Contented Among Strangers

Contented Among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest
By Linda Schelbitzki Pickle (230 pages)
Published by University of Illinois Press
Bookish rating: 4

The fact that this book--nearly 20 years old--is still in print speaks to relevance in immigration history and women's studies. Probably based on Pickle's dissertation, this study explores rural 19th-century German immigrant women before leaving Germany (or Russia, in the case of the Germans from Russia), their process over, and the ways in which they made new lives, bearing and burying countless children, setting up homes often made of sod, and protecting their native culture and language.

I found the book fascinating, particularly when the women spoke for themselves (though they often did so while aware of an audience, either via letters or memoirs meant for posterity--and these voices are only from those educated to read and write, unless stories were later transcribed). I also loved Pickle's wise and sensible wariness of making broad generalizations about an entire group of people. She carefully dodged stereotypes of the homesick frontier foreigner; the "meek, self-effacing" minister's wife; the "ignorant and browbeaten peasant woman (who serves her husband only as a fertile beast of burden"; and the "exemplary farmer's wife (who sacrifices all for her family)" (p. 182). These women, says Pickle, "were much too complex to conform cop0letely to any of these immigrant types" (p. 182).

A very important contribution to immigrant studies, agricultural history, German studies, and women's studies. Recommended.