Norwegian American Women contains nine essays on the role and function of women in various aspects of Norwegian American cultural history: their work on the farm and in cities, their commitment to issues of health and welfare, and their writing. The book is a solid contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of history, anthropology, material culture, and literary analysis.

Studies of women in immigrant culture often start with a statement that female voices have been ignored or subdued in earlier studies. An ideal example of such neglect, not mentioned in Bergland and Lahlum's collection, is O. M. Norlie's encyclopedia of the Norwegian American clergy (Norsk lutherske prester i Amerika, 1843–1915 – 2011). Faces of close to two thousand stern-looking men appear on more than six hundred pages, whereas wives are merely listed at the end of their husband's listed careers. Here women's names need to be lifted out of their glaring anonymity in future studies. They made an enormous contribution to Norwegian American Lutheranism, a topic which is not treated separately in the present study. Following the lead of L. De Ane Lagerquist's In America the Men Milk the Cows (1991) – which examines immigrant Norwegian American women based on gender, ethnicity and religion, and which Bergland correctly refers to as “groundbreaking” (10) – there is need for a new study of the role of immigrant women in congregational life.

Bergland's argument that “in the field of Norwegian American studies, women's and gender history has been largely neglected” (10) needs to be modified, however; a number of texts published by Norwegian American women have already established an unquestionable canon within the field. Admittedly, major contributions to this canon have been edited by men, yet not men who could in any way be characterized as driven by a sense of dubious male authority. Here I refer to works such as The Diary of Elisabeth Koren, 1853–1855 (1955); Frontier Mother: The Letters of Gro Svendsen (2001); The Lady with the Pen: Elise Wærenskiold in Texas (1961); The Strange American Way: Letters of Caja Munch from Wiota, Wis., 1855–1859 (1970); and A Saloonkeeper's Daughter (1877), all repeatedly acknowledged by contributors to this volume, as they have been by other scholars in the past.

In an attempt to redefine a more positive role of women in Norwegian American history, some contributors refer to Beret Holm in Ole E. Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth (1999) as a negative model. In her introduction, Elizabeth Jameson uses Beret as a representative of the “reluctant female pioneer” (ix) and, according to Bergland, Beret has, in negative ways, “come to dominate thinking about Norwegian immigrant women” (4). However true this may be, it is nonetheless rather unfair to Rølvaag's female character, for the obvious reason that she is a character of fiction.

A relevant footnote to our understanding of Beret the female protagonist in the Rølvaag novel is the kind advice given to the author by Professor Clarence Clausen. He suggested deleting the section in which Beret goes temporarily insane from homesickness, not because it was contrary to the logic of the novel, but rather because he felt that her madness was not true to social history or to the immigrant experience as he understood it. Clausen feared that Beret Holm could be interpreted as historical evidence! In his experience growing up on a Norwegian American farm in Minnesota, it was the man, not the woman, who was troubled by homesickness. Clausen's father would typically sit in the barn pining for the Old Country, whereas nothing could have persuaded his mother to return to Norway (my interview with Clausen, 1985). Rølvaag, however, had fictional heroines of another type in mind and refused, quite sensibly, to delete the scene.

Lori Ann Lahlum's essay “Women, Work, and Community in Rural Norwegian America, 1840–1920” introduces the reader to an abundance of new sources regarding women's chores on immigrant farms. It is perhaps not entirely new information, yet her stories of knitting, washing, baking, and so forth serve as a timely documentation of women's accomplishments in immigrant communities of the rural Mid-west. In her section on the Ladies Aid societies of local Norwegian American congregations, Lahlum argues convincingly that these societies “enabled churchwomen to take on public leadership roles when in all likelihood their congregations prevented them from participating in the governing and decision making of the church” (101). There is one exclusively female activity I find missing, one perhaps not often described in detail, yet common at the time among large Norwegian American farm families – the act of giving birth. In an immigrant letter from Wisconsin to a mother in Telemark, Norway, the daughter writes of her labour, describing it as “relatively easy, as so often before” (!). But she gently complains, “Dear Mother, what I truly missed was that you were not here, that I could not call out [råbe] come Mother, come help me” (Telemark historie, 1987, 9).

Laurann Gilbertson's essay on textile production in Norwegian America is based largely on her use of the remarkable collection of artifacts at Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, which she knows so well. Farm women are presented as skillful home practitioners of arts and crafts. As immigrant women continued to do their textiles in the New World, independently or as members of Ladies Aid societies, they combined in their products the old culture and the new. The reader is introduced to a long list of phrases now essentially forgotten as farm activities, like raising sheep, growing flax, interlacing weft yarns, composing bed coverings, weaving rugs. Nowhere does Gilbertson imply that these activities compensated for lack of authority and ownership. Carding, spinning, sewing, weaving become in Gilbertson's essay poetic expressions of farm women's body movements and of arts they mastered so well.

Ann L. Legreid documents the contributions of Norwegian American women to health care and welfare, both in families and in the larger community, as ministers’ wives, nurses, and deaconesses. Best known in the last category is Elisabeth Fedde (1850–1921). Legreid's article, like the essays of Lahlum and Gilbertson, includes sections on women's work in church congregations, thus enhancing our understanding of Norwegian American church history.

Karen V. Hansen's essay on Norwegian American and Dakota women, the best of this collection, in a fascinating way links American Indian history to the history of immigrant women. Students of American history will know how the General Allotment Act of 1887 affected Indian tribes, but Hansen breaks new ground by relating it to the land ownership of Scandinavian women in North Dakota at that time. She compares Norwegian American and Dakota women, following their lives as they acquired and used reservation land up until 1930, at which time “Norwegians owned more land on the Spirit Lake Reservation than did the Dakotas” (236).

In her essay entitled “The ‘Hungry Heroine’ in Norwegian American fiction,” Ingrid Urberg focusses on four Norwegian immigrant women writers of the upper Mid-west: Drude Krog Janson (1846–1934), Ulrikka Bruun (1854–1940), Palma Pederson (1879–1950), and Aileen Berger Evanson. The concept of the “hungry heroine” is applied by Urberg to the authors as well as to the main characters in their novels – in itself an argument that the novels are regarded largely as autobiographical. Common to the Norwegian American women writers and their fictional characters, particularly in urban areas, is a desire to discard stultifying traditions, while opting for education on an equal basis with men. Novels of this kind often resort to sentimental solutions and successful rewards. It makes sense to compare these women writers within the confines of their ethnic group, yet bringing them into the larger fold of American writers might be more useful, as, for example, in recent studies of Drude Krogh Janson's novel A Saloonkeeper's Daughter, and in Kristin Ripley's contribution to Kindred Hands (2006), in which Palma Pederson's letters appear with those of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rebecca Harding Davis.

Most of the novels in Urberg's survey were published in Norwegian. Her practice of italicizing translated titles is somewhat confusing and could lead a reader to believe that all the novels mentioned exist in English translation. Thus Ulrikka Bruun's novel Fjendens fallgruber (1884) is best referred to as The Enemy's Pitfalls (without italics).

The entire volume is dedicated to the memory of Dorothy Burton Skårdal (1922–2010). Urberg pays tribute to Skårdal's study entitled The Divided Heart (1974), in which literature is used to mirror social history. It is true that “the use of fiction in history continues to gain acceptance” (252), but it need be added that the interplay today between fiction and history rarely occurs in accordance with methods used by Skårdal.

The collection of essays concludes with Betty A. Bergland's study of the life writings of Norwegian immigrant women as nonfiction – diaries, letters, and memoirs. She argues that in the often “fragmentary life writings of Norwegian immigrant women” (284) there is a “plural we,” a “collective sensibility” (286) that can be distinguished from the more individualized sense of self prevalent among male writers. That this is not always so can be illustrated by The Diary of Elisabeth Koren. Compared with her eminent husband, Rev. U. W. Koren, the writer's sense of self is unmistakably more individualized and more personal.

Of course, other topics could have been included in a volume of this scope. A few that come to mind are Norwegian American women and ethnic food, women and the fine arts, women and music, and women and the Norwegian American press. Central to the history of women in journalism is Åse Elin Langeland's book Adjusting to America: A study in Kvinden og Hjemmet: A Monthly Journal for the Scandinavian Women in America, 1888–1947 (2009). Brev til Decorah-Posten, 1890–1922 (1996) features Torbjørg Lie's correspondence in Decorah-Posten, the Norwegian-language newspaper published in Decorah, Iowa from 1874 to 1972. Finally, Orm Øverland's massive seven-volume edition of immigrant letters in Norwegian from the United States to Norway from 1838 to 1914 has introduced a whole new body of letter writers. A casual glance at the last volume (2011) reveals that more than 20 percent of the letters were written by women. Any study of Norwegian American women in the future must take Øverland's work into consideration.

The present study alludes often to a publication entitled Souvenir, Norse-American Women 1825–1925: A Symposium of Prose and Poetry, Newspaper Articles, and Biographies, Contributed by One Hundred Prominent Women (St. Paul, MN: Lutheran Free Church, 1926). In so doing, the editors and authors make an apt reference to a major, if almost forgotten, source of inspiration, while at the same time effectively advancing the development of immigrant and ethnic women studies.