Useful and Sweet
Educating Young Norwegian-American Women By L. DeAne Lagerquist
Pikekor (Women’s Choir), Lutheran Normal School, circa 1910. Vesterheim Archives.
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seful and Sweet (Utile Dulci), the name of a literary society for female students in St. Olaf ’s academy division in the late 1880s, also summarizes a Lutheran view of education. By the early 1900s, Norwegian-American Lutherans provided girls and young women with a variety of educational opportunities informed by Lutheran teaching, built upon Scandinavian practices, and responsive to American circumstances. As in Norway, family and congregation fostered girls’ faith, in addition to insuring a basic level of literacy and theological knowledge. Academies, normal schools, colleges, and nursing schools offered adolescents and young women a range of possibilities for further study. Some graduates would return to their alma mater to teach other students; some were equipped for service through church agencies or missions; many employed their education in local congregations and in their homes. All this was in keeping with Martin Luther’s notion that education should cultivate believers’ faith and prepare them to contribute to the well-being of their communities. The usefulness of the latter purpose is obvious. The sweetness of education is multivalent. The Psalmist praised the sweetness of God’s word as like honey (Ps. 119: 03); Luther noted the “pure pleasure” that comes from reading a book; and, in the late nineteenth century American girls were often expected to conform to an ideal of feminine sweetness. All three aspects of sweetness are evident in the education available to Norwegian-American girls. Luther also advocated education to train men for the pastoral office. Because the Lutheran churches prohibited women from that calling, female students Vol. 8, No. 2 2010
were excluded from schools with a pretheological program until expanded mission, revised curriculum, and financial pressures opened those doors to them. In nineteenth-century Norway, the church both provided resources for education and held together the various parties within it. In the United States, those parties organized themselves into independent churches and founded their own schools. Despite the synods’ distinctive pieties and theological emphases, they shared a common Reformation agenda that linked religious instruction with basic literacy. When Martin Luther learned how little German Christians knew about what the church taught, what they professed to believe, he wrote his Small Catechism (1529). Based upon his sermons on the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, the little book offered simple instruction in basic doctrines and was suitable for use by pastors or parents. Luther urged the civil authorities to establish schools where both girls and boys would be taught to read, so that they could encounter God’s Word in the Bible themselves. This education was not, however, for the students’ spiritual benefit alone; its second purpose was to fit them for service to their neighbors. Luther argued, . . . in order to maintain its temporal estate outwardly the world must have good and capable men and women, men able to rule well over land and people, and women able to manage the household and train children and servants aright. Now such men must come from our boys, and such women from our girls. Therefore, it is matter of properly educating and training our boys and girls.1 11