The Teacher Was Supreme - Pattie (Barney) Hoard
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Pattie (Barney) Hoard
I found an interesting perspective from friends teaching in the schools regarding young women in our church. When I was done with my student-teaching, a group of us stayed and gabbed until the wee hours. They talked about the Finn girls and struggles they watched them go through and reluctance of the community to encourage them to go on to college. Even today I know a young woman desperate to go to college. Her brother currently is a junior [in college]. She may or may not be able to go based on the attitude of, “She’s a girl and what’s the use? She’s going to get married. She’s going to have children.”
A teacher revealed this girl had written in a journal how frustrated she was with her fathe because he said, “Go. But I’m not going to give you any money.” Some Finnish girls do participate in athletics at school. But I find, not so much the Finns, but New England in general to be really tough on women athletes. We had a great following in Minnesota:
I played basketball and volleyball. The community followed the girls almost as much as the boys. There wasn’t that attitude of ‘boys are better.’ It’s very different here. The teachers I talked to also remarked that some Finnish girls have had to endure verbally abusive boys. And that is probably what was the most troubling: that the boys were so young. The girls would spill their guts in their journals and say, “He’s treating me horribly.”
The teachers have to be careful how they handle that. Sometimes they’d say, “I can’t ignore this,” and confront them. However, the girls would always defend the boys and say, “Well, they’ll settle down.” Consequently, what I find most disappointing was the impression these teachers had of the church and of the limited foresight girls had for themselves.
And I think all of that started to change in the last few years when women entered the workforce. All of a sudden, it’s not enough to marry a good guy and start having babies because you may have to work. So you’re seeing some women in school; I graduated from college with two other Apostolic-Lutheran women.