Rural German-Speaking Women in Early Nebraksa and Kansas: Ethnicity as a Factor in Frontier Adptation

Germans were the largest foreign-born ethnic group in nineteenth-century Kansas and Nebraska. Whether one includes all of the German speakers or only those who came from one of the many states eventually united into one German nation, these immigrants made up a sizeable proportion of the frontier population. Counting only the latter group, by 1900 eighteen percent of the residents of Nebraska and almost nine percent of the residents of Kansas were either first- or second-generation Germans. 1 Because of the size of the German population, their various times of emigration, and the diversity of their European origins and cultural heritages, it is difficult to come to allen compassing conclusions about them. This difficulty is compounded when one tries to examine the lives of ordinary German women,who left many fewer personal records of their lives than Anglo-American frontiers women. (I use the term Anglo-American to designate English-speaking, American-born residents who are not persons of color.) In an attempt to diminish the complexity of the issues raised, this study focuses on first-generation German-speaking women who emigrated to the nineteenth century rural Kansas and Nebraska frontier from Switzerland, Austria, or the German states, and excludes the Germans from Russia because of the significant cultural and historical differences in their backgrounds. It asks whether their ethnicity led German- speaking women to more painful frontier lives than those experienced by their Anglo- American counterparts.