Educated to Be Mothers? School Reform and Demographic Backlash

Social norms play a critical role in society. This paper studies how difficult it is to manipulate social norms and whether efforts to do so may result in a backlash. We study the 1945 reform of primary education implemented under Franco’s regime in Spain, which promoted nationalist-religious values and emphasized women’s domestic roles. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure between birth cohorts, we show that women exposed to the reform have fewer children and tend to reject the regime’s promoted gender norms. These findings highlight the unintended long-term consequences that state-led efforts to engineer social norms can generate.