Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1992
Abstract
How did life change for people from the eastern prairie or forest regions when they crossed the Missouri River to settle in the Plains of Nebraska? The land presented its own social, economic, and environmental problems for the settlers. While some historians have emphasized the resourcefulness with which settlers adapted to maintain the life ways of the rural regions to the east, others have pointed to the cultural and social shifts effected by the plains environment. Considerable social divergence occurred within the plains population, even within the dominant northern European American ethnicity. This study addresses the lives of rural women using quantitative methods and census data along with historical narratives to explore the dynamics of childbirth decisions made within rural homes at the tum of the century. Comparing the birth patterns of a rural county in eastern Nebraska with those of a rural county in eastern Iowa, we find that on Nebraska farms the degree of social and geographic isolation of individual couples was significantly correlated with the number of children that women bore. Household composition mattered on the Nebraska frontier in a way that it did not in rural Iowa at the time. Frontier Nebraska women's high levels of fertility can be understood, in part, in terms of their relative isolation. 1
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 12:3 (Summer 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.