Introduction

In the 1870s, Mennonites from the village of Alexanderwohl in the Ukraine Molotschna Colony immigrated to the United States and settled in choice farming areas around Goessel and Meridian, Kansas, and Henderson, Nebraska (McQuillan, 1978; Crawford & Rogers, 1982; Stevenson et al., 1989; see Figure 5.1). They arrived with large families to a country already in the midst of fertility decline (Vinovskis, 1981), and within one generation they also were reducing family size (Stevenson et al., 1989). The recency of this fertility transition provides an opportunity to assess the relative importance of education, occupational opportunities outside the home, and the labour value of children in stimulating the reproductive decline for the Kansas and Nebraska Mennonites. This analysis is based on Caldwell's (1982) wealth flows model as modified by Handwerker (1986a, b, c).

Foreign colonists who had settled in Russia since 1763 were exempt from military and civil service ‘in perpetuity’ (Rempel, 1974). However, reforms in the 1860s resulted in the cancellation of this exemption and institution of compulsory military service. The most politically conservative portion of the Mennonite population (eventually one-third) began to emigrate to the United States and Canada in the 1870s. Many selected choice farmland in Kansas and Nebraska with the aid of railroad agents, and by the 1880s Mennonites were some of the most successful farmers, experiencing relatively few foreclosures during the severe droughts of the 1890s (McQuillan, 1978).

The Mennonite group which immigrated was also the most religiously conservative of the Molotschna Colony (Rempel, 1974).