Wanny Woldstad

Wanny Woldstad (January 15, 1893 – October 26, 1959) was the first female hunter on the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

Early life and career

Wanny Woldstad was born Ivanna Margrethe Ingvardsen in Sommarøy, Norway, in 1893.[1][2][3][4] Around 1915, she married Othar Jacobsen, with whom she had two sons, Alf and Bjørvik.[4][5] Othar died during the Spanish flu pandemic, in 1918, and she briefly remarried Martin Mikal Woldstad.[4]

Beginning in the 1920s, she worked as a taxi driver in the Norwegian city of Tromsø, becoming the first woman to drive a cab there. Some of her passengers were trappers returning from the Arctic outpost of Svalbard, who would brag about their exploits and how much money they were making.[5][6]

Svalbard expeditions

In 1932, Woldstad was recruited for an expedition to Svalbard led by Anders Sæterdal, immediately accepting the offer to join.[5][7] With this, she became the first female trapper in the remote archipelago.[2][5][8]

Some of her male peers on the trip were skeptical that Woldstad, at only 1.57 meters (5.2 ft) tall, could keep up, but she was an excellent hunter, having previously won trophies for marksmanship.[5][6][7] She shot her first polar bear that December. She returned to the islands, specifically to Hornsund, in 1933 and 1934, bringing along her sons, who became trappers themselves.[5][6][9] As a trapper, Woldstad generally focused on the area around the bay of Hyttevika.[5][6] She would spend five seasons in all on Svalbard, in which time she and her hunting partners killed 77 polar bears, in addition to foxes and geese.[1][7]

Later years

After closing out her time as a hunter, Woldstad settled on a farm with Sæterdal, with whom she was almost certainly involved romantically, but the pair split up five years later.[7]

In her later years, she frequently gave lectures on her Svalbard experiences around Norway.[4] She published a memoir of her time as an Arctic hunter, titled The First Woman Trapper on Svalbard, in 1956. It was later reprinted and translated into English as Wanny Get Your Gun.[6][7][9] Notable in Woldstad's writings is her use of masculine term fangstmann (trapper) to describe herself, instead of the expected feminine fangstkvinne.[10]

She died in 1959, after being hit by a truck in Sørkjosen.[2][4][7]

References
  1. Greiner, Robert (2012-10-09). "Ellen fødte alene i en fangsthytte". NRK (in Norwegian Bokmål). Retrieved 2021-04-26.
  2. "Wanny Woldstad". Norsk Polarhistorie (in Norwegian).
  3. Acadia, Spencer; Fjellestad, Marthe Tolnes (2020-11-26). Library and Information Studies for Arctic Social Sciences and Humanities. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-99791-4.
  4. Bråten, Halvor. "Wanny Woldstad – den første kvinnelige "fangstmann"". Vågemot miniforlag (in Norwegian Bokmål). Retrieved 2021-04-26.
  5. Henriksen, Jørn; Prestvold, Kristin (March 2015). "Wanny Woldstad – the female trapper in Hornsund". Norwegian Polar Institute. Retrieved 2021-04-26.
  6. "History of Female Trappers in Svalbard, Norway". Hearts In The Ice. Retrieved 2021-04-26.
  7. "4. Wanny Woldstad: The first woman trapper in Svalbard". Vågemot miniforlag. Retrieved 2021-04-26.
  8. Houghton, Lynn (November–December 2020). "Science In The Polar Night". Resurgence & Ecologist. Retrieved 2021-04-26.
  9. Hansson, Heidi (2018-01-23). Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5275-0691-6.
  10. Frank, Susi K.; Jakobsen, Kjetil A. (2019-10-31). Arctic Archives: Ice, Memory and Entropy. transcript Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8394-4656-0.
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