– ikkje ein ynskt son, men ein sjukepleiarengel i Amerika!
The Statue of Liberty—with its green flame—meets Gjertine upon her arrival in America in 1925. “She had never seen anything so great, so immovable, and yet so alive. Behind her lay the ocean. Before her—America.” (p. 92 in Remember the Women!).
Gjertine is from Huftaøy—about 45 kilometers south of Bergen—and the daughter of a man who is a boatbuilder and the son of a farmer, a man who needs a son. Gjertine is fifteen years old and asks her father for money for an education, but is told: “Had you been a boy, you would have been given anything you wanted.” (p. 91 in Remember the Women!). Her mother, Kari, gives her the money, and Gjertine is admitted to the nursing school in Bergen. Three years later she travels to America with her diploma and a Bible in her bag, and money sewn into the belt around her waist. She arrives in Minneapolis and finds work as a nurse. She reads the Psalms and is called “our Norwegian angel” by the patients (p. 93). She learns English—more from Bible verses than from dictionaries—writing down everything she hears, and replying with accent and gravity.
One winter evening she stands by the window, looking out at the falling snow, and thinks: “I belong here. Not because I understand everything, but because I want to understand.” (p. 93).
She meets Øystein. They marry and move out to Øystein’s farm, without electricity or running water, in Marlin, Washington—a dusty little prairie town, the kind of place where no one would think anyone would live. Gjertine plants a garden and keeps chickens. She and Øystein have a son, and for his sake they move to Spokane, where she becomes head of Riverview Terrace Hospital. “This is where I want to live, and this is where I will die,” she said the first time she saw the city (p. 95). And so it happens: in 1990, at the age of eighty-six.
In the days leading up to Christmas, we meet one of the book’s ten Norwegian women each day. They represent a large and diverse group of female voices that are only now, at the 200th anniversary of Norwegian emigration to America, beginning to be heard.
The book Remember the Ladies is now available
The book "Remember the Ladies: Sown in the Past, Harvested in the Future" gives voice to some of the Norwegian women who emigrated to America between 1825 and 1925. Through vivid retellings, you encounter lives that stretch from fjords and mountains to open plains and great cities—and that still move us today.
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In Norwegian emigration history, women were long given little space—but they carried just as much as men: children, language, hope, work, everyday life, and community. Remember the Ladies! is a part ofVågespel– an initiative that brings forward the voices of a selected group of Norwegian emigrant women from Western Norway.
Paperback · 116 pages
Authors: Inger-Kristine Riber and Reidun Horvei
Original language: Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Translation: Katherine Jane Hanson
Publisher: Onen Studio
Year of publication: 2025
The English version is only available in the United States.