Martin Luther and female education.

Basic principles of a Christian education

From my perspective as an educator, the subject "Luther and women" invites reflections about the extent and ways the reformer was concerned with creating opportunities for girls and young women in the educational system.

The Reformation period did not lead to very specific concepts of education for girls and women. Nevertheless, Luther stated a number of general principles of Christian education that took the religious education of women into account. According to these, schooling and education are absolutely necessary. Every Christian must be enabled to understand the Word of God and to acquire and cultivate the ability to engage responsibly with Holy Scripture. Thus, for example, lay persons ought to be encouraged through translations of the Bible in vernacular languages to independently deepen their religious understanding. This is central to all efforts at providing education. The study of Holy Scripture was designed to be "the foremost reading for everybody" in all types of schools. Luther draws a comparison with the training for a craft and says, "is it not only right that every Christian man know the entire holy gospel by the age of nine or ten? Does he not derive his name and his life from the gospel? A spinner or a s eamstress teaches her daughter her craft in her early years." (1) The standard of education for a society in which every individual becomes a Christian through the gospel of Christ does not allow for any differentiation based on gender.

The educational impetus extends to the family as much as to the school and the church. The first instruction for a child is instruction at home. Thus a child is first introduced to religious faith within the family. Luther's catechism of 1529 emerges as enormously popular reading. In it he assigns the master of a household the educational task to instruct children in the three most important constituents of Christian faith: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer. "Therefore, it is the duty of every head of a household to examine his children and servants at least once a week and ascertain what they have learned of it, and if they do not know it, to keep them faithfully at it." (2) Building on this, children and all lay persons were required to attend Sunday services in church on a regular basis and especially catechism lessons, which followed the service. Ideally all classes of society ought to be educated as conscious Christian believers.

However, education in the family and in church is not enough. The secular political authority is therefore given a responsibility for the provision of schooling as a further educational means. In his treatise To the Christian Nobility (1520), Luther admonishes the nobility to set up schools so that everyone would be able to read the gospel. The school education of girls is explicitly mentioned: "And would to God that every town had a girls' school as well, where the girls would be taught the gospel for an hour every day either in German or in Latin." (3) Here we find an authentic voice from the Reformation demanding the introduction of schools specifically for girls. Luther did not grow weary of calling for a proper school education for both boys and girls. In 1524 he published his appeal To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany that They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools. (4) To provide a good education was seen as a divine command. The civic authorities must not neglect it. Luther rounded off his i deas about education when in 1530 he published his A Sermon on Keeping Children in School and called for a general compulsory education. (5)

Luther focuses more on the education of boys and young men who would receive a vocational training for ministry or civic government. The education of girls would be orientated toward life in a household and its immediate neighborhood--toward domestic management and marriage and the raising of children. As far as school education is concerned, Luther does introduce a differentiation on the grounds of gender. Higher education is reserved for male students. Yet when Luther calls for qualified women to become teachers, he takes a step toward a more comprehensive education of women. Women would need to be given special training to enable them to work as teachers. And, as we have seen, Luther forcefully advocates the institution of schools for girls.

Protestant church constitutions and the foundation of girls' schools

Most of the sixteenth-century constitutions for the territorial Protestant churches also contain regulations for schools. Issues concerning education were of foremost interest for the church. About forty collections of Protestant constitutional rules are known in which Luther's impulse for the institution of girls' schools was taken up; some of them are more and others less specific about the required teaching for girls. (6) Let us use Wittenberg as a concrete example. The regulations of 1533 for schools there show that on the advice of Luther and Johannes Bugenhagen, the pastor at the Wittenberg town church, and with the support of the City Council, a girls' school was founded that had its own master. The curriculum for the girls included the following: Classes were taught on all working days. The morning sessions were devoted to learning to read, to practicing reading, and to repeating what had been read. Those who had mastered reading were to be given lessons in writing after lunch from 12 to 2 p.m. Follow ing this, the singing of psalms and the practicing of scales were scheduled. In due course the girls were also supposed to learn the numbers and some arithmetic. Wednesday and Saturday mornings were reserved for catechism lessons. The girls had a lunchtime break. There were no classes on Sunday. (7)

To put such a program into practice was difficult in many places and was handled differently from state to state and from town to town. It is therefore not easy to come to any general conclusions about how much school education girls in fact received. Research in this area is still a desideratum. It is safe to say that the establishment of girls' schools lagged behind that of boys' schools, and it was possible only for boys to move on to a higher education. One consequence of the Reformation was the disappearance of convents as a kind of educational institution for women.

Schooling and education for girls and women as an abiding issue

Luther himself emphasized the practical training of women for running a household but did not envisage higher education for women. Nevertheless, the reformers contributed to a development which, at least in theory, improved access to elementary skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic for wider sections of the female population. This contribution must not be underestimated. Reading skills above all facilitate an independent acquisition of knowledge by the individual. They are therefore a significant step towards the emancipation of women.

Furthermore, the Reformation gave women an impulse to participate in scholarly debates. For a short moment all segments of society, men and women alike, experienced a kind of religious upheaval. Women supported the new doctrines. Women joined the reform movement. (8) Motivated by their deep convictions, women acquired a thorough understanding of the new religious teaching. They studied the Bible at home, they wrote expositions of biblical texts and composed prayer books. They unfolded their creativity in writing hymns. They did all this as "defenders of the new teaching ... in the more intimate circles of a home or a parish." (9)

To conclude, readers may get mixed impressions of Luther's contribution to the development of school education for girls and young women. Scholarly opinions cover a wide spectrum about this, ranging from the view that Luther was a promotor of equal rights for women to the view that he was a protagonist in the oppression of women. It may well be that we have to leave the issue undecided. Some of Luther's ideas were more traditional, others were more progressive.

Martin Luther and the reformers generally point to the immense importance of education and more specifically school education in Protestantism. They did not ignore the issue of educating girls and young women, they addressed it directly. Against this background we can make a number of observations on the opportunities that became available for women in public as well as private spheres, the house, the family, the church, the school. This heritage should motivate us to engage further in debates about the opportunities and limitations of education.

(1.) To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, LW 44:123-217 (=WA 6:404-69), 205-6 (=461), quoted in Religionspadagogik: Texte zur evangelischen Erziehungs-und Bildungsverantwortung seit der Reformation, ed. Karl E. Nipkow and Friedrich Schweitzer (Munchen: Kaiser, 1991), I:45.

(2.) The Large Catechism, in The Book of Concord, ed. Theodore Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 357-461 (=WA 30/1:125-238), 362 (=129), quoted in Nipkow and Schweitzer, I:75.

(3.) As in note 1.

(4.) LW 45:347-78 (=WA 15:27-53).

(5.) LW 46:213-58 (=WA 30/2:517-88).

(6.) Westphal, "Reformatorische Bildungskonzepte fur Madchen und Frauen--Theorie und Praxis," in Geschichte der Madchen-und Frauenbildung, ed. Elke Kleinau and Claudia Opitz (Frankfurt/Main and New York: Campus, 1996), I:142.

(7.) Westphal, 143.

(8.) Angelika Nowicki-Pastuschka, Frauen in der Reformation (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1990)

(9.) Westphal, 140.

(10.) Nowicki-Pastuschka, 6-7.