishable form zero in all periods and specifications. City and 50-years period fixed effects included

This first descriptive exercise suggests that finishing schools indeed increased women’s representation among the human capital elite. However, this approach exhibits limitations that prevent a more thorough investigation. First, cities that never establish finishing schools cannot be included in this setup to comprehensively assess pre-trends or employ a standard difference-in-differences regression. Second, when we continue to explore alternative hypotheses using the opening of male schools, universities, increased economic activity, changing culture, or migration, normalization around the event would change the framework and data, limiting comparability.

In our main exercise below we thus create a balanced panel for all cities to keep a common framework for all our estimation results. For each city, we create 50 year periods from 800 until 1950 CE to ensure a sufficient overlap between the opening of a finishing school and its effect on women being recognized for their achievements in our biographical database. Finally, we assign each finishing school and birthplace to its closest city and period.¹⁴

4.1 Identification strategy

We combine the staggered introduction of religious finishing schools and unique biographical microdata on the universe of notable women in German history to a balanced panel of 388 cities between 800 and 1950 CE. The key empirical challenge is then to isolate the impact of finishing schools from potential confounders that are correlated with both finishing school opening and the increase in women’s representation among the human capital elite.

Cities that establish finishing schools may differ on a wide range of characteristics. Even if these schools were established by idiosyncratic decisions that are uncorrelated with local economic conditions or the demand for education, a causal interpretation of the impact of finishing schools requires that all unobservable factors that influence women’s representation among the human capital elite must be orthogonal to finishing school opening. However, as production technologies change, increased returns to education could also induce a rise in the demand for education, although the guild system prevented female entry into most occupations until its dissolution. Similarly, wars or natural catastrophes that disproportionately affect the male population increase the demand for female labor and thus the demand for educated women. These local, often unobservable, factors can increase the adoption of educational policies and thus change the relative wages between cities. Then, cross-sectional evidence or failing to control for local factors risks overstating the true effect of finishing schools on women’s representation among the human capital elite.

We address local differences between cities by including city and period fixed effects in a Two-Way-Fixed-Effects setup, capturing all observable and unobservable time-invariant factors that vary between cities and periods in our sample.

$$\begin{aligned} Y_{c,t} = \,&\beta \, Finishing~school_{c,t}+\alpha _c +\alpha _t +\alpha _c\times t \end{aligned}$$

(Baseline)

$$\begin{aligned}&+ \sum _{\tau =800}^{T=1950}\left[ X_{e,c}\times \alpha _\tau + X_{r,c}\times \alpha _\tau + X_{s,c}\times \alpha _\tau \right] + \varepsilon _{c,t} \end{aligned}$$

(Additional Controls)

In our baseline specification, we regress a binary outcome of whether a woman who became notable later in life was born in city $c$ and period $t$, on an indicator of the presence of a finishing school. We use two definitions of this indicator $Finishing~school_{c,t}$: In our main specification, this indicates whether a finishing school is present in city $c$ at time $t$. In “Appendix G”, we abstract from the variation in timing and define this variable as the classical difference-in-differences estimator, comparing 129 cities with finishing schools to 259 cities without after 1650: $Finishing~school_{c}\times {\textbf{1}}(t\ge 1650)$.¹⁵ We include city $\alpha _c$ and period $\alpha _t$ fixed effects as well as city-specific linear time trends $\alpha _c\times t$. This baseline set of fixed effects captures all unobservable city-specific trends that evolve linearly over time. We cluster our standard errors at the city level $c$ and report standard errors corrected for spatial correlation in “Appendix E, Table E.1”.

To identify the impact of finishing schools on women’s representation among the human capital elite, we must argue that conditional on our set of fixed effects, either school assignment is as good as random or that observed increases in women’s representation among the human capital elite can only be attributed to finishing schools. Since the former is unlikely, the latter requires us to relate the increase in the number of notable women being born after the opening of the first finishing school to the long-term trends that determine women’s representation among the human capital elite and finishing schools. Then, to identify the impact of finishing schools, cities need not exhibit different trends prior to the establishing of the first finishing school. In addition, since our baseline specification already captures differences between cities that grow linearly over time (e.g. population growth), our identifying assumption necessitates to sufficiently capture all remaining non-linear, city-specific, confounding factors.

With our additional controls we capture three sets of potential confounders that might non-linearly predict women’s representation among the human capital elite and the opening of finishing schools: economic, religious, and educational characteristics. The first set of covariates capture the potential direct effects of economic characteristics that influence the decision to open finishing schools ($X_{e,c}$). We proxy for the economic and financial development using membership in the Hanseatic League, Jewish settlements and pogroms against Jews (Voigtländer & Voth, 2012). We complement these covariates with population data in 1600 from Bairoch et al. (1988), female specific labor demand as proxied by religious battles during the 30 Years’ War affecting sex-ratios and local weather conditions affecting agricultural production from Leeson and Russ (2017). Combined, these covariates, measured before the opening of the first school, capture demand factors of productivity and relative wages that may impact the decision to establish a finishing school.

The second set of covariates capture the potential influence of religion on school opening and women’s representation among the human capital elite. Since almost all early finishing schools were established by religious orders, this set of covariates capture any direct effects of religious differences across cities ($X_{r,c}$). We include whether the city was a bishopric seat (Voigtländer & Voth, 2012) and distance to Wittenberg to proxy for the diffusion of Protestantism (Becker & Woessmann, 2009; Cantoni, 2015). We determine which cities were Protestant or Catholic in 1619 by digitizing cartographic material in Engel et al. (1995), and include the distance to the inner-German denominational boundary to capture religious competition between the major religious denominations. In combination, our religious controls thus address two major concerns regarding the comparison between Protestant and Catholic cities: first, early finishing schools were built by Catholic orders and Protestant cities did not establish secondary educational institutions in significant numbers until 1750. Second, as highlighted in Becker and Woessmann (2009), since Protestantism is generally associated with a greater proportion of women receiving (limited) primary education, we might wrongly attribute an effect of Protestantism to finishing schools.

Finally, we address the direct effects of differential returns to education across cities ($X_{s,c}$) by determining whether a city had a university or provided higher male education in 1650.¹⁶ In addition, we control for different educational preferences of different heads of state by controlling for the ruling house of each city as of 1619 using Engel et al. (1995).¹⁷ Combined, male schools, universities and the educational preferences of ruling houses capture local returns to education across all genders at the time the first finishing schools were established in Germany.¹⁸

In Table H.4, we show how these variables and our main outcome in 1600 predict whether a finishing school was established in a city thereafter. We begin by showing that the fraction of non-noble secular women among the human capital elite is not predictive of finishing school construction (Panel A), speaking against a local demand for establishing finishing schools. We continue in Panel B and show that larger cities and cities that lie further away from the religious divide between Catholicism and Protestantism were more likely to establish a finishing school.

To capture these differences and isolate the effects of finishing schools from these confounding factors, we include and interact all covariates with period fixed effects and show robustness to a matching strategy creating a balanced sample based on pre-treatment variables. Our identifying variation is thus limited to within-city, off the linear time trend of any unobservable confounding factor and the non-linear evolution of observable economic, religious, and educational differences across time. Hence, all remaining violations of the main identifying assumption must arise from unobservable non-linear confounding factors which explain both the opening of a finishing school as well as the subsequent increase in women’s representation among the human capital elite.

4.2 Evaluating pre-trends

We evaluate the validity of our empirical design by testing for differential pre-trends in the event-study graph of Fig. 2.¹⁹ Here, we limit our sample to all cities in which a finishing school has ever been established and estimate the impact of the first finishing school four centuries before and two centuries after its opening. Thus, potential differences between cities with and without finishing schools do not affect the validity of this analysis.

Fig. 2

Event-Study: Impact of finishing school establishment on notable women. Event study results for non-noble secular women creating 50-year periods before and after the period of school construction ‘0’. In a, the outcome is an indicator equal to one if a notable woman from the respective group was born in a given city and period. b Uses the natural logarithm of number of women born plus one. c Denotes the number of notable women by the number of notable individuals of all genders. Zero is the normalized time of opening of the first finishing schools in the city. The vertical line marks the reference period, which we choose to be 50 years prior to establishment of the school. City and period fixed effects included in all figures; The grey dashed line denotes estimates with covariates included. 95%-confidence intervals shown. Both lines are shifted for increased visibility, but estimated at the same period in time. Alternative approaches discussed in Sect. F

In Fig. 2, we provide evidence in favor of our identification assumption as finishing schools have a precisely estimated zero impact on the birth of a non-noble secular women in all periods prior to opening. After the first school opened to girls, the probability of a non-noble secular woman being born in the city and becoming notable later in life increases immediately. This relationship remains robust when including all control variables non-linearly (dashed line). In the remaining Panels of Fig. 2, we document the absence of pre-trends when using the number of women born (Fig. 2b) and the share of women among all notable individuals born in the same city and period (Fig. 2c). We observe a significant treatment effect in the first period after opening that is slightly increasing in the rights panels when controlling for covariates.

We find no evidence that this slight increase is driven by cohort-specific treatment effects biasing our estimates. This problem is most pressing in settings without a never-treated control group: Here, later-treated cohorts function as the control-group for earlier-treated cohorts, potentially creating negative treatment weights biasing the estimate (Goodman-Bacon, 2020). Using the suggested decomposition, we find non-negative weights and point estimates that result from the difference between never-treated cities and cities with finishing schools. We thus leverage cities that never establish a finishing schools as a pure control group in our setting and follow Baker et al. (2021) in providing three sets of evidence against heterogeneous treatment effect biasing our estimates: First, we provide the main event-study graph with and without controls (Fig. 2). Second, we provide estimates for each treatment-cohort (Table G.2). Third, in “Appendix F” we implement the aggregation methods suggested by de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfæuille (2020) and Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021), as well as include never-treated cities to the event-study design. We find no evidence of treatment-effect heterogeneity or differential pre-trends and report similar point estimates in all treatment groups and methods.

Finally, choices when creating the data might affect the observability of pre-trends. In our data, we merge women and finishing schools to a balanced panel of 388 cities, including never-treated cities, and 50-year periods. This, however, does not fully utilize the underlying premise of event studies: the exact treatment period of each school. In “Appendix C.3”, we construct alternative intervals around each exact opening year of finishing schools and show the resulting event-study graphs. Again, we find no evidence for a pre-trend in any specification, a significant uptick after opening, and point estimates that are not statistically different from our baseline. Thus, we use our balanced panel of cities, allowing us to include never-treated cities and control variables in a two-way-fixed-effects estimation, and take this result as additional evidence against pre-trends or heterogeneous effects biasing our estimates.

5 Women’s representation among the human capital elite

Our hypothesis is that the opening of finishing schools increased women’s representation among the human capital elite. Women belong to the human capital elite of their city of birth if their names were recorded in the Neue Deutsche Biographie. Using data on notable women from 800 to 1950 CE, we document a sustained impact of the opening of finishing schools on an indicator of whether a notable woman was born, the number of notable women, and the share of notable women relative to their male counterparts.

We present our main results in Table 1, using our baseline empirical specification including all cities and periods. We report estimates from three different specifications of our dependent variable to address the sparsity in our outcome variable. In columns (1)–(3), we regress an indicator variable of whether a notable woman was born in city $c$ at period $t$ on our indicator variable for finishing schools that turns on after the opening of the first finishing school in city $c$ period $t$. Our baseline estimate is reported in column (1) of Panel A and suggests a 20% point increase (s.e. 0.029) in the propensity to observe a woman being born and becoming notable later after the establishment of the finishing school.

Table 1 Female representation among the human capital elite

Table 2 Placebo estimates on the importance of finishing schools: differential returns to education

To capture the impact of city-specific differences on the establishment of finishing schools and notable women, we conduct two analyses: First, we interact economic, religious, and educational covariates with period fixed effects in column (2). The point estimate of 0.134 (s.e. 0.031) suggests a smaller impact of finishing schools on women’s representation among the human capital elite, with finishing schools doubling the likelihood of observing a notable woman in periods after their establishment.²⁰ Second, we match each city with finishing schools to a city without finishing schools based on pre-treatment variables in column (3) and include match fixed effects to confine the variation to within each city pair. We find that the point estimate in this balanced sample (0.157) is statistically indifferent from the point estimate in our baseline specification (column 1).

In the remaining columns (4)–(9) we explore the intensive margin of the effect of finishing schools on women’s representation among the human capital elite. Using the log number of women born in city $c$ at period $t$, we find that the number of notable women increases by 16.5%, even when extensively controlling for economic, religious and educational factors.

Population in 1600 interacted with period fixed effects might not adequately capture the heterogeneous growth paths of German cities.²¹ By using the number of notable men born in each city and period, we capture differential growth in population, prosperity, and creativity, that might lead to the adoption of finishing schools and an increased representation of women among the human capital elite. In columns (7)–(9), we thus divide the number of notable women born by the total number of notable men and women in the period and city. If the number of notable women in our sample only increased due to a discontinuous change in population, prosperity, or creativity happening at the same time, this would increase in the number of notable men in the same category, too.²² Relative to cities without finishing schools in which 2.6% of all notable individuals are women, the share of women among the human capital elite increased to 4.5% after the establishment of finishing schools.²³ The robust estimates suggest that finishing schools increased women’s representation among the human capital elite and did not affect a city’s population or its elite’s size in particular.

In Panel B we consider women from the nobility in a placebo exercise. Women from the nobility should not benefit from school construction because the had access to private tutoring. At the same time, it is likely that the fertility rates between the nobility and the common people correlate as the number of noble women increases over time (Online “Appendix A.2”). We find robustly estimated insignificant null effects of finishing schools on the nobility throughout all specifications indicating that only commoners used the opening of schools to achieve notability.

5.1 Robustness

We take the strong and robust results on non-noble secular women, and the non-existent impact on women from the nobility, as evidence that finishing schools indeed increased women’s representation among the human capital elite in Germany. We conduct numerous further robustness tests in the Online-Appendix to this paper. In “Appendix B”, we show that our results remain qualitatively unaffected when omitting the linear time-trend, using different covariates (Table B.1), or omitting outliers (Fig. B.1). In “Appendix C”, we gather additional evidence against data construction choices biasing our estimates: Our results remain unchanged when using alternative sets of cities (Table C.1), alternative lengths of periods (Table C.2), or an entirely different set of territories (Table C.3). The estimated effect does not vary greatly the timing of school opening (Table C.4). In “Appendix D”, we assess the role of demand-side factors and find no impact of finishing schools on population growth or a correlation with the arrival of the Enlightenment (18th century) and the Industrial Revolution (19th century). We dedicate “Appendix E” to show that the results are unlikely to be the result of systematic SUTVA violations. To assess whether spillovers affect our interpretation, we create 200 placebo datasets using the true spatial correlation and temporal assignment and find p-values of 0.000 for non-noble secular women, but p-values of 0.570 for royals, as expected. In “Appendix F”, we show that our point estimates are also robust to various weighting techniques from the recent literature on the validity of event study designs. In “Appendix G”, we report similar estimates from a classical difference-in-differences setting, dividing cities into those that had established a finishing school by 1850 and those that had not (Table G.1). There is no discernible pre-trend when using all treatment periods jointly (Fig. G.1). We find no effect of the arrival of the Protestant Reformation in cities (Fig. G.2), but consistent with a supply-side shock in the availability of education, find a significant impact when instrumenting finishing schools with monasteries that existed in 1300 (Fig. G.3). We regard the robustness of our results as evidence against a mechanical relationship between finishing schools and notable women which could arise simply due to finishing schools improving record keeping of influential women or increasing the demand for teachers.

6 Economic and cultural change as confounding factors

To rightfully attribute the increase in women’s representation among the human capital elite to the emergence of finishing schools, we show that changes in the returns to education, increasing economic activity, or cultural change do not predict an increase of the female human capital elite. We identify such potential confounding factors exploiting the following city- and time-specific placebo events: In Sect. 6.1, we explore the gender specific impacts of secondary schools to assess whether differential returns to education explain our results. In Sect. 6.2 we use construction activity as a proxy for economic activity; and in Sect. 6.3, we exploit the end of witch trials, the opening of female monasteries, the consecration of churches to a female saint, and the arrival of the Reformation, to capture gender-specific cultural changes at the local level. No placebo event predicts a subsequent increase in the number of notable women.²⁴ Unobservable non-linear and city-specific factors are thus unlikely to confound our finding that finishing schools increase women’s representation among the human capital elite.

6.1 Returns to education

In our first placebo exercise, we assess whether finishing schools merely capture local changes to the returns to education. We exploit cross-gender variation in the availability of secondary schooling and show that the number of notable men and women is only affected by the opening of male and female schools, respectively. We thus argue that finishing schools are unlikely to reflect local changes of the returns to education.

To assess the importance of changes in the returns to education, we correlate the occurrence of non-noble secular men with the opening of male schools. Following Galor and Weil (1996), an increased demand for skilled labor increases the returns to education, which in turn increases the demand for schools. School openings thus could reflect changes in local returns to education, and thus economic prosperity would bias our estimates. If that were the case, we would observe that the opening of a male school would increase the number of notable men and women—as would the opening of female schools. The absence of such cross-gender effects would provide evidence against local returns to education biasing our estimates.

In Columns (1)–(3) of Table 2, we limit our sample to 129 cities that ever constructed a finishing school, in a window of four centuries before and three after establishing the first school.²⁵ Despite the reduction in sample size and the omission of educational covariates, the estimated coefficient (0.126) in this event-study design is still close to those of the fixed-effects estimation reported in Table 1. Finishing schools do, however, have no impact on the likelihood of observing notable men in our data (columns 2). In columns (3) we then construct a panel in which every city-period cell has two observations; one for women and one for men. In this setup, we are able to control for city-by-period fixed effects and gender-by-period fixed effects to estimate the impact of finishing schools on women, while non-linearly controlling for the trends in men and city characteristics at any point in time. Our results confirm the pattern observed previously as finishing schools increase the likelihood of a notable woman being born in the city.

In Columns (4)–(6) of Table 2, we turn to the impact of male schools on notable women and men. The opening of a male school in a city only increases the likelihood of observing a notable man (Column 5), but the impact on women in the same city is a precisely estimated zero (Columns 4). Repeating the panel exercise and non-linearly controlling for city characteristics confirms this pattern and suggests that male schools only had an impact on notable men in the city.

This evidence is summarized graphically in Fig. 3, in which we mark the opening of a male school or finishing school, respectively, as our reference period. The validity of our point estimates is supported by the absence of pre-trends and the increase of notable women and men after the opening of finishing and male schools, respectively (top right and bottom left). If finishing schools captured local returns to education, in the same way male schools likely do, we would observe a significant increase in the number of men as well (top left). Similarly, if we observe more notable women purely because the returns to education increased, we should observe a similar increase in women when using male schools as the source of variation (bottom right). Since we observe neither, we conclude that differential returns to education are unlikely to explain the increase in the number of notable women after the opening of a finishing school.

Fig. 3

Cross-gender impact of male and female schools. The impacts of male schools and finishing schools on notable women and notable men. The outcome in the two Panels on the left (right) is an indicator equal to one if a notable man (woman) was born in a given city and period. Zero is the normalized time of opening of the first gender-specific schools in the city. We take as comparison the 50-years period prior to the opening to ensure a clean control group that does not include women and men born before the opening of the first school. The vertical line marks the reference period, which we choose to be 50 years prior to establishment of the school. All figures include full economical and religious controls; educational controls are omitted. 95%-confidence intervals reported

An alternative interpretation, consistent with our discussion in Sect. 7, is that the curricula across male and female schools differed greatly. While male schools featured large parts of mathematics and science, finishing schools often focused on religion, language, and pedagogy. Then, male pupils would be educated to be productive members of society, while female pupils would be given the tools to be effective writers and teachers.

Fig. 4

Impact of finishing schools on economic growth. Top Panel a: The correlation between finishing schools and building construction. The outcome in the left panel is an indicator variable capturing construction activity in a given city and period, while the outcome in the right panel is the log number of buildings constructed plus one. All covariates from Table 1 column (2) included in both Figures. Bottom Panel b: The outcome is city size as recorded by Bairoch et al. (1988). All covariates from Table 1 column (2) included in the right figure. Both lines are shifted for increased visibility, but estimated at the same period in time. Zero is the normalized time of opening of the first finishing schools in the city. The vertical line marks the reference period, which we choose to be 50 years prior to establishment of the school. 95%-confidence intervals reported

6.2 Economic growth

In the second placebo exercise, we test whether cities with a steeper growth trajectory established finishing schools earlier. Then, finishing schools merely reflect the underlying growth potential that attracted the human capital elite.

Under this alternative hypothesis, the increase in notable women born is not a response to the emergence of finishing schools, but a response to increasing income. We identify local economic activity in our panel using city-level construction data by Cantoni et al. (2018). If finishing schools are merely a manifestation of increased economic growth, the establishment of finishing schools should be a good predictor of future construction activity. However, this is not borne out in our data: even when defining a subset of growth-specific construction that excludes religious, military, and palace buildings, we find no impact of finishing schools on economic activity in Table B.2, nor in any period around the opening of finishing schools (Fig. 4a).

In Fig. 4b, we repeat this exercise, using population data from Bairoch et al. (1988). Again, we find no evidence for differential growth prior to the establishing of finishing schools and no significant impact of finishing schools on population afterwards.

We believe that the absence of general equilibrium effects on population and growth, in contrast to findings for more recent interventions (Duflo, 2001), is likely explained by two factors: First, finishing schools are neither primary schools that expand literacy, nor are they high schools that prepare women for, at the time nonexistent, high-skilled jobs. In fact, these schools never intended to prepare women for work outside the traditionally advocated family. Second, as husband’s approvals for work was required until at least 1958, labor force participation in higher-skilled jobs remained low.

6.3 Cultural change

In the last set of placebo exercises, we provide evidence against the premise that finishing schools are a reflection of broader cultural changes in society. To assess this alternative hypothesis, we exploit city-, time-, and gender-specific changes in culture: the end of witch trials; the opening of female monasteries; the consecration of churches to a female saint; and the arrival of the Protestant Reformation. Using event-study designs analogous to our analysis of finishing schools, we find no significant impacts of these cultural changes on women entering the human capital elite (Table 3 and Fig. 5).

Table 3 Placebo estimates on the importance of finishing schools: changing culture

Fig. 5

Impact of cultural change on notable women. The correlation between cultural change and notable women. The outcome in all panels is an indicator equal to one if a non-noble secular woman was born in a given city and period. The vertical line marks the reference period, which we choose to be 50 years prior to the respective event. Economic and education controls included in the all figures. Religious controls are omitted when identifying the impact of Reformation. 95%-confidence intervals reported

In Panel A of Table 3, we use data on the end of witch trials in Germany from Leeson and Russ (2017). Witch trials disproportionately targeted widows living a more independent life as well as midwives and female folk healers (Ehrenreich et al., 1973; Oster, 2004).²⁶ We thus argue that the ‘end of witch trials’ in a city is informative of a change in local culture away from one of the most violent forms of discrimination against women. The threat of the stake forced midwives and folk healers to practice in secrecy. Then, the end of witch trials might have increased their likelihood of entering our sample. However, we see no impact of the end of witch trials on women becoming recognized for their achievements.

In Panel B of Table 3, we exploit the opening of female monasteries taken from Cantoni et al. (2018) as proxies for gender-specific cultural change. Female monasteries presented women with one of the few alternatives to “traditionally advocated marriage” (Frigo & Fernandez, 2022) and household roles. The establishment of such monasteries could thus be considered reflective of local culture becoming more accepting towards women choosing a comparatively independent lifestyle.²⁷ However, we do not find significant impacts of the establishment of female monasteries on the number of notable women once we add economic, religious, and educational controls.

Next, we turn to the consecration of churches to female saints in Panel C of Table 3. We utilize data by Cantoni et al. (2018) on 12,334 church construction events in Germany, and identify 1,610 events in which a church was consecrated to honor a female saint.²⁸ We argue that since churches could be consecrated to any saint, using a female saint might indicate a cultural shift towards the inclusion of women and thus could be correlated with a higher status of women in society. To ensure an overlap with finishing school construction, we define our treatment as the first church consecration after 1650. We thus compare expanding educational opportunities in our main specification to a proxy for cultural change at the same time. Yet, we identify a precisely estimated null effect throughout all specifications.

In Panel D of Table 3, we use the timing of the Protestant Reformation in each city as an indicator of a potential shift in the status of women. We follow Becker and Woessmann (2008, 2009) who argue that, since Martin Luther suggested that women needed to be able to read, Protestantism had a positive impact on female education.²⁹ We utilize data by Cantoni (2015) on the timing of the Reformation in cities, to proxy for a cultural shift towards the inclusion and primary education of women following Luther’s teachings. Our findings suggest that Protestantism, and the associated potential shift in gender roles, cannot explain the increase in notable women, writers, or any subcategory.³⁰

We summarize the impact of cultural changes in the event-study graphs of Fig. 5: It is unlikely that gender-specific cultural change contributed to the establishment of finishing schools and the following increase in notable women. We conclude that unobserved economic or cultural change are unlikely to bias our estimates on finishing schools. Instead, it is more likely that finishing schools were established by religious orders in response to religious competition or idiosyncratic shocks. Thus, finishing schools, conditional on fixed effects, can be interpreted as an exogenous shift in the supply of education for women.

7 Discussion

In this section, we provide qualitative evidence that link finishing schools to the rise in the female human capital elite and substantiate this assertion with an analysis of book titles published between 1840–1898. We show that the prevailing teaching doctrine focused on religion, German, and foreign languages, which enabled women to develop and exchange critical ideas as writers. With an increasing share of literate women, these authors of the ‘Frauenliteratur’ effectively became leaders of social change, entering the hitherto male dominated human capital elite.

The first systematic evidence for teaching doctrines regarding girls date back to enlightenment thinkers Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712–1778) and Heinrich Campe (1746–1818). Yet, “both educational theorists were concerned with the legitimization of the subordination of women and the maintenance of a patriarchal gender relationship.”³¹ Women were seen as “unable to comprehend larger and more abstract connections” (Jonach, 1997, p. 77) and ‘fulfilling the duties as a mother left no place for the individual”.³² Schools thus focused on religious studies, German, and French or English, leaving little room in the curriculum for arithmetic, physics, or chemistry. “In principle, only such knowledge and skills can be useful for a woman, that correspond to her special purpose. Everything that runs counter to the educational goal of women as housewives, wives and mothers was not accepted as educational content or as a female quality to be trained and is rejected as useless and/or harmful.”(Jonach, 1997, p. 157).³³

The parents of graduates often worked in prestigious occupations, and as “it is not fitting for an educated man to marry an uneducated woman” (Rousseau, 1762)³⁴, positive assortative matching (Becker, 1973) is a likely motive for parents to send their female children to finishing schools. This view is supported by the few biographies known that list the occupation of the student’s parents, her husband, and herself: Almost all married into similar social strata than their parents and became subsequently known as writers, female rights activists, teachers, or artists (De la Roi-Frey, 2004, p. 284–286).

Thus, instead of preparing women to be successful participants of the labor force, these schools formed proficient readers and writers, fluent in foreign languages and pedagogy. This prepared its graduates to be leaders of social change amid the increasing share of literate women. While few women outside nobility could read in the 16th century, this portion of society grew in the 18th century. When “women started reading, the women’s question arose” (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880) as women started to reflect on their position in society and to formulate demands for emancipation (Jonach, 1997, p. 150). These schools, in essence, prepared women to develop and exchange critical ideas as writers.

Famous authors of the ‘Frauenliteratur’ such as Sophie La Roche (1771), Frederike Unger (1784), and Caroline Auguste Fischer (1801) debated a common theme; the awakening of the female mind (Daley, 2022). Authors often spoke foreign languages and imported English (La Roche) and French (Unger) lifestyles and ideas into German literacy circles. Unintentionally, finishing schools gave women the tools to become successful writers and effective social multipliers, entering the hitherto male dominated human capital elite.

7.1 Content analysis of book titles

We substantiate the argument that successful writers became effective social multipliers by analyzing book titles. Our hypothesis is that female authors who act as social multipliers tailor books towards a receptive audience. While it is easy to assign some book titles in Pataky (1898) to female rights activism (“Der Frauen Sklaventum und Freiheit”: women’s enslavement and their freedom), others such as “Biegen oder Brechen. Die Geschichte einer Ehe” (To bend or to break. The story of a marriage) are near impossible to assign based on the title. A great deal of other books in Pataky (1898) are translations from English or Latin; both languages taught at finishing schools.

To structure this analysis, we use a k-means clustering algorithm on 12,800 book titles published between 1840 and 1898 in Pataky (1898) and present the six groups in Fig. 6. The most common group with 80% of book titles is the first, predicted by words such as “märchen” (fairy tales) or “geschichten” (stories). However, already the second group is tailored towards women: The five most common terms essentially combine to ‘stories for young girls’ (“erzählungen, mädchen, jugend, für, junge”). Group 4 contains ‘for german women’ (“deutsche, für, Frauen”), with group 5 containing ‘stories for true german girls’ (“geschichte, für, wahre, deutschen, mädchen”). In combination, groups 2, 4, and 5 gather 15% of all booktitles in the data.

Fig. 6

Word frequency plot for the book titles in (Pataky, 1898). Fractions of speeches containing the word on the y-axis is given on the x-axis. Not shown is the frequency of each group: the most frequent group is 1 (80.7%), 2 (13%), and 3 (2.7%) of all book titles

The results suggest that some female writers indeed worked on topics relevant to girls at an impressionable age. Others wrote novels and dramas for women, discussing the role of women in society. Combined with the above analysis on important female works in literacy (Daley, 2022), the analysis here purports a significant role for female writers for social change.

8 Mechanism

In this section we present evidence on how access to secondary education, and an increase female human capital elite, are linked to social change. We show that finishing schools disproportionately produce writers and activists, that form networks across cities and attract other notable women. We especially focus on the group of writers, who by disseminating their ideas in places with high human capital, act as multiplicators of social change.

8.1 Who are the women in the human capital elite?

As a first step, we analyze the critical impact of female writers on social change discussed in Sect. 2.2. Female writers discussed the dependent and subordinate positions of women, propagating their criticism of the status quo through books, journals, and reading events throughout Germany. As access to secondary education increases women’s representation among the human capital elite, female writers would be instrumental in formulating and spreading this criticism. Indeed, our estimate in Table 4 column (3) suggest that the probability of a famous writer being born doubles after the establishment of a finishing school (8.7% to 19.7%).

Table 4 Occupations of women in the human capital elite

Similarly, theories on leadership in social movements predict that educational capital is necessary for leading activists to arise and change society (Morris & Staggenborg, 2004). Our estimates in Table 4 column (6) suggest that 7.5% of cities with access to secondary education have a female rights activists, compared to only 1.8% of cities without.³⁵

Finally, a common prediction of social change models is an increase in labor force participation of disadvantages groups. The remaining columns in Table 4 support that view, by showing that we observe more women as writers, teachers, academics, doctors, or any other occupation in cities with access to secondary education for girls.

8.2 Networks and immigration

These social leaders then utilize their networks in order to promote their critical ideas. Unfortunately, networks that exist within a classroom environment are no longer accessible to us as a researcher. We have to rely on networks between two women in the human capital elite.

We construct our measure of networks between women using the biographies of women in the Neue Deutsche Biographie. Here, we define a connection between two women if one is mentioned in the biographical text of the other. A network thus exists in a city if at least one local woman is connected to another notable woman.³⁶ The size of a city’s network in period $t$ is then defined as the sum of notable women being mentioned in the biographies of all other women born in that city in period $t$.

In Table 5, we analyze the impact of finishing schools on networks between notable women. We find that finishing schools consistently increase the likelihood of observing a network across the specifications. Reflecting the importance of female writers for social change, networks between female writers increase fivefold in cities with access to finishing schools, regardless of the specification (Column 6). Yet, as these events are rare, we use migration to infer on networks across cities, and confirm our hypothesis.

Table 5 Fixed-effects results on the importance of finishing schools: network formation across cities

If finishing schools facilitated the formation of, and access to, networks of like-minded women, presumably they also increased the likelihood that women migrated to the city (“pull” factor). We document migration patterns using the difference between women’s places of birth and death as recorded in the Neue Deutsche Biographie. A total of 1517 women in our data have migrated at least 10 km between birth and death.³⁷ We repeat our event-study for these immigrated non-noble secular women in Fig. 7. Again, we observe no pre-trends and a distinct increase in the likelihood of immigration after the opening of the first finishing school; a finding robust to including control variables (dashed line).

Fig. 7

Impact of finishing school establishment on migrated women.Main results for women who migrated to the city with finishing schools, focusing in cities that ever established a school. Zero is the normalized time of opening of the first finishing schools in the city. The vertical line marks the reference period, which we choose to be 50 years prior to establishment of the school. Full economic, religious, and educational controls added in the grey dashed line. Both lines are shifted for increased visibility, but estimated at the same period in time. 95%-confidence intervals reported

To identify whether finishing schools attracted notable women, or the immigration of notable women instead facilitated the foundation of finishing schools (reverse causality), we provide two pieces of evidence: First, if immigration of notable women increased the likelihood of finishing school opening, Fig. 7 would show differential pre-trends. The absence of such pre-trends suggests that finishing schools had a similar effect on immigrated women as on native women, and that finishing schools are likely not a result of immigration.

Second, we build on this result and provide further support for the idea of increased networking activity using the timing of immigration, or birth, of the first notable women as our source of variation. If immigration led to the opening of finishing schools, and therewith to the formation of a female human capital elite, the first immigration event would increase probability of establishing a school. Our effect would be driven by migrating women establishing different social norms. If instead, finishing schools increased women’s representation among the human capital elite, which in turn attracted notable women from other cities, we would observe that the first native notable woman appears when the first school is established. Our effect would be driven by schools changing social norms.

We explore these alternative hypotheses in Fig. 8, using either the first women who migrated to a city (left Panel) or the first notable women born in a city (right Panel) as a shifter in the likelihood of observing a finishing school. Using the first migration event as the “treatment period” in the left Panel, we find no correlation with access to secondary education. In contrast, the right hand side of Fig. 8 reveals that the first native-born notable woman appears at the same time the first finishing school is established.

Fig. 8

Impact of native and migrated women on subsequent school construction. The impact of the first notable female migrant on the probability of school construction is shown in the left Panel. Conversely, the right Panel shows the impact of the first “native” notable woman born in a city on the probability of school construction. Zero is the normalized time of either the first migrated notable woman (left) or the first notable woman born in a city (right). The vertical line marks the reference period, which we choose to be 50 years prior to the respective event. Full controls included in both Figures. 95%-confidence intervals reported

In combination, Figs. 8b and 7, suggest that access to secondary education increased the representation of native and migrated women among the human capital elite in cities.

8.3 Initial human capital and social change

Finally, we analyze the role of human capital in social change by studying migration decisions of different groups of women. Migration of notable individuals is endogenous to location preferences; an artist migrates to theaters and a scientist to universities. In Table 6 we ask what type of migration increases social change to learn about the underlying conditions that promote it. We begin by showing that there is a positive correlation between migrating non-noble secular women and schools: cities with schools and migrated women are more likely to have future non-noble secular women (Column 1). This interaction captures the general tendency for migration across cities, which we control for in the remaining columns.

Table 6 Fixed-effects results on the importance of finishing schools: Multiplicator effects

Next we differentiate two underlying conditions that promote this multiplication effect. Female politicians arguing and promoting for the integration of women into society and women’s rights need an audience that can read, but, not necessarily, critically engage with the topic. We contrast these groups in the remainder of Table 6. While we find no additional impact of active politicians over schools itself (Column 2), an active writer in a city with a finishing schools triples the effect of finishing schools (Column 3): Compared to 14.3% of cities without finishing schools having a non-noble secular women, 26.5% of cities with finishing schools and 53.8% of cities with finishing schools and active writers have a future non-noble secular women.

Our results suggest that finishing schools produced women that critically engaged with their status quo (writers and activists) who migrated to places in which they acted as multipliers of social change. These cities also had finishing schools, suggesting that high human capital helps activists to create a social movement.

9 Finishing schools and outcomes of social change

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Susan B. Anthony entered the political stage, they paved the way for the civil rights and suffrage movements to succeed and change society. So far, we have shown that independent women, writers, and activists for women’s rights entered the human capital after finishing schools opened. These women changed society in a way that is uncorrelated to economic or cultural change at the time. In this last section, we show that the social change brought forward by the new female human capital elite also altered cities in the long run.

As finishing schools contributed to the formation of a female human capital elite in cities (Table 1), women started to live independently and become writers and activists for suffrage and women’s rights. If these women changed the role of women in society, we should observe long-run changes of in cities with finishing schools. We use three direct outcomes of social change: First, we digitize all letters to the editor of the feminist newspaper “Frauen-Zeitung”, in which women’s role in society was critically discussed. Second, we use establishment and membership data of local chapters of the women’s rights movement in 1909 to capture the spread of critical ideas. Third, we study whether social change increased female representation in parliaments once suffrage was achieved.

We document the link between finishing schools and our outcomes of social change, estimating the following cross-sectional regression:

$$\begin{aligned} Y_c = \alpha + \beta \cdot \text {Finishing schools}_c + \gamma _1X_{e,c} + \gamma _1X_{r,c}+ \gamma _1X_{s,c} + \varepsilon _c \end{aligned}$$

(1)

In this cross-sectional setting, unobservable factors, previously captured by city fixed effects and linear time trends, potentially impact our interpretation. Even controlling for economic, religious and educational covariates (${{\varvec{X}}}_c$), unobservable factors could be correlated with the establishment of finishing schools and the women’s rights movement. When schools were built in areas with greater appreciation of women’s role in society or women’s education, our point estimate would overstate the impact of finishing schools. We assess the magnitude of this potential bias using three complementary strategies, all revealing a downward bias of our baseline estimates: First, we report the bias-adjusted point estimate from a bounding exercise in the spirit of Oster (2019), comparing coefficients from a regression without any controls and restrictions to a regression with a full set of controls in areas of religious competition, not more than 10 km away from the religious divide in 1619. Second, we corroborate these findings and report point estimates from an instrumental variables strategy using monasteries in 1300 and religious competition as a shifter in the likelihood of establishing finishing schools. We discuss the first-stage relationship and exclusion restriction in “Appendix H”. Third, we compare the effect of finishing schools using propensity score matching on all covariates in “Appendix H.1”. All strategies reveal, if anything, a downward bias of our point estimates.

The historical literature on finishing schools suggests that religious competition was one determinant of the location of early finishing schools (Lewejohann, 2014). Yet, religious competition may exhibit a direct effect on our measures, even when controlling for the distance to the religious boundary. Thus, we limit our sample to cities within 10 km of the borders marking the religious divide in 1619, i.e. to regions where religious competition was particularly pronounced in the early phases of finishing school openings. Limiting our sample to cities within 10 km of the religious divide also enhances the comparability of cities. For instance, rather than comparing Berlin to Munich (600 km due south), our strategy compares the neighboring cities of Hanover and Hildesheim.

We present our results linking finishing schools with the emergence of the women’s rights movement in the late 19th century and with political representation of women throughout the 20th century in Table 7. We start by replicating our panel results in a cross-sectional setting using a lexicon of female writers from a different source (Panel A). We then examine the link between historical finishing schools in 1850 and the dissemination of critical ideas of women’s role in society to the general public (Panel B), and the institutionalization of the women’s rights movement by founding local chapters and recruiting female members (Panels C). We then turn to female representation in parliaments after women achieved the right to both vote and stand for parliament in 1919 (Panels D).³⁸

Table 7 Long-term impact of finishing schools on the women’s rights movement and political representation

9.1 Encyclopedia of female writers

We replicate our finding that finishing schools increase the number of writers in the first Panel of Table 7. Here, we exploit an encyclopedia that contains a cross-section of female writers active between 1840 and 1898, and recognized as important by their contemporaries (Pataky, 1898). In Table 7 column (1), we estimate a bivariate regression without any controls or restrictions, and report a 17% point greater likelihood that a female writer was born in a city with a finishing school until 1850 (Panel A, Column 1). However, selection on unobservables remains a threat in this cross-sectional analysis.

To assess the potential severity of selection on unobservables, we report the bias-adjusted point estimate from a restricted estimation in column (2) and report estimates from an instrumental variables strategy. First, we include all previously defined controls and limit the sample to areas that, had been religiously competitive at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. We estimate a similar point estimate of 0.180 (s.e. 0.039), a 138% increase over the likelihood of a female writer being born in cities without finishing schools (0.130 in this sample). The bias-adjusted point estimate and the IV estimates using monasteries in 1300 are of similar magnitude (0.185 and 0.176). In columns (3) and (4) of Table 7, we repeat this exercise with the number of recognized female writers. Again, the bias-adjusted point estimate confirms the OLS point estimate and suggests a 33% increase in the number of female writers, while the IV estimate is larger.³⁹ Despite using different data, the relative increase in the cross-section compared to cities without finishing schools (138%, Table 7, Panel A, Column 2) is similar to the point estimates in the panel setting (148%, Table 1, Panel C, Column 2).

9.2 Dissemination of ideas

The first outcome of social change we consider is the dissemination of critical ideas. We digitize all letters to the editor of the first feminist newspaper in Germany, “Frauen-Zeitung” (1849–52), in Panel B. We use the place of residence of all letters and link this to the pesence of finishing schools in the nearest city. In Table 7 column (2), we estimate a bivariate regression with all controls and restrictions, documenting an increase in the likelihood of sending a letter of 0.122 (s.e. 0.037), an threefold increase over the mean. Only 3.8% of cities without finishing schools by 1650 sent letters to the “Frauen-Zeitung”, compared to 16% of cities with finishing schools. We interpret this increase as evidence that critical ideas are more common in cities with finishing schools. While bias-adjusted point estimates reveal a similar magnitude (0.132), IV estimates reveal a downward bias of the OLS (0.249).

9.3 Women’s rights associations

Next, we turn to studying the institutionalization of the German women’s rights movement as an outcome of social change. We digitize novel data on local chapters of women’s rights associations from the Imperial Statistical Office (Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1909). This source provides detailed establishment and membership data on more than 1,200 local chapters in 1909, irrespective of their political affiliation. The average local chapter in our dataset was established in 1898 and counted approximately 1600 members. This source also allows us to differentiate between different types of associations, e.g. female suffrage association and associations dedicated to improving women’s educational opportunities.

We exploit this unique micro data in Panel C of Table 7. Controlling for covariates in column (2), we find that an additional finishing school by 1850 increases the likelihood that a city has any local women’s rights association by 14% points (Panel C), equivalent to a 50% increase over the mean in cities without finishing schools. The number of members organized in these local chapter even doubles (Column 4).⁴⁰ Again, while bias-adjusted point estimates reveal a similar magnitude (0.132 and 1.021), IV estimates reveal a downward bias of the OLS (0.378 and 2.868).

9.4 Female representation in parliament

Finally, we study female representation in parliaments as an outcome of social change. As women represented a larger share of the human capital elite in cities (Table 1), they started to live independently and become writers and activists for women’s rights, equal access to education and female suffrage. Thus, ence suffrage was achieved, this larger representation of women among the human capital elite should have translated into greater female political representation in parliaments.

We explore this hypothesis in Panel D of Table 7. To measure political representation, we collect the place of birth of all female members of parliament in the Weimar Republic (1919–1933, Panel D).⁴¹ We report positive and significant coefficients when regressing an indicator for and the number of female politicians in all parliamentary elections since 1919 on the number of finishing schools in 1850.⁴²

10 Conclusion

We set out to determine whether access to education contributes to the arrival of social change at the example of the women’s rights movement in Germany. Following the literature on social movements (Wood & Tilly, 2012; Markoff, 2015) and the history of successful movements (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr for the civil rights movement or Susan B. Anthony for the suffrage movement) we argue that social change often starts from educated leaders who challenge the status quo. But for social change to emerge, leaders require a critical mass of followers that join to form a social movement.

We study the importance of one form of educational institutions in bringing about social change, using the example of the arrival of finishing schools and the women’s rights movement in Germany. In this setting, newly collected panel and cross-sectional data allows us to draw out the effect of education on the success of social movements: First, after cities established finishing schools, women started to represent a larger share of the political, intellectual, and economic elite (“human capital elite”), forming an activist nucleus of independent women, writers and activists for women’s rights. These women contribute to a changing role of women in society as measured by critical discussions in newspapers, the emergence of women’s rights associations, and female representation in parliament.

Using a wide range of empirical specifications our paper highlights the role of education in contributing to the emergence of a female human capital elite from which early activists for social change can emerge. Further, our empirical results suggest that a world without educational institutions but significant economic and cultural changes would not see the level or pace of social change we observe throughout history.

Taken together, our findings indicate that educational institutions, which foster the exchange of critical ideas and provide the space to form networks, can function as important catalysts for the formation of a human capital elite critically engaging with its status quo. Yet, education does not only benefit those receiving it; to the contrary, society as a whole can benefit when committed activists fight for and bring about social change.