Go DeAne, It's your Birthday

Way TO GO DeAne.  Your "As Sister, Wife and Mother: Education for Young Norwegian-Amerian Lutheran Women" was great.  Concise.  Informative, and not at all obnoxious to read like a lot of scholarly writings that beat you over the head with jargon so hard it feels like they are hiding flaws in their argument...  Practicing what you preach.

( and mega brownie points for me for actually putting this on my blog.)

Now on to my response to the content of the essay as well as the Ladies Hall section on the St. Olaf archives.   The essay will prove extremely useful to me as I consider my "Day in the Life of an Ole" essay, because my topic directly concerns a woman student at St. Olaf who comes up against the very issues of women's education presented in the article.  My character, Eleanore, is a woman who grew up in a traditional Norwegian-American home where Norwegian was spoken, the religion was Lutheran, and female respectability was important.  As such, Eleanore is torn between the wish to become educated and have new experiences and the feeling that she has been raised to execute traditional family roles.   "As Sister, Mother, Wife," gave me new context with which to examine her identity dilemmas.  For some reason, before reading this, I had been under the impression that women were able to go to college in the early 20th century, become teachers, nurses, or secretaries, get married, and continue to work so long as it was in these accepted "women's" professions.  In retrospect, this was a silly assumption, as it goes completely against the other information I knew, which was that women were expected to take care of and run the home.   The essay explained that for the early coeducational institutions, women were being educated primarily to hone skills and culture that would make them  better mothers.  Only a minority of women went on to even higher education or careers outside of the home, and those women were not married.    Now I can include a more complex struggle with my character, as she can question why her family is sending her to school and at the same time can try and decide if she is actually content to be a traditional women, or whether she is simply conditioned to accept them.  The rules dictating appropriate behavior on campus and even off campus applies directly to my interest in dating and social life during this time.  I was amused to see on the Ladies' Hall page that even earlier than "The Shack" dance mentioned in class on Wednesday, ladies were bending the rules- even having a "Grand Ball" in the attic of the dormitory.  While it is a mystery to me how they would have had enough room to dance in an attic, let alone how they snuck men into the hall, it is a pleasant thought to think of people so long ago experiencing some of the same things we do today.  It is easy to just assume that people in the early 1900s were stuck-up, boring, and nothing like college kids today.   The ladies hall page and DeAne's essay helped to show that social life was still an important part of these students' lives, albeit one that was much more structured than today.  The role of extracurricular clubs, town businesses and restaurants, and outdoor activities were important parts of academic life, though certainly secondary to academic and religious pursuits.   I will be interested in examining further the ways in which the religious and church affiliation of St. Olaf affected the policies in place at the time, as was mentioned in DeAne's essay.   All in all, I feel that I have some interesting information in place now, particularly concerning women, that will help me develop an accurate social setting for my final project.