Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities (review)

In this volume, co-editors Betty A. Bergland and Lori Ann Lahlum draw together multidisciplinary work on Norwegian American women to provide a gendered perspective of Norwegian American history. As noted in the book’s foreword, the common stereotype of Norwegian American women is based on Ole E. Rølvaag’s fictional character Beret from the novel Giants in the Earth. Beret is the central female character in the novel and is portrayed as continually and unhappily struggling with the challenges of migration and immigrant life in rural South Dakota. In her introduction to the volume, Bergland stresses the limits of this stereotype in its disregard not only of the rural female Norwegian Americans whose experiences were positive, but also of the Norwegian American women who lived and worked in urban areas—limits that this collection is designed to address. According to Bergland, “this book attempts to imagine, document, and interpret these historically neglected women by examining their lives in the context of gendered communities, both American and Norwegian American” (4).

Norwegian American Women is largely successful in achieving these goals. The volume contains work by nine different scholars whose specialties include history, textiles/anthropology, sociology, geography, American studies, and Scandinavian studies. The book is divided into three thematic parts examining gendered contexts, gendered communities, and gendered identities with the section on communities containing five chapters and the other sections two chapters each. A well-edited collection, parts 1, 2, and 3 each open with a brief summary of that section’s central theme and the relation of the coming chapters to that theme. Some parallel construction is also evident in each chapter with a summary of findings included in the first few paragraphs. Though each of the contributors has published on related topics elsewhere, the findings in this volume represent new research building upon each author’s previous work.

The book’s first section, “Gendered Contexts: Norway and Migration,” provides an excellent grounding for the later chapters though the opening work by Norwegian scholar Elisabeth Lønnå is unfortunately the least well integrated in the collection. Lønnå describes the experiences of women in Norway in the later half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the years during which many Norwegian women came to the United States. Her work is valuable to American readers because it provides a fine overview of this period of Norwegian women’s history in the English language. However, Lønnå does not clearly explain how the history she describes shaped or influenced Norwegian women’s experiences as migrants and as Norwegian Americans. Her work is disconnected from the immigrant experience. In the following chapter, historian Odd Lovoll draws upon his years of study and research in the field to describe Norwegian American women within the broader context of Norwegian migration. For example, Lovoll notes that Norwegian American women had lower rates of emigration than Norwegian American men and that women’s migration was less sensitive to downturns in the American economy than men’s (related to the diverging economic sectors in which men and women earned their living) (52–3). His work provides helpful background material for understanding the chapters that follow, and his inclusion of charts, maps, and photographs complement and enrich his discussion.

Lori Lahlum’s contribution provides a strong opening for part two of the book, “Creating Gendered Norwegian American Communities.” Moving far beyond the Beret stereotype, Lahlum describes in rich detail the experiences of rural Norwegian American women including their roles in the rural economy and in church and community life. Her careful, detailed documentation also represents a valuable resource for both scholars and students who want to pursue further research on Norwegian American women.

David Mauk’s contribution examines Norwegian American women in an urban context, relating detail about migration paths, work experience, and family life with emphasis on Norwegian American women in New York and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Mauk’s use of evidence from oral history, interviews, and the...