97 Dressing Up in Postwar America DREAMS, E XPER I EN CES, A ND EMB ODIMENT AM O N G F EMALE N ORWEGIA N MIGRA NTS I N NEW YORK, 1 945–1 955 Siv Ringdal After living two years in Brooklyn, Jenny went back to her hometown in Norway for a visit. The young woman who returned to Norway had a different look than the girl who had left in 1947. She had a new hairdo, her clothes were in a different style, and she wore high- heeled, peep- toe sandals. Jenny can still recall her grandmother’s reaction to her new American shoes: It was sinful to wear this kind of shoes! Her uncle, on the other hand, thought they could be of use. He joked about how she could wear them in the fields the next spring, helping him make small holes in the ground when he was planting his peas.1 Jenny Solaas2 was sixteen years old when she left the peninsula of Lista on the southern coast of Norway for America. The story about her visit to Norway 98 articles a couple of years later is amusing, but it also serves as a demonstration of the core argument of this article . The two years she had lived and worked in Brooklyn had an impact on Jenny in many ways. She had become familiar with the English language and the American job market; she had become acquainted with new kinds of food and leisure activities. However, life in America had also materialized itself on Jenny’s body. Her clothes and shoes were in different colors and designs and her hair was styled in a new fashion . In a similar manner, the two years in New York had also affected Jenny’s habits and body language. She had started to smoke, and high heels demanded a different way of walking than the flat shoes she had worn before she left Norway. Her new appearance provoked her grandmother and amused her uncle, and in this way brought some of the core values of her rural home town to the surface, such as obeying religious norms, and being strong and able to work rather than good looking. Jenny’s new looks challenged these values. In this article, I aim to shed light on the crucial role that body and materiality plays in migration. I will examine this topic through the experiences of a group of young, unmarried women who migrated from the two counties of West and East Agder in the southernmost part of Norway to New York City in the ten years following the Second World War.3 Upon their arrival in America, the young women’s bodies became important tools for dealing with, negotiating, and adapting to their new everyday lives. In this article I will show how the young women used their bodies and the material culture of their surroundings as tools of negotiation— between traditional and modern female ideals, between a conservative religious and a more secular way of life, and between the culture of austerity in postwar Norway and the blossoming consumer culture in postwar New York. I will also demonstrate how the young women’s experiences growing up during the Second World Figure 1. Jenny photographed in a photography studio in Brooklyn not long after her arrival in America. The photograph was sent home to a good girlfriend in Norway. Courtesy of Jenny Hansen. 99 dressing up in postwar america War shaped their dreams and expectations in the postwar period. This had an impact on how they encountered, lived, and interpreted their new lives in America. The bodily and material perspectives presented here were first introduced in my PhD dissertation in cultural history, which later formed the basis of my book På høye hæler i Amerika (On high heels in America), published in 2018.4 The most important source material, in both the thesis and book, was qualitative interviews with some of the women who left their hometowns and villages in Agder and went to New York City in the two decades following the Second World War. Some of them left their homes permanently, while others returned to Norway after...