Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [29]
What Helga carried inside seemed as important as the items in her satchel. Emboldened now with a decisive plan of action, she exuded a spirit of confidence, indomitable determination, and engaging intelligence, which reporters noticed. Free from the predictable daily responsibilities of birthing, nursing, and raising children that had shaped the past twenty years, Helga sounded excited about the unpredictable “pleasurable” adventures open to them as tourists when they visited major cities in America.21
And she carried the immigrant’s mantra—to improve one’s lot in life, one must be willing to journey into the unknown. During her stepfather’s journey to America and her husband’s move to homestead in Minnesota, she had followed them. Now Helga made her own decision on how to improve their family’s life through intrepid travel. She was determined to try, despite the risks.
But this choice meant she stepped beyond traditional boundaries for women in the 1890s. Although women settling the West lived with much less rigidity to roles than eastern middle-class women, the Victorian concept of separate spheres for men and women still prevailed. Magazines, literature, and sermons elevated a woman’s role in caring for her home and children, and a man’s role in the public marketplace. Motherhood, contended the editors of the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book, was the most “striking and beautiful” aspect of the “female character,” providing the “fulfillment of a woman’s physiological and moral destiny.”22 The widespread belief that mothers set the moral tone of a home still found expression in science, religion, and political structures of late-nineteenth-century America. “Heaven,” wrote one advocate of women’s elevated moral role, “has given special favors to your sex, through this simple fact or principle of dependence. It is your work to soften and refine men. Men living without you, by themselves, become savage and sinful. The purer you are, the more are they restrained, and the more are they elevated.”23
Perhaps even more unsettling than the tangible dangers was Helga’s choice to break the intangible taboo, particularly strong in Norwegian-American communities, against a mother leaving one’s children. She would be leaving her eight remaining children, including Lillian, a two-year-old toddler too young to even understand why her mother left. Many believed that no proper moral woman would dare consider such a thing. Ole’s best friend, Martin Siverson, clearly disapproved and could not comprehend how a mother could walk away from her family responsibilities. He expressed what others in her Norwegian community were thinking, “Women just didn’t do such things!”24
But Helga not only held confidence in herself but also in her family. While recognizing this journey would be challenging, she believed Ole and their children could help make this work. She had returned to the Midwest for several months three years earlier in 1893, and the family proved they could sustain one another. Besides, Olaf, seventeen, Ida, fifteen, and Bertha, now fourteen, were considered old enough to work for others, so they certainly could help keep house, care for their younger brothers and sisters, and assist with the farm. Arthur, eleven, and eight-year-old Johnny could take care of the chickens and pigs and help some with four-year-old William and little Lillian. Ole’s sister, Hanna, had emigrated from Norway and worked in Spokane as an ironer at the steam laundry. She could help on weekends.25 Helga believed their kind neighbors would help in an emergency; besides, she planned to be back by Christmas.