In immigration history studies, the prevailing characterization of women has been as “dependents, migrants' wives or mothers, unproductive, illiterate, isolated, secluded from the outside world and the bearers of many children.” Only in the past twenty years have ethnic history studies challenged this view by demanding that immigrants' experiences should be differentiated according to class and gender. These studies stated correctly that many immigrant women were not as helpless and unable to acculturate as previously assumed and took into account particularly their participation in the American labor market. In German American immigration history as well, the understanding of German immigrant women's experiences was, until the 1980s, oriented toward the predominant representation of women as “the repository of the past, the preserver of custom.” This stereotype was based on the assumption formed in the nineteenth century that the possibilities for German immigrant women - regardless of their specific sociocultural background - were limited due to their family, child care, and household responsibilities. While this image certainly applied to some women, it underestimated the fact that many married and single German women from the lower social classes had to earn a living and were thereby forced to confront American society on different levels. In this essay, I will widen the scope of experiences investigated to date by examining the lives of young, single German immigrant women working as domestic servants in America between 1850 and 1914. Scrutiny of the working and living conditions of German domestics between the ages of fourteen and thirty years old, as described in their letters home, will conclude that the German women's experiences in America have to be reevaluated. In raw numbers, they represented more than one-quarter of all immigrants traveling alone at the end of the nineteenth century. By investigating the particular motives and conditions of emigration of some of the many young German women belonging to the lower social classes who emigrated - not as accompanying family members, but as independent individuals or daughters traveling without their parents - it will be shown that their experiences are too important to be ignored. My argument contends that the experiences of young German women could in fact have had an accelerating influence on the process of acculturation of these young women and their future children.