Daughters of Norway

The largest secular organization of Norwegian American women to date, the Daughters of Norway, was founded in Minneapolis in 1897. Its creators worked to form a group that focused on women’s needs, their interests, and their connections to Norway.

The United States and Minnesota supported dozens of fraternal organizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They formed to provide social and economic support to a specific group of people, often an ethnic group. Most had members that were either all female or all male. Most were also national in scope and made up of place-based groups called lodges. They usually wrote constitutions and established their own rituals, often including a secret handshake, practiced only by members.

Daughters of Norway members followed a prescribed ritual at their twice-a-month meetings and called each other sisters. They offered insurance to members who had no health or life insurance. For example, in exchange for regular dues payments from each member, the Daughters of Norway provided burial insurance, a payment of a set amount of money that, after a member died, helped her survivors pay for her funeral. When there was enough money in the treasury, the Daughters also paid members a small amount for each day that they were sick or unable to work.

The organization, whose original Norwegian name was the Døtre af Norge, served single, working-class women who were immigrants or first-generation Americans. The immigrants had left Norway to work as domestic servants and cooks in prosperous American households or as seamstresses or laundresses in local businesses. Those born in the US often grew up on farms in Norwegian regions of the Midwest and moved to cities as young women to find non-farm jobs.

A brief history of St Paul’s Synnoeve Lodge described its early days around 1903, when members met at the city’s Central Hall: “The aim of the lodge was to help…members in times of sorrow, to keep alive the traditions of the old country, as well as its culture, and to create a place for the young girls that came over from Norway where they could come and speak their native tongue and enjoy themselves socially.”

Within many lodges, members organized singing groups and sewing groups that attracted new members. By 1909 there were 2,000 members in thirty lodges, all of them speaking and singing and conducting lodge rituals in Norwegian. Drill teams took part in parades and performed for lodge meetings. They sometimes competed with other lodges’ drill teams for prizes like elaborate banners. In 1904, the Daughters of Norway head lodge offered such a banner to the drill team judged the best of that year: Minneapolis’s Freya #1.

The Daughters of Norway reached its maximum size in 1927, when it totaled 5,553 members organized into seventy-two lodges. Elected leaders belonging to a head lodge in Minneapolis guided the lodges’ formation. Though most lodges were in the Midwest (Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois), there were also a few in the northeastern US (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York). After the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration to the US, the number of immigrants from Norway, both women and men, dropped.

The Daughters continued as an organization until 1950, when they merged with the Sons of Norway, also based in Minneapolis. Insurance laws had changed in many of the states where the Daughters offered insurance, and the Daughters could no longer insure their aging members. Since there were fewer immigrants, fewer young women joined the lodges. That meant there was less money to pay out for burial insurance and sick leave. Members discussed changing the name of the Sons of Norway to reflect the merger, but the name did not change.

Minnesota towns and cities have supported one or more Daughters of Norway lodges since the organization’s founding. They include Minneapolis (five), St Paul (two), Duluth (two), Windom, Cloquet, Virginia, West Duluth, Two Harbors, Hibbing, Halstad, Thief River Falls, Benson, Crookston, and, possibly, Lanesboro. Records of several individual Minnesota lodges have been preserved in the archives of the University of Minnesota Duluth, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Cottonwood County Historical Society, and the Iron Range Research Center.