The Lives of Amish Women 1421438704, 9781421438702

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women
2 Becoming an Amish Woman
3 Marriage and Ever After
4 Events That Bring Women Together
5 Women Out of the Ordinary
6 Homemakers and Breadwinners
7 Reading Amish Women
8 Change, Diversity, and Amish Womanhood
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

The Lives of Amish Women

You ng C e n t e r B o ok s i n A n aba p t i s t a n d Pi e t i s t S t u di e s Steven M. Nolt, Series Editor

The Lives of Amish Women

K A R E N M . JOH N S ON-W E I N E R

Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore

© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnson-Weiner, Karen, author. Title: The lives of Amish women / Karen M. Johnson-Weiner. Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. | Series: Young Center books in Anabaptist and Pietist studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019052329 | ISBN 9781421438702 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421438719 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Amish women—United States—Social life and customs. | Amish—United States—Social life and customs. | Amish women— Religious life—United States. Classification: LCC E184.M45 J645 2020 | DDC 289.7/73—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052329 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

C on t e n t s

Preface  vii Acknowledgments  xvii

1  The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women   1 2  Becoming an Amish Woman   32 3  Marriage and Ever After   68 4  Events That Bring Women Together   103 5  Women Out of the Ordinary   133 6  Homemakers and Breadwinners   157 7  Reading Amish Women   190 8  Change, Diversity, and Amish Womanhood   231 Notes  249 Bibliography  281 Index  293

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Pr e fac e

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I began this work with the assurance from my friend, colleague, and mentor, Donald B. Kraybill, that it was a project I could do easily. But like Wonderland, with all of its paradoxes and false transparencies, the land of Amish women is not easily traveled. Laura Klein notes that “when gender studies began to gain acceptance in anthropology in the 1970s, the scholars of the time reviewed the ethnographies . . . [and] recognized that women were largely missing . . . that the interests . . . pursued were largely contemporary American (and male) interests, and that leadership in the societies studied [was] regularly described to be in the hands of men.”1 Certainly, this was the case in the mid-1980s when I first began to meet Amish women. When I began my research on the Amish more than thirty years ago, there were not many works by and about women except Gertrude Enders Huntington’s amazing dissertation, “Dove at the Window.” Beyond that, however, most of what I found, like Yoder’s Rosanna of the Amish, was written by men. Amish Roots, John A. Hostetler’s 1989 collection of articles about all aspects of Amish culture, features more than 150 essays about Amish life, but only 18 are written by women—and the article on the Amish kitchen is written by a non-Amish man. While works such as the 2013 The Amish by Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt have done much to promote better understanding, portrayals of Amish women have been paradoxical at best. Sometimes the women are viewed as simple homemakers, subordinate to

viii  Preface

their husbands and content to be in their kitchens and raising their children. This leads some observers to see them as examples of appropriate female behavior lost in a feminist world. Others find in the seeming simplicity and isolation of Amish women’s lives the virtues often attributed to people living in an earlier time. For example, in Plain and Simple, Sue Bender, a self-described “driven” artist and therapist, describes the Amish she visits as real people who move “unhurried, as if in a contemplative world of their own,” with fields that “looked like their quilts—rich, lush, orderly, and serene.” The Amish way, Bender reports, is “full of connections” whereas her “English” (non-Amish) life is “equally full of disconnections.”2 In his introduction to The Amish Cook at Home, non-Amish Kevin Williams asserts that readers are drawn to the Amish cook’s “calm sense of simplicity, this living connection to a time when life wasn’t so fast paced.”3 To others, the apparently simple and isolated Amish women seem oppressed, at the mercy of strict husbands in a religious world that allows them few options. A blogger, commenting on his experience passing an Amish buggy while on a cross-country biking trip, noted that the two women inside looked glum. A short time later, he passed an Amish man and little boy who “were all smiles.” The blogger noted how he later learned that “this is the way of the Amish. Amish women do not talk to or apparently even look at strange men. I also learned that an Amish woman is never allowed to conduct business of any kind and that an Amish man will not conduct business with a woman, period! I would have loved to learn more about these mysterious people.”4 Old Order Amish women have become stereotypes for mainstream society.5 Either they are understood to enjoy their isolation from technology, happily raising offspring, gardening, cooking, and keeping the home, or they are thought to glumly toil as wives and mothers in a rigidly patriarchal world. Googling “Amish women” at the start of this project, I found entries promising to answer such questions as “Are Amish women happy?” “What roles do they play in Amish society?” “Do Amish men oppress their women?” One blog post, “Roles of Amish Women,” asserted, “In Amish society there is a clear patriarchy in which gender roles are strictly defined. Amish women are expected to marry, have children and submit to their husband’s will.”6 No “some” or “many” or even “most” qualify popular assertions about women in the Amish world. Contemporary understanding of Amish women renders them ahistorical, suggesting a universal sameness on the basis of a generalized understanding of the Amish.

Preface  ix

Unfortunately, even the most accessible scholarship does not do justice to the truth. For example, Amish women do not get much coverage in Hos­ tetler’s seminal work, Amish Society, the first book to present the Amish to a wide audience. Now in its fourth edition, Amish Society devotes more than 400 pages to Amish life and history yet discusses women explicitly in fewer than 10 pages. Hostetler notes, “The Amish woman’s sphere and work are at home, not in the factory or in a paid profession.” He goes on to suggest that Amish women are rewarded by their society for good meals, homecanned preserves, homemade clothing, and well-tended gardens. “Caring for the children is, of course, her principal work.”7 Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt’s The Amish offers considerably more coverage of the lives of Amish women, but the general scope of the book prevented the authors from treating the diversity of Amish women’s lives in detail. In this book, I have tried both to emphasize the shared values of the Amish world and to highlight its diversity. We should hardly expect Amish women to be all the same when the Amish themselves are not. Nevertheless, there are common aspects of Amish life that cross church community borders and unite groups that do not fellowship with each other.8 Life across the Amish world is marked by church meetings every other week, twice-ayear communion, eight grades of formal schooling, horse-and-buggy transportation, plain dress, and the German language. These traditions shape the values and goals of Amish life. At the same time, even as the language they use to talk about themselves and their faith may be the same, the meanings may not be. What does it mean for an Amish woman to be humble when she is the owner of a business that serves people internationally? Is she humble in the same way as the Amish woman who helps her husband eke out a living on a dairy farm or the Amish stay-at-home mom whose husband works in a factory? Is a childless Amish woman or a single Amish woman a “keeper at home” in the same way as a woman raising a family? What does Gelassenheit—giving oneself up to God’s will—mean in a subsistence-level agrarian Amish community, and is it at all comparable to what the term means in a wealthy settlement where some members may be millionaires? In this work, I hope to foster a better understanding of the lives of Amish women by looking at the Amish contexts in which they are born, grow up, interact with others, and produce new Amish women. Throughout I use Etienne Wenger’s notion of a “community of practice,” a model of learning that suggests that newcomers to a group actively engage with more knowl-

x  Preface

edgeable and adept members in order to acquire over time the experiences, tools, stories, and values that will make them full participants in the community. In such a community, newcomers participate to the extent of their abilities, gradually becoming more fluent and identifying increasingly with the group and performing their identities as members. I suggest that each Amish church community is a community of practice. In practicing a “lived faith,” Amish generations have traditionally worked together, the younger learning from the older particular tasks and how to accomplish them. Members of the same church community wear identical dress, build and furnish their homes according to the same church rules, travel to church in horse-drawn buggies that look very similar to those their grandparents used, and worship according to patterns set generations earlier. In learning to do things in the same way as their parents and grandparents, each new generation has renewed and reinforced the Anabaptist understanding of the church as a fellowship of believers who must remain “unconformed”: separate from mainstream society so that they can follow Christ’s example. Fellowshipping church communities reinforce the community of practice as members move across church district boundaries to engage in shared traditions and participate in community events. An infant girl born into an Amish home interacts at every stage of her life with older members of her community to become an Amish woman, internalizing through her activities with other community members the goals and values of her gender in her Amish world. This is not to say that all Amish church communities are the same or that they do not change. Today’s Amish are a diverse people for, in renewing their faith and practices, Amish in each new generation have been part of a changing world. Guided by tradition and scripture, each church community has continued to define and redefine itself, and the line between the community and the world has shifted in notable and community-specific ways. While some Amish church communities set themselves apart from the mainstream by rejecting the technologies that increasingly structure mainstream life, others have adopted and adapted those same technologies, setting themselves apart from the world by redefining Amish values. Moreover, in shaping its nonconformity, each Amish church community defines itself as similar to some Amish groups (and so fellowships with them) and different from others (with which it will have little interaction). In other words, everything about the Amish—dress, language, education, transportation, work—emphasizes

Preface  xi

At every stage of life, an Amish girl interacts with older community members, internalizing through her activities the goals and values of her gender. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

their separation from the world, but how each community chooses to live can also separate Amish church communities from each other. Infant girls learn to be very different kinds of Amish women. Change within the Amish world also affects how the Amish live their faith and the extent to which the community of practice remains effective in handing down traditional values and practices. In exploring the lives of different kinds of Amish women, I have realized that the very nature of community in the Amish world is changing. As Amish businesses expand beyond the borders of the church community or as Amish church members go to work for non-Amish employers, young people no longer grow up working with multiple generations. Not only does the knowledge required to live an Amish life change, but the traditional way of acquiring that knowledge— by working with others in multiple settings in the church community—may no longer function effectively. In some communities, for example, this has led to a greater emphasis on formal schooling, unequal access to paid employment, and a different way of understanding the role of women in the church community.

xii  Preface

In evolving an identity as an Amish woman, the infant girl born into an Amish family engages in and practices the ways of her community, internalizing its particular goals and values. As communities evolve in different ways, they produce different kinds of Amish women, whose daily lives may or may not be very similar. Ideally, the stories and analysis in the pages that follow will foster greater appreciation and understanding of all the varied ways in which Amish women construct rich identities through their daily interactions and cultural and religious traditions. This book is not a women’s history or even a history of Amish women. My first goal is to describe the lives led by women in different types of Amish communities. To do so, I draw on their own words and their stories. Nevertheless, guided by Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “women are made, not born,”9 I also try to understand how infant females become Amish women by exploring the contexts in which they grow up, the activities in which they engage, the values they come to espouse, and the roles they define for themselves. Recognizing that change and the tension between faith and worldliness have helped to shape the worlds in which contemporary Amish women live, I begin this work by exploring the context in which their foremothers came to be. Chapter 1 looks at the early years of the Anabaptist movement, when women helped to spread Anabaptist teachings, and many were martyred for their faith. Exploring Amish origins in the seventeenth century, Amish migration to North America, and the evolution of distinct Amish communities, this chapter shows how the Amish world came to be so diverse, how women have been key players in Amish history, and how socially and religiously defined gender roles have evolved and diversified over time and shaped relations of power and authority in the Amish world. Subsequent chapters focus on different phases of contemporary Amish women’s lives and their different activities in order to understand how Amish women construct gendered identities in ongoing interactions with Amish and non-Amish others and the diverse contexts in which they do so. In these chapters I also explore the means by which Amish faith, history, and tradition combine to shape women’s identities. Specifically, chapter 2 looks at the lives of Amish females from birth until the teenage years, when young women join the “young folk” (what Hollywood has popularized as Rumspringa) and begin to contemplate dating and joining the Amish church through baptism. Chapter 3 looks at marriage to understand what submission means for Amish women, and chapter 4 focuses on the events that bring

Preface  xiii

women together in different communities. Chapter 5 focuses on women who are extraordinary in Amish communities: those who, because they are not married with children, do not meet the norms for women held by most Amish. Chapter 6 explores the traditional and evolving entrepreneurial and occupational roles of Amish women, and chapter 7 looks at how the varied identities that Amish women enact for themselves are influenced and reinforced through the books and magazines they read. Finally, chapter 8 suggests the broader importance of this study of the lives of Amish women. I was introduced to the first Amish woman I ever met by the non-Amish owner of a local craft store. I met the second through a student, who happened to live near her. I approached both women in the same way, identifying myself as a linguist and inquiring if I could ask questions about Pennsylvania Dutch. As I became increasingly involved in their lives, both women became close friends: my children grew up visiting their homes and playing with their children and grandchildren, and our conversations ranged broadly. These women also opened doors for me in their respective Amish communities and facilitated my visits to schools, attendance at church meetings, and trips to settlements in other states. Each new person I met has introduced me to others, a snowballing of contacts that has continued ever since. Of course, not all of my Amish contacts came about through these two initial women. A chance meeting with an Amish man in a Lancaster County hardware store led to a delightful evening with two Amish couples and an ongoing correspondence. An Old Order Mennonite woman I came to know when I first began studying Pennsylvania Dutch introduced me to a number of Amish women, while a fellow researcher introduced me to others. An Amish teacher working in New York invited me to visit her home in Ohio, and later, as I drove her and several of her friends to visit different Ohio Amish schools, I met people from different Amish affiliations. I met still others when teachers I was visiting took me to teachers’ meetings and introduced me to the parents of their pupils. Since first meeting those two Amish women, I have spent thirty-five years doing fieldwork in diverse Amish communities in a number of states, including New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Minnesota. The approach I have taken is called “participant observation,” a qualitative method of fieldwork in which the researcher joins in the activities of those whose culture she is attempting to understand. Participant observation requires a long-term commitment, for the researcher must immerse herself in the lives of group members in the attempt to understand the per-

xiv  Preface

spectives of those whose way of life is under study. As one field guide puts it, “Participant observation is . . . useful for gaining an understanding of the physical, social, cultural, and economic contexts in which study participants live; the relationships among and between people, contexts, ideas, norms, and events; and people’s behaviors and activities—what they do, how frequently, and with whom.”10 Staying in Amish homes and visiting Amish families regularly over long periods, I have talked with women while helping them to prepare meals, wash dishes, and bag vegetables at local farm stands. I have visited Amish schools and helped to grade papers, attended Amish church services, driven women to midwives, rejoiced with families at weddings, and mourned with friends at funerals. Early in my research, I was often accompanied by my young children, and so I had considerable opportunity to talk with Amish mothers, to observe family interactions, and to compare childrearing practices. I have followed the lives of Amish women whom I first met when they were small children, whose marriages I’ve attended, and whose children I have observed growing up. In addition to participant observation, I have conducted phone interviews with some Amish women and corresponded with others, posing questions in letters that might not be asked when we are together. Further, I have done face-to-face interviews with Amish women who are actively contributing to the economic stability of their families and communities by teaching school, doing craftwork, or operating businesses that cater to their church communities and/or to the non-Amish world. In addition to my own interviews, I have drawn on interviews of Amish women entrepreneurs in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, conducted by Flo Horning on behalf of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. The Horning interviews explore the lives of women who appear to have moved outside the traditional roles of housewife and mother to engage in entrepreneurship, challenging the popular stereotype of the quiet, submissive Amish woman. Thanks to a Snowden Fellowship in the fall of 2015, I was able to conduct research at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. I have also done archival work at the Muddy Creek Farm Library in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, and at the Heritage Historical Library in Aylmer, Ontario, two Old Order institutions with a wealth of holdings that focus on Old Order life. I have been able to integrate fieldwork, interviews, and archival study with research on Amish women’s magazines and more general Amish publications to which women are often

Preface  xv

key contributors, including Pathway Publishers’ Family Life, Blackboard Bulletin, and Young Companion and the Amish newspapers the Budget and Die Botschaft. I have subscribed to all of these over my thirty-five years of research in Amish communities, and I draw on multiple issues of each for this work. Finally, I have been privileged to research letters and other documents related to Pathway Publishers and other Amish publishing ventures at both the Heritage Historical and Muddy Creek libraries.11 For chapter 7, I made a point of asking Amish women what magazines they read, and then I selected the three most often named for analysis. Amish women were eager to share these with me, and one woman even sent me a subscription form for Ladies’ Journal. Diane L. Wolf suggests that fieldwork makes the researcher vulnerable: “I am sure that there are issues of a political or personal nature regarding conflicts, confrontations, or dilemmas that we choose to keep secret, to not discuss in a conference setting or to publish.”12 My conversations with various Amish friends have ranged over many topics, and I have tried to answer their questions honestly and to respect their concerns about the often very personal details of their lives they shared with me. Most important, I assured them that I would protect their identities. Many Amish, particularly those in more conservative church communities, are hesitant to be studied formally, generally resisting attempts to record their speech or to photograph them in their homes or at work. As one Swartzentruber Amish bishop told me early in my research of Amish life, “We don’t like to advertise.” The late Werner Enninger noted, “In this culture, the choice the field worker has is to work on the basis of the obtainable data, or to gain no insights at all.”13 When I go into an Amish home, I take a notebook with me. I ask permission before I write down what people are saying and may ask them to rephrase what they have said to be sure that I have understood. Later, I add descriptions of what I saw in order to provide context for the notes taken in situ. All of those whom I visit are aware that I am researching their lives, and many joke with me about what I might write next. I share drafts of my work with them and provide copies of published materials. Amish friends in different settlements have read and commented on the chapters in this book, and I am grateful for all they have taught me. Most have wished to remain nameless, and I have honored their request. This approach has enabled me to describe activities and give readers an inside view of Amish life while ensuring the privacy of the Amish who invited me into their homes and shared their thoughts.

xvi  Preface

I am not Amish, nor do I come from an Amish background. But I have great respect for the Amish and the diversity of their world. Throughout my research, my goal has been to understand better the lives, values, faith, and actions of the people who have welcomed me into their homes and communities.

Ac k now l e d g m e n t s

There are many without whom this work would never have been undertaken, much less completed. Two Amish women were instrumental in introducing me to Amish life, first welcoming me into their homes more than three decades ago. One is gone now, and I miss her greatly. The other has moved to a new settlement, and I see her when I can (and visit with her children and their families often). I also owe thanks to my dear friend Mary S. for all she has taught me about Old Order life. I am also grateful to her daughter Dorcas for being a willing companion as we visited Amish women entrepreneurs in Lancaster County. I thank the members of the Amish community who read drafts. They did much to ensure that I did not stray from the path. I am deeply grateful to Donald B. Kraybill and Steven M. Nolt for their friendship, encouragement, and advice. I also thank my friend James A. Cates for his support and help in my making new Amish friends and for his willingness to read drafts and give me feedback. Thank you as well to Jeff and Ann Bach and Edsel Burdge, who helped to make my time at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies so rewarding. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for the time they took to read this manuscript and for their useful and insightful comments. This work would never have been completed were it not for the patience, support, and editorial guidance of my husband, Bruce I. Weiner. This work has been greatly improved by comments from many of the above. I accept full responsibility for the faults that remain.

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C h a p t e r On e

The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women

The three sisters were drowned; they would in no wise depart from God and His truth. The youngest one laughed at the water; which was seen by many a one there. Some held that the devil had hardened them; but others were moved in their hearts, so that they confessed that God must have given this, since otherwise it could not be possible. Thus, they valiantly testified to the holy and divine truth. —“Nine Brethren and Three Sisters, A.D. 1528,” Martyrs Mirror

Continuity and change, tradition and dynamism shape the lives of Amish women and make their experiences both distinctive and diverse. For some, the principled commitment to living Old Order lives, purposely out of step with the cultural mainstream, has provided a good deal of constancy. In 1903 an anonymous Lancaster County Amish woman described her routine as rising “at daylight . . . as I have been doing every morning during the spring and summer months since my marriage—more than ten years ago. There were signs of life, even at that early hour, for in this Amish settlement industry ranks among the cardinal virtues.” She added that after packing lunches and sending her three oldest children off to school, “little Annie was left to keep me company while I went about my housework.” She described “an equal division of labor and responsibility between the Amish men and women.” “The women,” she explained, “keep the house and the men work

2   The Lives of Amish Women

the farms. . . . All are exceedingly industrious, and as soon as the children are able to work, they are put at some useful employment.”1 That early twentieth-century description still rings true today for women from the highly traditional Amish subgroup popularly known as the Swartzentruber Amish. Writing to me in May 2016, one young mother of eight noted happily, “We are having nice spring days, and the air is warmer again, makes me planting fever [eager to plant].” She had already done “some baking this morning, made cheese. Now I want to quilt today.”2 Another wrote, “It’s Tuesday morn[ing] after breakfast. I got a big batch [of ] cottage cheese draining. The girls are doing dishes, then they have to sweep floors etc. etc. [The] garden needs to be weeded, so I hope to have some of that done today while the ground is wet.” In a short note included with her mother’s letter, one of her daughters, who had just finished the third grade, described how her school had enjoyed a “yummy lunch” at the end of the term and then added, “I have to help Mom and play with Rachel [her infant sister].”3 Even in relatively more progressive Amish communities, women still engage in the same activities as their counterparts in earlier times: gardening, homemaking, and childrearing. Writing while at work—“I have a few spare minutes. Seems like I can squeeze in my writing here at work”—an Indiana Amish housewife noted, “My garden is slowly coming along. For a while the weather was so cool and wet . . . the plants just seemed to sit there. Now it has changed.”4 Asked to compare her life when she was twenty to her twenty-­ year-old daughter’s life, a Lancaster Amish mother said that she does not see many differences. She expects her daughter’s married life to be much like her own and says that her own life is much like her mother’s was. “We do a lot of canning or freezing. In summer that’s about all I do.” About her canning of fruit, vegetables, and meat, she noted simply, “I do about the same amount as my mom [did].”5 Amish women in diverse communities fill their days with household chores, children, church, and visiting. In early February 2016 in Die Botschaft, a popular weekly Amish newspaper that prints letters from readers across the country, a woman from Brush Valley, Pennsylvania, wrote, “In the working line, we are trying to get the upstairs finished, trimmed, etc. After this week, we hope to think of something else. Sewing not near done yet and time to order seeds.”6 A few months earlier, also in Die Botschaft, another housewife from Pennsylvania described a full day of work and added a caution that “it doesn’t pay to hurry.” She described how her daughter, having gotten a late start at house painting, caught the paint can with her sleeve,

The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women   3

Farming families work together. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

knocked it over, and spilled the paint. “Here we both were, scooping up a gallon of paint. But we got her stuff painted and [later] the men folk came to work on the icehouse building in the evening.”7 Within Amish communities, these persistent themes of domestic labor and the responsibilities of motherhood have been affected by profound social, economic, and technological changes during the course of the twentieth century, shaping Amish women’s lives in different ways and resulting in increasingly diverse experiences. For example, in the most conservative settlements, where church members have resisted technology and preserved a way of life focused on the small family farm, women are more likely to come together frequently for a variety of “frolics” or work parties to accomplish different chores.8 For women whose families are engaged in agriculture or operate a home-based shop, interactions frequently cut across gender lines. Wives, mothers, and sisters are involved in a variety of ways with the work of husbands, fathers, and brothers and vice versa. Wives often work with their husbands, particularly when there are no children to take on chores.

4   The Lives of Amish Women

One Amish woman told me about a recent visit to a friend who, with no children at home, was often out in the fields with her husband. “I asked her if she’d got her plowing done,” the woman commented, laughing. The humor derived from the fact that the question is usually one exchanged by men. Yet for a woman with no mothering responsibility, there is no reason not to engage in fieldwork.9 Similarly, depending on the season and the tasks at hand, men from conservative Amish groups that remain focused on farming help their wives with a variety of household tasks. A Swartzentruber Amish bishop joked one fall that he had spent “so many hours peeling peaches [for his wife] that [his] butt was numb.” His role during peach season demonstrates the wisdom of the Swartzentruber mother who, commenting on how important it is for her sons to help in the house, said she regularly told them, “If you don’t help us, how are we going to know you’ll help your wives when you marry?” In contrast, in more economically progressive Amish communities, where families have moved off the farm in much greater numbers and both women and men have turned to employment in businesses or factories, Amish homes increasingly feature technological adaptations that allow fewer people to do more. Sociologist Judith Nagata has suggested that one result of a more reliable cash income is “greater reliance on automation, and a tendency to spend surplus cash on remodeling the home.”10 Surplus cash means that clothes can be bought rather than produced at home and that one woman with more access to technology, including gas refrigerators, freezers, and washing machines, can do the work of several. As a result, in such communities, Amish housewives are more likely to work alone. They spend much less time on food preservation and require less assistance. Such women are more likely to buy beef already butchered and to freeze produce rather than canning it because freezing is a less time-­ consuming process. When they do can foods, they use a gas stove rather than a wood stove, making the process even easier. A gas stove also means that women can cook meals by themselves, without helpers to split wood and fill the woodbox. In progressive communities that permit electrical inverters (which convert the direct current of batteries into alternating current that can power kitchen appliances), housewives can use blenders, mixers, and food processors, easing meal preparation. Indoor plumbing means no one needs to fetch water, and so cleanup is simpler. With modern indoor toilets, people no longer visit outhouses with multiple seats, a locus of community conversation in more conservative settlements, and with bathtubs

The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women   5

Amish kitchens reveal the diversity of Amish life. Left, gas appliances and handsome cabinetry; right, a wood stove and fewer amenities. Photographs by the author.

and showers, personal hygiene is accomplished daily and independently. Family members no longer have to wait their turn on Saturday evenings to use the tub set up in the kitchen, next to the stove for warmth and close to the basins of hot water that are added to keep the bath warm. Technological change and economic integration have often eased women’s work while simultaneously isolating and segregating it, rendering it more gender- and age-specific. Amish author Lena Yoder, writing in 2015 about her life in the large, progressive northern Indiana settlement near Ship­ shewana, describes how traditional women’s work evolves: “Every year the children can help more, and the responsibilities change.”11 Similarly, in her autobiographical collection of stories, Simple Pleasures, Marianne Jantzi, a Milverton, Ontario, Amish housewife, describes a day that begins at 5:00 a.m. when she rises to fix and eat breakfast with her husband. The two share devotions before he leaves for work, and then she enjoys time “to pray, meditate, read, and write.” If she’s lucky, she has about an hour to herself before the children are up. After feeding them breakfast, she gets the eldest off to school, starts laundry, works in the shoe store she owns, gets a roast in the oven for dinner, has lunch with her preschool children, reads to them before they take a nap, washes dishes, bakes rolls for dinner, brings in the laundry, and waits on a customer. Only when the children come home from school is she no longer working alone, for then they can hang up the wash, and her school-age daughter peels carrots while her son sets the table. After dinner, she and her husband work together in the shoe store until it’s bedtime for the children who, after a story, are tucked in. Giving the kitchen a quick sweep, she showers and heads for bed at 9:00 p.m.12

6   The Lives of Amish Women

More conservative Amish do not have showers, not all women run businesses, and many have more than Jantzi’s four children, but most aspects of her day are typical. In a letter to her sister in another state, a Swartzentruber Amish woman in Maine wrote, “Well this is now Mon AM. Got wash out on porch. Looks real drab and rainy but that it’ll dry someday. It was 48 [degrees] de mya [this morning], later 52 so it’s cool, feels like a cool wet May.” She goes on to note that her husband and son have covered the melons in the garden and that the strawberries look nice and then adds, “I hope we go a day [to] Menno’s [because] she [her daughter] would help me make bonnets for [a neighbor’s] twins.” Finally, her long, newsy letter begins to come to a close: “Well I should go get ebbes [something] ready for supper, probably soup of some kind. We wanted to go get rhubarb at the neighbors for Fannie [a daughter] to can so she can do lots at once. Now it’s stopped raining so if it dries off, we should go one of these evenings.” Yet the letter is finished only after supper: Now [it’s] evening, after supper. 6:30. Stopped raining right now. [It’s] not a wash drying day. They’re saying sunny Wednesday, so we’ll find out. [I] should plant the late cabbage. I think I’ll just make holes in plastic and plant it in there. That way there’s no transplanting. The same with the celery and cabbage. . . . We plant most of our stuff in plastic, peas, early potatoes, and sweet corn is all that’s not in plastic, it’s so much easier. . . . Well I’d better stop my nonsense and get to something else. Now your turn. By[e].13

Her letter, written over a long, rainy day, had begun with talk of her garden and ended the same way. The variety and commonalities that surface in Indiana, Ontario, and Maine suggest the contours of Amish women’s lives in the twenty-first century. Although many of the concrete realities that shape their lives today are new, others have deep roots in the experiences of their foremothers, who lived through eras of profound social change and consequential choices. Amish Origins Although it is unlikely that many Amish women today would point to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as shaping their daily lives, events of that period have contributed to current understandings of what it means to be a female member of an Amish church. The ancestors of Amish women today lived in times of social and religious upheaval, when women were gaining somewhat greater agency within their families and communities. As histo-

The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women   7

rian Sherrin Wyntjes suggests, this was a period in which feudal society was giving way to modern states, and women’s activities, which had been more constrained by social position, kinship, and class, were increasingly defined by gender.14 During this period, key elements of contemporary Amish life— marriage, the church, the ministry, the relationship to secular authority— were being formalized. As the religious grouping that would later be called “Amish” evolved in the context of changing European society, women in the movement began to shape an understanding of what it means to be female church members. The Amish descend from a radical faction of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began in October 1517, when Martin Luther (1483–1546) posted ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. Luther had hoped to initiate changes within the Catholic Church, but his actions ignited protests against the pope and church doctrine that spread across Europe and split the church. By 1518, the city council of Zurich, an independent Swiss city-state,15 had elected a former Catholic priest, Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), to be head pastor and to lead church reform. However, Zwingli refused to carry out any church reforms without the consent of the Zurich City Council, which had assumed full civil and ecclesiastical authority over the church. His reluctance to enact a more thoroughgoing reform angered several of his young students, particularly Conrad Grebel (ca. 1498–1526), the son of a prominent Zurich family; another well-educated Zurich native, Felix Manz (ca. 1498–1527); and a former priest, Georg Blaurock (ca. 1492– 1529). The conflict between students and teacher ultimately came to a head over infant baptism, a practice that not only had religious significance but also served a secular function, for it ensured that children were entered into state records. In other words, it created not only church members but citizens of the state. Grebel and his contemporaries argued that because infant baptism had no scriptural basis, it had no place in the church. Rather, they argued, baptism should be a sign of faith and undertaken only by those willing to commit themselves to Christ’s teachings. The church, they argued, should be a believers’ church, independent of secular authority, a position that government leaders feared would bring anarchy. Ultimately, the Zurich City Council enacted laws requiring that infants be baptized and making illegal any attempt to rebaptize those who had been baptized as infants. Abandoning the state church, Grebel, Manz, and Blaurock met secretly on January 21, 1525, in the home of Manz’s mother to re-

8   The Lives of Amish Women

baptize each other as a sign of their devotion to a “church of believers,” one they asserted would be according to “evangelical truth and the word of God.”16 Viewing their actions as treasonous, Zwingli denounced the “rebaptizers” or “Anabaptists” as they were called pejoratively, charging that they had brought division into the church. Many who joined the Anabaptists suffered arrest, fines, imprisonment, torture, exile, and death. Women in the Forefront From the earliest days of the Anabaptist movement, women were both actively involved and persecuted. Nevertheless, researcher Marlin Adrian has noted that “historically, the role of [Anabaptist] women has been understated,” and historians Kimberly Schmidt and Steven Reschly assert that women have been “simply left out of historical accounts.”17 Indeed, Linda Huebert Hecht argues that the very success of the movement “required the participation of everyone, particularly the women who were part of the household and family settings where Anabaptists held their meetings and won their followers.”18 In fact, like men, Anabaptist women helped to spread the movement and paid the price for their religious activities. Only three months after that first illegal adult baptism, authorities attempting to impose fines on Anabaptists in Zollikon, a small village outside of Zurich, encountered a group of Anabaptist women who refused to pay. According to the historical record, the women “spoke evil and shameful words” to the authorities, and one, Elsy Boumgartner, exclaimed that “God created the earth for her as much as for milords,” an assertion of both religious and civil equality.19 In a crackdown by Zurich authorities later that same year, key leaders of the nascent Anabaptist movement were arrested, including Margret Hottinger. Other Anabaptist women joined her in prison only a few months later.20 Even the harshest penalties exacted by the authorities did not stop the spread of Anabaptist ideas. In February 1527, only two years after the Anabaptist movement began, a Benedictine prior turned Anabaptist missionary, Michael Sattler,21 produced the Schleitheim Confession, which put into writing beliefs of the first Anabaptists about how the church would function as a community within, but separate from, worldly society. The confession defined a church that adult believers joined voluntarily by choosing to be baptized. It also rejected violence. Within the church, those who sinned and were unrepentant were to be banned from fellowship. Anabaptists who embraced the Schleitheim Confession conceived of a church that was neither a

The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women   9

building nor a set of rituals but rather a community of believers who had committed themselves to following Christ’s teachings. Members hoped to achieve Gelassenheit, the complete surrender to God’s authority and trust in God’s will that would make the individual worthy of salvation. Their faith was to be lived, not simply declared. The foremothers of today’s Amish women were from different walks of life and different regions of Europe. Some lived in cities and others were village dwellers; some were well educated and others illiterate. There were married women, single women, elderly women, and mothers of small children. Some left husbands to follow their Anabaptist convictions, while others were separated from their spouses by prison and execution. Some left infants behind, while others were executed with their adult offspring. Some saw children, husbands, siblings, and parents imprisoned, tortured, sent into exile, or executed. These women lived at a time when women had little access to religious or secular authority, but in the religious upheaval of the Reformation, they spread the gospel, witnessed to neighbors, and defied both secular authority and the leaders of the mainstream churches. They shared a belief in the literal truth of the scriptures and a conviction that only by following Christ’s example—even into martyrdom—could they live as true Christians and hope to be worthy of salvation. They defined themselves first as Christians and, in so doing, claimed for themselves the right to participate fully in the life of the church. In choosing to be baptized as adults— a believer’s baptism—these women, hardly passive or submissive, acted on their faith. An Old Order woman descended from these early Anabaptists marveled that her foremothers “over the years have passed down that stamina and heritage. It’s amazing that it’s still there.” The early Anabaptist women knew that choosing adult baptism meant they would likely face persecution. They saw both men and women suffer; often, spouses were tortured and executed within days of each other. Michael Sattler was burned at the stake in May 1527. According to Martyrs Mirror, a collection of stories of those “baptized only upon confession of faith, and who suffered and died for the testimony of Jesus,” Sattler’s “fellow brethren were executed with the sword, and the sisters drowned.”22 Sattler’s wife, Margaretha, “after being subjected to many entreaties, admonitions and threats, under which she remained very steadfast,” was drowned a few days after her husband had perished.23 One story reports that the countess of Hechingen attempted to convince Margaretha to recant her Anabaptism and stay at the court, but she refused.24

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Sattler’s wife did not get her own entry in Martyrs Mirror, but stories of the torture and martyrdom of hundreds of other women are testimony to the active involvement of women in spreading the Anabaptist message. For example, in the same year the Sattlers were martyred, a woman known only as Weynken, “a widow, daughter of Claes, of Monickendam,” was burned at the stake in The Hague. Martyrs Mirror reports both her interrogation, in which she repeatedly cited scripture in defense of her faith, and the attempts by others to get her to recant. Reportedly, one woman urged her, “Dear mother, can you not think what you please and keep it to yourself? Then you will not die.” Weynken responded, “Dear sister, I am commanded to speak. . . . hence I cannot remain silent about it. . . . as the Lord has ordained it, so it must be, and not otherwise; I will adhere to the Lord.” In the end, Weynken went to her death “gladly, as though she were going to a marriage; and her face did not once betoken fear of the fire.”25 In all, perhaps a third or more of Anabaptist martyrs in the first century and a half of the movement were women.26 Forced to face the legal implication of women’s religious activism, some authorities began to formulate policies governing the way Anabaptist women were treated. A 1571 procedural statement suggested that members of the state church should consider divorce if they had been abandoned by Anabaptist spouses, particularly in cases where children had been left behind. When the abandonment was not by choice (e.g., when the Anabaptist spouse had been arrested), the abandoned party was urged to be patient.27 A 1584 ordinance dealt specifically with the question of what to do when the arrest of the Anabaptist wife of a non-Anabaptist man threatened the stability of the family. Such wives were to be “handed over to their husbands to be chained in the house,” and access to them was to be limited “to take care that such erring women not presume to lead their families or others astray.”28 The ordinance commanded pastors of the state church to visit such dissident women to try to bring them back into the official church and ordered magistrates to visit the home without warning to ensure that no one was releasing the women, “for when such erroneous and headstrong women, who have such ill-timed zeal . . . are freed, they may sometimes wander secretly at night to other places and among people, especially other women, where they may cause harm.”29 As this quotation suggests, women in the formative years of the Anabaptist movement were actively spreading Anabaptist teachings. The early Anabaptists envisioned the church as the body of Christ and enacted an ideology of the “priesthood of all believers.” Explaining this concept, one early

The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women   11

Anabaptist, Johannes Brotli, wrote, “Christ is our high priest, so the hands, fingers, toes, body and members are priests as well.”30 Thus, in its early years, the movement drew relatively few gender distinctions. In some places, women as well as men preached.31 As historian Hans-Jürgen Goertz put it, Anabaptism in some cases allowed women to “discard the traditional role of the husband’s obedient helpmate and subordinate and to claim the right to speak, to protest, to reject the demands of clergy and governments and to support the new religious insights, even to the point of martyrdom.”32 Historians Snyder and Huebert Hecht note that “the early phase of Anabaptist development opened up many more possibilities of direct participation and leadership for women than was the social norm in the sixteenth century, or than would become the norm in later Anabaptism.”33 Margaret Hellwart, who lived near Stuttgart, was so successful in converting neighboring women to the Anabaptist movement that the authorities had her chained to the floor of her home at least twenty-one times between 1610 and 1621. In 1618, a neighbor, Katharina Koch, stated to authorities that she no longer needed to attend the state church because Hellwart had taught her what she needed to know. An Informal Witness As Hermina Joldersma and Louis Grijp point out, although Anabaptist women were not all the same in the nature of their religious dissent, they were alike in holding religious views that challenged the state.34 They note that Anabaptist women faced representatives of religious and secular power that excluded not just Anabaptist women, but all women: “Each individual woman was put in a position of defending herself against a weight of sanctioned authority and theological learning to which she, by virtue of being a woman, was allowed no access.”35 Yet Anabaptist women drew on an understanding of scripture that empowered them to speak. Wyntjes asserts, “The radical Reformation’s insistence on freedom of conscience for all adult believers eliminated distinctions based on sex, and the doctrine of baptism or rebaptism for all believers became an equalizing covenant. Anabaptist priesthood included all members of the laity, both men and women.”36 Similarly, Irwin suggests that by claiming that the authority to preach comes from God, the Anabaptists opened the door for women to participate in the church in ways that previously had been denied them.37 Perhaps in reaction, the Schleitheim Confession encoded a formal, male ministry, which was a rejection, Snyder and Huebert Hecht suggest, of a charismatic strain in the early movement.38 Snyder argues further that the

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ministries of women were increasingly constrained as the Anabaptist movement became more text-centered.39 Goertz suggests, “Often the men were not prepared to surrender their own patriarchal position and assist the women in realizing their new-found confidence.”40 As the movement consolidated, women were excluded from formal positions of authority.41 Still, women continued to be influential in the spread of the movement. Given the familial nature of the early Anabaptist church, women often facilitated the activities of family members. For example, Snyder and Huebert Hecht document the case of Anna Scharnschlager, wife of Leupold, whose financial acumen kept their family afloat during decades of exile, freeing her husband to serve as preacher to small Anabaptist congregations, first in Strasbourg and later in Ilanz, Switzerland. As wives, mothers, and neighbors, women provided a more informal witness to the Anabaptist faith. Boulding writes, “The homemaker wife who created a gathering place for members of the religious community was perhaps a special product of the religious struggles associated with the Reformation.”42 For women in the first decades of the Anabaptist movement, following Christ’s example even to prison and execution was a means of providing a teaching witness to their families, a way to encourage them in their faith. For example, one of the most moving images in Martyrs Mirror shows fifteen-­year-old Adriaen Wens and his three-year-old brother, Hans, near the burned stake where their mother, Maeyken, a minister’s wife, died. Before her death, Maeyken Wens had written to Adriaen, “Fear not them which kill the body.”43 The letters of wives and husbands imprisoned at the same time offer evidence of mutual encouragement. Writing to his wife, Lijkwen Dircks, Jerome Segers expressed thanks to God: “He has made us both worthy to suffer for his name.” In a return letter, Lijkwen wrote, “Be of good cheer . . . my most beloved in the Lord, and rejoice in Him as before, praising and thanking Him for having chosen us to be imprisoned so long for his name.”44 Jerome was burned at the stake in 1551; Lijkwen, who was pregnant when they were arrested, was drowned after the birth of their child. The Church and the World The bloody persecution of Anabaptists etched into their belief system a sharp division between the church and the outside world.45 For the Anabaptists, the church was “a holy nation, a peculiar people . . . who were called out of the darkness” (1 Peter 2:9),46 while the world was a dark, sinful place,

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The sons of Maeyken Wens search for her tongue screw among her ashes, 1573. Martyrs Mirror, 661. Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas.

fallen away from God and Christ’s teachings. The scriptures taught the Anabaptists to love neither the world nor “the things of the world” (1 John 2:15) and called any who would befriend the world “an enemy of God” (James 4:4). Further, the Bible admonished true Christians not to conform to worldly ways (Romans 12:2). Thus, in joining the church through baptism, Anabaptists and their descendants committed to a life in which decision-­ making was to be shaped both by a desire to keep the church pure and by a suspicion of society outside the boundaries of the church community. In his invocation at the beginning of Martyrs Mirror, author Thieleman J. van Braght addressed God and talked of “the sufferings and the death of Thy martyrs, who altogether innocent, as defenceless lambs, were led to the water, the fire, the sword, or to the wild beasts in the arena, there to suffer and to die for Thy name’s sake.”47 As Marlin Adrian notes, Martyrs Mirror served to encode suffering and martyrdom not as a “journey to death” but as the “only true path into eternal life.”48 Today’s Amish still read Mar-

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The drowning of Maria von Monjou, 1552. Martyrs Mirror, 131.

tyrs Mirror and find consolation in it for the difficulties they face because of their unwillingness to conform to the dominant society. For Amish women in particular, Martyrs Mirror demonstrates that women, too, are worthy to suffer martyrdom.49 Adrian argues that the women whose stories are told in Martyrs Mirror not only repeat the metaphor of a difficult passage between a temporal, worldly life and everlasting paradise, but embody the passage.50 In their suffering, Anabaptist women emerge triumphant, purified, and ready to become brides of Christ. Joyfully singing on her way to be drowned, Maria von Monjou asserted, “I have been the bride of a man, but today I hope to be the bride of Christ, and to inherit His kingdom with Him.”51 According to Adrian, the women recognized in Martyrs Mirror are manifestations of the sacred, “who because of their remarkable lives and deaths, represent a joining of heaven and earth.”52 They serve today to emphasize the paradise that awaits those who are faithful and submissive to Christ’s example, and they remind women that, however frail they might be, they can endure. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Anabaptists were widely known

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as “Mennonites” after Menno Simons (1496–1561), a Dutch priest turned Anabaptist preacher whose teachings helped to further shape Anabaptist views. Defining his followers as “in doctrine, life, and worship, a people separated from the world,” Menno Simons helped to reinforce the notion of the church as a fellowship of believers who, following Christ’s example, would maintain the purity of the church. The faithful practice of Christ’s teachings, he taught, would bring about a genuine change in one’s life. In other words, Simons taught that salvation could only be achieved through the grace of Jesus Christ, and faith and commitment to Christ’s example would lead to good works. Simons was particularly influential in codifying church discipline, especially the Bann (excommunication) of those who transgress. He wrote, “A church without ban or separation, is like a vineyard without an enclosure and trenches, or a city without walls; for the enemies have free ingress into it to sow and plant their pernicious tares unhindered.”53 Therefore, church members must “shun the apostates, lest they contaminate us with the impure, deceiving doctrine, and with their ungodly, carnal lives.”54 He re­ affirmed that a church formed by those committed to following the Bible as sole authority must be pacifist, nonresistant, and separate from the worldly social order and that excommunication and shunning (Meidung) were the only means to guard the purity of the church. Importantly, he also advanced the formalization of males’ priority in the Anabaptist movement, which had begun in the Schleitheim Confession, by asserting a more traditional role for women. Confirming Max Weber’s assertion that the equality of women in religious participation rarely continues “beyond the first stage of a religious community’s formation,”55 Simons advised women to be humble and dress modestly. [Women should be] obedient to your husbands in all reasonable things. . . . Remain within your houses and gates unless you have something of importance to regulate, such as to make purchases, to provide in temporal needs, to hear the Word of the Lord, or to receive the holy sacraments, etc. Attend faithfully to your charge, to your children, house, and family, and to all that is entrusted to you, and walk in all things as the sinful woman did after her conversion, in order that you may be true daughters of Sarah, believing women, sisters of Christ, heirs of the Lord to come (I Peter 3:6).56

As the Mennonite movement evolved, variations in practice troubled church communities. In 1632, leaders of a number of factions came together

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in the city of Dordrecht in Holland to iron out disagreements. Menno Simons had argued that shunning those who were excommunicated from church fellowship was the only means church members had to guard the purity of the church. Shunning meant not eating or conducting business with those who had been banned from church fellowship. Since church membership superseded family ties, shunning also involved suspending the marriage relationship if a husband or wife was excommunicated and the other spouse remained in the church. Marital shunning was controversial in Anabaptist circles, but Simons endorsed it, and the Dordrecht Confession upheld the practice. The Dordrecht Confession was one Anabaptist statement of faith, but it was not universally embraced. Although ministers in Alsace, for example, largely accepted the Dordrecht Confession, many of the Swiss Anabaptists did not.57 The failure of Swiss congregations to practice shunning in the manner prescribed by Dordrecht was one of the key factors that sparked Anabaptist leader Jakob Ammann (1644–by 1730) to break with his fellow ministers in 1693. In addition to concern over shunning, Ammann argued that Swiss Mennonites were becoming too worldly, conforming to fashions in dress and interacting with and even marrying non-Mennonites. The majority of Mennonite preachers and congregations outside of the Alsace region, where Ammann had moved from Switzerland, rejected Ammann’s call for greater separation from the world.58 The conservative minority who followed Jakob Ammann became known as Amish Mennonites or, simply, Amish. There is little information about the women in the church communities that chose to align with Ammann. Perhaps because most of them lived in areas where the Anabaptists were able to live in relative peace, there are fewer records of their daily lives. Perhaps, in the words of Mennonite historian Harold S. Bender, “after the creative period of Anabaptism was past, the settled communities and congregations reverted more to the typical patriarchal attitude of European culture.”59 Prevented from serving as ministers, Amish women did not play leading roles in the governing of the church community. Nevertheless, early reports of Amish life suggest that some of the practices of modern-day Amish communities—including pacifism, mutual aid, and endogamous marriage—were already well established, shaping relationships that would affect women’s lives in the generations to come.60 As one official noted of Amish churches, “They gather for services at special places with the women sitting separately.”61

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Under Ammann’s leadership, the Amish began to create church communities that were both physically and socially distinct.62 Isolated from mainstream society by persecution and migration, Anabaptists evolved over a few generations from a religious movement based on adult baptism and confession of faith to an ethnoreligious group identified by shared beliefs, practices, and family ties. As they limited interaction with non–church members and found homes in areas where not only their beliefs but also their language, dress, and lifestyle marked them as different, they began to find in the practices of everyday life a means of defining themselves as separate from their non-Amish neighbors, a trait characteristic of their twenty-first-century descendants.63 Ammann argued, for example, that men should not trim their beards, for that was a worldly fashion.64 His male followers became known as Bartmänner, or “beard men.”65 Ammann also emphasized conformity in dress and was attentive to sumptuary laws that mandated plain clothing, perhaps, as French historian Robert Baecher suggests, because Ammann was a tailor, like his father.66 Followers of Ammann became known as the Häftler, or “hook-and-eye people,” because they chose to use this simple means of fastening their clothing instead of buttons, which they considered more worldly. The Mennonites were called Knöpfler, or “button people.”67 In asserting a stricter discipline, emphasizing particular dress, and limiting social interaction with non-Mennonites, Ammann drew a boundary around his followers that made the group more cohesive and gave it a distinct identity. Writing in 1702, one Alsatian priest noted that Amish men had long beards, and “the men and women wear clothing made only of linen cloth, summer and winter.” In contrast, the Mennonites had shorter beards and dressed “about like the Catholics.”68 While Anabaptist refugees fleeing persecution had found respite in the Vosges Mountains of the Alsace region, their peace was tenuous. Protected by the local authorities, they had been given certain privileges, including exemption from military service and civil oath taking, and the right to worship in their homes. In return, they contributed their labor and agricultural skills to restoring a region devastated by the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 1648). Yet they were resented by the local population, which petitioned King Louis XIV to remove them from the region. In 1712, he ordered that all Mennonites, including Amish Mennonite followers of Jakob Ammann, be driven out of regions under direct French rule, leading many to settle in areas then outside of France, including Lorraine and the principality of Montbéliard.

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Some Amish families responded to William Penn’s invitation to settle in the colony of Pennsylvania, where they would find religious toleration. In 1737, fewer than four decades after Ammann led his followers in schism from the Mennonite church, the ship Charming Nancy left Rotterdam for Philadelphia with twenty-one Amish families on board,69 marking the beginning of Amish migration to North America. There are no longer Amish congregations in Europe. Life in America A transatlantic voyage was never an easy one. According to a diary kept by Hans Jacob Kaufmann, a passenger on the Charming Nancy, twenty-two Amish children, including two of his own, and two Amish adults died en route. An infant born just two days after the ship landed in Philadelphia also died.70 A century later, Johannes Güngerich, originally of Gensburg in Alsace, recounted the storm his family experienced on their voyage in 1840: “We sailed for four days and had good weather, after that we had a little storm and the people had to vomit, and the storm lasted four days; our ship was running three feet higher on one side than on the other and rising and falling nine or ten feet front and back. We had to tie down everything that was breakable and when we ate, we had to hold up the bowls.” The storm must have been especially frightening to his wife, who, he wrote, “gave birth to a little daughter, her name is Barbara, her place of birth is the sea.” The baby was strong and healthy, he added, and “mother and child stayed healthy for the whole trip.”71 Not all were so lucky. As one Amish historian notes, “Many a mother left the European shores with 6 to 10 children and arrived here in America with not one living child.”72 Jakobine, the wife of Peter Nafziger, left Europe with her husband and six children in 1827. She gave birth to her seventh child while en route and arrived in North America a widow.73 These early immigrants brought their religious and cultural customs with them. Most were good farmers and continued the traditions of their forebears. Women spun flax, cooked, and made clothing. Families worked together to clear land. Amish genealogies tell their stories. The Family Rec­ ord of Jonas M. and Carolina (Yoder) Swartzentruber, for example, begins with the story of early immigrants Daniel and Barbara Swartzentruber, who in 1836 were working together in the hay field when a bear carried off their infant son, Moses, who had been sleeping at the edge of the field, wrapped in a blanket. Daniel followed the bear and retrieved the baby, who became

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the ancestor of a “large number of Amish with the Swartzentruber surname.”74 Immigrant and pioneer families worked together to build farms, raise children, and create community. Rosina Mosser Gerber, born to Alsatian immigrants in 1842, remembered that “as a child [in Ohio] we spun our own wool and wove our own cloth.” We raised sheep in those days. Mother and the girls would spin the wool and father wove it into cloth. The bolts were too large to wash by hand, so they had “kickings.” They put the goods in the middle of the floor inside a circle of chairs, tied together with a rope so they would not slip. The men and boys rolled up their trousers and when the warm soap suds were poured on the cloth they would kick and kick until they thought it was clean. When the kickers were tired out with laughing and kicking, they dropped back into the chairs and others took the floor.

Her family also raised flax, “and mother and the older girls spun it. Father had a loom and wove it into cloth. We bleached it on the grass and made it into sheets, towels and clothing.” Butchering brought families together. Gerber recalled: “We had home grown and home cured meat. For our yearly supply we killed eight or ten large hogs and a beef and made tubs full of sausage. Before we had sausage grinders we cut the meat with cleavers. They put the meat on a large block and four or five men, each with two cleavers, walked around the block and chopped with both hands. They would sing and laugh and have a big time while they were doing it.”75 Church life continued patterns established in Europe. Households took turns hosting Sunday worship in their homes, and services were led by men ordained as deacons, ministers, or “full ministers” (senior ministers, commonly known in English as bishops). Although not among the ordained, women took part in church discussions, voted in congregational meetings, and nominated men as candidates for the ministry, all practices still found in Amish communities today. Moreover, as the Amish established new settlements and social and technological transformations challenged their commitment to a faith that kept them separate from their fellow pioneers, Amish women were at the forefront of both change and resistance to change. Settlement and Change Women took an active role in the establishment of communities. The first Amish settlers in the Nappanee, Indiana, region, for example, were the four

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sons of Barbara Stahly, a widow who had brought her family to North America after her husband’s death in 1825. Catherine Oesch and her son joined them from Wayne County, Ohio.76 Others arrived with husbands, parents, and siblings to claim land and build new settlements. In many respects, the nineteenth-century Amish Americans were similar to other rural white settlers. As historian Theron F. Schlabach points out, they did not establish communities that were geographically exclusive or radically isolated. Amish households were generally integrated into local economies of the time, but they tempered their entrepreneurship with clear communal commitments. As Schlabach explains, “They hardly held the eighteenth-century notion that individuals came before society. Nor did they have a concept that a person entered into relationships with others or into the ‘social contract’ only far enough for the individual’s own convenience and advantage.”77 Instead, they emphasized a view of the church as a living body of members committed to following Christ’s example; individuals humbly submitted to the church community. Yet differences emerged. As had happened in Europe, the conditions in which the Amish settlers found themselves shaped how they lived their lives and practiced their faith. Some Amish moved to avoid church conflict, establishing new communities with different practices. For example, Jacob and Barbara Oesch left Germany in the second wave of migration and settled in Maryland. Then, upset by what they perceived to be lax morals in the Amish church they had joined, they moved farther west.78 Others, alarmed that some early settlers were less attentive to their Amish faith in the absence of religious persecution, reasserted the importance of Bann and Meidung.79 Social and technological changes exacerbated differences. The world in which the Amish lived was changing, and new products and practices had an impact on the Amish way of life. By the 1860s, plows were no longer made of wood, and there were cultivators, threshing machines, and horsedrawn rakes to do what had once been handwork, which meant that how people worked together also changed. In his 1862 memoir, Lancaster County bishop David Beiler (1786–1871) lamented that his people no longer led simple lives in which “one was satisfied with and delight[ed] in home-made stuff.” Well established in the New World, the Amish were able to purchase more of what they needed, and Beiler mourned that “the large amount of imported goods with which our country is flooded, as also the domestic cotton goods which are to be had at such a low price, have almost displaced the home-made materials so that the daughters who now grow up no longer

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learn to spin.” Reminiscing about how, years earlier, “wives and daughters spent the winters spinning” flax into linen and how it had been “customary to hear the spinning wheel hum or sing in almost every farm house,” Beiler sighed at “what a great change this is in the last sixty years.”80 As Beiler’s lament suggests, women were in the forefront of change, and attempts by church communities to legislate clothing styles and other elements of Amish life reveal both the issues challenging church members and the role of women in redefining what it meant to be Amish. For example, an 1809 Pennsylvania church discipline warned men about “proud trousers” and took women to task for “proud dresses, . . . hats, and combs in the hair, and similar worldly clothing.”81 Later church disciplines also suggest that women were exerting an assimilationist influence that church leaders needed to control. A Pennsylvania discipline from 1837 noted, “There is awful pride in clothing, namely with respect to silken neck-cloths (Halstuecher) worn around the neck, so that mothers tie silken neck-cloths on their children, and make high collars on their children’s shirts and clothing, and the mothers permit their daughters to wear men’s hats and go with them to church or other places, or . . . even the mothers have them themselves.” The discipline cautioned those making the clothes “to follow the old style and such as is indicated by the ministers and older people of the church.”82 Women were less engaged in working at home and so had more time to visit. One consequence of Beiler’s complaint about how much time was wasted in social interaction—“in frivolity, . . . telling jokes and in unprofitable conversation”—was that the Ordnung (discipline or rules governing daily life in the church community) began to regulate both the color of carriages and “excessive driving of sleighs or other vehicles.”83 Women also were told how to keep a churchly home. For example, the 1837 discipline forbade “display in houses, namely when houses are built, or painted with various colors, or filled with showy furniture, namely with wooden, porcelain, or glass utensils (dishes), and having cupboards and mirrors hung on the wall, and such things.” Perhaps to remove temptation, furniture makers were not to “make such proud kinds of furniture and not decorate them with such loud or gay (‘scheckich’) colors.”84 By the mid-nineteenth century, Amish church communities from Pennsylvania to Iowa faced different challenges and began to evolve in different ways. The Ohio Amish Directory notes, “There was a growing liberal faction whose tastes became evident with the adoption of fashionable dress and beard shaving.”85 Similarly, in Marshall County, Indiana, minister John

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Ringenberg (ordained in 1853) disagreed with his more conservative counterpart, minister Tobias Hochstetler (also likely ordained in 1853), on discipline and conformity in dress, and he favored a shift from worship in homes to worship in church buildings.86 In 1862, the first of what would be a series of annual Diener-versammlungen, or ministers meetings, was held in Wayne County, Ohio. The Amish leaders who gathered from across the United States and Ontario hoped that by discussing differences they could standardize religious practices and ensure unity in the church.87 Although they did not play a formal role in the ministers meetings, women attended and likely were involved in the church community discussions about the decisions reached. One nineteenth-century church discipline noted, for example, “We have no basis in scripture for excluding any member from taking part in the council of the church.”88 Certainly, women had a vested interest in the outcomes of the meetings, which were doing nothing less than determining what it meant to be Amish. The mid-nineteenth-century Diener-versammlungen did not result in Amish unity but instead exposed a widening gap between conservatives and progressives. On the one hand, tradition-minded ministers were committed to a way of life “structured . . . around a codex of fixed regulations” that each local congregation would maintain.89 Progressives, on the other hand, sought a fluid set of guidelines that would evolve through ongoing meetings of the church leaders from a wide area. The conservatives’ approach centered decision-making in the local church community. While women in such communities could not be ministers, they did have a voice in local discussions. The progressives’ approach, in contrast, took decision-making away from the local congregations, putting it instead in conference-style gatherings that brought together male representatives from different church communities,90 a process that effectively undermined a good deal of local autonomy. Given that women could not serve as ministers, the progressives’ conference structure severely limited the role they could play in shaping the direction of the church. By the time the Diener-versammlungen ended in 1878, the conservatives who maintained a more traditional understanding of the Ordnung of the church were becoming known as the Alte Ordnung or Old Order Amish. The Old Order church communities were marked by a desire to maintain fidelity with traditional patterns of daily life, church governance, and religious observance. Their more progressive Amish Mennonite counterparts eventually merged with various Mennonite conferences.91

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Going Forward Schisms like the one that defined the Old Order Amish as distinct from more progressive Amish Mennonite groups are typical of the ongoing struggles of Amish church communities to apply Anabaptist principles in the face of pressure both from the dominant, worldly society and from forces within the group. Today, there is no conference, synod, or other central organizing structure that unites all Amish congregations. Each of the roughly 2,500 local congregations, which are spread across thirty-one US states, four Canadian provinces, and two South American countries,92 is distinct and self-defined, separate not only from mainstream society but from other Amish congregations. The Amish have a lived faith. Rejecting Sunday schools, which many believe undermine the role of the family in children’s religious upbringing, and skeptical of private Bible study, which fosters an individualized faith, the Amish understand the church as the community itself rather than as any ritual, service, or building. The Amish church community is a fellowship of those who have signaled by their baptism that they are dedicated to putting Christ’s teachings into practice. Too young to understand the importance of baptism, young children are not yet members, but their parents are committed to guiding them in the faith and to teaching them by example, so that they will take this important step when the time comes. Each church community is guided by its Ordnung, a set of moral guidelines shaped by tradition and resistant to change, which specifies the behaviors deemed appropriate. Because Ordnungs evolve over time as church members respond to changing circumstances, no two congregations have exactly the same Ordnung. Each church community may fellowship with others and consult with them when issues arise, but ultimately it must find its own way. As a result, Amish women live in communities that have come to define Amishness in diverse ways. For example, in 1927 the Somerset County, Pennsylvania, Old Order Amish community divided when Bishop Moses Beachy rejected strict shunning, and within a year members of this so-called Beachy Amish church had adopted both automobiles and electricity. At first, they continued to worship in German and retained plain dress, but by the late twentieth century they had Anglicized, entered into vigorous mission efforts, started a number of institutions, and otherwise moved in a decidedly different direction from other Amish. To a lesser degree than the Beachy Amish, the New Order Amish (also

24   The Lives of Amish Women

called the Amish Brotherhood), an affiliation of horse-and-buggy Amish that formed in 1966, have also embraced some newer technology. The New Order Amish allow tractor farming but forbid automobile ownership.93 New Order Amish spirituality differs somewhat from that of the Old Orders, in that they generally articulate a more individualistic belief in the assurance of salvation. Traditionally, the Old Order Amish have claimed a “hope of salvation.”94 Believing that individuals are unable, on their own, to follow Christ’s example, they express hope that joining with other church members to live according to the Ordnung and the Bible will give them the strength to live lives worthy of salvation. In claiming that one can know oneself to be saved, the New Order suggests a somewhat diminished role for the church community.95 Other Amish divisions have resulted in far more conservative affiliations, such as the so-called Swartzentruber Amish, Nebraska Amish, Andy Weaver Amish, and Troyer Amish. All these groups sharply curtail the use of technological innovations, enforce strict Meidung, and limit social and economic interactions with the mainstream society. For example, the ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish, who broke with the main Old Order Amish community in the Holmes County, Ohio, settlement in 1917, forbid the use of air or hydraulic power, and several subgroups forbid the use of LED flashlights. Arguably the most conservative of all Amish affiliations, Swartzentruber Amish also forbid upholstered furniture, carpeting, linoleum, pressurized gas lanterns, indoor plumbing, and the use of the orange slow-moving-vehicle triangle on their buggies and wagons. Between the poles of the New Order Amish and Swartzentruber Amish are communities whose lifestyles are as different from each other as any of them are different from their mainstream neighbors.96 While a conservative Amish woman seldom travels except to visit family, to attend community events in other settlements, or to seek medical treatment, her more progressive counterpart may have a vacation home in Pinecraft, Florida, and spend her winters there, far away from her church home. An Amish woman who depends on her children to bring in wood to cook the family’s breakfast, uses linseed oil on her wooden floor, has no running water in the home, lights lanterns in the evening, and preserves all her food through canning or salting is “Amish” in a different way than her counterpart with a gas refrigerator-freezer, linoleum floors, propane lamps, and indoor plumbing. An Amish woman I know in a community that regularly hires drivers to go shopping or to take trips recalled that once she and her husband were unable

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to find a driver and so took the bus. It was a way of traveling she did not enjoy, and she expressed dismay that her Swartzentruber Amish neighbors regularly traveled long distances that way. (She also noted with surprise—and disgust—that they did so with infants in cloth diapers and no rubber pants!) Although women in the different communities may acknowledge each other as “Amish,” they may not always understand each other’s behavior. Each of the different ways of being Amish informs a particular way of being an Amish woman. For example, in redefining the nature of the church community to encourage spiritual outreach to the wider world, the Beachy Amish see the home and family as a private domestic unit distinct both from other families in the church and from the surrounding society and as subordinate to the church community. Further, as the domestic sphere is more narrowly defined, so too is the range of acceptable women’s behavior.97 For example, citing Paul’s advice to “let your women keep silence in the churches” (1 Corinthians 14:34–35), the Beachy Amish argue that permitting women an active role in the administration of the church community is both unspiritual and threatening. While acknowledging that sometimes “the sisters push things to the limit, so we try to work with them, kind of,” one Beachy Amish bishop pointed to the disappearance of women’s head coverings in the Mennonite church as evidence that the involvement of women weakens church discipline. “If there is something they [women] want to know,” he argued, “they can ask their own husbands at home. It is a shocking thing that a woman should address the congregation.” Although in most Beachy congregations, women are formally permitted to voice an opinion in the selection of ministers, in practice, the bishop acknowledged, “I don’t believe it is often done.” As one woman who left the Beachy church put it, “Women don’t speak up.”98 It is assumed that the husband and wife will talk privately about issues, but in gatherings of the church community, the Beachy husband is expected to speak for his wife and cast one vote for them both; unmarried female church members may vote only on less important issues. Similarly, the New Order urges women to be subject to their husbands in all things.99 In contrast, the Swartzentruber Amish churches reinforce an agrarian lifestyle that emphasizes family, tradition, and patterns of social interaction that give women much greater responsibility for the spiritual, economic, and social health of the church community.100 Within the church community, most important interactions are face-to-face, and informal debate and discussion, in which women as equal members take an active role, underlie and

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constrain the exercise of formal (male) power.101 Swartzentruber women join with men in deciding when a new minister is needed, and although women cannot hold the office, they share the responsibility for suggesting candidates and choosing who will serve. Women, like men, are responsible for the maintenance of the Ordnung, the rules governing the church community, and women too must agree with the Ordnung if there is to be peace in the church. Women speak up if they have opinions on church matters, and their voices are included with men’s in the Rat der Gemein (council of the membership), to which even the bishop is subject.102 As church members, women also share in the decision to excommunicate. If her husband is disciplined by the church and put under the Bann, the wife’s responsibility as a church member is to shun him (and it is also her choice not to).103 Three Paths As Amish churches have adapted to new challenges, they have tended to follow one of three broad paths. Groups that regard the small family farm and the shared labor of family and neighbors as essential to the religious and social health of the church community have tried to limit the use of technological innovations, choosing to move to regions where cheap farmland allows them to continue a preindustrial, agrarian lifestyle. In these most conservative communities, women and men may take responsibility for different tasks, but they help each other, and the filled silo, the butchered cow, and the newly built barn are recognized by all as the fruits of everyone’s labor. Other groups have innovated technologically, allowing the establishment of larger manufacturing enterprises, and both women and men have become entrepreneurs. In communities that have taken this route, Amish women generally start, own, and operate businesses that are extensions of their traditional roles as homemakers. Working at home or close to home, they, like the men, must follow church guidelines. Children continue to work with their parents, and both husband and wife contribute in obvious ways to the economic health of the family. Still other communities have permitted church members to engage in wage work for non-Amish employers, a move that has altered both generational and male-female interactions. Children have much less opportunity to acquire the knowledge they need to support their families by working side-by-side with their parents; no longer able to learn by doing, children must rely more on formal and vocational education. Further, because mar-

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ried women generally have much less opportunity to work away from home than their husbands or unmarried sisters do, they no longer share the economic responsibility for maintaining the family in the same way as their agrarian and entrepreneurial counterparts do.104 In communities that allow wage employment in non-Amish workplaces, the experience of Amish women is arguably more similar to that of Western women in general following industrialization.105 In their study of European families, for example, historians Louise Tilly and Joan Scott demonstrate that by the end of the nineteenth century, husbands and unmarried children were becoming wage earners while wives were devoting their time more exclusively to childcare and household management.106 The result, historian Nancy Cott points out in her study of social change in early nineteenth-century New England, was that “the persistence of the household occupation of adult women reaffirmed their adjunct and service relationship to men in economic activity.”107 Cott asserts, “If an individual’s work changes or the work typically associated with a social group does, wider-ranging change in the person’s or group’s role in society can be expected.”108 That married men with families can engage in wage labor while their wives are expected to remain at home restructures the relationships between home, church, and the world. Because clothes must always be sewn, meals cooked, and children tended, women’s work is obvious and relatively constant; men’s work, on the other hand, may take place far from the home, and the only evidence of it is his paycheck. Further, employed away from home, the husband is no longer available to help with housework nor can his wife help him with his work while the baby naps. Because fathers are absent during the day, mothers must assume the primary role in childrearing.109 Perhaps most important, the church has relatively little influence over those working outside the community. For example, Amish workers employed in non-Amish businesses routinely use tools and equipment forbidden to them in the church community, including vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, CD players, and other electrical equipment. When the Amish family works together on the farm or in a family business, all of their labor is in the context of the church community, and even the choice of tools reflects the church’s belief about what is proper in the eyes of God. When church members work outside the church community, the church has less control over the workplace; the home thus becomes a refuge of traditional religious values, and married women become responsible for providing relief and succor to men when they return from the outside.110

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Living with their families in a church community surrounded by nonAmish society, Amish women live within the boundaries established by the Ordnung, scripture, and tradition. Their access to telephones, electricity, and automobiles and the way they cook their food, do their laundry, and earn money for their families are all guided by the rules they have helped to establish in their respective church communities. With their families and other Amish, they speak Pennsylvania German or Deitsch, also called Pennsylvania Dutch, but they use English to talk with outsiders. From birth, they wear the plain dress of their community, which reflects not only their gender but their age and marital status and distinguishes them from outsiders and from members of other Amish church communities and gives them a sense of belonging.111 At each stage of their lives, they learn to live the faith of their forebears, taking on new tasks and interacting with others in ways that their church views as appropriate. As they reach adulthood, they commit themselves in baptism to follow the disciplines that shape their daily lives and religious practice. Finally, as church members, they enact their church community’s understanding of Amish womanhood, carrying out the tasks and living the values deemed essential for salvation. They will never, however, be ministers, deacons, or bishops, which has led some researchers of the Amish to describe their world as “unabashedly patriarchal.”112 Soft Patriarchy? Much is made of gender roles in Amish culture. The man is the head of the household, and the woman is responsible for housekeeping and mothering. She is the helpmeet, a keeper at home, a role that is biblically defined. Titus 2 instructs older (“aged”) women to “be in behavior as becometh holiness, that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children. To be discreet, chaste keepers at home, obedient to their own husbands that the word of God be not blasphemed” (Titus 2:3–5). Referring to the creation of Adam and “his mate,” Eve, and their subsequent expulsion from the garden of Eden, Amish historian Joseph Stoll argues, “scripture very clearly places the man in a position of responsibility as the head of the household, and his wife in a position of subjection,” adding that the Bible “leave[s] no room for misunderstanding. Man is to be the head of the woman.”113 Similarly, another Amish writer argues that the “loving submission and acceptance of wives to their husbands is more beautiful in the sight of God than all the outward ornaments of worldly women.”114 Amish sources often cite the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians,

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“Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord; for the man is the head of the woman, just as Christ also is the head of the church. Christ is, indeed, the Savior of the body; but just as the church is subject to Christ, so must women be to their husbands in everything.” In Amish communities, women signify their submission with the prayer cap or head covering they wear at all times in deference to 1 Corinthians 11:3–6: “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven. For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.” As one Amish publication puts it, every woman “whether married or single” should wear the head covering at all times, for it “is also a symbol of woman’s submission to man. It indicates that she accepts the position in which God has placed her as her husband’s helpmate.”115 Yet the Amish deny that women are less than men, and Amish life reveals a complicated pattern of gender interaction. The overt organization of church and family does reflect an order that makes male dominant over female, older dominant over younger, parent dominant over child, and baptized member of the community dominant over the yet to be baptized (1 Corinthians 11:3). Moreover, males and females, husbands and wives, parents and children generally take on separate roles and distinct respon­ sibilities within the church community, reflecting the structure they find in God’s ordered universe. At the same time, informal social relationships often integrate the voices of men and women, reflecting the equally powerful belief—embodied in the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ— that in Christ there is no male or female (Galatians 3:26–28). Spiritually, all church members, male and female, are considered responsible for their fate and faith, and the well-being of the church community depends on all remaining committed to the Ordnung.116 Old Order Amish women, like Old Order Amish men, make a conscious, voluntary choice to join the church through baptism, and their baptismal vow is the same as is the obligation to “walk in the obedience of faith” and “shun and flee from . . . [all things] which are highly regarded by the world.”117 Explaining the place of women and men in the church, a wife in an ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish community said simply, “The Amish way is that the

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men have to go ahead of the women [during baptism], but the women get baptized just as well as the men do.” Yet although the baptismal vow is the same for all, each gender commits to a particular set of expectations and responsibilities. As a Canadian Amish author put it, “Women have souls as well as men. God created both men and women. Christ died on the cross for both. The angels in heaven rejoice when a sinner repents, whether man or woman. Being equal in worth does not mean equal in calling. . . . Men are still men, women still women, no matter how equal. And each has been assigned separate and distinct roles by the great Creator.”118 While their roles are separate, in daily life the domains of men and women are interconnected and complementary in ways that vary with each community’s pattern of economic interaction with mainstream society. Women influence men and share responsibility and power with them in directing the day-to-day activities of the church community in diverse ways across the spectrum of Amish life.119 While no Amish women hold formal church authority, to varying degrees they have agency: the capacity to act independently and to make their own choices. The patriarchy of the Amish world may be considered “soft.” That is, as W. Bradford Wilcox explains it, Amish men have been “domesticated” by their religious beliefs “in ways that make them more responsive to the aspirations and needs of their immediate families” and so are “not as authoritarian as some would expect, and given to being more emotional and dedicated to their wives and children.”120 In fact, the Amish stress the importance of submission for men as well as women. Just as important as Ephesians 5:23, which tells wives to submit to their husbands, is Ephesians 5:25, which commands husbands to love their wives just as Christ loves the church. To be a good Christian, an Amish husband must be a loving and supportive spouse. In characterizing Amish society as patriarchal, even softly so, the focus is too often on the formal positions of power in the Amish church community. Yet as anthropologist Sherry Ortner has pointed out, patriarchy is a particular gendering of power, “a set of relations between relations. . . . The ethos of different patriarchal structures can vary a great deal.” Importantly, the gendered power arrangements of patriarchy are, Ortner writes, “deeply enmeshed with other systems of power.”121 Historians Kimberly Schmidt and Steven Reschly note that gender roles in Amish society are nuanced and varied across the spectrum of Amish life, the result of “social and cultural forces that are historically significant to time and place.”122 As Amish church communities evolve in response to a

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variety of internal and external developments, including what historian Roy­ den Loewen characterizes as “local variations in environment and economy and the interweaving repertoire of community practice and ethnic identity,”123 women’s roles and the patterns of male and female interaction change. To understand Amish notions of gender—the learned, context-specific patterns of behavior that accord in Amish culture with the perceived biological differences between male and female and with the structure of social and power relationships within the church community124 —we must explore how gender is constructed, fostered, and enacted in an ongoing interplay of age, context, participants, and beliefs. To do so, it is necessary, as anthropologist Laura Klein argues, to break down “questions about gender . . . into elements that can be investigated,” and so we should examine how the roles of Amish females—and church communities’ expectations of Amish females—change with age, marital status, family, community-specific economic practices, and, most important, patterns of relationships with other women and men.125 Drawing on Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman’s understanding of gender as a “routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction” and on historian Judith Butler’s view of gender as something we perform, we see that Amish women are constructed in their play, their work, and their everyday interactions with friends, family, and outsiders.126 The following chapters explore how, in diverse ways, Amish females negotiate their gender in interactions with fellow community members and with outsiders throughout their lifetimes. Based on my conversations and interviews with Amish women, their letters and publications, and participant observation in diverse Amish communities over three and a half decades, this work sheds light on how each new generation of women learns particular ways of being, interacting with others, and understanding the world and puts this learning into practice as they mature into adulthood. By exploring the different stages of Amish life and the different contexts of Amish interaction with each other and with non-Amish society, we can understand better how the Amish notion of gender—what it means to be an Amish woman or an Amish man—reflects and reinforces power, authority, prestige, and influence within the diverse Amish world.

C h a p t e r T wo

Becoming an Amish Woman

I was sitting with Mary, drinking coffee. Three-year-old Becky, as always, came to join us. She climbed into my lap, in part to share my coffee, and then began playing with my hair (always a fascination because it is not covered). Mary started teasing her about braiding my hair, and this became her game. All of a sudden, she pushed my head back and then started smoothing the sides of my hair back. Clearly, she was “washing” my hair. Then she began to smooth down the top. She announced to Mary that she was putting my “Kapp” [a cap or prayer covering] on. I asked her why I had to have a cap on [fəvas mus Iç ən kap havə?]. She replied, to put your “paddies” [hands] together [fə pædis nunə]. Mary explained that she meant “to put my hands together in my lap”—that is, to pray, which is what very young children learn to do at the table. In this community, girls and women put a cap on to go to the table to eat, even if they have just washed their hair and it is not yet dry. That way, they can pray before and after meals. —Author’s research notes, June 5, 2015

Michelle Z. Rosaldo has argued, “To claim that family shapes women is, ultimately, to forget that families themselves are things that men and women actively create and that these vary with particulars of social context.”1 Laura Klein notes, “Gender definitions and gender roles are initially learned in kinship contexts. Not only are children taught how to be good little boys

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and girls by family members, the role modeling of their family members also provides the templates for their future behavior. They will not only be categorized by gender, but they will be expected to live their lives as members of that gender and that family.”2 Amish women get their start in Amish families. With the birth of the first child, Amish women and men become mothers and fathers, and couples become families. As Peter Burke points out, these relational identities “tie them intimately” to the social structure of their communities.3 In turn, these new parents re-create and reinforce the social and kinship bonds that unite the church community and contribute to the creation of more Amish women and men. Useful in exploring these issues is the notion of a community of practice, in which newcomers to the group move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of the community.4 As Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-­ Trayner point out, members of such communities “engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.” Members of the community also “develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice.” Finally, members of the community “value their collective competence and learn from each other.”5 Within a community of practice, new members gain competence and a sense of identity in the group over time through their increasingly involved participation in the activities of the community. As Etienne Wenger notes, this engagement is a process of creating meaning that is “at once both historical and dynamic, contextual and unique.”6 Reflecting on her conversion to Orthodox Judaism, one woman noted, “You start with something true and tested, and then slowly this whole tradition becomes your own; you find yourself in it. You find your life in it as a woman, as a mother, as a wife. Even if you begin without belief, after a while just by practicing on a day-to-day basis, you develop an understanding.” 7 Similarly, Saba Mahmood suggests that religious identity or belief can be “the product of outward practices, rituals, and acts of worship rather than simply an expression of them.”8 Considered in this way, Amish newborns, welcomed into the midst of family and church activities, are increasingly active participants in the life of their community, becoming more adept practitioners of Amish life as they mature (see chapter 4). From birth, little Amish girls are engaged in the lives of the girls and women around them, learning, enacting, and eventually reinforcing their community’s notions of what it means to be female and Amish.9

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Amish Parents and Parenting A non-Amish woman, watching her Amish neighbors, noted how well behaved the Amish children were and how they stayed with their parents. “I just admire the characteristics that are forming in those children. One of their [parents’] chief aims is to keep their own within the church.”10 For the Amish, raising children is a God-given charge. Menno Simons, one of the most influential of the early Anabaptist leaders, argued that parents were morally responsible for their children and admonished parents to watch over the souls of their children for “this is the chief and most important care of the godly, that their children may fear God, do good, and be saved.” Worldly parents, Simons said, “desire for their children that which is earthly and perishable, such as money, honor, fame and wealth. From infancy they train them up to vice, pride, haughtiness and idolatry. But with you, who are born of God, this is not the case; for it behooves you to seek something else for your children; namely, that which is heavenly and eternal, and hence it is your duty to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, as Paul teaches, Eph. 6:1–4.”11 In a letter to the Amish magazine Family Life, “A Parent” wrote more succinctly that the impression young children have of their parents is the impression they will come to have of God.12 Amish infants begin as the children of Amish parents, who have a responsibility to provide the example of what they should be and how they should act. Peter Burke has said that one’s identity “is a set of meanings applied to the self in a social role or as a member of a social group that define who one is.”13 An Amish newborn is immediately a member of a family: perhaps a sibling, certainly a daughter or son, a granddaughter or grandson. Moreover, with the arrival of the infant, a couple becomes a mother and father, and first-time parents become a family. With these roles, they take on particular obligations within the church community. Although the Amish world is diverse, parents are remarkably uniform in their notions of what mothers and fathers should do to raise future church members: encourage obedience, hard work, and devotion to God and surrender to his will. “If they don’t learn to listen to their parents,” one elderly woman told me, “they’ll make a lot of trouble later.” Similarly, an Amish father in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, settlement said, “The schrift [scripture] tells us: Children, obey your parents, for it is the first commandment.” He recalled a visiting minister who, speaking directly to the children in the congregation, said, “Even if you forget everything else that was said,

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remember this[:] horcha uft Mam and Dat [listen to Mom and Dad].” Echoing his words, a Swartzentruber Amish mother of eight told me that the most important thing to teach her children was “to obey their parents,” adding, “They say that all the time in church, that you should obey your parents. My grandfather [a bishop] said that you raise your child in the first four years, and what he meant was that they have to learn to listen to you by then.”14 A young couple, watching their children play together, told me that child­ rearing was sometimes difficult because of the children’s “attitude” or unwillingness to mind. “But who puts the attitude in them?” questioned the father. His wife nodded and added, “You have to make children listen and get them to where they know who’s boss. Sometimes it’s hard to get them there, but when they are, they’re pretty much raised.” Noting that today’s children are tomorrow’s church members, a father in an Andy Weaver Amish settlement said, “At a young age, [children need to learn] obedience. That’s something that’s especially important in conservative communities—that children understand the requirement of being obedient.” When I asked about his assertion that obedience was especially important in conservative communities, he acknowledged, “All [Amish] would agree that obedience is important, but there [is] a difference in how different churches see this. For example, I have been in churches where small children are allowed to make a fuss during the service, but we wouldn’t allow that.”15 Teaching obedience means not sparing the rod and thus spoiling the child. In a letter to the Amish newspaper Die Botschaft, Amish author Linda Byler writes, “Our children need to feel loved and cherished, and they need our time.” But she adds, “I am a firm believer in a good old-fashioned paddle, having used it often, and can’t imagine raising a family without it.”16 But parents agree that teaching obedience is just the beginning. After commenting on the importance of teaching his children to obey, one father added, “And one more thing—teach them to honor God.” In discussing with me what is important in raising children, another father asserted that parents have to “teach them [children] to listen to their parents.” “And to love God,” interjected his wife. She went on to add, “You have to put them [children] back the way you got them. God gave them to you, so you have to keep them in his hands.” Similarly, an Andy Weaver Amish father noted, “Once at an age where a child can understand [discipline], obedience is still a very necessary factor, but we would try and train the child to want to be good. When my son came to an age of better understanding of what we’re

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trying to say, my way of doing it was to say that if he tries to be good, it makes home life so much better for him and the parents. Gradually, we tried to instill faith in him of a loving father in heaven that wants him to be good.” Ultimately, parents want their children to learn to “give up.” Giving up—uff gewwe [uf gɛ və]—is key for understanding who the Amish are. Resignation is not highly valued in the English world, but for the Amish, to be resigned, to conquer one’s own will and submit to that of God, is to achieve Gelassenheit, a term that, according to Sandra Cronk, incorporates the personal attributes of yieldedness and powerlessness.17 To achieve Gelassenheit, to trust in God so completely that you question nothing that befalls you, is the ultimate goal of Amish individuals.18 If you have given up, then you will be humble and obedient to your parents and the church community. Parents inculcate Gelassenheit in multiple ways as they train up their children, fostering in them an attitude that will turn “personal interests and individual energies into cultural capital that benefits the entire church community.”19 If children learn the behavioral lessons, acquire the habit of submission and giving up, and act in community-appropriate ways, they are “good” children. A nineteenth-century minister, George Jutzi, cautioned parents: “the responsibility to teach your children lies fully upon you, for both the Old and New Testaments command you as parents to bring them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.”20 In a short essay entitled “How to Ruin a Child,” an anonymous Amish author suggests that when parents give a child whatever he wants, laugh at him if he uses bad language, neglect his spiritual training, let him read whatever he can get his hands on, take his part against community authority figures, and “when he gets into real trouble, apologize for yourself by saying, ‘I could never do anything with him,’ ” they should “prepare for a life of grief ” for they “will likely have it.”21 In “Parents Set the Example,” Amish author Elmo Stoll warns parents, “How you react to a situation will do much to determine how your child will react to a similar one later in life.”22 The Amish believe that God has endowed women with an instinct for mothering. Thus, from the moment she first cradles her infant, a mother is expected to be nurturing, to provide security, and to demonstrate her love, which she will feel “naturally . . . as part of her very being.” With “true motherly instinct,” she will naturally be prepared to protect her new offspring with her life. Further, one author contends, “As she nurses the baby and looks after his needs, love flows freely to the child, and it is just as freely

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returned. It is natural for the child to love the mother who supplies his every need.” At the same time, the Amish mother is expected to guide her offspring, to help the infant learn that “life is not always pleasant. She must help him become aware that he cannot entirely escape pain and discomfort. He must learn to endure the disappointment of not getting all he wants immediately. Sometimes he must wait, and this is for his own good. Occasionally he must strive to get what he wants and needs, without giving up too soon.”23 More important, a mother is expected to teach by example, the child’s suffering mirrored by her own: “While teaching her child this endurance and resignation, the devoted mother will suffer along with her child. Because she withholds some of the child’s wants, he may resent her interference, at least temporarily. At such a time she must especially demonstrate her love toward him so that he feels the love as counterbalancing her refusal to grant his every desire.”24 Thus, through her loving example, the mother’s role is to prepare the soil for future religious instruction.25 The baby’s father is also expected to provide love and security. Yet, according to the Amish author, “even though the father becomes a part of the child’s world and the baby accepts him as someone to love rather than to fear, the mother still remains the chief object from which love is received and to which it is given. If the child cannot depend on his mother to love him, he will find it exceedingly difficult to love God and to understand His love.”26 While a mother must be the primary influence on her child in the first few months of its life, she is expected to support her husband as well, following his lead as they work together to “train up a child in the way he should go” so that “when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). One Amish text asserts, “Instructing, teaching, and admonishing must be a very large part of child training. Moses said, ‘These words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart. And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down and when thou risest up’ (Deuteronomy 6:6–7).”27 “A Grandfather,” writing in Family Life, counseled, “If the groundwork is properly laid—if the parents’ love is demonstrated to the child at an early age, if they are regular and sincere in their prayers and church attendance, and if they give honest simple answers to their children’s questions, religious education will be off to a good beginning. What remains is for the parents

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to continue guiding and training their children, and being a good example to them. The rest will fall into place as a matter of course.”28 As children grow older, parents are expected to act as a unit, Amish mothers and fathers playing distinct though complementary parts. While the father is to be “a leader and a provider,” the mother is expected to support her husband and instruct her children. The mother’s role is particularly important when it comes to raising daughters, for mothers are expected to set the example to which girls should aspire. In his letter to Titus, Paul charges older women to “set a high standard” and to “school the younger women to be loving wives and mothers, temperate, chaste, and kind, busy at home, respecting the authority of their own husbands” so that the word of God “will not be brought into disrepute” (Titus 2:3–5). Echoing Titus in a letter to Family Life, a Kentucky woman asserted, “We mothers and grandmothers do have a grave responsibility to teach our daughters and granddaughters why the church has the standards it does.”29 An Amish mother models the behaviors she wishes her daughters to adopt, slowly preparing them in age-appropriate ways for a greater role in the community and more responsibility. For example, I watched one young mother involve her daughters in the weekly pie making by handing them pie dough. Imitating her mother, the four-year-old banged her lump of dough on the table, hitting it repeatedly with the palm of her hand to flatten it out. Her thirteen-year-old sister, already an old hand at pie making, easily duplicated her mother’s twisted crust edging. There was flour all over the table and floor by the time the pies were made, but an Amish mother is generally unfazed by a mess in the kitchen. Writing about helping an Amish mother prepare strawberries for breakfast, author Pauline Stevick recalls, “As I begin to hull the berries, in comes three-year-old Katie, begging to help. My impulse is to send her away, knowing that her ‘help’ will slow everything down. But Sarah [Katie’s mother] has already lifted her up to the bench and put a plastic bowl in front of her. Placing a berry in her pudgy hand, she shows her how to remove the stem. Katie squashes the berry in the process, then picks up the next berry and tries again. Eventually she learns how.”30 Cleaning up is another chore to be shared, another skill to be learned, another example to copy. In rural or more conservative communities where farming is the primary occupation, the task of raising both sons and daughters is made somewhat easier by shared labor, for in working with parents and grandparents, children witness daily examples of the behaviors appropriate to men and women

Becoming an Amish Woman   39

in their church communities. There is less discussion about what to do and more emphasis on doing and involving children in the practice. In more progressive communities, where parents’ work may be much more integrated with the worldly economy and fathers and even mothers may work away from their children, parents have fewer opportunities to model labor and may more overtly and explicitly emphasize their faith and the necessity of God’s help. For all Amish parents, however, there is an understanding that the extended family of the church community will help with the childrearing task. As Amish author Linda Byler notes, “It is a serious responsibility, this raising children, and more so than young parents like us realize. But what a joy to trust the good Lord to help us as trials come along, for He will not give us more than He gives us the strength to carry on.”31 Similarly, a Lancaster Amish father emphasized in a journal entry the importance of parents, extended family, and the church in guiding children to spiritually rewarding lives: “Satan loves detached believers, [who are] unplugged from the life of the church body, isolated from God’s family and unaccountable to spiritual leaders because he knows they are defenseless and powerless against his tactics.” He added, “God gives the shepherd leader the responsibility to guard, protect, defend, and care for the spiritual welfare of the flock. We are told their work is to watch over your souls [the souls of the children] and they know they are accountable to God.”32 As might be expected in a community in which faith is lived rather than talked about or intellectualized, Amish parents expect their children to learn by copying and doing until appropriate behaviors and attitudes become second nature. In parenting their children, mothers and fathers both model the Ordnung and the behavior of men and women deemed proper in their church communities, contributing to and reaffirming gender differences in the Amish world. In other words, playing scripturally defined roles, female and male church members raise children to adulthood, at which point, ideally, the offspring enact the patterns of their parents’ lives. Children are successfully reared when they choose baptism and become adults. Young Amish people are full participants in the church community when they marry and begin to raise children of their own.33 Amish Children Linguists Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet assert, “Being a girl or being a boy is not a stable state but an ongoing accomplishment,”34 which

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is achieved through the interactions between the individual and those in the various communities to which the individual belongs. Amish girls are made not born, and the gendering of an Amish person begins at the moment of birth and in the context of family life. For example, where children are born says something about the community in which they will grow up and the expectations or norms for mothers and offspring. As summarized in The Amish, “In some communities most children are born in hospitals, while in other settlements birth centers have become common, and in still others, births take place in the home.”35 The different situations reflect not only the available options, but also local customs and traditions and, importantly, the relationships between women and others in the community. For example, giving birth in a hospital takes the woman outside her home, surrounds her with all of the technology of modern medicine, and puts the authority of motherhood in the hands of people distant from the family and the church community. The mother’s first postpartum meal may be dictated by an anonymous hospital dietician or, in the case of some Amish birthing centers, purchased from a stock of ready-made frozen items that can be heated in a microwave. Giving birth at home, however, means that motherhood begins in the community, in the context of family and an extended female network. In a Swartzentruber community, for example, mothers may take advantage of a local Mennonite midwife, but most prefer to have the child at home where the woman can be attended by her mother, mother-in-law, and, ideally, the local Swartzentruber midwife (who may be the mother or mother-in-law or even a sister). One grandmother I know lamented her inability to be with both her daughter and her daughter-in-law, who gave birth on the same day only a few miles apart. In a Swartzentruber community, when the mother eats her first meal after the birth of her child, it will be food she helped preserve, served on her own dishes, with her family around her. Later, at home for six weeks until they make their first appearance in church, the mother and child are attended by a hired girl—a niece or neighbor—and visited by sisters, aunts, and other mothers, who discuss childbirth and share their own experiences, though never in front of an unmarried girl. Regardless of where infants are born, they immediately become a part of family activities. The family, not the individual, is of paramount importance in Amish life, for it is the primary social unit of Amish society. The family may even be seen as the church in microcosm, its formal structure reflecting the structure of the church community, which is the larger family

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of those in the body of Christ. The father is the head of the family, guiding it just as the ministers guide the church. The father reads the scripture in the morning when the family rises and again before they retire for the night. Every meal begins and ends with silent prayer. Everyday practices reinforce the scripture lessons. The father sits at the head of the table with his wife at his side, and the children sit in order of age, boys on one side and girls on the other. All children know their place in the family and thus in the community. The size of a church district is measured by the number of families it includes, not by how many baptized church members there are. The key events of the church community—church services, weddings, and funerals— all take place in the context of the family home. When inviting guests to a wedding, the bride’s parents consider the number of families, and there is no thought of not inviting children. The newborn is fully incorporated into the Amish world and learns to be Amish from its earliest hours of life.36 An infant goes to church when only a few weeks old and learns to be quiet during the hours-long service. Often the child naps in the kitchen or living room, slumbering while parents, older siblings, and visitors talk, play, and work. The infant may be held by other children only a few years older and learns early to be passed from one person to another at events. Even children’s names embed them in a web of family relationships and generations. Only in the most progressive groups will parents give their infant a first name or a middle name that is new to the family and community More likely, the child will receive the same name as a grandparent or other close relative. Thus, in each generation there may be first cousins with the same given and family names. Middle initials help to distinguish one from another, and, again, how this works depends on the church community. In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the child’s middle name is traditionally the mother’s maiden name. Elsewhere, children have a middle initial, generally that of their father’s given name. In Swiss Amish families, the child’s middle initial may be the first letter of the father’s or mother’s given name, and some children have both initials.37 One mother I know thought very carefully about names for her children, discarding those whose German variant she did not like. Naming her first son after her father, she acknowledged that the German pronunciation was not the same as the English, but she liked them both. Sometimes a child is named for an aunt or uncle whose birthday might be near the child’s own, and the adult honored with a namesake owes the newcomer a special gift, such as material to make a baby girl

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a “name dress” (nomə rɛgli) or a baby boy a new suit. “Still,” said one aunt, “the girls get spoiled the most. Sometimes we give them fabric or make them a dress when they get older.” Since people of many generations and their offspring share names, children become known as much by the first names of their father and grandfather, as in Mosie Jakie’s Jonas (Jonas, son of Jakie, son of Mosie). Girls will later acquire not only their husband’s last name but his first: Levi Mary (Mary, wife of Levi). Blessed with a name that shows it belongs, the baby will sleep in the same room as its parents, and during the day it will be in the middle of family activity, whether it is being held or taking a nap in a crib in the kitchen. If the infant is not the family’s first child, the older siblings are always there to hold it, caress it, and play with it. The mother will hold the baby on her lap at mealtimes and, when it gets older, hold the child’s hands together as the family prays. Parenting is, in many respects, multigenerational, and “the real test of parents is to see how their grandchildren turn out.”38 With grandparents taking part and a variety of relatives joining in to welcome the newcomer, Amish adults collaborate to ensure that the baby will grow up to be a good Amish man or woman. For example, the Swartzentruber Amish joke at a child’s birth that “the lazy one [parent] gets the help,” meaning, for example, that if the child is a boy, the father must have needed help. This is a joke more often aimed at men, suggesting a self-awareness of gender roles. Other Amish parents announce the arrival of a “little dishwasher” or a “little wood chopper.” Yet early on there are few outward signs of the baby’s sex since infants are often dressed identically in dresses, and a girl can be distinguished from a boy only by her head covering, the small prayer cap she wears on Sunday or all week long, depending on her community.39 In colder weather, even that small outward sign may be hidden under the bonnet sported by both little boys and little girls. Further, although gendered accessories like pink or blue crib blankets may mark the first-born child, pink is not a color commonly worn in most Amish communities, and items are usually handed down, not only from one child to the next but from one generation to the next. It thus may be difficult to guess a baby’s sex based on what the child is wearing. Nevertheless, the prayer cap immediately puts the child in a particular social space. With a prayer cap, the infant girl is already learning to be “submissive to man,” already destined for “the position in which God has placed

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her as her [eventual] husband’s helpmeet.”40 Sewing additional caps for the small baby is often the first task of the hired girl who helps the mother of a newborn daughter. Parents expect a new daughter to be quieter and gentler than a baby boy.41 One unmarried woman commented to me that her nephew who lived next door would be “different” from his sister because he was a boy. “Boys are rougher,” she asserted, noting further that little Mose “was banging toys and making a lot more noise than [his sister] was at that age.” As one grandmother put it, “Girls are girls, and boys are boys. That’s just how it is.” A mother told me, “In some ways boys are easier, and in some ways girls are. Potty training is harder for boys, but girls’ hair is harder. Boys’ hair you just chop off, but you have to braid girls’ hair.” In communities in which little girls wear prayer caps only for Sunday services, a child becomes overtly marked as male or female only when a boy is old enough for his first haircut or a girl has enough hair for her mother to braid or put it up in the style of the church community.42 In keeping with Paul’s teachings in 1 Corinthians 11, Amish girls and women never cut their hair, and not even the littlest girl lets her hair down, except perhaps to let it dry after washing. But each Amish community has its own way of following this scripture. Visitors to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, for example, see little girls without caps, their hair gathered into a bun in the back. “Little girls only wear caps in church,” one Lancaster mother told me. Daughters born to ultraconservative Swartzentruber families get their caps as soon as they are washed after birth, and as soon as their hair is long enough to twist around a piece of yarn, it gets braided. One young mother, noting that her not yet one-year-old’s hair was already showing around the edges of her cap, sought the help of her aunt to braid it. While the aunt distracted the baby, the mother worked to catch the little girl’s wispy strands of hair and then wrapped a kerchief around her daughter’s head to keep the braids neat before putting the child’s cap back on. When the community Ordnung requires girls’ hair to be braided, then braiding becomes a regular Saturday task. Little Swartzentruber girls, for example, take turns climbing up on a high stool so that their mother first can make two braids and then twist them elaborately with string so that they won’t show under the girl’s cap. Mothers pull the hair tight, and the girls learn early on not to cry or complain. The littlest might get a candy to eat while her hair is being braided, but by the time she is four or five she will

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no longer need it nor receive it.43 Thus, in the simple act of doing a child’s hair, a mother hands down the gender traditions of her church, and her daughter learns a lesson in submission and giving up. When a boy is considered old enough—depending on the church community, this may be when he is a year old or toilet trained—he graduates from wearing a dress to clothes that are a miniature version of his father’s, complete with broadfall trousers and suspenders. A little girl is generally the same age as her brother when she is toilet trained, but she will continue to wear a dress that buttons in the back, with a long apron over it, until her church community deems her old enough to wear adult-style clothing.44 Gender, Age, and Responsibility Hair and dress are symbols of gender and age and the responsibilities that go with each. Long before they are out of diapers, children have already begun to get a sense of who and what they are and should be, and their play reveals and reinforces their identity. One mother gently said to her one-yearold daughter, who was trying on her older brother’s hat, “No, Mary. That is John’s hat [Jan se hut].” Guiding her daughter’s hands to the prayer cap she was wearing, the mother added, “You have a cap [du hoš ə kap]. Show me your cap.” Young mothers often note that their babies react negatively to seeing their mother with her cap off and hair down. Related one, “Barbara’s little Andy cried to see me, so Susie got me a cap to put on.” By the time they are walking, both boys and girls have begun to share in the work of the household. After all, as one mother told me, “They eat a lot, [so] they have to work too.” One-year-olds can help to pick up toys, and two-­ year-olds can help carry wood for the stove, fetch small items for a parent or older sibling, or even help to entertain a younger brother or sister. Like all children, they begin by copying their older siblings and parents in play, but by the time they are four or five, they are doing a number of real tasks, little girls generally helping their mothers and little boys generally working with their fathers. Joking with four-year-old Susie, who was washing lunch dishes, her mother said that she could wash the diapers when she was old enough to start school. “That’s a stinky job,” objected Susie. “Yes,” replied her mother, “but you’ll be old enough.” Turning to me, the mother added, “Some have younger girls do it, but I think it’s a hard job, and the little ones don’t do it so well.” Some parents combine chores with other learning. At one home, I observed a five-year-old boy, the eldest of three and the only boy, earn an M&M for each load of wood he carried in. When the woodbox was full, his

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mother waited for him to count out the pieces of candy, reinforcing his knowledge of numbers. “The bigger they get, the more children want to do something like make pies [rather] than play,” a mother of eight told me. Her eldest daughter, age ten, was already an accomplished baker and aware that she was making a valuable contribution to the household. Although children live with gendered expectations, in many respects preschool work and play are remarkably ungendered. The toys in the toy box (found even in homes without children) are for all the children to play with, and a boy is just as likely to be carrying a doll as is his sister, and his sister will drive the toy car or play with the plastic horse like her brother. Both boys and girls take care of younger siblings, carry in wood, or set the table, and they play together in most games.45 Nevertheless, children learn by watching and doing, and their play reflects what they see. In dress-up games and playing church, the genders divide. Little boys tape corn silk to their chins or glue it on with honey to mimic their father’s beard, and little girls often turn scarves or blankets into capes as they dress up like their older sisters and mother.46 And although little boys are as likely as little girls to play with dolls, in games of “church,” little girls sit quietly on their benches holding their babies while their brothers preach. Most Amish children do not learn to make the same distinction that their non-Amish neighbors do between work and leisure. Children take care of younger siblings and are entertained by them, and the older ones delight in being able to go on husking parties or to quilting bees. A frolic (work party) in which members of the community come together to raise a barn, build a house, cut firewood, make apple butter, or butcher hogs is a time for learning not only how to perform tasks and enjoy them, but also how much individuals can accomplish in fellowship with others. Used to participating in family life from birth, children often acquire a confidence that enables them at an early age to take on tasks and engage in activities that non-Amish parents usually consider beyond their years. Toddlers, for example, may spend time away from their parents, cared for in the homes of neighbors or relatives while their mothers and fathers are away. It is not uncommon for parents to take the youngest baby and an older child on out-of-state trips, leaving the other children in the care of neighbors or a hired girl. Both boys and girls delight in watching the antics of infants and toddlers, and a visiting baby can be a treat for families that no longer have little ones to spoil. Older children who work away from home as hired hands, teachers, or mother’s helpers often bring younger charges home with

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Working with older siblings and parents, Amish children learn by doing. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

them for a weekend, a delightful distraction for the family. One teenage hired hand I know returned to his family’s home with his employers’ oneyear-old daughter; the baby stayed a week, a source of joy and entertainment for the hired hand’s younger siblings, who no longer had a little one of their own to play with. Visiting toddlers also provide the youngest children in a large family with experience in caring for even younger ones. Children develop confidence in others in their communities and an independence that leads them later to take on more adult responsibilities. One mother told me about her eight-year-old daughter, who was so interested in her teacher’s stories about her own family and her own little sisters that the eight-year-old decided she would go home with the teacher on the bus for the weekend and announced her plan to her parents, who agreed. It was an

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excruciatingly long weekend for the little girl’s nine-year-old brother, who pestered his parents with questions about what his sister was doing. Fortunately, his father kept him busy by teaching him to drive the hay wagon, a task he soon managed by himself. Growing Older As they reach the age of puberty, young girls begin to wear an adult-style “front-shut” dress with a cape, a layer of fabric that goes over the dress to cover the bosom. Shedding the pinafore apron of childhood, they also begin to wear the half apron, which goes around the waist. In the most conservative Amish communities, preteen girls adopt a cape that crosses in front; they start to wear an adult woman’s straight cape at about age fifteen.47 At church a little girl in a cape is expected to sit with other little girls rather than with her mother. Her brother at the same age sits with his male peers, a process that divides the sexes in religious observance. Adopting adult clothing, young girls also begin to put up their own hair. Putting their hair up and wearing adult dress signal new responsibilities for adolescent Amish girls. They are expected to help at home, but they might also go to work for other families in the community. During the summer months, even school-age girls may go to work for other families, and once they finish the eighth grade and graduate, they may hire out for several weeks at a time, going home only on weekends. The advent of puberty may signal monthly limits on the work young women do. With menstruation, girls are further marked as different since they are “sick” at regular intervals.48 Cramps and headaches are accepted as the norm, and there are numerous superstitions about the effects of menstruation on girls’ health and their ability to work. “Girls can’t do heavy lifting [when they’re having their periods],” one Swartzentruber mother told me. “They can help with dishes and then rest.” Another mother noted that when girls have their periods, they “can do some canning, but some of the vegetables, like corn and beans, wouldn’t keep” (i.e., the jars will not seal as well if canned by a woman during her period). She continued, canning “fruit is OK, and they can do baking. Just work that’s not as hard.” Yet another mother told me, “Girls shouldn’t bake cakes during their periods because the cakes won’t rise.” Because parents seldom discuss reproduction and other aspects of sexual education with their children, brothers are not told why their sisters take to their beds more often or are excused from doing the heavy lifting.49 They just are.

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In these drawings, a Swartzentruber Amish schoolgirl presents her world (left), and her younger brother presents his (right). Photographs by the author.

Schooling and Education Amish children generally start school at the age of six. While some may go to kindergarten if they live in a church community that makes use of public schools, most start in first grade. Formal education ceases with their graduation from eighth grade. Amish schooling reflects the diversity of the Amish world. In some parts of Indiana and Ohio, Amish children attend public schools, where their curriculum is the same as that of their non-Amish peers and includes an introduction to technologies that are strictly forbidden to their conservative counterparts. For example, reporter Jonathan Scholles notes that in Fredericksburg, Ohio, where 40 percent of the public elementary school enrollment is Amish, “it’s clear to see there are no cultural differences. English and Amish students alike are connected . . . and technologically proficient. All students have their own laptops connected to Smartboards, and thanks to a supportive Parent Teacher Organization, most have their own iPads.”50 Writing about Mount Hope Elementary, a public school with a 100 percent Amish population, Scholles notes that the students were immersed in technology and that their parents were quite supportive. Scholles asserts, “It’s the desire for children to be successful, not just in the classroom, but in life.

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And that’s an innate aspiration for every parent. One that transcends all cultural boundaries.”51 However, Amish parents, particularly in the most conservative communities, define what it means to be “successful in life” quite differently. Unwilling to send their children to public schools, the vast majority have built small, one-room (or sometimes two-room) schoolhouses in which their children acquire the literacy and arithmetic skills they need to succeed in their own communities. They use archaic textbooks, including McGuffey Readers, that keep them from learning much about the non-­A mish world. In other communities, Amish private schools focus on preparing children to maintain Amish values as they work in non-Amish settings by actively bringing religious instruction into the classroom through displays on bulletin boards, Bible verse memorization, and devotions.52 Like the parents who send their children to Mount Hope Elementary School, these parents want to prepare their children to compete economically with their non-Amish counterparts on a worldly playing field, but at the same time they hope to keep them Amish. When Amish children attend Amish schools, they enter a domain in which gender distinctions and expectations may be more overt than at home. Amish schools are generally taught by young, unmarried women (some are older teens), who answer to school boards composed only of the fathers of schoolchildren.53 Fathers repair the schoolhouse and cut wood for heating it, and mothers prepare food for the occasional hot lunch, the end-of-year picnics, and special events, such as Christmas programs. Entering the classroom for the first time, little girls learn to hang up their coats and store their lunch pails in a different part of the schoolroom than their brothers use. Children are seated by grade rather than by gender, and they study the same subjects, but their school activities are increasingly gender-specific. For example, teachers often give pictures to the children to color when they have finished tests or assignments, but girls and boys are likely to be given different pictures to color.54 Often girls will color pictures of flowers or bunnies while boys color pictures of horses. Girls will clean the schoolroom while boys fill the woodbox or bring in water. Although younger boys and girls play together during recess, as girls get older, they are more likely to choose different games than their male counterparts, often preferring indoor board games to outdoor activities. In the Amish world, formal schooling ends with eighth grade. The last day, a time for clearing out desks, is also a time of celebration, and often children who will be entering school the following year attend the party.

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Students playing ping-pong during recess in the basement of their school. Amish schools reflect and reinforce the values of the church community. Photograph by Dottie Kauffmann.

Some Amish communities make the last day a family event, with picnics, the awarding of graduation certificates, and perhaps a ball game afterward. In the most conservative schools, teachers provide their pupils with ice cream, small gifts, and charts showing their scores on spelling and arithmetic tests. Yet when their school days are over, Amish children are hardly done learning. For most, the time between their graduation from eighth grade and when they join the “youngie” (young folk) at age sixteen or seventeen is really an intense preparation for the activities of adult life. In taking responsibility for important chores at home and in hiring out to help neighboring families, a young Amish person is getting on-the-job training in both the labor and the interpersonal skills that they will need to become contributing members of their church communities. Indeed, although their formal education is complete, Amish children remain integrated in the community of practice, watching older, more knowledgeable community members, engaging with them in daily activities, and putting their knowledge to work in the context of the church community. For the Amish, this is the learning that matters. Amish parents draw an important distinction between schooling (book learning) and education,

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which they associate with the inculcation of values. Hostetler notes, for example: “Amish parents want their children to acquire the skills of reading, writing, and ciphering. For this reason, they want their children to attend the elementary schools. After completing the [elementary] grades, however, they believe that Amish youth should get their instruction in farming and management at home. This vocation, they contend, does not require higher education, and such schooling is ‘a waste of time.’ Too much ‘book learning’ is not good.”55 As a Swartzentruber Amish bishop told me, “By fourteen, you’ve pretty much learned all you need to in school, but you can’t wait ’til then to start learning what you need to live.” Another Amish leader put it even more succinctly: “With us, our religion is inseparable [from] a day’s work, a night’s rest, a meal, or any other practice; therefore, our education can much less be separated from our religious practices.”56 In other words, “education” is participation in the social practices of the family and church community, which increasingly draws the Amish young person into the network of relationships, perceptions, conventions, and behaviors that are signs of membership in the group.57 In that sense, Amish children are educated from the moment they enter the world. Indeed, in the most conservative Amish communities, the school often plays a rather marginal role in the community; it is where the child learns English, arithmetic, and other skills needed to survive in a world in which the Amish are a minority.58 The important lessons—how to manage the farm and household, how to raise children, how to fulfill their divinely established roles as men and women—must be learned at home, and so the real education of children begins in earnest when they leave school and are considered able to take on major tasks and responsibilities at home or as hired hands working for a neighbor or relative. In their post-schooling education, girls take on a variety of tasks that prepare them for motherhood and homemaking. While their brothers help their parents or neighbors with farm chores, join a carpentry team, or go to work at a sawmill, cheese factory, or other business, young girls take responsibility for cooking, cleaning, childcare, and sewing. It is not unusual for a fifteen-year-old girl, hired as a “maid,” to take care of several children while their parents are away, and she does all the cooking and housekeeping. At the same time, girls learn that these activities are useful and valued and that it is important to give themselves up to doing them, regardless of whether they want to or not. Older daughters are in demand as neighbors

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seek them out to help after a child is born or when a mother is sick, and hired girls may spend weeks at a time living away from home and helping a family with many small children. They may also go from helping a mother with a new baby to helping another woman with the task of butchering. “Working as a maid is a good experience for any girl, and especially for the younger girls in the family who do not have the chance to help with babies or small children,” writes “A Thankful Mother in Kentucky.” Noting that she had found her own experience as a maid “very rewarding,” she adds, “It is interesting and educational to observe the many different ways of doing something, and it is also enlightening to observe the methods that are used in handling and training children.”59 From age fourteen to sixteen or seventeen, Amish girls are exposed to both numerous examples of what it means to be an Amish woman and multiple opportunities to practice appropriate behavior in diverse settings under the watchful eyes of older Amish women. They learn to sew clothes and quilt, take care of children, and keep house, skills that will serve them as adult members of their church community. In response to my question about how she managed to run both her household and a small grocery store and still find time to sew for a local gift shop, one mother credited the help of her daughters. “I’ve got three girls, the three oldest are girls, and two are out of school and one is in the eighth grade. They do so much.” In contrast to their brothers, many of whom find work that takes them into the non-Amish world, most Amish girls find work in their communities either with families, as teachers, or in Amish-owned retail establishments. Only in the most progressive communities are young girls working for wages from non-Amish employers. Wearing the dress of adult women, they learn to act the part, going to church services with others in their peer group and working independently, often outside the immediate supervision of their parents. They are not yet adults within their church communities, but they are not children either. The Young Folk At age sixteen or seventeen, depending on the church community, Amish girls and boys join the youngie, participating with their peers in the “running-­ around years,” a period of time popularized in mainstream media as Rumspringa. Rumspringa is sometimes presented as a year-long experiment during which Amish youths go off and live a mainstream life. In reality, it is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a time of exploration and decision-making within the

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context of the church community. One Michigan mother noted, with some exasperation, “Rumspringa. The way people talk about it is a lie. What group of parents that love their children would say ‘go out and do whatever you want and decide whether you want to be like we raised you’?” At this age, the gap between male and female widens, for young men are generally allowed more freedom and independence than young women are. In the smaller, more isolated communities, young men are more likely to be working away from home, to run errands in town alone, and to shop by themselves. In larger settlements, young men have more access to employment, such as working on carpentry crews that take them away from the church community. Further evidence of the greater freedom and independence accorded to young men is that generally, if their families can afford it, Amish boys receive a buggy when they join the young folk. Girls rarely have their own transportation and must rely on a brother or other male relative to get to young-folk gatherings.60 At this time the gap between Amish identities also widens, for what it means to be Amish and in the young folk depends on the church community. A traditional young-folk activity is the singing on Sunday evenings, but singings and other activities before and after church and during the week can vary widely. Some Amish young folk get together often during the week, and others see friends only every other week at singings. Stevick distinguishes “adult-centered communities,” which are marked by “the continuity of behavior from the teen years to adulthood,” from “peer-centered communities,” in which the behavior of young people is likely to be at odds with their parents’ expectations.61 The behavior of Amish girls and boys in adult-centered communities, which tend to be more conservative, is monitored by parents and other adult church members to ensure that they act according to adult (and church) standards, whereas their counterparts in larger, often more progressive, peer-centered communities may have greater access to and interaction with the non-Amish world.62 In adult-centered communities, particularly those that are smaller and more traditional, the young folk attend church services and stay with their families for the traditional meal that follows before heading home to do chores. In these communities, young people dress much like their parents, and while they may gather to play volleyball or softball before the singing starts, they sing traditional German songs. In ultraconservative Swartzentruber communities, for example, girls and boys eat popcorn and drink water or Tang while singing German hymns or even sometimes “school songs.”

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In a cupboard in her bedroom, a young Amish woman keeps the china she is collecting for when she will be married and have a home of her own. Photograph by the author.

One minister told me that he “liked to help [the young folk] sing” when they were in his home and that it was “interesting to watch them leave” because he might get a sense of who might be dating whom. In adult-centered communities, each church district likely has its own young-folk group, and teens may meet others only when they attend weddings or funerals, visit extended family, or go to work for a family in another church district. In the most conservative communities, activities are gendered, and young girls work or socialize together rather than in mixed-sex groups. Even at mixed gatherings of the young folk, girls sit separately, and couples pair off for dates only at the end of the gathering. As one Swartzentruber Amish girl told me, “Sometimes girls go together [to visit or to town] but not girls and boys together.” A group of girls might encounter a group of boys, “but that’s just a happening.” In adult-centered communities, adult church members set the standards, and the young folk follow them. In peer-centered groups, on the other hand,

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the young folk become a powerful arbiter of behavior. It is not unusual for teens to skip the communal meal after church services to gather with friends for the afternoon, long before the evening singing. In some of the largest settlements, young-folk groups will bring together young people from different church districts, and teens must choose which group they will join. In Lancaster County, for example, distinct “gangs” with names like the Broncos and the Swans present teens with a choice between more traditional activities and those that take them outside the realm of acceptable Amish behavior. While a horse and buggy is still the primary means of transportation, young men may drive cars or trucks, and girls ride along. Young folk in peer-centered communities may push the Ordnung boundaries. For example, girls may wear dresses that are shorter and more brightly colored than the Ordnung allows or even, like some of their male peers, “dress English,” putting on non-Amish clothing once they are away from the family. Particularly in larger peer-centered communities, young-folk activities might include drinking alcohol, smoking, or dancing. Teenagers in such communities are likely to join the church later than those in more rural, isolated communities, with some even delaying baptism until their mid-twenties.63 Stevick notes, “Males are much more likely than females to deviate from adult and community expectations in the areas of dress, car ownership, alcohol consumption, friendship with outsiders, and church membership.”64 The tendency of unsupervised young folk to bend or even break church rules has led parents in some communities to be more involved than they might have been in earlier generations. For example, one Lancaster Amish mother recalled that there had been no supervised young-folk groups when she was young, but nearly two decades ago, some Lancaster County parents formed the first supervised young-folk group, the Eagles, which has since divided several times as it has gotten bigger. Today, she told me, there are fifty to sixty such supervised groups, and her own children’s group, the Whitetails, was getting too big and also was dividing. Supervised young-folk groups in effect impose adult-centered standards, including standards for appropriate gender behavior, in communities that had been peer-centered. For example, in supervised young-folk groups like the Eagles and the Whitetails, church clothing standards are enforced, drinking is not permitted, and participation in organized sports leagues is discouraged. Instead, the Lancaster mother noted, participants “play a lot of volleyball games and indoor games in winter, including card games like Rook. They’ll sing for old folks,

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When and how Amish young folk interact depends on the standards established by their particular church community. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

work with Christian Aid [a Mennonite service organization], or get together to help families with special needs. Last week, they helped a cousin’s family strip tobacco [since the father] had heat stroke.”65 In other communities, rowdiness among the young folk may cause some families to move to another settlement, or even to another state, so that their own children are not led into unacceptable behavior. Commenting to me on an uncle’s Troyer Amish community, one man blamed married couples for letting the young folk “act up” and noted, “They don’t put away bad habits when they get married.” Twelve families from the uncle’s community had started a new settlement because they were “fed up with the young folk.” Talking to me about his move from Ashland, Ohio, to a new settlement in New York, a member of the conservative Andy Weaver Amish church noted that he and his wife “had a lot of good close friends. My parents are buried in the family cemetery. I was debt-free. To leave all of that, that took something to make that decision.”66 Nevertheless, the couple felt they had no choice but to move for they and others were appalled by the behavior of the young folk. Fearing both for their children and for the future of the community, they uprooted their lives and began anew.

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A Time to Make Decisions Whether in an adult-centered or peer-centered group, all Amish young folk are in an important time of decision-making, for during this period they must make up their minds whether or not to join the church by being baptized and committing themselves to the Ordnung of the church community. Like the first Anabaptists, the Amish understand baptism as a vow to God to follow the teachings of the Bible as taught in the Amish church and interpreted in the Ordnung. Because the Amish see the church as a fellowship of believers, Amish young people do not become truly Amish until they are baptized and join the church, a step that is taken after they join the young folk. Approximately 85 percent of all Amish make the decision to be baptized sometime between their late teens and early twenties. Those younger than seventeen are considered to be too young to be morally accountable or to appreciate the enormity of the baptism decision. Likely because they have less access to mainstream society and less freedom to test the limits of their own, “females almost always join the church at a younger age than males,” usually by a year or two.67 Prior to baptism, young people meet with ministers to study the Dordrecht Confession and to review church teachings so that they more fully understand the commitment they are making, and those considered too young or unready are counseled to put off the decision. If any young Amish people decide to forgo baptism, then they need to seek a life to some degree apart from their families. Yet, although some families encourage those who have decided not to join the church to keep their distance so that they do not set a poor example for younger siblings, they are not shunned. Only in cases where people choose to be baptized and then, at some point in the future, leave the church community are they regarded as having broken a sacred vow. Such individuals face Bann (excommunication) and Meidung (shunning). Deciding to Leave While parents are obligated to “raise up a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:6), children are biblically commanded to “honor thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12).68 Many Amish view a child’s decision to leave the church as a violation of the commandment and a rejection of parental teachings. In a short story for Family Life, Delbert Farmwald tells of an elderly Amish couple who receive flowers from their daughter, who has

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left the church. The mother wonders if this is the daughter’s way of showing that she has not forgotten them. “Could be,” her husband replies. “But it appears she has forgotten what we tried to teach her. It seems she thinks flowers and large expensive cards make up for her disobedience and worldly life style. If she would just lead a Christian life, that would mean a lot more to us than these flowers. The gifts and cards that Rosemary and John keep sending us don’t compare at all with what the other children are doing for us. The rest of them are concerned to live in God’s will and are bringing up their children in the fear and nurture of the Lord.” Farmwald concludes the story by asserting, “We should honor our parents in the modern sense of the word—showing them respect and courteous regard, but can we do that if we turn our backs upon their teachings and outrightly ignore those teachings and the faith they have tried to live? Can flowers and cards and gifts ever compensate for that?”69 Similarly, talking with me about several church members who had recently left their community, including two young couples, a Swartzentruber woman wondered sadly how they could hurt their parents so much.70 The rate and pattern of defection from church communities vary over time and can be affected by the father’s occupation, family issues, church affiliation, and schooling. Further, some Amish leave and return several times before finally deciding where they want to be.71 Importantly, those who leave the Amish before being baptized often leave for different reasons than those who leave after joining the church.72 In deciding not to join the church, young folk may be swayed by opportunities in the world, both occupationally and socially. They may have grown up in dysfunctional families, perhaps the victims of abuse. Saloma Miller Furlong, for example, points both to abuse in her immediate family and to a lack of support in her church community as reasons for her departure.73 In a survey of those who left the Amish, Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell find that most of those who left the large Holmes County settlement did so either to have a less restricted lifestyle or to have a “more intense religious experience.”74 While the first speaks to a longing for more freedom and access to more technology and material goods, the second is a desire for a more personal and expressive faith, one that allows them to read and interpret scripture for themselves and gives them assurance of salvation. As one woman told me, “My life has taken a turn. I’ll always be Amish on the inside. But my faith is too important, and my faith is real. I’m born-again.” The decision to leave is a gendered one. Not only are males likely to join

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the church later than females, they are also more likely to leave, a fact Meyers attributes to females having less opportunity to explore the non-Amish world.75 Even when the decision is spiritually motivated, men and women take different paths. Caroline Faulkner finds that men object more to “arbitrary enactments of church leaders’ authority” and suggests that this motivates the exit of men who see this as limiting their own gender authority within their families and the church community. In contrast, Faulkner notes, women, “who lacked the potential for spiritual authority and for whom spiritual submissiveness was expected and practiced,” generally accepted male authority but cited personal attacks by church leaders over issues such as dress or dating as reasons for leaving.76 Marriage also influences the decision to leave. When a married couple leave the church, the Amish often put the blame on the husband since as the head of the family he is responsible for the well-being of his wife and children. One conservative Amish couple told me that they were sure that their daughter had been drugged by her husband to convince her to leave: “He’s giving her pills so that she will relax and do what he wants.” An elderly Swartzentruber bishop, reflecting on the departure of a granddaughter and her husband, told me that he had not been surprised. “He [the granddaughter’s husband] was a reader. Always reading. If they keep getting too much education, you can’t trust them. He started to think he knew better.” According to this bishop, the young man’s overconfidence in himself was evident early on. “I remember him coming to church as a young fellow, just out of school, singing out as if he were one of the older men.” Faulkner’s study supports this notion that the husband is responsible. She found that single women who left the Amish for spiritual reasons were influenced by other family members, employers, or co-workers, but married women who left generally were influenced by their husbands.77 One woman from a midwestern settlement complained privately, “My minister said that we needed to use shunning to hold the church together. But I don’t want to be part of a church held together by shunning instead of by God’s love.” Her community, she went on, seemed to be undergoing “spiritual upheaval,” and “a lot are leaving.” She added, “The church used to wait a year to shun those who left in the hope that they would come back, but now the shunning is immediate.” She asserted that “99 percent of the time” those who leave do so “because the Amish deny knowledge of salvation,”78 a stance with which she personally “disagreed.” Another woman contrasted the decision she and her husband had made to leave with that of her

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younger, unmarried brother, who had left their parents’ home under cover of darkness. “[He] left to fulfill the flesh. He didn’t leave like us because of convictions.”79 For their parents, however, the reason that the children left is of little importance. Because they both left to be in the world, they both had to be excommunicated and shunned. When a church member, male or female, leaves the fellowship, the outcome is the same. Excommunication and shunning are acts of tough love, attempts to persuade the errant church members to see the error of their ways and return to the fold. “When we ban someone out of church, we turn it over to the Lord and let the Lord take over,” one Amish member told me. “It’s the last love we can show for them, to try to get them back.”80 Parents who must shun their children face ongoing heartbreak. The Swartzentruber Amish, for example, continue to observe streng Meidung, the strongest shunning, cutting off most interactions with their baptized children who leave the community, even if they join another Amish church. When one Swartzentruber woman left with her husband and children to join a non-Amish evangelical church, neither her parents nor her husband’s parents would welcome the couple into their homes or correspond with them. The woman’s mother mourned the loss not only of her daughter, but also of her grandchildren, who would grow up outside the community. “I don’t think those children will be Amish,” she told me sadly. In more progressive communities, those who have been baptized can leave more easily. One Old Order woman explained, “If they left to go to a Mennonite or Beachy Amish church, there would be Bann, but if they stay with the Old Order Amish, then there would be no Bann,” adding, “The New Order are still like the Old Order. We wouldn’t put the Bann on them.”81 In communities that do not practice a strong shunning, an excommunicated church member can still engage socially with those in good standing, although there are limits. Talking about her sister who had been excommunicated, one woman told me, “She can eat with us, but I’ll fix her plate,” meaning that the excommunicated sister was not allowed to serve herself. Similarly, an excommunicated woman from New York told me that members of her former church community could no longer accept gifts from her nor could she offer them rides in her car or give them money. Further, she could not purchase things from them and could not sit with church members at the same table for meals. She added that when church members spoke to her, they were supposed to admonish her to come back. Neverthe-

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less, she was permitted to attend funerals in the community and continued to interact with her siblings. An Amish shopkeeper in Lancaster County noted the diversity of ways that excommunication and shunning are observed in the Amish world by telling me the story of a visitor to her store who worried that she wouldn’t be allowed to shop. The owner assured the customer that she would always be welcome in her store, at which point the customer explained that her mother had been turned away from an Amish greenhouse when the owners learned that she had been excommunicated, telling her that they did not want her business and that she should not return. The shopkeeper, reflecting on the incident, asserted that shunning could be carried too far and is often too harsh, and her practice was “don’t ask the customer if they are in the Bann, even if you think that this is a real possibility. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”82 In contrast, Erma Troyer, a Kentucky widow who ran a small grocery store, refused to serve Ruth Irene Garrett after learning that Garrett was in the Bann after leaving her Iowa church community. Garrett sued, and the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights found in her favor.83 A woman I know who was shunned by the Swartzentruber Amish after joining a less conservative Amish group asked a neighbor to get her maple syrup from a Swartzentruber seller, saving both parties the embarrassment of dealing with the issue. Courting The overwhelming majority of Amish young folk stay in their church communities and become baptized church members, moving on into Amish adulthood. Baptism is the necessary precursor to an Amish marriage. All Amish church communities are endogamous, meaning that marriage must take place within the fellowshipping community. Further, a church member can only marry another church member. A couple may begin to date before either party is baptized, but baptism is a necessary step before they can begin to plan a life together. Dating, which occurs only among the young folk, is for most Amish a means of finding a life partner. Consequently, young men or women who are perceived as “too wild,” “too fast,” or “too willing to crowd the fence” and engage in behaviors unacceptable to the church community might find it difficult in some communities to find a partner who will take them seriously. Dating several girls or boys at one time or dating a lot of girls or boys

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is frowned upon. Moreover, boys are expected to ask girls for dates, and not the other way around, reinforcing the boy’s role as the leader in a couple. Girls learn to be patient and quiet and to be accepting if they are not asked out. One mother recounted to me a story she had heard from her sons, who were both in the young folk, about a visiting young woman who asked one of the young men to go for a walk with her and serve as her “bodyguard”84 — tantamount to asking for a date. The young man was quite embarrassed and was relieved when another woman volunteered to go with the visitor. The mother added that she had talked with her sons about the girl’s behavior: “That’s not how I raised my daughters to act. That’s not how we do things.” Although a young man may have known for many years the girl he intends to ask out and may even be distantly related, getting that first date— traditionally the chance to accompany her to her home after the singing— can be nerve-racking. Some ask the girl through an intermediary: a friend who might be dating one of the girl’s friends or relatives. “In our culture, he wouldn’t just come up and ask me,” said a Swartzentruber Amish woman. “There would be another young-folk boy. He would get the other boy to ask me.” Others may send a short note in advance or, in the most progressive communities, in which some teens have cell phones, text her. Still, it is not easy. As one Lancaster Amish woman told me, talking about her husband, “He finally got the courage to ask me out.” Since young men must take the initiative and girls are expected to wait to be asked, dating—and young-folk gatherings in general—are not always easy for young women. One young woman in a conservative Swiss community noted that her group held singings every Sunday, instead of only on church Sundays as is common in many other communities, and the singing is preceded by a supper. She then asserted that she did not like to go. When I asked why, she explained that she has chores to do and so often arrives late, sometimes after the others have eaten. She said that the other girls her age do not have chores like she does (perhaps because there are more siblings at home) and may not even go home after church, but instead “stay all afternoon for the singing in the evening. They have dinner and then go off with their boyfriends on a date before the singing starts, which is supposed to be around 8:00 but is usually around 8:30.” Because she does not have a boyfriend and is all alone when she arrives, she “hates it.” When I asked if she could just skip the singings, she said no because her father “feels it’s like church”—a responsibility that she has to meet, even though she is “not really interested” in any of the local boys.

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Although they cannot initiate dating, young women are aware that they have choice in the matter of courting, and they often have a clear idea what they are looking for in a boyfriend. One woman noted that she went with a young man for three months before breaking up with him. Recalling the experience, she told me, “It was just one-way [communication]. I said nope.” Dating had showed her what the future with him would have been like. “He didn’t really talk with [me] about decisions. He seemed to leave everything up to me, and I couldn’t imagine a marriage like that.” Her actions would have pleased a Lancaster County Amish mother who, when I asked what advice she would give a girl about to join the young folk, replied, “Just because a boy asks you on a date doesn’t mean you have to say yes. Be your own person and learn to know yourself.” Remembering her own courtship, another Lancaster woman told me how important it had been to her “to look at [the boy’s heart]. I sent many a boy down the road. They had farms and were well-to-do, but I looked at [their] heart.” She acknowledged that there were Amish women who looked at other things, “but the heart shows beauty.” Marriages are not arranged, and in many communities couples often try to keep their dating secret from those outside the young-folk group, including their own families. Particularly in the most conservative groups, siblings not with the young folk may have no idea that an older sister or brother is dating. This can be willful ignorance, especially in those Amish groups that permit “bundling” dates or “bed courtship”—a practice dating back to colonial times in which a courting couple lies down in bed together fully clothed. To ensure that the dating couple has privacy, parents make sure that their daughters in the young folk have their own rooms. In a community that allows bed courtship, the dating couple arrive at the girl’s home after her family has retired for the evening, and they go quietly to the girl’s bedroom. There, they lie together on her bed until the early hours of the morning, when the boy must leave the house before the family wakes. One woman laughed to remember when her niece had a date, and the niece and young man fell asleep. “My sister was up early and called upstairs for everyone to get up, and she heard strange footsteps run down the stairs and out the door! That was pretty funny!” As the couple settle in for their bundling date, the boy may remove his shirt, and the girl may take off her outer dress, keeping on her underdress or “courting dress,” which is “never sheer, low cut, or otherwise suggestive.”85 Since the teenage girl sews the dress herself under her mother’s watchful eye,

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she has to meet the guidelines of her community. “Underdresses can be almost any color, but not white or pink or yellow,” according to one Swartzentruber Amish woman. “Girls just make it that it’s new and not worn out.” Dates can be filled with excitement since friends of the young man and sisters and friends of the young woman—members of the young folk but not yet dating—will make every effort to drop in on the couple. But they too must be quiet so that they do not wake younger siblings or, worse, the girl’s parents.86 Bundling can be found even in some of the more progressive communities. One Old Order Amish mother shook her head over the practice. “We’ve had that topic come up [in church],” she said and wondered, “How did it ever start?” Still, she noted, although “bed courtship is there, it’s a ‘guideline rule’ not to do it,” and she named some activities in which the young people were encouraged to engage, including singing and playing ping-pong and other games. A Lancaster Amish mother with three children in the young folk noted that when she was their age, “They still had bundling. We’d sleep together, with our clothes on.” But things have changed in her community. Describing her own children’s activities, she said, “Young folk get together every week [on] Sunday about 2:00 or 3:00, eat at 5:00, sing at 7:30, and leave at 10:00 p.m. When a boy asks a girl for a date, he takes her to supper, drives her home, stays for a couple [of] hours, sitting outside around a campfire, on the porch, or in the kitchen.” Many groups have prohibited bundling, and some, such as the settlement in Clarion, Pennsylvania, have called for “hands-off” courtship and “pure” relationships. A young mother in a conservative western Pennsylvania settlement told me that she did not want to raise children in a community that had bed courtship and expressed relief that although the church was not tak­ ing the lead, “the young folk are deciding against it.” After all, her mother added, “Any old man should have enough brains to see where that leads to, tradition or not!” Dates generally take place at the girl’s home, and eliminating bed courtship means they often occur with her parents in the next room, alert to goings-on. Regulating dating activities has become increasingly important in many communities. For example, a Lancaster County mother told me that the young-folk groups in her neighborhood discouraged casual dating and there was a growing conviction that young men and women should learn more about each other through socializing in groups. Similarly, a couple living in a settlement in north central Pennsylvania, which had been

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founded by Amish from Lancaster, asserted to me that in their community there was “no bed courtship. Dates happen on Saturday night on the weekend the girl doesn’t have church, [and] the couple sees each other every Sunday night. From 1:00 to 3:00 on Sundays they all play volleyball, then supper, then singing until about 9:30, then have a date.” As in Lancaster, a date means going to the girl’s home and talking. A woman living in a conservative Lancaster “daughter” settlement laughingly described courtship in several communities with which her church is in fellowship.87 “In [a local Byler Amish community,] young people get married young. Some boys are even under twenty-one. That would not happen in our community. In their courtship, boys and girls sit in the kitchen—they must have a table between them, or at least a corner.” Then she drew me a picture to show that the boy and girl do not sit on the same side of the table but take seats at a right angle to each other. “In our community,” she clarified, bringing the discussion back to her settlement, “the boy and girl sit on a sofa in the living room. In Lancaster, people live in the kitchen and keep the parlor for dating.” Among the conservative Andy Weaver Amish, young people engage in “chair courtship,” which varies from community to community. In some church communities, chair courtship means that the young woman sits on her boyfriend’s lap, and so the two occupy a single chair. But one Andy Weaver Amish father noted, “Lap-sitting chair courtship is a situation that causes a lot of problems.” A member of one of the Swartzentruber churches agreed. Acknowledging to me that some of the more progressive groups looked down on the Swartzentruber Amish for their continued allowing of bed courtship, he asserted that a couple could just as easily get into trouble in a chair. In at least one Andy Weaver church community, chair courtship has been modified, and families with daughters of young-folk age invest in a wide chair in which the couple can sit side-by-side, a purchase that often elicits joking and teasing. As one Andy Weaver Amish mother told me, “Sometimes we parents just say we’re getting a little wider in our old age.” Her husband noted that the couple could “put two regular chairs beside each other, but it’s just not as comfortable.” Adulthood Eighteen may be the age of majority in mainstream North America, but Amish children are considered of age only when they turn twenty-one. Until that important birthday, many Amish children turn their earnings over to their parents, who may put the money aside for them until they are

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adults. In the most conservative communities, children owe their labor to their parents until they are “on age,” and their parents in turn owe them room, board, and a good start in life. Children’s earnings go into the household coffer, and parents count on the income children contribute to help cover household bills. After they turn twenty-one, however, Amish young people are responsible for paying their own bills. Continuing to do chores around the house helps those over twenty-one to cover their room and board, but conservative Amish parents know that they will have to pay wages if they put their offspring to work on larger projects after that child has “come on age.” One Swartzentruber woman told me how important it was for her and her husband to get their dawdy Haus (retirement home) built before their youngest sons turned twenty-one. “Otherwise, we have to pay them!” Coming of age, however, is not necessarily the same as being an adult. Young folk become church members when they choose baptism, usually around age eighteen or nineteen, and are responsible for themselves fi­ nancially after their twenty-first birthday. They truly become adults when they marry within the church community and begin to raise children of their own.88 Because Amish young people who marry before the age of twenty-one leave home still owing their parents, most couples wait until at least one of them is twenty-one to marry.89 Talking about her sister, who would be only twenty when she married, one Swartzentruber woman told me that she “would have to reimburse the[ir] parents for the work they’d lose, about the same amount they would get if she ‘worked out.’ ” She figured that the newlyweds would owe approximately $300 or $400, adding, “it’s more for a boy,” who earns more with his labor. In many Amish communities, a young woman expects to receive upon marriage several quilts from her family, including a good one to use on church Sundays and an everyday “tied” (not quilted) comforter. While growing up, she likely helped to make them for her older siblings. If she marries before turning twenty-one, she may have to make her own quilts, a means of reimbursement for the labor her parents are losing. As members of the young folk celebrate birthdays, those around them begin to speculate about who will marry first or next. There are, of course, those who do not marry: more likely female than male simply because women must wait to be asked.90 Unmarried men face considerable pressure to find a wife, and because more women than men choose to be baptized and join the church, the odds are in their favor. Stevick notes, “Community

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members often feel sorry for females who were ‘never asked’ and worry about males who never marry.”91 Although unmarried men and women may stay with the young folk for as long as they like, the older they get and the longer they stay unmarried, the more they occupy a liminal position in the church community. The church community expects members over the age of twenty-one to at least be contemplating marriage and by the time they reach thirty to be raising families and hosting church services. An unmarried woman remains a “girl,” and an unmarried man will never be a candidate for the ministry. A woman who does not marry, whether because she has turned down suitors or because she was never asked, usually chooses to leave the young folk in her late twenties or early thirties. When she does so, she adopts the cap of a married woman, and at church and other gatherings she sits with the wives her age rather than with the young-folk girls. She may continue to live with her parents or move closer to siblings. Indeed, most single women are absorbed into their extended families, although they must support themselves. Depending on the Ordnung of her church community, a single woman may take a teaching job, do sewing or gardening for her siblings, start a business, or take a wage-paying job.92 Unlike her married sisters, she will not host church. In their parenting, mothers and fathers model the Ordnung and the proper behavior of women and men, and they hope that both sons and daughters will give themselves up to the church community and its Ordnung. They hope their sons will grow up to be humble, responsible leaders and their daughters to be giving, helpful, chaste, and supportive women. They construct their families by contributing to and reaffirming gender differences in the Amish world. Playing scripturally defined roles, female and male church members raise their children to adulthood. At the same time, their children practice for adulthood all their lives, their behavior reinforced not only by their parents, but by other children, older siblings, and the church community.

Chapter Thr ee

Marriage and Ever After

Advice to newlywed couples: “Shafa [šafə], shefa [šɛfə], shpora [šporə]” (Work, be humble, and be thrifty [sparing]). —A Swiss Amish housewife whose daughter had just married

“Amish girls grow up thinking of home and family,” a Lancaster Amish woman told me. “I wouldn’t ever want to change the Amish way.” Marriage came about, the Amish say, because “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18).1 Hostetler notes, “What matters most about the prospective bride and bridegroom is not whether they come from a wealthy family, but whether they show promise of being a good housekeeper and a good farmer, respectively, within the bounds of the community.”2 The Amish view marriage as ordained by God, the uniting of a man and a woman into “one flesh” (Matthew 19:5), and so there can be no divorce, for “what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). In accordance with 2 Corinthians 6:14, so that couples not be “unequally yoked together with unbelievers,” Amish people only marry others in their own or in a fellowshipping church community. Moreover, as eighteenth-­ century Amish bishop John Nafziger put it, one should not marry a church member “who is guilty of sin or has been set back or expelled from the church.”3 Indeed, one Amish text asserts, “It is better to remain single all your life than to marry someone who will weaken your faith.” Since marriage is undertaken to provide a context in which to bring children into the

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world, this text argues further, “Children of such a marriage are liable to be confused and live in unbelief.”4 In other words, Amish marriage can only take place between a man and a woman who have taken the vow of baptism to serve God and live within the Ordnung and who are in good standing in the church community. Bishop Nafziger counseled, “A person who desires to marry is first to call on the Lord for wisdom, then to take counsel with his parents, and when possible also with the ministers or elders.”5 Amish marriages are not arranged, and young couples generally base their decision to wed on love. Nevertheless, given that marriage sets the stage for young people to have families and ensure the survival of the church community, parents and the ministers of the church do their best to ensure that couples start out strong in the ways of their faith. After all, as an article in Family Life put it, basing courtship on physical attraction rather than on “true love and open communication” would likely be more destructive to marriage than forgoing courtship altogether. “If you do not learn about true love and communication during courtship, the feelings you had will likely shatter at your feet after marriage. Then what will you have left? Just a hollow shell.”6 Through marriage, Amish women take a greater role in the Amish church community. As church members, they participate in affirming the Ordnung, helping to choose the ministers, and reinforcing church unity through baptism. As a wife, a woman is expected to fulfill a role that she has been training for all her life, including hosting church. When she weds within the Amish church, a woman takes on and enacts a particular gender identity, and to the extent that she enacts the part appropriately, she maintains and reinforces the church community. The Wedding Amish adulthood begins effectively with marriage, and it all starts with the wedding, which itself is a context for exploring the multiple roles played by Amish females. Who is invited, how many are invited, who helps and how, and what food is served all reflect the traditions of the church community. Further, revealed in the ceremony and the festivities that follow are community-­specific notions of age, gender, and social identity that interact as an Amish female transitions from “single Amish girl” to “married Amish woman.” As John Hostetler put it, the Amish wedding is “one of the most import-

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ant life ceremonies.”7 Bishop Nafziger’s eighteenth-century account of the marriage ceremony noted that when a young man decides to wed, he asks the deacon or another minister to act as a go-between or Schtecklimann (štekliman), who visits his intended’s home to verify that the young girl is willing and that her parents are agreeable to the match. Later, if all are agreed and the marriage is to take place, the bishop “inquires of the deacon whether the matter has been conducted in proper order and whether there are any objections.”8 In the twenty-first century, little has changed in these formalities. As one Amish mother told me, “The boy goes to a minister, and they take care of it.” One of the earliest modern accounts of an Amish wedding is Joseph W. Yoder’s 1940 description of the marriage of his mother, Rosanna, to “Little” Crist Yoder.9 Although the accuracy of Yoder’s account of his mother’s life has been questioned,10 his description of the key events of the wedding bears a striking similarity both to Nafziger’s eighteenth-century description and to contemporary celebrations in most Amish church communities: • • •

•

•

•

• •

The courtship was conducted in relative secrecy. Both participants were baptized church members. Rosanna stayed home on the Sunday that the upcoming nuptials were announced (“published”), and Little Crist made a fast getaway from the church service. For the wedding itself, cooks were invited to prepare the food for dinner (the largest meal of the day) and supper; unmarried friends were asked to be table waiters and hostlers. Particular friends were asked to be Newehockers (nevəhoxə), or “side sitters.” The actual marriage ceremony took place at the end of a service that followed the format used on Sunday mornings and included preaching from the book of Tobit.11 There was afternoon singing. The young folk paired up to go into supper, a ritual fraught with anxiety for some.

When Yoder was writing in 1940, the Amish world was only a fraction of its current size: 34 settlements in thirteen states and the province of Ontario. Today there are more than 550 settlements spread across thirty-one states, four Canadian provinces, and two South American countries.12 In

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1940, farming was still the Amish way of life, but even then, as the population of young Amish grew, affordable land for farming was becoming more limited, and some were beginning to search for employment off the farm. In the twenty-first century, while the small, low-tech, labor-intensive family farm remains the primary source of income in the most conservative Amish church communities, other settlements have seen a shift from farming to entrepreneurship and wage labor, and settlements no longer devoted to agriculture can accommodate more and more families in the same geographic area.13 Population growth and the shift away from family farms have had an effect on wedding celebrations. For example, Rosanna and Little Crist married in the fall, after the harvest season was over and when temperatures were cold enough to preserve food, but many of their counterparts today are less bound by the seasons and the weather. In 2004, Cooksey and Donnermeyer reported that because of changes in family occupations and Ordnung restrictions in different Amish communities, “preferences for time of marriage are beginning to look no different from the rest of American society.”14 Similarly, Hurst and McConnell have observed that in the large Holmes County settlement, the shift away from farming, along with the adoption of refrigerators and freezers, has resulted in a longer wedding season. As they note, “Now that farming is on the wane and food can be kept cold year-round, there is no need to coordinate weddings with the harvest.”15 In her unpublished study of Amish weddings in Illinois, Lindsey MacAllister also found that marriages were occurring “more frequently throughout the year” because communities were “no longer solely reliant on the agrarian calendar.”16 And the change is widespread. A sample of more than a thousand weddings in five US states and Ontario found that only 3 percent took place during the winter months, with 37 percent taking place in May and June.17 Even in Lancaster County, young people are increasingly tying the knot in the spring. As one Lancaster parent put it, “We’re no longer driven by the calendar.” The growing size of the Lancaster community and other progressive settlements whose membership is no longer tied to agriculture has made lengthening the marriage season a necessity. Lancaster area weddings were once held on Thursdays only, but now are held on both Tuesdays and Thursdays.18 There are so many young people wishing to marry that there simply are not enough days in the fall to fit everyone in. The Das Hochzeit Buchlein

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(The Wedding Booklet) notes that there was an average of 10.7 weddings a year in the 1880s but 105.5 a year in the 1980s. It reports 180 marriages for 2010.19 Wedding guests have also been freed from the constraints of the agrarian calendar and now have more time to travel. Moreover, the shift from farming to entrepreneurship and wage labor has meant more reliable sources of income and more resources for traveling longer distances. As a result, not only are there more weddings, but the guest lists have grown. The guests at Rosanna and Little Crist’s wedding came mostly from the same church district as the bride and groom. The tradition of limiting the attendees persists in the most conservative Amish communities. For example, a father in an ultraconservative Swartzentruber community told me that there would be too many people if the couple invited everyone in the church district, and so the guest list was limited to close friends of the bride’s family, young folk, and the couple’s close relatives. In contrast, for a wedding in a small, conservative Swiss Amish community in northern New York, more than 500 invitations were sent, and guests arrived in a variety of vans and a chartered bus from other settlements in New York, Pennsylvania, and northern Indiana. Similarly, weddings in larger, progressive settlements might draw guests who have traveled hundreds of miles. Writing in her blog about her daughter’s upcoming wedding, Lovina Eicher, the author of Lovina’s Amish Kitchen and a member of the large Old Order Amish community in southwestern Michigan, reported that they had invited 600 guests for the noon meal at her daughter’s wedding, 700 for the evening supper, and 200 for the young-folk meal. They expected that about 30 percent would be unable to make it, but that still meant cooking and serving 1,000 meals.20 A Lancaster wedding today might draw from not only several church districts but also several states. Said one Lancaster parent, “Weddings began to get bigger in the ’60s and ’70s and especially in the last ten years.” “Now,” he added, “we invite everyone. Back when my dad got married, you had a farmhouse and you just filled that. Now, you have a small house and you build an addition.” Today’s Lancaster County father of the bride will likely have to supervise the construction of a temporary addition to the house that will be large enough to accommodate 500 guests or more.21 These changes suggest that as communities become less tied to the land and more technologically integrated with mainstream society, the networks that structure the Amish world increasingly stretch across church district lines and state borders and challenge the small scale of traditional Amish

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A bride’s wedding dress hangs in her bedroom, ready for the special day.​Next to it hang the new dress and the matching shirt for her intended that she made for the day they were published in church. Photograph by the author.

life. In larger, more progressive communities, such as the Lancaster settlement, weddings now cost amounts that those in the most conservative communities cannot imagine. Moreover, much that would have been grown and cooked at home or borrowed from neighbors (and still is in the smaller communities) is now purchased from specialized businesses. The publishing of a couple—that is, announcing the upcoming nuptials at the conclusion of a church service—is still, as Stephen Scott succinctly puts it, “a special event.”22 And, as did Rosanna and Little Crist, couples still try to keep others in the dark about their wedding plans, a custom rooted in tradition, not scripture. They seldom succeed but for different reasons. In smaller or more conservative communities, where weddings tend to be less

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frequent and with fewer guests, there is still secrecy, and speculation about who might be getting married and when is part of daily personal interactions or gossip. Among the ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish, whose wedding season begins with the end of threshing and corn husking, every church Sunday is an opportunity to announce a wedding, and folks watch to see whether families with marriage-eligible girls are painting their homes and whether those girls are sewing new dark blue dresses. Informing me about her daughter’s wedding plans, one conservative Swiss Amish mother noted that folks in her northern New York community were pretty sure when the couple would be published. “They weren’t supposed [to know], but I think just about everybody had it figured out.” The speculation about who will be published, which is based on frequent face-to-face interactions, is evidence of the close-knit character of a community in which “the members know each other, work with and care for each other, every day of the week.”23 But in larger, more progressive settlements, secrecy may be even harder to come by because with more and larger wedding celebrations, couples must make arrangements in advance to accommodate everyone and to ensure that all those planning to wed will have access to the equipment they need. As a result, while couples in the most conservative settlements are generally published only ten days before their wedding date and make no obvious preparations before that time, those in more progressive settlements may be openly planning for the festivities and be published long in advance of the actual wedding date. Lovina Eicher announced in her blog in June that her daughter had just been published and would marry in mid-August.24 A woman now living in New York noted that couples in the large Indiana community in which she had grown up were now sending save-the-date cards to claim the wedding date they desired. In Lancaster County and Lancaster daughter settlements, upcoming nuptials have traditionally been published on the first church Sunday after the fall communion church, and in the past, some attempted to keep the upcoming wedding secret until then. Nowadays, families are likely to talk about future weddings, which not only helps to space weddings out over the fall, but also ensures that the upcoming festivities are no more secret than those in the English (non-Amish) world.25 Whether or not the young man and woman about to be published are present in church on the Sunday when the nuptials are announced still depends on the traditions of their respective communities. In many church communities, both are there, and like Little Crist, they try to leave the

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church service as quickly as they can, ideally during the singing of the last hymn, to avoid any good-natured teasing.26 The close ties connecting the future bride and groom to their peers in the young folk mean that the couple have been the subject of considerable speculation and behind-the-scenes planning even before their secret is out. For example, if some of the youngfolk boys suspect what is about to happen, the soon-to-be groom may find the reins of his horse tied up in knots, slowing the couple’s escape. If the boy does not live in the district where the wedding is announced, the girl’s brother will help her leave. “We had church when Eli and daughter Katie were published,” one Swartzentruber Amish father told me. “Eli [not a member of Katie’s district and so not in church] was staying in the little house [just down the road, by the sawmill], and Katie just left and ran down there.” That Katie joined Eli in public was a mark of their new status in the Swartzentruber Amish community. Unlike dating couples in more progressive Amish groups, young Swartzentruber women and men never appear in public together until they are engaged or married. “I knew Jacob and Susie were published,” said one woman laughing. “Barbara saw them go by in a buggy Sunday morning about the time church let out.” Added her daughter, “If you see a[n] [unmarried] couple riding together in the daytime, you know something is up.”27 In Lancaster County and Lancaster daughter settlements, the bride generally stays home from church on the morning she is published. Traditionally, she prepares lunch for the groom-to-be, and they eat together, a moment of calm before all the preparations begin. Once the wedding is published, the couple is officially engaged, and life changes. Invitations have to go out, whether orally at church, by phone, or by mail. In the past, couples made their own wedding invitations or just sent handwritten cards. This is still the practice among the most conservative Amish. In Swartzentruber communities, for example, the engaged couple, acting together publicly for the first time, visit friends and family in their church district to invite them personally to attend the wedding. They also work together to write postcards to those outside the district. In larger, nonfarming communities, however, the bride and her family take charge of the invitations, which may be more elaborate or even commercially printed. Das Hochzeit Buchlein provides Lancaster parents with an example of a spreadsheet to keep track of whom to invite and how, with hints about what to include in the invitation. It notes, for example, that the couple must be sure to give the address “for using in a GPS” and cautions that phone messages need to be clear and simpler than written invitations. In yet another sign of

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the growing size, reach, and diversity of the guest list, the couple is encouraged to give those who will “need buses” enough time to plan and to “be sure to tell English Guests that we kneel in prayer.”28 Among the Amish, weddings are about the bride, and so most of those invited are members of her family and her friends.29 While the groom’s immediate family will be in attendance, it is unlikely that his extended family will attend, particularly if they live outside the bride’s church district. Similarly, because the wedding is the responsibility of the bride’s family, those invited to help are usually from the bride’s extended family and her friends from the young folk. Invited helpers are assigned chores based on gender, age, and marital status. For example, the bride and her family need cooks to prepare the food for the large noon meal following the wedding, the supper, and snacks, a role most often played by the bride’s aunts or married sisters, although the groom’s mother and married sisters might help.30 The bride and her family also need young men to serve as hostlers to handle the horses and park buggies and cars, and they need young girls to serve as table waiters for the meals. Those invited to fill these roles will be unmarried but of young-folk age and are generally siblings or close friends of the bride and groom. In some communities, young men and young women are paired to serve together as table waiters. Finally, the couple chooses their Newehockers (also Newesitzers [nevəsItsə]) or side sitters, the couples who will stand with them during the marriage ceremony and sit with them at the Eck (corner table) for the wedding feast. Couples try to keep secret the identity of the side sitters, and much guessing goes on about who will be chosen after a couple is published. In choosing friends and siblings to be side sitters or to help at the wedding, the bride and groom may take the opportunity to do some matchmaking. For example, the bride’s cousin from another state who was invited to be a table waiter might be paired with the groom’s brother who was asked to serve as a hostler. That way, young folk are introduced to potential partners, and one wedding helps to ensure more. Because weddings are getting larger, the number of people invited to help is also growing. When I asked one mother of the bride how many table waiters would be needed, she replied that it depended on the number of tables set up for folks to eat. In very conservative Swartzentruber communities, where weddings occur during the winter months and tables are always set up in the bride’s home, the number remains relatively constant, but in other communities, where shops, tents, or additions to the family home are used, the number can vary considerably. As one Lancaster man told me,

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“Additions are getting bigger and bigger, and then you need more food to feed people, and then you need more cooks.” Food preparation has also changed, and items that were traditional in the past have disappeared. For example, Lancaster weddings have gotten almost too big for homemade baked goods. In the past, a bride and her mother, assisted by neighboring wives and friends, served homemade pies and donuts at the noon meal, and guests arrived with home-baked cakes as wedding gifts to be served for supper. Now, however, one Lancaster woman told me, “you just go and buy them.” Another Lancaster Amish parent concurred, noting that years ago “people would have done their own things, but [now] people ask others to sew or bake.” One Amish baker, a widow who has built a business making pies and donuts, reported to me that during wedding season, she might bake for four or five weddings a day, each wedding requiring about 400 donuts. As weddings get larger, baked goods are not the only thing Amish families may be purchasing from outsiders. Writing about Lancaster County Amish weddings in 1988, Stephen Scott noted that it was the groom’s job to cut the heads off the chickens that would be served at the wedding celebration.31 Chicken remains a staple of most Amish wedding feasts, but the young Lancaster groom, no longer used to the ways of the farm, has only to go to the grocery store—or, more likely, lets his future in-laws supply the poultry. Nor are his counterparts in other communities doing much butchering. Instead, many families anticipating weddings watch newspaper circulars for sales on chicken parts and order in bulk from local grocery stores or wholesale clubs like Costco. In the past, families grew much of the food for the wedding feast. Now, they place orders with those still farming or with large grocery stores, Amish and non-Amish, which meet the needs of families no longer earning a living from the land. Yet even as communities grow and change, Amish weddings reveal how families commit to the traditions of the church community. Amish brides have attended many weddings before their own, and so they know what the expectations are. For example, although families may turn to commercial sources for the food they serve, the bride and her family know what the menu will be, leading one Lancaster father to draw comfort from the fact that “we still have the same meal,” even as he shook his head at the size of his daughter’s wedding. Each Amish community has its own particular feast, both for the large noon meal and the supper. In Lancaster County and in communities with Lancaster roots, families serve a chicken “roast,” which

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is a casserole of chicken and stuffing. Mashed potatoes and gravy are also a key part of the Lancaster County feast, which also includes creamed celery, cabbage, applesauce, dinner rolls, peaches and pears, “Indiana salad” (green Jell-O with pineapples, cream, and Cool Whip), donuts, and pies. Swartzen­ truber wedding guests expect to eat chicken that has been boiled before being rolled in butter and cracker crumbs and baked. In addition, they feast on mashed potatoes with gravy; stuffing; bread with various spreads, including butter, jam, and honey; sliced cheese; celery and pickles; and lettuce salad. For dessert, there are bowls of mixed-fruit salad, peach halves, prunes, cakes, pies, and cookies. The supper meal features leftover mashed potatoes made into potato pancakes, meatloaf, bologna, noodles cooked in chicken broth and mixed with gravy, lettuce salad, jelly rolls, and tapioca or date pudding. At one wedding in a Swiss Amish community, the guests ate chicken, mashed potatoes with ham gravy, noodles, mixed vegetables, and salad. They were also served sliced cheese, fruit salad, cake, and pie. Hot dogs were on the supper menu. Not only is the menu well known, but most families follow tradition in the timing of the food preparation. Das Hochzeit Buchlein cautions Lancaster wives to cook the chickens the day before. Further, it advises, at least two roasting pans filled with stuffing and chicken cut into bite-size pieces should be in the oven by 7:00 a.m. on the morning of the wedding.32 A rural Amish housewife noted that cakes generally get baked on Monday and pies on Tuesday, tasks made easier with the help of neighboring women, including youngie friends of the bride. On Wednesday, she added, they get the chicken ready to cook and cut up fruit to be put in bowls for the next day. In Clarion, Pennsylvania, a community with its roots in Ontario and Indiana, cooks prepare casseroles the day before the wedding. The mother of a bride in northern New York, who served barbecued chicken at her daughter’s wedding, recalled the help she had from relatives in Clarion, Pennsylvania, to get ready for the event: “On Monday, we baked the wedding cakes, and on Tuesday we decorated them. Wednesday we prepared the meat and got it ready to cook on Thursday. The boys would be up early on Thursday [the day of the wedding] to start the fires. Clarion ones [young men from Clarion] did it for us. They had a grate over an open fire, and two guys put meat on the grate. Then they put another grate on top to flip it.” She added that things had been a bit different in the Allen County, Indiana, settlement in which she had grown up. There, she recalled, “We’d pass out cake mixes to the table waiters, who’d make them for the wedding.

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Here, we just make the cakes together.” Swartzentruber women know that they should bake cakes on the Monday before the wedding and that there should be both chocolate and yellow cakes, with cake rolls for supper. They also know that the cheese and bologna should be sliced the day before the wedding. Having participated in other weddings, the Amish bride has prepared for her own, and she knows what to do when the time comes. That her mother, youngie friends, and older women are there to help reinforces kinship ties and strengthens the social network that will sustain her and her husband as they begin married life. She will be in church with her husband-to-be while the preparations go on at home, but she knows that all will go as it should. The day of the wedding, the older women invited to be cooks prepare the meal at the home of the bride’s family while the wedding service is in progress at a neighboring home. In the Lancaster community and Lancaster daughter settlements, they do the cooking in the family kitchen and in the mobile wedding trailers specially outfitted for food preparation, which are parked only steps away from where the wedding is taking place. In both cases, the women start their work early in the morning. A woman who served as a cook for her brother’s wedding described how she and the other cooks arrived at the bride’s home around 7:00 a.m. and got the chicken boiling around 7:30. “You have to visit a little, of course,” she noted, laughing. Getting the chicken ready was a task for the groom’s mother and his married sisters. Other invited cooks got started peeling the potatoes and preparing the stuffing. As the groom’s sister remembered, “We tore lettuce apart while the chicken was cooking.” Women know what to do because they have likely done it before at other weddings. The preparations follow the particular church community’s traditions, and women know their roles. While the cooks prepare the meal, the table waiters are busy setting the tables, which are generally put up in advance, after which they will cut pies and cakes, arrange sliced cheese on plates, and put the mixed fruit into bowls. Little girls too young to be table waiters eagerly watch all that is going on. Cooks with toddlers or infants generally bring them along, often with an older daughter or two to help watch them, and there is always someone to change a diaper or comfort a crying child. Thus, a younger generation learns. In Lancaster County and its daughter settlements, four young married couples, relatives of the bride, coordinate the day’s activities and assign tasks since the parents of both the bride and groom are honored guests at their

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children’s nuptials. Elsewhere, the parents of the bride may not see their daughter marry, for they themselves supervise the cooks and others and make the last-minute preparations to welcome the newlyweds and their guests home from “wedding church.” In ultraconservative Swartzentruber communities, for example, although the unmarried girls serving as table waiters eagerly head to the church service in time to see the couple exchange vows, the married women helping to cook do not. As a young Swartzen­ truber wife said, “It’s not our way for the older married sisters [helping to cook] to go.” But there’s variation, she added. “I’ve seen [my husband’s] married sisters going along [with the table waiters], but they’re in different [more progressive] churches.” Generally, the table waiters eat their dinner before they head to the wedding church. When men and women wait tables in pairs, they head to the wedding church together. One English guest, told to be at the church at 11:30 to see the marriage vows exchanged, was surprised to be behind a pickup truck filled with young people who had just left the bride’s home and were headed to see the nuptials. Arriving at the home where the wedding church was in progress, all took their seats quietly in preparation for the event. While the table waiters are at church, the cooks wash the dishes they used and clean and reset the tables. Then it is time for the cooks to eat and toddlers to be fed, after which they will wash dishes and reset the tables one more time so that everything is ready when church is over and the guests start to arrive. Unlike the table waiters, the hostlers are likely to arrive at the church much closer to the beginning of the service. They may, however, stop at the bride’s house to have coffee before heading over so that if anything needs to be done, they can do it. One woman told me that the bride’s father will often save some work for them rather than just tell them to go on to the service because “they want to be helping, not just sitting in church.” One father, for example, used that time to have the hostlers put the braces under the beds in the bride’s bedroom in preparation for the crowd of young folk that would sit on the beds to watch the bride and groom open presents later in the day. He also had them put up an extra support beam in the living room to help hold the weight of all who would crowd into the bedroom above. Talking about the recent marriage of her husband’s cousin, a Swartzentruber mother laughed at her six-year-old daughter who, given the choice between going to school (which she loved) and going to the wedding, chose

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the wedding “because she liked to hear them say yes.” The actual exchange of vows, the focus of English weddings, is a very short part of the long morning wedding service, during which ministers, drawing on passages from the Old Testament and from the book of Tobit, emphasize the unbreakable holy bond created by marriage and the importance of this bond not just to the couple, but to the entire church community. Prior to taking their vows, while the congregation sings, the couple meet privately with the ministers for advice and blessings, after which, in front of family and friends, the bride and groom each promise to care for the other as befits a Christian spouse and to remain faithful until the two are separated by death.33 The bishop then prays for the couple, and other clergy offer blessings before the couple and the congregation kneel in one final prayer. It is a solemn time. Once the church service ends, the fun begins. Describing her experience at a Lancaster County wedding, writer Ann Hark noted that “immediately the rooms became a seething hubbub of brisk motion,”34 an apt description, for in Lancaster County and daughter communities, where church and meal are both held at the bride’s home, a place of worship must quickly be turned into a place of feasting by transforming the church benches into tables. The wedding trailer, a relatively new business that has developed to meet the demands of Lancaster Amish weddings, makes this easier: it transports dishes, tables, and serving utensils to the wedding location and also provides cook stoves, a steam table, a freezer, a walk-in cooler, and sinks for washing up. Although well known in progressive Amish communities in the Midwest, where couples must make arrangements to rent the trailer many months in advance, such trailers have only been used in Lancaster County for a few years. Describing how weddings were done in the past, one Lancaster woman told me, “We used to have a lean-to, and we’d get Lapp Gas to bring over three stoves, and then we’d use the ones in the house.35 We’d buy one for our daughter and use that. We got dishes from the neighbors.” Another Lancaster housewife concurred, noting that when her parents had gotten married, “folks would get together all used dishes. Also, each area would have a couple of chests of dishes.” Renting for nearly $1,000 a day, the new wedding trailer eliminates the need to borrow or rent dishes. It also makes cleanup the next day much easier, for the dishwashers no longer have to separate utensils to get them back to their proper owners. It remains to be seen how much longer Das Hochzeit Buchlein will advise couples to “order chests of dishes as early as June,” well before they are published, and will continue to

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feature a list of those who rent chests of dishes, bakery racks, and other cooking supplies. No such wedding supply businesses exist in smaller, more conservative communities, and the bride’s parents borrow dishes, silverware, and other necessities from friends and neighbors, another way in which the smaller, less progressive communities maintain mutual labor exchanges, which are disappearing in larger ones. Tables set with a variety of dishes wait to welcome churchgoers. In some communities, where wedding supply businesses and sufficient neighbors to loan dishes for all the invited guests are lacking, some brides are turning to paper plates for all but the wedding party. One young bride and her mother worried while shopping whether 600 large plastic cups would be sufficient and whether they needed a large supply of smaller cups to put by the water jug for guests to use. Regardless of where the dishes come from, no table is set more nicely than the Eck where the newlyweds sit, flanked by their side sitters. Here, the bride uses her new china and her best glassware. The serving bowls that come to this corner are those the bride has been collecting since childhood, and the glassware has been gifted to her by relatives or by neighbors for whom she has worked. The Eck stands in contrast to the rest of the setting: although the tables are nicely set, there are no decorations, and the wedding party carries no bouquets. The bride and groom are dressed in the clothes they wear to church on other occasions. In some communities, a bride may make her intended a shirt to match the dress she makes for herself to wear on the day they are published. On their wedding day, however, their clothing will be dark and sober; the bride’s dress is generally a dark navy blue or black, and she wears the white cape generally worn for church. Swartzentruber brides wear the crossed cape of adolescent girls on their wedding day.36 Many brides wear the black cap that generally denotes unmarried status. It will be the last time they do so. From their vantage point in the corner, the bridal party can see all the festivities. They are seated first so that they can watch as everyone comes to the table, and when all have been seated and a silent grace offered,37 they are served first. Nevertheless, the newlyweds are tested. For example, in some communities, when the bride and groom go in to take their place, everyone watches to see if the bride will forget and step over the broom that someone will have laid across the threshold. If she does, claim some, then she will be a housewife who is “too lazy to pick up a broom.” Perhaps a kinder inter-

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The wedding Eck is always nicely decorated, and the newlyweds eat from the best china. Photograph by the author.

pretation is that offered by a Lancaster man, who asserted, “It just means she’s a woman now.” Brides, of course, are on the lookout for the broom, and many make plans to enter the house through a side or back door.38 In Lancaster County and in settlements with Lancaster roots, the groom too must be on guard, for traditionally the men and boys seek to throw him over a fence. This is perhaps a threshold of a different kind. Said one Lancaster father, who had landed on his feet at his own wedding, “It means that he’s not with the young folk, but the married guys don’t want him either.” His wife added that now sometimes the girl is thrown over the fence too, and the groom is supposed to catch her. Her daughter, who was about to be wed, seemed taken aback and admitted that she hadn’t known about that. Jokes focus on the corner table and the wedding party. One woman told me that sometimes “someone takes a needle and sews the prunes together. Then, when they [a member of the wedding party] take one, they take the whole chain.” The bride’s sisters, especially those who are young folk, take particular delight in playing tricks. At one wedding, the celery sticks standing upright in a vase of water had been tied together at the base. The butter

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dish in the corner had been decorated with small cinnamon hearts. One sister hid plastic spiders near the bride’s seat. A Lancaster County man reminisced that someone had put a mouse trap in the large bowl of salad earmarked for the bride and groom. After the noon meal, while the cooks wash dishes and then sit and visit, the men, boys, and women who were in church sing. According to the women, “It gives them something to do.” One woman told me that “sometimes they sing right through the afternoon.” At Lancaster County weddings, everyone is involved. “It’s chaos and noise,” one man said. “It’s surprising anything gets done [since] nothing is organized.” While the songs sung in the most conservative Amish weddings are German hymns from the Ausbund, the sixteenth-century German hymnbook used in all Amish church services, couples in less conservative communities often prepare songbooks featuring a mix of English and German songs, many of them favorites of the bride’s family. By midafternoon, the cooks are snacking, the men are singing, and the young folk are visiting. In communities that hold weddings in the spring and summer, there may be a volleyball game to keep the teens and younger children occupied. Schoolchildren wander in groups among the other guests, and babies sleep. Generally, while invited guests and workers relax, the newlyweds, their side sitters, and assorted young people are up in the bride’s bedroom, unwrapping wedding gifts. A relatively new addition to the afternoon festivities in Lancaster County is the singing of English hymns by young folk while the bride and groom are opening their gifts. “Opening gifts in the bride’s bedroom is an old tradition,” one woman told me. “They used to put gifts on the bride’s bed. Now they need to set up a table and decorate it.” This is likely because, as another woman put it, there are “many more gifts [on] the day of the wedding.” Calling it “one big change,” she added that the couple used to go visiting and collect gifts. A Lancaster County father told me that some “newlywed couple[s] still visit folks, mostly [over] the next month or two, to collect gifts, but this is changing as more gifts are given at [the] wedding and less visiting is done.” In another sign of changing community ways, he added, “Some [newlyweds] go to Florida that winter,” and with more and more weddings in the winter and spring, there is “less time for visits.” Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Lancaster grooms have also started giving their new brides roses, a custom that had one Lancaster father shaking his head. “It used to be that you knew you loved each other. Now, you have to give each other gifts.” In less progressive com-

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Mementos given by the newlyweds to their helpers may be simple handmade items or more elaborate, commercially made gifts. Photograph by the author.

munities, there are no trips to Florida. Instead, the couple stays several weeks with the bride’s parents, visiting and collecting gifts from neighbors and friends in other church communities who were not at the wedding. Not only do the bride and groom receive gifts, they also give them, particularly to acknowledge the assistance of those who helped them. In the most progressive communities, cooks, table waiters, hostlers, and members of the wedding party are given wedding favors imprinted with the bride’s and groom’s names and the date of the ceremony. These are likely to have been purchased from commercial sources and may be as varied as mirrored lamp holders or china cups. In more conservative groups, the bride and groom often work together to create pen holders and other items out of wood, using glue guns, decoupage, and wood burners to personalize them. One conservative Amish bride shopped with her mother to purchase tea towels, small plastic containers, and dish scrubbers for her cooks and table waiters. A Swartzentruber Amish bride may present her cooks and table waiters with a dish, a “Canada spoon” (serving spoon), a dish towel, an orange, and/or a candy bar. The hostlers may receive a handkerchief, a cigar, and/or a candy bar. Swartzentruber side sitters may each get a blue glass filled with a hanky, a candy bar and other candy, and/or a $2 bill, this last often requiring a special trip to the bank in anticipation of the wedding. Guests also receive wedding remembrances. Perhaps because of the chang-

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ing attitude toward tobacco among Lancaster Amish, today’s bride and groom are likely to give beef sticks to male wedding guests instead of the cigars commonly handed out in decades past; guests might also receive pens, rulers, and/or name cards professionally imprinted with the names of the bride and groom. Even in more conservative communities, guests are likely to take home pens and printed napkins, as well as bookmarks and name cards, although the latter are more likely photocopied and hand colored than professionally printed. At the most conservative Amish weddings, guests might receive oranges or pick out a candy bar or cigar (the latter for men only) from large bowls passed around by a table waiter. For little children, there are smaller candies. For families and married couples, the evening supper marks the end of the wedding festivities. But for the young folk, the night is young, and supper is the beginning of an evening of socializing and singing. But first they must go in to eat, and this can be a stressful time for the unmarried youth. Although in some communities, the bride and groom pair up the young folk to go in to supper, in Lancaster County the boys pick their partners. While this poses no problem for those who are dating, for others, particularly the girls, it can be difficult. Describing how the girls stand together to wait for the boys to pick them, one Lancaster mother compared it to a cow sale, and she added that if a girl is not picked, she may decide not to go in. Others worry about who might pick them. As the Lancaster mother put it, “Some girls try to go in a corner so they don’t get picked or in a corner so a particular boy knows where they are.” When the bride and groom pair up their friends to go in for supper, they often face attempts to influence their decision-making. One conservative Amish bride and groom, tired of being asked by their table waiters and hostlers days before the wedding whom they and other young folk had been paired with (and aware that some had guessed the name of their likely partner), shuffled the pairings on the eve of the wedding so that all would be surprised. Singing follows supper, and by midnight, the festivities, which for the wedding party and their families started long before sunrise, are finally over. A New Stage In her Amish community, the newlywed has been rehearsing her whole life to play the part of a bride, although not as little non-Amish girls do (playing dress-up with a scarf for a veil), for an Amish bride wears much the same dress she has worn for church services every other Sunday. Rather, the Amish

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The interior of a wedding trailer. In the communities that permit them, such trailers make preparing a wedding dinner much easier. Photograph by the author.

bride has been a supporting character in numerous weddings before her own. As a toddler, she likely came along when her mother was a cook. Later she helped tend toddlers, and still later, as a member of the young folk, she was probably a table waiter or perhaps even a side sitter. At each stage she learned from those who were older, internalizing the patterns of behavior that will come to mark her as a woman in her community. The morning after the wedding, she assumes the role of wife. As a married woman, she will no longer join her peers in the young folk, and at her younger siblings’ weddings, she will cook. But the newlywed couple is not immediately on their own; the morning after the ceremony reinforces the couple’s role in the extended family and the church community. Generally, the bride and groom spend their first married night in the bride’s old bedroom, and they are up early for breakfast, devotions, a chance to say good-bye to out-of-town guests also staying in the house, and the beginning of the cleanup, a task made easier in the communities that use wedding trailers. As an Indiana woman told me, “we can have dishes counted more quickly” than was possible when families had to sort and return them to different sources. In communities without wedding trailers, borrowed dishes and utensils must be returned, a process made somewhat simpler by the Amish housewives’ habit of painting initials on each dish or piece of silverware. Even when the bride has used paper plates,

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much needs to be done. If she has borrowed several oil stoves and a number of mixing bowls—items too necessary for daily life to be kept long—they must be returned quickly. Newlyweds often stay with the bride’s parents for several weeks or even months before setting up housekeeping on their own. When they do move into their new home, they receive furniture gifted from their parents; a variety of new housewares, canned goods, and foodstuffs from their friends and extended family; and a wealth of good wishes. Most important, when all is done, another young couple takes their place in the church community to raise a new family in their parents’ faith. After the Ceremony: Preparations for Life Although Amish brides and their new husbands are familiar with wedding celebrations, they are often less informed about what to expect on their wedding night. One woman, for example, described herself as being “shocked” on her wedding night and did not talk about it with her mother until several weeks later. “I was so shy about it,” she remembered. Talking about her younger sister, who was about to marry, another woman noted how lucky the girl was that she “has married sisters she can talk to [after the wedding]. When I was married, I didn’t.” Although marriage is undertaken to provide a context in which to bring children into the world, adults generally say nothing about sex in the presence of children or unmarried young folk, and there is little Amish sex education. In a list of suggestions for the bride and groom, Das Hochzeit Buchlein includes a discussion of the importance of folic acid for the health of newborn babies. Acknowledging that he is not a doctor, the anonymous author recommends that “future mothers . . . prepare to support the systems that are vital in infants even the year before marriage. No more is needed to be said. I don’t wish you any surprises.”39 Mankind Marvelously Made, a health text used in some Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite schools, has a chapter on reproduction, but as Alta Hoover, the founder of the Old Order Mennonite publishing company Schoolaid, told me, “Many teachers cut it out.”40 Although Amish children grow up around farm animals, many, particularly in the most conservative communities, know little about the reproductive process. One Swartzentruber Amish man, for example, expressed his astonishment at learning, after his marriage, that women have menstrual cycles.41 It is accepted that the girls in the house will be “sick” at monthly intervals and excused from such

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activities as canning or cake baking, but their brothers are never told why, nor are their prepubescent sisters prepared. One Swartzentruber woman told me how unprepared she had been for her wedding night. When I asked if she would tell her daughters what to expect, she shook her head. “Oh no. That would scare them too much.” At the same time, articles in the Amish publication Family Life suggest a need for parents to instruct their children about reproduction. A letter from “A Concerned Ohio Parent,” for example, counseled parents that “your children will learn ‘the facts of life’ from someone: a twisted version from another child, pornography, an abuser, or you. From which source do you want them to get it first?”42 In the most progressive communities, most young people are aware of menstruation and reproduction. One woman, raised in a more progressive church community, told me that her mother had talked with her about sex and pregnancy in advance of her wedding because she wanted a closer relationship with her daughters. “It’s too much,” she said, “for a young girl to suddenly after the wedding have to know and do everything. It’s not fair.” Her sister-in-law, she added, “said she’d never have gotten married if she’d known what was going to happen,” a thought echoed by another young woman who told me that if she’d known what was expected, she’d have called off the wedding. When I asked her if she would talk to her own daughters, she thought she would.43 In the most conservative communities, there can be considerable variation in how much unmarried young folk know about sex. “Boys know everything from the barn,” asserted one Swartzentruber woman. “They’re out there with the heifers and the bulls, and they deliver the calves. Our sixteenyear-old hired hand knows everything, and the girls know nothing.” On the other hand, when I asked if girls learned the facts of life before they got married, another woman in the same Swartzentruber community responded, “They’re told exactly. If not, their mom is off-duty.” She went on to assert that while mothers should tell daughters, it was up to fathers to educate their sons. “It’s not my duty, it’s [the] dad’s duty. The boy is supposed to be told what he should do and what he shouldn’t.” She suspected that her own son “knew what to do when he got married,” and her unmarried daughter, who was listening in, appeared to agree: “Boys ain’t so dumb.” Her assessment was supported by one young father, who commented that many young men “know more than you think,” but he also admitted that “others don’t know anything.” He went on to tell the story of his wife’s

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then-unmarried brother, who noticed that his sister was gaining weight and wondered why, clearly unaware that she might be pregnant. “He asked her if she needed calcium,” the storyteller said and laughed. He then noted that his brother-in-law, since married and the father of three, “now understands.” His brother-in-law’s ignorance reminded him of the story some young men tell about a stranger to the community who, when asked who he was, replied, “I’m my mother’s son, and they say my father’s the one responsible.” The young father found this response shocking. “Some guys know a lot,” he repeated, making it clear by his tone that his young son will likely not know a lot when the time comes for him to marry. Certainly not all Amish couples are virgins on their wedding night, and a hurried wedding in response to a pregnancy happens in all communities. Sometimes temptation comes more easily when young people are less supervised. A woman in northern Indiana recalled in a letter to me how “at the ripe, old age of 21 and fresh off the farm,” she went with a group of older Amish girls to Phoenix, Arizona, where they lived in a Mennonite-owned trailer court. At the same time, “a load of Amish boys arrived . . . on a ninemonth western trip.” Perhaps the result was predictable: “So the rest is history. . . . Within a year we were married, and I was six months pregnant. We did it all backwards . . . as I can now plainly see. Hindsight.”44 If word gets out that a couple is sexually active, they are expected to marry as soon as they can, although they are not pressured to marry if they are unwilling. In any case, they are no longer permitted to participate in young-folk activities. If one of the couple has not yet been baptized, then there may be special arrangements made to take the young person into the church so that they can be married. If they are both baptized church members, then they are subject to excommunication and shunning for several weeks before being married, after which they can be taken back into the congregation.45 Even if the couple have not been found out ahead of time, they are expected to confess to the ministers prior to the wedding if they have not remained “pure” or had a “pure courtship,” and if they confess to having engaged in premarital sex they are subject to excommunication and shunning. Said one Swartzentruber Amish woman sadly, “A couple like that will always carry that weight. . . . It [premarital sex] is a shameful thing. Yeah, they do [confess to the ministers]. Not many do it, [because] they get warned so hard in church.”46 When premarital sex results in pregnancy, the wedding festivities are likely more muted. Stevick notes, “In Lancaster County settlements, a first

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wedding announced for any time other than the community-sanctioned months means that the couple ‘had to get married.’ ”47 Generally, such couples are expected to limit the guest list and eliminate the afternoon activities and wedding supper, although if the bride is still in the first trimester, they may be able to manage more by not being honest when asked if they have had a pure courtship. Yet not all communities react the same way. One Swiss Amish woman expressed dismay at a couple in an Indiana community “where almost anything goes” who had a full-day wedding, including the wedding dinner and supper, “even though they had to get married.” Another woman was scandalized that a couple in her central New York community had all the festivities even though they were expecting. “How could they be totally happy?” she asked. Still, said a Michigan housewife, “if something happens . . . it’s done. If a girl gets pregnant, we say that’s too bad, and then we move on.” It is unclear how many Amish couples engage in premarital sex, yet a number certainly do despite church teachings and the possible embarrassment of a hurried wedding. In a study of the timing of the first birth relative to the date of marriage among Old Order and New Order Amish in the large Holmes County settlement, Elizabeth C. Cooksey and Joseph F. Donnermeyer found that approximately 11 percent of births came within the first seven months of marriage, and approximately 13 percent came within the eighth and ninth months. They also concluded that their “estimate of premarital conceptions is likely a conservative one,”48 and there was some indication that the rate of premarital conception is higher in more conservative communities. On the other hand, there is evidence of casual sex in more progressive settlements. One Indiana Amish mother was livid to find a pair of panties hanging out of her son’s buggy one Sunday morning following a gathering of the young folk the night before.49 The Amish often see premarital sex and pregnant brides as evidence of other dysfunction in particular church communities. One Amish man asserts, for example, that “pregnancies are more likely to result when the girls join in the drinking.”50 Much like the Swiss Amish woman who linked a hurried marriage to a community in which “anything goes,” a Swartzentruber woman asserted that problems in the large Ohio settlement she had moved from were the result of “partying before joining church.”51 A midwestern Amish couple shook their heads over the behavior of young people in a Pennsylvania community in which a cousin had taught. “They’re nasty. They’re very plain, but the seventh- and eighth-graders are having sex in the

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cornfield.” Another woman lamented the “rowdy” actions of young folk in her community, noting that when buggies arrive at young-folk gatherings “the girls go out to the barn with the boys. They’re just waiting for trouble. They’ll get way too used to each other before they’re old enough.” Asked if she thought her community would step in, she seemed doubtful. “The ones [girls] who aren’t even seventeen [the traditional age for joining the young folk in her community] are playing volleyball just like the young folk.” One Pennsylvania housewife said, “If they want to drink, take drugs, have sexual relations, then they might as well not belong to a church.” Expectations Even though a young woman has observed and practiced homemaking, child tending, and chores, carrying out these activities in her own home, without her mother or siblings, can be a challenge, for she must now do these things not as the girlfriend in a courting couple, but as a wife. Schwieder and Schwieder have noted the “interchangeability” of an Amish upbringing, that is, the understanding all Amish people have at the beginning of a courtship that they share the same lifestyle as the dating partner. As they put it, “Certainly there are many individual differences, but, overall, they share a common heritage and upbringing that binds them together in a homogeneous life-style.”52 Nevertheless, as one mother of three told me, “I thought the hard part was getting married. But the wedding means the hard part has just begun. You really step on each other’s hearts until you know each other.” Raised in fellowshipping church communities, a young woman and her intended share expectations about their relationship as wife and husband. The bride-to-be expects that her new husband will sit at the head of the table and lead the family devotions and that she will manage the household. Implicit in the shared understanding of the relationship between wife and husband is that the husband is the final decision-maker if the two disagree. As a Family Life article entitled “Building a Christian Marriage” argued, “Building a good marriage is a lot like laying blocks. A crew of three can lay blocks very efficiently if they work together in harmony. When it comes to building a marriage, let us think of the three as being the husband, the wife, and Jesus. For any crew to run smoothly, it needs a rank of authority. Jesus is the head and also the one who will reward us when our work is done. The husband is the foreman, and the wife is the assistant.”53 In other words, in an Amish marriage, the wife and the husband have

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particular roles to play. The husband is considered the head of the family, and his task is to love his wife “even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). As a Family Life article, “The Husband’s Role,” puts it, this means that “since Christ’s mission on earth was a life of service . . . a husband’s role is no different.” However, the article also states that the husband’s role would be overwhelming if his wife, the “weaker vessel,”54 “did not stand beside him, looking up to him.” After all, “a submissive wife gives courage to her husband because she knows that not just his life but also her own life is at stake if his moves are not according to God’s will.” Looking back at his own marriage, the anonymous author of “The Husband’s Role” writes, “Submissiveness commands respect. I have been married for more than thirty years, and I feel my wife’s submissive attitude has drawn me closer to her than all other things combined. The husband’s role is to be the leader of the family and to bring up his children in the way of truth also becomes an overwhelming challenge, were it not for the wife’s support.”55 Amish in Lancaster County tell of a noted senior bishop whose wedding sermons always made the point that “when two people come together who both know how to submit, the marriage will work. When two people come together and only one knows how to submit, the marriage can work but it won’t be good. And if two people come together and neither one knows how to submit, the marriage won’t work.” Significantly, he never put the burden of submission on the wife alone.56 Huntington argued that Amish husbands and wives “are to be as individuals to one another, and of one mind to all others.” The result is that “the public ‘stance’ of the Amish family is one of wifely submission and obedience; in private and in practice, the family functions relatively democratically with important decisions . . . generally being made jointly (often with additional input from the extended family).”57 An Amish housewife in Michigan told me, “The people who see patriarchal Amish see only the public face. There are very few [bossy men] out there. People talk it out.”58 Simply put, “submissive” in an Amish context does not mean “subservient,” and most Amish women see themselves as equally important in their marriage and in their community, though not in the same role as their husbands. For example, calling herself “lucky” because she married “a Godly man,” a midwestern Amish housewife affirmed to me, “It’s not about obeying. It’s about being a helpmeet. We share convictions and follow biblical precepts.” A young Swartzentruber Amish mother noted, “The man can be

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the leader, but he’ll do a lot of nice things if he loves her [his wife]. He won’t expect his wife to do things he wouldn’t. If love is there, leadership is easy.” Her neighbor, sitting with her and mending children’s clothing, added, “[If love is there,] everything is there. They see each other’s point. In down times, they’re both needed, and in up times, they’re both needed.” The first woman continued, “Love means he gives in too. Love is always patient, it never ends, is always hopeful, and forgives and forgets. That’s what makes a marriage.” Indeed, for many Amish women love makes marriage a partnership in which issues are discussed and decisions made together. A Swartzentruber Amish woman noted, “In German, if they preach about it, they say we’re under the husband, the husband is the head of the house, and the husband shall lead. At weddings, though, they say the husband should lead, but that he should listen to the wife because she can give good advice. We should talk about things.” A New York Amish housewife shook her head over her sister’s husband, who had asserted that his wife had to listen and do what he said: “But that forgets about love. A man who loves his wife will do as she wants. He will try to please her. And if I love him, I see it his way as well.” She reported the advice of a minister who said, “Don’t go 50–50, go 80–80. Overlap it. Don’t leave that crack in the middle.” “I guess we just help each other,” a Swartzentruber Amish woman in a New York settlement told me. “I’m glad for everything I do, so he can use his time for what I can’t do.” When I asked her what “submission” meant in her marriage, she answered, “A lot of times I get his opinion first before I go ahead. Sometimes, it’s do as you wish. If you don’t agree, you just have to give your opinion and decide what’s best. You talk it out.” Her husband agreed: “If I had something to say, she would listen.” The wife responded, “If I would want to buy something [e.g., something extra or expensive], I would ask. We discuss a lot of stuff with each other.” “To see if we’re on the same page,” her husband added. Summing up, the wife asserted, “Yes, the woman is under the man, but we’ve got to help each other. He’s just human. What if he’s making a mistake? We have to help each other.” Similarly, a Lancaster Amish woman said, “We try to be submissive, of course.” But, she added, “Being submissive doesn’t mean I just do what he wants. We work things out together. For example, he thought I should have a bigger shop. I said I didn’t want that, so he said OK. I told him that now that our youngest daughter got married, I want the freedom to do what I want.” In short, like her Swartzentruber counterpart, her notion of submission meant that she

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talked things over with her husband. “The woman is set under the man because Eve got Adam into eating the apple,” asserted one mother of eight.59 “Not as if we couldn’t still get into that. I think we both have to be strong, and if we do step into the wrong path, we can’t just blame it on each other.” “Submission is a tough question,” said the wife of a Lancaster County minister. But she also told me that “submission is not necessarily a church issue. The church doesn’t set standards. There are biblical examples, but marriage is equal. Both have their roles. If a woman is downtrodden, maybe it’s a personality issue.” Her husband affirmed the lack of specific church guidelines: “These are things handed down. Everyone has traditions.” Two middle-aged Lancaster couples laughed together in their attempt to define what submission means in their community. One noted that in a recent sermon, a bishop had suggested that it’s nice when a wife gets up and makes her husband breakfast. “It doesn’t have to be a big one, but it’s good to sit down and make eye contact.” His neighbor’s wife snorted, “We have plenty of eye contact—just not in the morning. My men make their own [breakfast].” Her husband nodded and added, “We’re just happy if she packs our lunch.” Giving him a look, his wife retorted, “They’re men! Twenty-eight and twenty-six.” “Of course,” she added, “I do the dinner and cleaning.” The discussion later came around to the question of guidelines, and this wife commented, “He got me when I was nineteen. He thought he could train me.” The other wife in our gathering laughed and added, “As Amish, we have good husbands, so it’s not hard to submit. I need a husband.” “We did it together,” reflected a Lancaster widow, who had started a business with her husband. “Submission means both husband and wife need to be submissive to each other. They need to work together. Marriage is a partnership. That’s how it should be. A two-way street.” Her observations were seconded by another woman listening in on the conversation. “A husband and wife submit to each other and work together to make things work. Submission is really about talking. He has to submit too.” Another Lancaster Amish woman asserted, “English women want to be men. In our society, the differences are appreciated.” Besides, she added jokingly, “Women are glad to be women so they can boss the men around.” At this, her husband laughed and then joked that he wore the pants in the family, but his wife told him which ones to put on. More seriously, the wife told me, “It’s a universal, timeless fact that women tame men down. Women need lots of power to do that . . . they must necessarily have gobs and tons of soft power.” “What Amish women don’t do,” asserted a Michigan housewife, is go up to

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the husband and say ‘this is what we’ll do’ in public, but at home they’re not so shy.” Smiling, she added, “If you listen to the men speaking, it’s ‘this is what my mother did.’ Mothers rule the world.” Submissive Church Members As conversations with Amish women suggest, the Amish understanding of submission reflects the complicated place of gender within the church community. On the one hand, the relationship between male and female is hierarchical, with God over man, and man over woman. Yet that hierarchy requires submission at all levels. While women submit to men, men in turn submit to God, a submission that requires particular behavior on the part of men toward women. Men must follow Christ’s example. As one Amish publication put it, “When a man vows before God to take a woman as his wife, he is accepting responsibility for her physical and spiritual well-being until death parts them. He promises to provide and care for her and be the leader in the home. He promises to love his wife no matter what. . . . Every man who is blessed with a wife and children in a home of his own needs to recognize the awesome responsibility that comes with this blessing.”60 A minister writing anonymously in Family Life points out that scripture gives direction to both husband and wife. Whereas wives are counseled to “submit yourselves unto your own husbands,” husbands are reminded to be “patient, forgiving, tender, appreciative, and sympathetic, . . . reasonable, considerate, compassionate, courteous, and gentlemanly.” Similarly, one young wife told me that the husband and wife should be a “team.” If he’s a good man, she said, “he won’t just do what he wants.” Men, in submitting to God, must follow Christ’s example, caring for their wives as God cares for the church. At the same time, gender relations are further complicated by the understanding that in Christ’s church “there is no male or female” (Galatians 3:28), which mandates women’s equality as church members. Thus, while men preach, women make the church service possible by preparing the home in which it takes place. The wife hosting church with her husband is, like him, a church member acting to ensure the well-being of the church community. This shared responsibility for the well-being of the church community is evident in other patterns of social interaction that give women power and responsibility nearly equal to that of men. For example, women play an ac­

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tive role in the informal discussions and debates that underlie and constrain the exercise of formal power. Amish women, like men, are involved in choosing the candidates for the formal leadership posts of deacon, minister, and bishop, and they share responsibility for maintaining the Ordnung.61 Further, at Ordnungsgmay, the twice-a-year church service at which the Ordnung is confirmed by the membership, women, like men, must express their agreement if there is to be peace in the church.62 When I asked a Swartzentruber woman whether the ministers would listen to her if she had a disagreement with the Ordnung, she answered, “Of course. They would have to.” A woman who had grown up in a Lancaster church community asserted, “[Amish] women are very free to say what’s on their minds.”63 Both men and women participate in the Rat der Gemein, the collective decision of the church to which even the leaders are subject, and women join with men in exercising discipline over church members. Importantly, a woman’s responsibility as a church member trumps her role as a wife: if her husband is excommunicated, she is expected to shun him. The hierarchy that places men in authority over women operates in overtly religious contexts and in those situations in which the church confronts the public, non–Old Order world. A woman would never think of taking the place of a minister at church, but in her own home she does not hesitate to take her husband’s seat at the table when he is not there, figuratively and literally taking on the role as household head. Just as parents together have authority over and responsibility for the children, women stand with men as church members, dominant over and responsible for those not yet baptized and in opposition to worldly ways. Traditionally, what has been much more important than whether an individual is male or female is whether that individual is willing to yield their personal desires to the needs of the community. Men and women alike must learn to “give up,” to place the church community’s needs above their own desires. The goal for all is to trust in God, for only God knows what is planned. The family and church community both prosper when church members trust each other to act in good faith and give themselves up to the teachings of the church and Christ’s example. As one Indiana Amish woman put it, “I don’t think we are an elite or special people. [Being] Amish is our way of life, and it is our spiritual walk that is at the heart or meat of what really matters.” True submission, she added, “does not deny my own value or negate our differences. It offers my ideas, opinions, and strengths to you

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with the motive of adding something that only I can give; but this is an offer, not a command; a sharing, not a takeover; a giving of myself, not a powerplay.”64 When Submission Is a One-Way Street Telling me that Amish women had no difficulty speaking up in social gatherings or at home, a midwestern Amish housewife added, “unless [she’s in] an abusive situation.” As in all societies, sadly, such situations occur. When I asked her what she would tell her twenty-year-old self if she had the chance, a woman in her sixties said simply, “Make sure you really know the man you marry.” She added that after four years of dating, she hadn’t known her husband at all. “He was a different person when we got married.” Feeling as if she could do no right in her husband’s eyes, she noted that he didn’t seem to think of her feelings and spoke little but commands to her when they were alone. She debated going to the ministers but wondered what she could say and how. Writing to me about her own life, an Indiana woman noted that her mother was not verbal in a lot of the heart issues and looked to dad as having the answers and being the leader. Which I don’t think is wrong. The part that is underestimated is that a woman has a mind and brain that is very functional, useable, and valuable! . . . Anyway I think it is scary to some men, and we or I can be aware that I don’t lord it over them, yet realize in my own heart that I am of value and my place is right beside my husband (not under, over, behind or in front).65

She felt very passionate about this because it had been a journey . . . through a deep dark valley to come to this point. . . . Especially the search in learning what true submission is. Some of the questions that I really struggled with were: if in [sic] being submissive where do I have a voice? Do I wait till my husband asks what I think about something? What if he doesn’t ask? Then if I do speak without being asked and it is upsetting to him to hear my opinion, am I out of my place? And if I talk to anyone else about it, they will think I’m weird, and I’m the problem.

It was not, she noted, a pleasant part of her life, for she and her husband “were having children [who] needed constant care,” and she had “the work load of meals, cleaning, sewing, gardening, and chores.” Eventually she found herself having suicidal thoughts, but as she wrote in her letter, “in

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looking back I can see that God was with me, and my husband did listen if I spoke, even if he didn’t understand, he did care.” In finding her voice, “in being more free to talk of our feelings, thoughts and opinions,” this Indiana Amish woman found that she was better able to deal with the events of her life. The resolution is not always so easy or so happy, however. “If they [husband and wife] both want what’s right, then they’ll be OK,” one Amish woman told me, yet she described how her own marriage had been fraught with difficulties that had ended only with her husband’s death. Mutual submission does not take place in all Amish homes, and there are unhappy Amish marriages just as there are unhappy marriages in every society. Commenting sadly about a neighboring friend whose husband appeared to take his wife’s work for granted, one Swartzentruber woman questioned why “some men act that way.” Shaking her head, she noted that ministers had attempted to council the couple, but the husband “listened but didn’t change.” The Bible says wives should submit to their husbands, so when husbands ignore the part about loving their wives like Christ loves the church, the wives, counseled to be patient and pray, often find themselves alone, for even complaining can seem evidence of an unwillingness to trust God’s will. When it comes to the relationships between husband and wife and parent and child, church communities are often ill equipped to deal with church members who pay lip service to or are simply unwilling to yield to the church, for “giving up” depends on trusting that other church members sincerely desire to follow Christ’s example. But as one housewife said sadly about her bullying husband, “He’s different outside [in public].” An Amish publication aimed at those suffering abuse counsels, “The ‘abuser’ is different. He is frequently driven to abuse again and again, a pattern of controlling and hurting others to meet his own needs.” And, like many who are not Amish, families “must hide the torment; building a wall of shame, enclosing both victim and abuser, silencing the terrible secrets that many may know, but none accepts.”66 Ironically, greater assimilation may exacerbate such difficulties by separating the domains of men and women. As some church communities redefine their relationship with the mainstream society and allow church members to work for employers away from the home and even outside the church community, the relationship between husbands and wives in daily life changes. In such situations married men with families may work as wage laborers, while women are expected to remain home after marriage and certainly

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after childbirth, thus becoming financially dependent on their spouses. Further, when men leave the home and community for work, they are no longer there to help with children, to help with chores around the house if wives are busy, or to visit as neighbors drop by, nor can the wife help her husband with his work for she is not part of his work life. With income from the outside, she and her husband are much less active in frolics, the labor exchanges that help to keep farm families connected. Most important, men’s work becomes defined by specific hours of labor, and the result—the paycheck— is more reliable, tangible, and even more financially rewarding than days spent milking, planting, or harvesting with the rest of the household. At the same time, in the absence of their husbands, women take on even more responsibility for the day-to-day tasks of childrearing and homemaking. Because clothes must always be sewn, meals cooked, and children tended, a woman’s work is relatively constant and produces little in the way of bankable results, even with access to more labor-saving devices that the church Ordnung might permit and the increased income allow. Men have both more time and more money to do things outside the community than women do, especially women with young children. More important, as men leave the church community to take jobs in the non-Amish world, the church community may exert less control over individuals’ behavior. In a study of changes in the Amish community in Arthur, Illinois, sociologist Judith Nagata observed that growing commercial interaction with mainstream society and an emphasis on “extreme commercialism” results in “a changing ethic that pervades many aspects of behavior.”67 When the family works together on the farm, the church community more easily influences the technology used, the interactions that take place, and relationships in the family. It is far more difficult to control the behavior of men working for non-Amish employers in a public setting. Ultimately, assimilation can prove to be more confining for Amish women. As men take up wage-paying occupations outside the church community and married women do not, the distinction between men and women suggested by a hierarchy that places men under God but over women may be increasingly encoded in everyday life, potentially narrowing the range of acceptable female behavior. Isolated, dependent on male family members who have much greater access to financial and social resources, and with a diminished role in providing for the financial security of their families and in the church community itself, some Amish women find that submission

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comes to characterize an unequal relationship in which the husband has power and authority, and she is truly subordinate.68 Women’s Work? Hostetler argued that the extent to which Amish men help their wives in household tasks is “nominal.”69 Yet, as in mainstream society, the degree to which husbands help wives depends on the family. Austrian researcher Susanne Schwemmlein found that in Amish communities “cooperation between wife and husband differs greatly from family to family.” She cites a 1975 Family Life article that asserted, “Be willing to help your wife with many duties and she will be willing to help you,” noting that mutual aid between husband and wife is considered the ideal.70 A woman in a Lancaster daughter settlement told me bluntly, “They say in church the husband has to help the wife.” Her words were echoed by a Swartzentruber woman who told me that she saw few differences between the lives of her daughters and her own, except that “the boys help their women more than they used to.” There is a difference, however, between husbands helping wives at tasks that are women’s work and husbands and wives working together. In many Amish communities, while women and men may take responsibility for different tasks, they recognize their economic and social dependence on each other. Thus, as anthropologist Henrietta Moore puts it, “the ideology of complete male control over the productive and reproductive potential of the household has to be understood in the context of an actual reality of male and female interdependence.”71 In more conservative church communities, women have the assistance of their children, and they are also more likely to work with their husbands at farm chores and seasonal tasks. Women help men, and men in turn take part in a variety of activities the mainstream world might think of as women’s work, whether it is watching over offspring as they play outside, preparing the small garden plot for planting, or doing the grocery shopping. In conservative, technologically primitive Amish church communities, family interactions on the farm and in small shops cut across gender lines. Amish wives, mothers, and sisters are involved in a variety of ways with the work of husbands, fathers, and brothers, and vice versa. The involvement of women and men in each other’s work gives both an easy familiarity with all kinds of work and emphasizes the connections between diverse tasks. When I asked a harness maker if I could visit his shop and talk with him about his business, both the man’s wife and his sister

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joked, “in the shop, he won’t be too busy,” a mocking denigration of his daily labor. Both the harness maker and the other men present joined in the laughter. The teasing goes both ways. The harness maker claimed that he was the one who taught his wife to use a sewing machine. As families have moved off the farm, and as fathers work away from the home and children, there is less interaction between wives and husbands. Living lives less dependent on familial, intergenerational, and neighborly help, women in such Amish church communities have found a spiritual purpose in domestic tasks and motherhood.72 Writing to the women’s magazine Keepers at Home, which is read in more progressive Amish circles, one mother noted, “No one had warned me before I became a mother that an uninterrupted shower was actually a luxury. . . . No one had told me that I would lose my name and become Mommy, Mommy, MOMMY. . . . I didn’t realize that discussing events with my husband as we drove home would become all but extinct.” But, she concluded, “I am a mother. I am the heartbeat of the home. What a privilege! What responsibility lies in that! And what joy. Fulfillment of the most satisfying type comes through accepting my God-given role as a woman, a wife, a homemaker—ultimately, a mother.”73 An article in another women’s magazine, Ladies’ Journal, asked, “WHY is work—hard work—our measurement, determining if we are a true, good keeper of our home?” The author asserted, however, that mothering was her most important work and concluded that being a “keeper at home” really means to be a “keeper of the hearts,” “the sweet, little hearts God has given to our care.”74 In these relatively more assimilated Amish communities, men may help their wives, but they choose whether and when to do so, and the chores they help with remain “women’s work.” Men working for wages outside the home assume the role of chief breadwinner in their families and the most important contributors to the economic strength of the church community. Upholding that ideal, a woman identified only as “a daughter-in-law” wrote to Ladies’ Journal, “Let’s learn together to love, honor, and reverence our husbands. May we give them the attention and care that they deserve as the breadwinners in our homes.”75 As the Amish world has become more diverse, the lives of women in conservative and progressive Amish communities have evolved in new and sometimes paradoxical directions. Nevertheless, women in all groups continue— in different ways—to work together and support one another throughout the year and across generations.

C h a p t e r F ou r

Events That Bring Women Together

There isn’t much for me, except getting together with sisters and doing things such as chip making, butchering, or helping get ready for church. —An Amish housewife in central Pennsylvania

While “keepers at home” is a biblical expression widely used in Amish literature to describe women, it is not a phrase many Amish women use to describe themselves.1 Nevertheless, the home (and all that goes on in it) is women’s domain, and they embrace it. Undergirding all social relationships in the Amish world is the firmly held belief that God has established a natural order to life, more particularly that God created male and female to play different but complementary roles.2 Convinced of a divine plan, Amish women may help their husbands with farm chores or shop work, and Amish men may help their wives with children and canning, but all find that life goes more smoothly when men and women work in a complementary fashion. That they have an important role to play is an essential lesson for Amish girls, and their church communities, as communities of practice, provide the context in which they can engage with others to learn what they need to know to succeed as Amish women. While chores provide on-the-job training for children in the home, frolics (social gatherings to accomplish large tasks) and other mutual labor exchanges offer them the opportunity to practice their skills and to experience the balanced nature of male and female work on a larger scale. At frolics, Amish girls and boys learn the activities that keep their church

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communities economically, socially, and spiritually strong by working with their parents, siblings, and neighbors. Wenger suggests that gatherings such as these, which may reoccur, offer participants the opportunity to “produce meanings that extend, redirect, dismiss, reinterpret, modify, or confirm— in a word, negotiate anew—the histories of meanings of which they are a part.”3 By participating in such shared labor, young girls learn women’s work, how women’s work and men’s work together undergird the church community, and how gender can take a back seat to necessity under certain conditions. Getting Ready for Church Perhaps the most important frolic in the Amish world is getting ready for church. In response to a question about how important the church is, one Amish publication asserts, “It would be just as reasonable to ask how important a little child’s mother is. . . . Just as God is our spiritual Father, so the church is our spiritual Mother.”4 In working together to prepare a home for church, a family and its neighbors renew the understanding that God’s church offers “a means of fellowship among believers.”5 A family begins preparing to host the services weeks before it actually “gets church,” that is, before the announcement during the church service of where the next service is to be held. Because there is a rotation of the service from one house to the next, most families know when their turn is coming, and so they wait to schedule trips or other activities until their turn has passed.6 What follows the announcement are two weeks of intense preparation as the entire family readies the household to welcome the congregation. The work of getting ready for church is gendered. In a rough division of labor typical of Amish life, male members of the family take care of the outside, and females take care of the inside. Fathers work with sons to clean the barn and rake the yard. In the spring and summer, particularly in conservative, rural congregations, the family may hold the services in a barn or shed where it is cooler, and it is the job of the father and sons to ensure that the floor is clean. The mother and daughters concern themselves with the house, for even when the service is held in an outbuilding, the Sunday meal and the visiting that comes afterward take place in the family home. Generally, men expect and get very little help from their neighbors.7 The father puts his sons and/or his hired hand to work. If he does not have any sons or they are too young, he may ask a nephew or a neighboring boy for

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help. Women, on the other hand, expect and receive lots of assistance. Following the announcement that her family is next to host the services, a wife can count on her mother, sisters, nieces, married daughters, and neighboring women in the church district to help. If a woman cannot go herself, she sends a daughter to take her place. After all, someday the daughter will be hosting church, and taking part in such labor exchanges helps to strengthen the ties between families. Some help comes in the first days following the announcement of who has church next. Unmarried girls who arrive with their mothers—or are sent by their mothers—are assigned such jobs as washing windows, cleaning the pantry, or washing the outhouse. Those who come to help during the week before church is held likely assist in preparing the food served at the meal following the service. Amish females participate in the activities of their church communities at all stages of life. Young mothers who come to help bring their infants, who are held, played with, and comforted by the older girls and women who are working. Preschool girls encounter their age-mates, and older girls both watch them and send them on errands. Mothers supervise the big girls, who are learning by doing to prepare their own homes for church. No home is as clean as an Amish home made ready for church. The walls in every room are washed or even repainted. China cabinets are emptied, the shelves are dusted and polished, and each treasure is cleaned and replaced on the shelves. Young girls wash ceilings, walls, and woodwork. Even in the most conservative homes, where the doors to china cabinets are made of solid wood so that no one can see inside, each item is cleaned, a job that older girls like since it gives them the opportunity to handle their mother’s special dishes. New shelf paper is put down, even on the tops of cupboards so high that women have to stand on a ladder to reach them. Pots and pans are scoured so that the copper bottoms shine. Floors are washed, and in the most conservative communities that frown on linoleum and varnish, the wooden floors are oiled. It is hard work, but, as one woman put it, “I’ve always enjoyed the excitement and bustle of housecleaning, scrubbing porches, [washing] window screens, cleaning out corners, preparing food. It’s all part of our tradition and one I really enjoy.”8 By Saturday afternoon, if the family is holding the service in its home, the father and sons have put most of the furniture in a back room or shed so that there is room to set up the collapsible, backless wooden benches that provide seating for the congregation during the long church service. It is usually the task of older boys to fetch the benches from the home of the family that last

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hosted church, where they have likely been stored on the porch or in a bench wagon. Under the father’s direction, the boys unfold the benches and move them into place, a task made easier by practice. They already know where the preachers will stand to deliver their sermons or lead prayers and how to arrange the benches in the kitchen where the women sit so that mothers with infants can leave the room easily to feed a fussy baby or change a diaper. The young boys also are responsible for fetching the box of Ausbunds (Amish hymnbooks) and the bag or box of items forgotten at the last service. This lost-and-found box (bɛtlsə) contains such treasures as baby toys, scarves, handkerchiefs, and mittens, and at each church service it empties as families reclaim items and is refilled after everyone leaves and the host family gathers up forgotten items. Looking at a particular item in the box while her husband and sons arranged the benches, one woman told me that it must have been left by a visitor, since it had been in the box for some time. On church Sunday after the service ends, the father can expect help from other men to move the benches into place for the communal meal. In the kitchen, the women have already moved benches away from the cookstove so that the wife, helped by daughters and other women in the congregation, can serve the meal. Each Amish affiliation has its own menu for the communal meal that takes place after the church service. A standard menu, like uniform dress and Ordnung restrictions on household furnishings, serves as a symbol of the community, helps reduce any temptation to show off, and limits the amount of time and effort meal preparation might otherwise take. Some communities serve sandwiches after the service, and most groups make special spreads that are offered with bread. Author Pauline Stevick notes that the standard meal in one settlement where she attended church consisted of “homemade bread and/or store-bought bread, cold meats, and sliced cheese, cup cheese, pickles, and pickled red beets.” She adds that the women also set out butter “and a spread consisting of a mixture of honey and peanut butter.”9 The Swartzentruber Amish serve a bean soup that is made with bread and navy beans. In the fall, after the beans are gathered and dried, housewives take the time to sort through them, carefully picking only the best for use in the church meal. As I helped a visiting Amish friend sort navy beans for church in one Swartzentruber kitchen, the wife warned us to get only the good ones. The Amish helper laughed and told the wife to blame any problem with the soup on the two of us. This sorting happens with other foods as well: only the nicest peach halves are canned to serve at the Sunday meal,

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Schnitz pies ready for church. Photograph by the author.

and only the best apples are dried to make the schnitz filling for pies. When the Swartzentruber Amish gather after the service, they dip spoons into communal pots of bean soup and eat beets, pickles, and bread, followed by fruit and schnitz pies. Schnitz pies also turn up at events like barn raisings because they make it easy to feed large numbers, and making them is a tradition in many Amish communities. Among the Swartzentruber Amish, schnitz pies take the form of turnovers, easily cut in half and eaten without dirtying a dish. The Friday before her family hosts church, a Swartzentruber housewife and her older daughters get up early to make a hundred or more such pies. If her younger children are lucky, the first pies may come out of the oven in time to take to school for lunch. Making the pies on Friday ensures that there will be time to clean the kitchen and cook the meal before Sunday. Daughters learn not only what must be done but when. As researchers have noted, in hosting church, a family offers fellow church members the opportunity to inspect the home and judge its owners’ compliance with the Ordnung.10 In getting the house ready, young girls get onthe-job training in what is acceptable and what is not. Anything in the house

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that should not be there disappears during the cleaning. Ideally, the host family is not worried about what people will think nor is it hoping to show off. Instead, it has prepared the home to welcome friends and extended family to share in worship. The hard work is done in devotion to the Ordnung and to the church; that others share in it is a sign that the community is intact. Although single women and older women living in dawdy (retirement) houses do not “take church” themselves, if their home is connected physically to that of the hosting family or in close proximity on the same homestead, they too arrange to welcome fellow church members, not only by helping prepare the home of the hosting family, but by preparing their own. They also have lots of help, for women who have come to help clean the main house treat the dawdy house as an extension. Mothers may take small children over to the dawdy house to nap or play after church is done, and after the meal, visitors stop in. The church service lasts three to four hours, and even the youngest children stay throughout. During the service, young mothers often leave to nurse babies in a side or upstairs room or to take little girls out to the toilet. Fathers do the same with little boys. Apart from that, children are expected to be quiet, and parents often keep small toys handy just for church. Crackers and cookies may be passed among the congregation at some point, but these are for the youngest children, and by the age of five children are expected to ignore the plate as it goes by.11 When the congregation rises from its final prayer, it is time for the communal meal.12 As at weddings and all gatherings where a meal is served, women eat with women and men with men. The oldest church members come to the table first, and the littlest children sit on their parents’ laps. Older children play until it is their turn to eat. All children learn their place early; giving up, which means among other things accepting that God has ordained particular behaviors for people based on age and gender, is an early and repeated lesson. In preparing for church, in gathering to worship, and in eating the traditional meal, young Amish girls and boys internalize the standards of their church under the watchful eyes of their parents and others. Bowing their heads together in silent prayer before and after the meal, all members of the community are together in their devotion to God and the Ordnung. The church community survives and thrives because its members have shared values and goals and work together, and by doing things with others

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in the context of community, children learn this. In helping their mothers prepare for church, young girls are actively drawn into a practice that regularly sustains and renews the community. Their work is appreciated, and they learn that others will help them when they have their own home, acquiring the sense of obligation to others in their church community that comes with knowing that help given must be returned. In sorting beans or preparing fruit, they learn that the best must be given to others, another aspect of the submission that will become second nature to them as Amish women. Girls also learn that they will play a different role in their church community than their brothers will. Women do not serve as deacons, ministers, or bishops and so play no formal leadership role in the church community (see chapter 3). Nevertheless, they may marry a man who is later chosen for the ministry, and as one Amish minister wrote, “[A minister’s wife] shares [his] calling. . . . She cannot escape a share of the responsibility.”13 Further, while men do the preaching, women prepare the home in which the church service is held, and thus her labor makes church possible.14 The deacon’s wife bakes the bread for communion while her husband makes the wine. Both are necessary for the religious health of the church community. One Beef and One Pig Smaller family frolics, to which a family invites relatives and close neighbors, reinforce the lessons of hard work and gendered chores. Like preparing for church, these too demonstrate the complementary nature of male and female work in many Amish church communities. Equally important, the smaller frolic offers a more intimate context in which mothers and fathers can easily model for their daughters and sons the traditional tasks appropriate to their gender so that, at larger frolics, they can more easily join in the work. Young girls gradually learn to do the work of women while, at the same time, they come to appreciate the joys of working with others. As they mature and take on ever-greater responsibilities, Amish girls come to understand themselves and their place as women in the community. A butchering frolic involves both the outside domain of men and the household domain of women. Men do the killing and dressing of the cow or pig, and women process the canning jars filled with meat. Amish author Gideon L. Fisher remembers, “In my childhood days, a special custom for Amish farmers during the winter months was butchering as many hogs as there were members of the family. Often a few neighbors or relatives would

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go together to help out in the event. The women could help as well as the men. Usually they chose a cold crisp day in December or January. The day before was spent in preparing and cutting wood to heat the water, sharpening knives, and getting the butcher tools together.” The women’s work “was to clean the pig stomach and the small intestines, which were to be filled with sausage meats.”15 Butchering a pig, a cow, or both is an annual cold weather event in agrarian Amish communities, where families continue to work together to raise livestock, butcher animals, and preserve the meat. Generally, it happens late in the year, sometime between November and January when the temperatures are cold enough to preserve the meat between the time the animal is butchered and the time the meat can be smoked or canned. Filling the cellar with canned and smoked meat is the work of many hands, and a butchering frolic often brings together the families of siblings or, if the parents are not yet in a dawdy house, parents and married children. Butchering is labor-intensive, and there is work for everyone to do, from the oldest adult to the youngest child able to walk on its own. All are expected to help. The day before the frolic, the father of the family hosting the butchering slaughters the animal, and older boys help their father dress the meat. At the same time, their older sisters help their mother prepare pies, sweet rolls, and other snacks to sustain all who come to help process the meat. The youngest children make sure the woodbox is full to keep the stove going and to keep kettles boiling the next day, when the work begins early and in earnest. Most families butcher first the cow and then a pig or two—or vice versa— but a few do both at the same time. As one Amish housewife told me, “People with help like to do it all at once in one week.” Her brother-in-law had butchered two cows and three pigs at the same time: “We all pitched in. His sisters and his parents helped. There was meat everywhere you looked. His two married daughters helped too.” Still, the housewife noted, her brother-in-law never butchered like that “when he had all his help at home,”16 and she added that her sister-in-law “was responsible for all the canning. That’s too much. I hope none of the meat spoiled.” After a cow (“a beef”) is butchered, meat must be cut from the bones, and while the men cut off large chunks, the women slice it into smaller, more manageable pieces, dividing the meat into steaks and separating other pieces to be ground into hamburger or processed into bologna. After most of the meat has been cut off, the bones are boiled, cooking any meat that is left,

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which is turned into mincemeat or, perhaps, doused with barbecue sauce. “We like that,” one woman told me. “That’s real good.” Once the meat is off the bone, the work of preservation begins. Smoking meat is the men’s responsibility. Families locate the smokehouse away from the family home so that the smoke does not get into the house. Keeping the fire going long enough to smoke the meat requires lots of wood, and boys are charged with fetching it. Fathers decide when the meat is cooked, and they store the finished product in the family cellar.17 Women are responsible for preserving the meat by canning it or, depending on the church community, freezing it.18 If the weather is cold enough, some housewives may set aside steaks to be eaten fresh. Others like to slice the steaks thin, fry them, and then can them. They can chunks of meat, ground beef, and bologna. If a family is also processing a pig and/or a deer, then the ground meat is mixed together for sausage. While a cow yields beef chunks, steaks, and hamburger, a pig provides sirloins, ham, ribs, bacon, pork chops, and sausage. “A lot of women make liverwurst with the meat from the bone,” one woman told me, rhapsodizing about fresh pork. “I don’t. My husband doesn’t like it. He calls it ‘haw, drek, n spek’ [hair, dirt, and fat].” She does, however, produce pork sausage, making the meat into balls and then roasting them in her oven before canning them. Other women fill casings with ground sausage: one turns the crank that pumps sausage meat into casings, and the other holds the casings and smooths the filling as it goes in. In the absence of outside assistance, men and women help each other to do what needs to be done. Knowing that help would not arrive until the middle of the week, one Swartzentruber couple decided to go ahead with their plans on their own. The husband butchered the cow on Monday, and then together they “got it worked” on Tuesday, dividing it into chunks and ribs before grinding the rest. “I canned it on Wednesday,” the wife told me. “I done a lot of it in hamburger, which is easier.” Fortunately, by Wednesday, her married daughters arrived. While the housewife and her daughters canned the hamburger, her husband worked with his sons-in law to butcher pigs. “We dressed the four pigs on Wednesday and worked them up on Thursday,” he told me. The result, according to the family matriarch, was “60 pounds of pork rolls and 150 pounds of bologna. We canned it Friday. That was a lot more meat than usual!” Another housewife in the same settlement, whose family had just finished butchering, told me how happy she was to finally have mincemeat on hand again. “We [she and her husband] both love

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mincemeat. When I was pregnant, I craved it, and so this time I thought I’d make some.” She described how she had taken the “mince”—beef picked off the bone—and ground it up with apples, raisins, and spices. “It’s a half-andhalf mixture,” she noted, “half beef and half fruit and spices.” Hunting season and butchering weather often overlap, and if the family is lucky enough that a child or father has gotten a deer, then venison gets added to the store of canned meat. Unmarried girls frequently hunt along with their brothers. For several hunting seasons in a row, one young woman in a conservative Swiss Amish community shot the first deer.19 One Swiss Amish woman told me that after her husband has dressed the deer, she likes to process the venison right away, cutting the meat into chunks and roasts, grinding it up, or drying it for jerky. If the deer is killed late in the season or if the weather is cold enough and the family is ready to butcher its livestock, she adds ground venison to other meat, usually ground pork. There is a seasonal quality to Amish food storage. New chicks arrive in the spring via mail, some destined to replace the family’s flock of aging egg layers and others destined for eating. The meat chicks are butchered within two months of their arrival; the aging hens are butchered and canned in the early fall when the new chicks are grown and start laying. While both the raising and slaughtering of large livestock are the responsibility of men, raising chickens is women’s work. Women sell the eggs, and when the time comes, women butcher roosters and chickens, clean them, and can them. Married sisters help each other, or daughters help their mothers. After mothers cut the heads off, older girls (and any boys not working elsewhere) go to work, dunking the corpses in boiling water and pulling off the feathers. Young children are also pressed into service, keeping the woodbox filled so that there is boiling water to clean and can the poultry and fetching empty jars for the meat. One chore often leads to another. Butchering a cow means there is tallow for soapmaking, and butchering a pig means lard for baking. Butchering chickens means egg noodles. As one housewife told me, “When we butcher the old laying hens, we usually have a bunch of yolks inside. It’s so good for noodles.” Noodle making is another occasion for women to get together, for it takes time to make the dough, roll it out, cut the noodles, and dry them, and that offers an opportunity for socializing (see chapter 2). Butchering like this goes on throughout agrarian Amish communities as families fill their cellars so that they can eat through the winter. Young Amish children know intimately where their food comes from. They have

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seen calves born and have fed chickens. As she works with her mother to cut meat from bones, pluck chicken feathers, and can ground beef, a young Amish girl learns what she needs to know to run her own home. One woman, just returned from helping her brother-in-law, a widower, with his butchering, lamented to me that her older nieces had not been kept home from school to help, adding that the young girls “will never learn that way” to do it themselves when they have their own families. Implicit in her comment was that unless they work with others, her nieces will not learn to butcher meat and can it the way they are supposed to, and learning to work is more important than school. Hostetler writes, “The Amish home is an effective socializing agent that is directed at making the child a mature person in the Amish way of life.”20 At frolics, not only do young girls learn what they are expected to do and how to do them the way they should be done, but they also acquire a sense of accomplishment and confidence from the part they play in ensuring the family’s well-being, and they have a vested interest in the outcome. I arrived at one home not long after the family had butchered, and on her own, the eldest daughter, just a year out of school, went to the washhouse and filled a plastic bag with freshly ground beef. Giving it to me, she said simply, “Here. We butchered.” Other Food Frolics Like the processing of chickens, food frolics are women’s work.21 Taking place in the family kitchen, they reinforce the Amish understanding of women as responsible for putting food on the table to keep the family well. As little girls help their mothers, they become adept over time at every aspect of the process of food preparation and preservation. By the time they are in their teens, girls know what to do. They may not yet do it as well as older women, but they have come to appreciate the process.22 Particularly in farming communities, women come together to make fruit sauces and fruit butter or to process sauerkraut. Writing of a frolic to make pear butter, Rose Heiberger notes that when she arrived at her friend Emma’s farm, there were already four buggies parked in front of the stable and six bushels of pears sitting on the kitchen floor: “We sat down and began to work. . . . The quicker our hands, the faster our mouths moved! The pear butter frolic was well under way! We peeled, cut, cored, sliced and dumped! When the delicious, sweet smelling pear butter was ready, it was poured, hot and steaming, into the sterilized glass jars which were set in rows on the

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counter. Next the jars were placed in the pressure pots for processing. We all clapped our hands and shouted ‘All done!’ when the baskets were finally emptied.”23 And, as at most frolics, when the work was done, the women rested from their labors, drank coffee, ate cookies, pie, or ice cream, and talked. Canning pear butter or tomatoes is the type of traditional activity many non-Amish expect Amish women to engage in. After all, although many in the dominant society may be unclear about the specifics of Amish life, they expect the Amish to live old-fashioned, plain, simple, separate lives unsullied by technology, closer to God and nature. The Amish are supposed to be different from the English, living nineteenth-century lives in a twenty-­ first-century world. In her study of Amish-themed romance fiction, Valerie Weaver-Zercher writes, “The Amish are often viewed as chaste residents of an otherwise defiled larger culture . . . frequently imbued with power commensurate with their ability to abstain from what many view as essential intercourses of a technological age.”24 Similarly, in her study of Amishthemed tourism, Susan Trollinger suggests that tourists find the Amish fascinating because “they seem to live an authentic life. . . . They appear to have no pretense . . . to hide nothing. They look as though they exist simply and unselfconsciously in the world.”25 Many expect this supposed Amish simplicity and authenticity to show up in the quality of Amish food production. For example, although she asserted, “who better [than the Amish] to go to for produce,” one customer of an Amish produce stand said she felt betrayed when the watermelon she purchased proved to be tasteless. Assuming that real Amish shun all modern conveniences and lead lives removed from modern vices, many English shoppers look askance at Amish women who put candy and soda in their shopping carts. Author Sue Bender expressed dismay to find that the Amish family she visited used refined, white sugar. She later stayed with another Amish family that she deemed more authentic because they used honey and whole wheat flour.26 But Amish women come together to produce a variety of food items that might surprise mainstream observers. For example, when the fall comes and men have brought in the potato harvest, women make potato chips. Making potato chips is not hard, but it is labor-intensive and takes time. Men are responsible for harvesting the potatoes, washing them, usually in an old wringer washing machine,27 and then slicing them. Usually a husband will

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Frying potato chips is a fall frolic. Photograph by the author.

do this by himself or with the help of his sons the night before. He’ll leave the potato slices soaking in tubs of water until it is time to fry them. His wife and daughters do the actual cooking the next day. Centered as it is on a large kettle of boiling oil sitting on top of a fire, chip making is not for large groups. Rather, it is a chore for one or two families and therefore likely for sisters or neighbors. When a woman’s mother or mother-in-law is in the dawdy house next door, the two join forces. There are usually children around, of course, and so having an older child or an extra adult to keep an eye on little ones is helpful, but the work, done in tight quarters, is an intimate chore for those who are closely related or simply close friends. Women work together. One scoops potatoes out of the water and onto a towel so that she can press them dry. After separating the slices so that they do not stick together as they cook, she dumps them in the hot oil. Another woman stirs the chips in the oil so that they do not stick together, and when the cooked chips rise to the surface of the oil, she skims them off and dumps them onto paper towels to drain. Then she salts the freshly cooked chips or maybe seasons them with cheese or sour cream and onion powder, while the

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first woman dumps more potato slices into the hot oil. The women take turns doing the different tasks, resting in between, and sending older daughters to fetch coffee. And they munch on fresh potato chips. At one chip-making frolic I attended, two married sisters and their mother handled the chips. The three women took turns separating potato slices, frying and seasoning the chips, and keeping an eye on the children. The patriarch of the family stayed close by, joking that he had to taste the chips to ensure their good quality. As necessary, he and his sons-in-law took turns bringing in firewood to keep the stove going. By the end of the day, all three men were drinking coffee with their wives and eating chips. In only a few hours, the three women produced more than thirty gallons of potato chips, storing them in plastic buckets for get-togethers or quiet evenings. After a chip-making frolic with her sister, another woman had more than twenty buckets for her small family, which included her husband and five daughters. When I asked a couple of months later how many gallons remained, she laughed and said, “None.” As in other labor exchanges, children may not be actively involved at every stage of the work. Little boys can help gather potatoes and throw them in the washing machine, but they are not able to help with the slicing, which can be a dangerous task for little fingers. Similarly, little girls can fetch coffee and watch other children, but they need to be older to stir the frying potatoes. Still, I watched one preschool girl help her mother separate potato slices before they went into the hot oil. Watching older men and women work, boys and girls come to understand the steps involved in any activity and are ready to practice when the time comes. Little girls and their brothers understand that they do different tasks, but at the same time, they learn the joy of working together. Only when all play their part, the unwritten lesson goes, will the outcome be a good one. Community Frolics Frolics that bring families together from across the church community and beyond emphasize the broader importance of the lessons children learn through home chores and family-based frolics. At a large frolic, infants learn to be at ease with strangers, and young girls watch older girls they do not know well as they try to stay out of the way and be helpful at the same time. Girls out of school interact with young wives, and older women direct it all. In short, community-wide frolics offer an opportunity to practice in the larger church community the gendered activities and norms of the home,

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reinforcing the understanding that these define the church community and everyone in it. At one time, most Amish participated in shared labor and community-­ wide frolics. Data collected by the sociologist Victor Stoltzfus in the early 1970s, a time when most Amish communities were still largely agrarian, suggested that Amish farmers might spend as much as thirty days a year in such labor exchanges. As he noted, “Labor was frequently shared along kinship lines and neighborhood harvest rings for haying, threshing, and silo filling. Much of the capital was generated out of a very small initial investment and the slow buildup of profit and reinvestment. Other capital needs were frequently supplied by kinship resources.”28 Such shared labor and kinship resources still mark Amish life, particularly in more conservative, agrarian Amish communities. Perhaps the best example of community-wide shared labor in the Amish world is the barn raising, which remains a common event in agrarian Amish communities. As Amish settle in new regions, their non-Amish neighbors may be startled as a barn appears seemingly overnight. Ideally, a barn raising is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and husband and wife prepare accordingly. Scheduling it long in advance, they line up an experienced Amish builder, who will serve as foreman, and invite not only the neighbors, but also family and friends from a distance. Prior to building the barn itself, there are several smaller men’s frolics as neighbors or kin come together to mill the lumber, dig out the foundation, and pour the cement flooring. For each small frolic and for the raising itself, the husband is responsible for the lumber and cement and for inviting the men who do the building, but the wife makes the shopping list and plans the menus. At each gathering, women work to provide the noon meal and snacks for coffee breaks. “We give each other our labor,” one Amish builder explains. “We look forward to raisings. There are so many helping, no one has to work too hard. We get in a good visit.”29 Barn raisings reinforce community norms. For example, depending on the community, much of what is served at such a frolic is standardized. At a Swartzentruber barn raising, for example, the workers eat chicken that is prepared much like it is for weddings (breaded and baked), along with mashed potatoes, salad, bread, canned fruit, cakes, pies, and cookies. Raisings also reinforce the separation of genders as they eat and work. Men eat at tables set up in the house and outside, bowing their heads first for a silent grace. Their meal is followed by the women and children eating: the oldest are seated first, as the men finish. Dishwashing goes on constantly as women

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and older girls keep the table set for new diners. Later, while the men rest before slowly going back to work, the women clean up and start to quilt. The group around the quilting frame is fluid as women begin conversations, take breaks for coffee, help to prepare for coffee breaks, or stop to nurse or change babies. Little children mimic their elders. While little boys eagerly pick up nails, practice their hammering skills on discarded boards, or watch their fathers high up in the rafters, little girls, many hugging dolls and carrying smaller versions of their mother’s diaper bag, stay close to the women. Schoolgirls watch not only their younger siblings but other younger children, entertained by their behavior and eager to play with them. Candy bars are handed out to all the workers, while children enjoy lollipops and other treats. At a smaller house raising I attended in an Old Order community, there was a similar division of labor. The host and hostess set up a grill for hamburgers and hot dogs, and while women in the community sliced tomatoes, mixed salad, and offered cheese, macaroni and cheese, and cake and ice cream to the laborers, men took turns grilling meat.30 Although the family used paper plates, there were plenty of dishes to wash, and women set up an assembly line in the cellar of the new home while the men worked to raise the walls and get the roof on. With the washing up done, the women lingered outside, watching the men and talking. Frolics not only provide a safe context for Amish children to learn to act in gender-appropriate ways, they also provide an opportunity for young folk to interact outside of the regular Sunday singings. At one barn raising I attended, I stood with several older women who were watching two young Amish women talking with two young men who were taking a break. The girls stood on one side of a low fence and the boys on the other. I knew all four members of the group well and was aware that one of the girls was dating one of the boys. While it would have been unacceptable in this particular community for the young man and woman to be together in public as a couple since they had not been published, they could talk in a group, at least until they were called back to work. All four were likely well aware that they were being watched by women in the house and men high up on the barn. Just as food frolics bring women together, other farm labor is men’s shared work. Threshing circles, for example, are social labor arrangements between neighboring families. When oats are ready for threshing at one farm, men and boys from the three or four neighboring farms show up to do the work. The team then moves from farm to farm in the circle until all the threshing

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is done, working cooperatively in a way that saves time and limits the investment each family must make in threshing equipment. Yet even when the frolic is focused on the outside labor of men, women are usually involved, for the wife at whatever farm the team is working at provides the noon meal, and she is often helped by neighboring women, who know their turn will come. In the agrarian Amish communities that have limited technology and maintained community labor exchanges, women seldom work alone. While public attention often focuses on the teams of horses in the fields and the men hammering on a new barn, the women are working together behind the scenes, cooking, serving, and washing up. Finally, late in the year, when harvests are over and silos filled, neighbors often come together for a winter frolic—the ice harvest. Like threshing circles and corn husking, the ice harvest is accomplished by neighbors working together. Lacking refrigeration, many conservative Amish rely on ice cut from local frozen ponds, which is packed in snow and sawdust and stored in icehouses to cool milk, refrigerate food, and enable ice cream making. Arthur Bolduc describes ice harvesting in Mount Vernon, Ohio, as “more a social event” with a “near carnival atmosphere.”31 Ice harvesting, like many other frolics, begins days before the event. When the weather turns cold enough that farm ponds freeze over, farmers begin watching to see how thick the ice is. The Ohio farmers described by Bolduc waited until the ice was seven inches thick. Farmers in northern New York, who expect longer winters and colder temperatures, prefer that it be at least a foot. Barry Adams, reporting on an ice harvest for the Wisconsin State Journal, described ice blocks that were twelve inches by eighteen inches.32 Wearing cleats, men saw through the ice, making cuts at right angles. Some Amish communities allow the use of chainsaws, which are put to work on ice as well as on wood. Others use hand saws to separate the blocks of ice, which are then hauled out of the water with the aid of giant hooks, pushed to the shore, and loaded on a flatbed wagon pulled by a horse. When the wagon is full, the blocks go to the icehouse, where they are packed in layers, with sawdust and snow separating each block from the others. Again, frolics can bring young men and women together in a context that lets them interact freely in community-permitted ways. For example, Bolduc describes a lively competition between young ice cutters, who took turns to see who could push the blocks of ice farther toward the waiting wagon. He notes, “Young ladies bringing hot drinks and doughnuts for the working

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crew were interested in firing [throwing or sliding] cakes of ice across the pond. I don’t know if they got into the act or not, but in [the] last years I have seen some of them do better than hold their own, rapid firing cakes of ice to the shore.”33 Ice harvests in the Swartzentruber community in New York’s North Country are likely to be local affairs drawing neighboring men and boys together to the nearest pond. One farmer noted that several neighbor boys had helped him cut ice and that he would, in turn, help their fathers do their harvest, lending a hand himself because he had no “big boys” to send. Like butchering or chip making, ice harvesting often involves married siblings or parents with older and/or married children coming to help. Particularly in conservative Amish communities, each farm has its own icehouse, usually a wooden structure or a walled-off corner next to the milk house. Unlike some other conservative Amish groups, the Swartzentruber Amish do not use chainsaws, and so the ice must be cut with hand saws, broken off with picks, and hefted out of the water with large pincers; it is not work that women are expected to help with. Women do, however, keep the men and boys fed and well supplied with hot drinks. Young girls take thermoses of hot coffee and donuts to the workers, but they are likely to run back to the warm house as soon as they make their delivery. There was little of the carnival atmosphere Bolduc described at the ice-cutting frolic I attended, and none of the game playing. Content to watch from the house, one woman told me, “That’s men’s work.”34 Cutting ice or threshing oats is men’s work. Feeding men is women’s work. Pictures of barn raisings usually show men climbing high on the beams, not women mashing potatoes, but the Amish understand that such gatherings could not go on without the participation of women. As long as men do their work and women do theirs, men and women together can accomplish much more than either working alone. Particularly in agrarian communities, frolics reinforce the family dynamic in which all work together, each according to age and gender. Little girls take on increasingly important roles as they become more capable of doing larger tasks. At the same time, they learn other important lessons of being Amish: working together is fun, each individual has a place in the larger group, yielding one’s individual aspirations to the goals of the group is the ideal, and all must do their best or all will suffer. Most important, they learn that their work is valued and that their roles in the community are important.

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No Men Involved While women get involved in men’s frolics, if only to feed them, and men may help women with chip making or fruit canning when the work is overwhelming, men tend to stay away from tasks that women can clearly accomplish without them. Quilting, for example, is generally women’s work. Indeed, all women sew and quilt, and they teach their daughters how to do it as soon as the daughters are old enough. Little girls begin simple sewing before they start school, and by the time they have finished formal schooling, they are helping to make their own clothes. They have also started quilting. Quilts play an important role in Amish family life. John A. Hostetler, a sociologist who grew up Amish, describes them as “emblems of affection” and notes that they serve as “an extension of parental affection to the family, the kin group, and to the wider world,” underscoring “the importance of the transgenerational family.”35 Among the Swartzentruber Amish, all offspring receive three quilts when they turn twenty-one. As one woman explained me, there’s a quilt “for everyday use, which is tied; a plain, solid color quilt; and a good quilt, often a lone-star pattern, to be put on a bed when the family hosts church.” Folklorist Varick Chittenden notes that he talked with “one woman, a prolific quilter for the tourist trade, [who] laughed when I asked about the quilts she herself had received when she married. She told me that she had only received two quilts, one for every day and one plain one. Since she had gotten married when she was twenty and so owed her parents work, she told her mother that she would make the third one for herself. Now, twenty years after marriage, she still doesn’t have it.”36 Young girls are likely to practice their skills on the quilts that they will take with them when they marry. Chittenden reports that he once asked “two young women, one a relative newlywed and the other there to help her [as a hired girl], when they had started quilting. Both answered ‘fourteen,’ one adding that it was just after finishing school [at the end of the eighth grade].”37 Home with their mom or working as a hired girl, daughters at this age are engaged in the practical education that will enable them to keep house and raise a family. Sewing and quilting together with their mother and sisters, young girls learn while doing. Although it is traditional, quilting has become increasingly important in Amish women’s lives.38 Once simply warm and attractive bedcovers, quilts now serve to reinforce an Amish understanding of community and mutual

A quilt held taut in a frame, ready to be worked on, is a familiar sight in Amish homes. Photograph by the author.

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aid. The Amish do not purchase medical insurance, and so they must negotiate with doctors and hospitals to cover services. Writing about her Amish neighbors in Harmony, Minnesota, Drucilla Milne reports that Amish women might come together to work on a quilt that will later be sold to help pay medical bills.39 In upstate New York, Swartzentruber women gathered to work on a queen-sized quilt, which they presented to a state legislator. Their hope, they said, was that the quilt might be sold and the money donated to a local volunteer fire department, which had been instrumental in helping the Amish community when two young Amish girls were kidnapped in 2014. (They were later safely returned to their families.) Quilts have also become an important source of income for many families.40 Some Amish quiltmakers supply English stores with quilts on consignment, while others piece quilt tops for neighbors who are having frolics and do not have time to piece a quilt and get it into the frame. Nowadays, women in the most conservative communities vie to be chosen as quilters for quilt dealers in more progressive communities, who are marketing handmade Amish quilts to the lucrative tourist trade. Older women in the community often share tops they have received with younger women who are eager to earn extra income for their families, an incentive for them to hone their quilting skills. Quilting pieced quilt tops that were likely put together by other Amish women in distant communities, Amish women earn a set price for every yard of thread they use. Indeed, the finished quilt in a Lancaster County shop often reflects the specialized labor of different women in widely separated settlements—a sharp contrast to the quilts made for family use in isolated, conservative settlements, which are likely the product of a single woman, a mother-daughter team, a gathering of sisters, or a group of neighbor women passing time while the menfolk build a barn. Yet despite the economic importance of quilting, quilting bees remain an opportunity for sisters, nieces, married daughters, and other close relatives to come together for an afternoon of catching up and fellowship. Amish author Marianne Jantzi recalls how, for her thirtieth birthday, her sisters “put a quilt in a frame and invited the . . . cousins in to quilt, visit, and eat.” Since then, she writes, “each glimpse of my lovely quilt reminds me of that wonderful day.”41 I was invited to attend such a “sisters quilting,” which was arranged by a single woman living alone for all of her sisters, their unmarried daughters, and a neighboring housewife, who arrived with her two preschool-age children. The hosting sister worried for days in advance about what to serve,

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To make egg noodles, one Swartzentruber housewife has mechanized the process. Instead of cutting the noodles with a knife, she folds the dough several times and uses a meat slicer to produce even noodles. Photograph by the author.

finally deciding on “yamasetti” (a noodle casserole), applesauce, cake, fruit, and pecan pie. By the day of the event, she had also added ice cream to the menu. The day of the quilting, most of the invited women and girls gathered around the frame, and there was generally more talking going on than stitching. One sister was wearing gray and sitting back from the others, unable to quilt because of arthritis in her hands, and the others called her “Grandma.” Another sister was unable to attend but had sent a letter, which the eldest read to the assembled group, who applauded her reading style. (“Just like a preacher!” said one.) The women laughed, joked, and played rhyming games about the colors of their dresses, which were, of course, identical in style: the one wearing green wants to be seen, the one in plum makes the boys come. Throughout the afternoon, while the sisters talked, their unmarried daughters and nieces watched, stitched, laughed, and listened. Younger children played under the quilt frame. By the end of the afternoon, the quilt was nearly done, but much of it was hidden under bowls of pretzels and wafer cookies, needles and thread, handfuls of M&Ms, pin cushions, and a box of chocolates someone had brought. The quilt featured hanging hearts in the border, feathered hearts in each corner, and a big rose in a feather ring. The hostess claimed that “there’s no quilt so sweet without a rose so sweet,” and thus the completed quilt was a very sweet one indeed. Eventually, having finished the quilt, the women sat together to drink coffee, eat just one more cookie, and talk about children’s activities, gardening plans, what they had read recently in the Budget or Die Botschaft,42 and the events that occupy their days. One wanted a recipe, while another asked

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whether anyone had experience with a salve she had heard about. One sewed a new mop for her daughter, a thick cloth with a hole in the middle that would fit over a long wooden handle. An older mop got a workout when one of the children knocked over a coffee cup on the floor. As buggies headed down the lane, the hostess commented to me how nice the falling snow was and how her puppy was “pretty proud about the day,” the little Chihuahua standing in for the hostess. Changing Ways Through both their play and their work, at home and at frolics, children come to be Amish by actively engaging in the meaningful activities of their world. Little girls get a sense of the women they should grow up to be by watching the women around them: their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and older sisters. Interacting with other little girls, they see that those peers are learning the same things.43 They see what they should do and what they should not, and they learn early that boys and girls have different chores. Yet not every Amish child has the same chance to join with others in the community at frolics or other mutual labor exchanges. Barn raisings, butcherings, and other such gatherings have become increasingly rare as church communities have allowed more technology and encouraged wage labor or the establishment of nonagricultural enterprises. As larger and more progressive settlements have moved away from their agrarian base, families no longer come together to harvest, and generations interact differently than they used to. Children have fewer opportunities to work with their parents and grandparents to learn the skills that maintained their communities for generations because those particular skills are no longer relevant. As one Pennsylvania woman put it, “In our area, there aren’t many get-togethers [nowadays].” This shift from a reliance on labor shared among many families to individual activity has affected even the most personal relationships. “Families don’t socialize in the same way,” observed a Lancaster Amish father when I asked about frolics and other get-togethers. A Lancaster woman told me simply that “family life just evolved with change. Now we have our family time with vacation. We don’t socialize with chores, but we make it a point to have family day.” A housewife from central Pennsylvania wrote to me that she would get together with her sisters “about once in every 2 months . . . and just spend the day visiting or doing our own sewing of some kind.” “I’d gladly do that more often,” she added, “but my other sisters are busier

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Amish women work together to make and sell food for a fundraising auction. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

and more tied down with housework, etc. at home. I’m the oldest and now have my daughter’s help.”44 As a result, children spend less time learning routines and practicing tasks in the setting of the larger church community. The community of practice evident in frolics has weakened as individual families take on greater responsibility for teaching children the skills they need to work with other members of the community. Work ties and labor obligations have given way to other kinds of bonds formed through social gatherings. As families leave the farm and as children and neighbors forge more independent lives, other events bring women together, reinforcing social ties. There are, for example, school picnics at the end of the year, when the mothers put on potluck meals for the children while the fathers play baseball with the scholars. There are also shared shopping trips or get-togethers to help elderly kin. Other commitments, including mission work, turn participants toward the world outside the church community. For example, Jantzi writes about a gathering to sort cast-off sheets from local motels, which were then sent, via a local Mennonite church, for use in Third World coun-

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tries. “A comfort knotting for [a quilt donated to the] Mennonite Central Committee is a yearly thing,” a woman in Pennsylvania told me.45 In events like these, Amish women redefine the boundaries of their church communities, finding connections in work done for outsiders rather than in activities performed for the church community. As in the most conservative communities, little girls learn to work hard at particular tasks, to help their mothers, and to participate in increasingly fluent ways in the activities of their church communities, but those activities may also take them into the non-Amish world quite differently. Other gatherings explicitly focus on women’s lives and women’s connections, bringing participants together because of shared interests as much as any need to accomplish a particular task. The owner of a Lancaster County herb shop, a single woman, told me that she finds her business “fulfilling” and so doesn’t take much time off, but she enjoys attending Ladies’ Day. “Ladies’ Day is a group that gets together four times a year to talk about nutrition and healthy eating.” She added that “a bunch of Ladies’ Day members” were her customers, and through the Ladies’ Day events she had learned many things and gotten to know many people. Describing life in her In­ diana community, one woman told me, “Women here, we have hen parties,” in which “once a month mother, daughters, and in-laws get together. Maybe in the morning we work, and in the afternoon, we do hand-sewing. We get together in different places.” Sometimes, she added, a hen party is “just friends [who] get together.” Similarly, a Pennsylvania woman wrote of “tea parties” and cookie exchanges with her sisters-in-law.46 Finally, families come together not for work but for fun. “Ice cream socials around here are just the thing,” a midwestern Amish woman told me. “We also call them family nights.” She added that she and her family would get together with the neighbors in their immediate area, taking turns to host the gathering. While the hosting family provided the ice cream and the “warm food,” others brought salads and snacks. Such gatherings provide many families with a busy social life that may have little to do with getting any work done or ensuring that family and community have enough to eat and enough fuel to keep warm. More important, as get-togethers have become more social and less focused on accomplishing essential tasks, how they structure relationships within the community and, consequently, the participants’ identity as members of an Amish community changes. For example, one woman, noting that at one point she

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found herself attending three hen parties a month along with two evening ice cream socials, admitted to me, “It’s not always a good thing. Children are unsupervised while their parents are visiting. They get too well acquainted and become too bold.” In other words, such occasions serve more to give adults a chance to socialize than to teach children how to interact in ways that support the church community. Another woman lamented that even family gatherings were increasingly hard to arrange as children got older, further evidence that children are less integrated into the rhythms of family and church. In these Amish communities, life is no longer as structured by seasonal events, necessary labor exchanges, or a commonality of tasks. For the most part, women work alone to accomplish household tasks, and while their daughters may do chores, changes to household technology mean that getting things done does not require as much help. While mothers bring children to social events, and older daughters still watch toddlers, the next generation is less involved in mastering the traditional tasks that link them to previous generations. The End of Life In all communities, families come together when someone dies. Like weddings, funerals are events for the church community, and men and women both play their parts. Funerals emphasize the passage from the worldly, transient life to an everlasting one. Whether the deceased is male or female, the ritual follows a pattern that emphasizes equality in death. The end of life for an Amish church member means visits from relatives and old friends, who sit by the dying one to talk and visit with others who have come. It is a quiet time of both reminiscences and catching up. When one elderly woman suffered a stroke, her daughter moved her from the dawdy house next door into the larger family home, and several of her grandchildren moved in to help take care of her and to help with the cooking and cleaning. From the time she became bedridden until her death several weeks later, community members were there, taking turns to stay by her side at night so that family members could catch up on sleep. The Amish welcome and use hospice services, but it is the community upon which the family depends, and church members are there to talk to the dying friend or relative and to share stories with each other. When death comes, calls go out to other communities to inform friends and family members, and all communities keep lists of non-Amish phone

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numbers for such occasions. The script for such calls is brief and to the point: the name of the deceased, their age and spouse, and the time and place of the funeral. In distant settlements, such calls result in messages carried to neighbors, hurried packing, and arrangements to get to a bus or hire a driver. Those who are farming must make arrangements for a hired hand to help with chores, while those with children must find someone to care for them. When the deceased is a child or an infant, fewer Amish attend. At the funeral of a child who had lived only a week, the older daughters of a neighboring family rather than their parents attended. If the child is stillborn, then the funeral will likely include only the immediate family. On the other hand, when the deceased is elderly and death is expected, families prepare in advance and attendance at the funeral is large. One housewife, knowing that her mother-in-law was not likely to live long, raced to sew overcoats for her older boys, who would be accompanying their parents to their grandmother’s funeral. When death is sudden and unexpected, friends and family must hurry to make arrangements and not all can attend.47 There are no gender differences in Amish funeral customs, for in Christ all are one. There are no flowers, and the service takes place in the home of the deceased or a close relative, either in the house or in a nearby barn or tent. Supervised by the oldest married couple in the congregation who are not family members, women clean the house and manage meals for the family and visitors, while men take over any barn chores and set up church benches so there will be a place for all to sit as they hold vigil until the funeral, leaving the family of the deceased to mourn in peace. In most communities, a local funeral home prepares the body, returning it to the home for the funeral; in the most conservative communities, the oldest women who are not family members wash and dress the body of a deceased female, while their oldest male counterparts prepare a deceased male for burial. The clothing in which the deceased is dressed has been made by a female relative, and the hair is dressed and the cap put in place or the beard combed by someone who knew the deceased well and had sat by them at numerous worship services, weddings, or frolics. The coffin is built by a local Amish carpenter. Once the body has been prepared, it is laid out in a side room for visitors to come and pay their respects. In some communities, the body is never left alone. In Arthur, Illinois, for example, two or three family members stay with the body day and night.48 Among the Swartzentruber Amish, two couples, one young and one old, stay with the deceased through the night.

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Amish men dig a grave for a church member. At the home of the deceased, women prepare meals to ensure that all who come to mourn are fed. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

During the day, the rest of the house is full but quiet, the main room emptied of most furniture and church benches set out to accommodate visitors. As newcomers enter the room, they shake hands with those who arrived earlier. For visitation, the benches are scattered and often shoved aside as people come and go. There are always children around, not only those who are family members of the deceased, but also those who have come with parents to visit or help with various chores. At various times during the day, visitors are invited to enter the room where the deceased is laid out to see the body and offer their respects. Even the youngest children go in, learning early that death is a natural part of life. At the funeral of a young boy who died in a logging accident, one father held his young son, pointing his son’s gaze toward the dead boy’s face and talking quietly with an English visitor about how little the accident showed. Seeing the body makes clear, even to the youngest, the reality of death, and most Amish are appalled at the thought of a funeral with a closed casket, deeming such a practice unnatural. Following the drowning death of one community member whose body was not found immediately, several friends and family told me how relieved they were that even several days later, the coffin could still be open.

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On the day of the funeral, men arrange the benches much as they would if the family were hosting church, with the exception of the benches in the main room, which are arranged so that the coffin rests in the middle and family members can sit around it. Then, with women sitting together in one room and men in another, the service begins. Those who will preach the funeral service have been notified in advance, and it usually falls to a minister in the deceased’s own church community to preach the main sermon. Usually there are two who preach, but there may be only one if the funeral is for a child. When it is time for the service to begin, the preacher takes up a position between the main room and the kitchen so that all can see or hear. There is no eulogy. The preaching at a funeral references the life of the deceased but focuses on the need to prepare for the inevitability of death. When the deceased is an infant or a young child, then the message stresses the child’s blamelessness and the sure welcome that awaits it in heaven. When a young man coming home late from a date was struck by a car, the preacher noted that although the young man had not yet joined church, he had decided to be baptized. As one Amish guide puts it, “Through cases of death, we are reminded anew time and again that we must die, that our life has a goal (will end), and that we must depart from here. The funeral sermon shall be conducted accordingly, and not too much be said about the deceased. The good qualities (attributes) of the deceased may be held up as examples and models, but this does not require much time. The most devout (godly) man still has too many weaknesses to allow him to be held up as a perfect example. Christ alone is a perfect example.”49 Life goes on even as the service acknowledges death. Little girls play on their mothers’ laps, while toddler boys squirm or sleep on their fathers. Periodically, young mothers take babies past the preacher to head upstairs for a diaper change or a nap. There is no singing at a funeral service. Following the preaching and prayers, the first preacher reads the obituary of the deceased. Then the coffin is moved to make it easier for the congregation to file past, saying a last farewell before the lid is closed and the coffin is taken to the cemetery. For a well-known church member or one from a large family, a funeral service may be preached at several homes simultaneously to accommodate a large number of mourners. The death of a bishop in one settlement brought attendees from a number of states, and the service was preached in three homes. Later, the coffin was brought out of the bishop’s home and placed

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on supports in the yard so that all who had attended could file past to see him one last time before the burial. After a final prayer, the casket was put on a wagon for the ride to the cemetery. When the bishop’s wife passed away only a short time later, many of the mourners were still there, and her funeral was also conducted in multiple venues because all the mourners could not fit in one house. The final good-byes are said at the graveside. Again, children of all ages are in attendance, learning early that life ends. A hymn is read, and the grave is filled in. Then, family and friends return to the deceased’s home to share a meal prepared by women in the community, leaving the deceased with their brethren in an Amish cemetery, typically established on land donated by an Amish church member.50 Later, a marker, likely made by another community member, is put on the grave. In joining to mourn, the Amish reinforce their understanding of life in this world as a journey to eternal life in the next. Remembering the death of a child, her mother remarked to me, “Our youngest girl left us a long time ago. She was six, killed in a car accident. We think she’s lucky.” Her daughter-­ in-law nodded, adding, “We know where she is.” Yet life in this world goes on, and gatherings like funerals, which involve the entire church district and bring together family and friends from long distances, help to ensure future weddings and other gatherings, for they bring the young folk together. While the kinds of gatherings have changed as Amish groups have ­adopted new technology and left the farm behind for manufacturing and factory labor, church services, frolics, and family events help ensure the continuity of the Amish. Through such get-togethers, young girls and boys are socialized to share the norms and patterns of behavior that will be expected of them as adults. As young women grow up working with older ones, they prepare for the time when it will be their turn to contribute to the church community by marrying and working with their husbands to raise children who will carry on the traditions.

Chapter Five

Women Out of the Ordinary

I observed that singlehood is nothing to fear. Really, no position in life is to be feared if God walks with us. —“A Satisfied Spinster”

The bedrock of Amish life is family and church, the latter being in a real way the former writ large. In both, women play the key roles of helpmeet and mother. Keepers at Home, a magazine read by many Amish women,1 argues, “Mothers are the vessels that God uses to carry a little soul and bring it into this world.” Further, “God needs women who are willing to work behind the scenes, women who are willing to love, honor and obey their husbands, women who pray earnestly and without ceasing (I Thess. 5:7) that God will lead their husbands according to His will as leader of their homes.”2 Women are supposed to marry, support their husbands, and raise children up in “the way they should go” (Proverbs 22:6). The Amish norm is a married woman with children, which raises the question of what becomes of women who do not fit this pattern: single women, married women without children, and widows. Married women without children are helpmeets but not mothers. In the first year or two of marriage, this is sufficient. As time passes and children do not arrive, couples help with nieces and nephews. In more progressive communities, childless couples may adopt children or serve as foster parents. They still host church in their homes, but widows and single women do not. Widows are no longer helpmeets, but if they have children, they re-

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main part of the family lives of their offspring, and so take part in the many social and work exchanges that structure family life. Neither helpmeet nor mother, single women are not part of any immediate family unit except that in which they were raised. They often take care of their parents until they pass away and may continue to occupy the dawdy houses, living attached to relatives but separately, or they may live alone. In this chapter I explore the lives of Amish women who do not have the kind of lives they have been raised to expect. Traditional gender expectations continue to structure their lives, even as circumstances prevent them from meeting those expectations. Some women have options unavailable to others, but all are challenged to accept what they understand as God’s will. Single Women Perhaps no one is further from the Amish norm than a single woman well into her twenties or older. Writing in Mennonite Quarterly Review, for example, Thomas J. Meyers notes, “Amish society exerts strong pressures on young people to marry. Singleness is much more stigmatized than in the dominant culture. Every Amish child—and particularly an Amish girl—clearly receives the impression that marriage and family are among the most important components of adult life.”3 As a Lancaster County Amish woman told me bluntly, “Marriage changes your status.” Upon being wed, a woman sits with the married women in church and anticipates the day when she and her husband will host the congregation in their own home. In many Amish groups, married women wear different head coverings than their unmarried counterparts. A married woman often plays a different role at gatherings. For example, at weddings, she is a cook, not a table waiter. But most important, once married she has a home with her husband and looks forward to children. By their late twenties, after the time most couples have married and left the young folk, single people stand out for failing to take that last step into Amish adulthood. Actually, it is more acceptable in Amish life to be a single woman than to be a single man. After all, Amish men must take the lead in initiating dating and marriage. As one woman pointed out, “Boys have more choice. They can go visiting. For girls, it wouldn’t be so proper to be visiting all around.” If a man is not married, then it is his own fault. Women, on the other hand, must be asked.4 And those who are not asked must at some point accept that they will not be any man’s helpmeet. Leaving the young folk and sitting with the older women in church signal a single woman’s acknowledgment that marriage is not likely to be in her

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Walking a path for which they were not raised, single Amish women often find they are regarded differently from their married peers. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

future, and so she must simply do the best she can and accept what comes. In other words, it is a sign to all in the church community that she is giving up and accepting her single status. As noted in chapter 2, children are taught from infancy to be resigned to the will of God.5 Gelassenheit undergirds the Amish way of life, fostering obedience and humility, as well as a willingness to work hard and help others.6 A mother teaches these lessons when she holds her infant’s hands together for prayer or takes part of a cookie away from a two-year-old to give it to a one-year-old sibling. A little girl learns these lessons when she submits to having her hair braided. Older girls learn them when they must care for children or help at frolics or are forbidden a dress because the color is not permitted by the Ordnung. Over time, giving up becomes an embodied action, a mark of the individual’s active participation in Amish life. In putting on the cap of a married woman, a single woman enacts a core value of

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Amish life. She yields herself to God’s plan for her, accepting as a church member that this is simply how it will be. A single woman can adopt the married woman’s cap and sit with her married peers at church at any age, but most begin to do so in their late twenties or early thirties. One woman told me that she decided to stop attending young-folk gatherings when she was thirty-one and that “the decision was a challenge.” An older man who, with his wife, sometimes chaperoned young-folk gatherings in his community described two women in his community who, at twenty-six, were “just about past that time.” “They still go with the young folk,” he said, “but as they get older, they go more sporadically to the singings and then stop going. It’s an individual choice.” In a conversation over coffee, another woman, now nearing fifty, recounted to me that she had been thirty-two when she decided to stop sitting with the young-folk girls and join the women at church, adding simply, “I was old enough that I just wasn’t interested [in the young folk] any more.” When they cease to participate in young-folk activities, single women are not called “girls” any longer, but “older girls” or “single girls.” “We have older girls,” a Lancaster County woman told me. “They’re ladies and will sit with the ladies [meaning the older women, most of whom are married].” She went on: “When a female gets older, they’re an old maid, but you hate to call them that. In their thirties and forties, they’re an older girl. They’re a woman, but we’d just call them an older girl.” Pausing to reflect on what she had just said, she added, “ ‘Single girl’ is a nicer phrase than ‘older girl.’ ” In groups that make a distinction between church caps and everyday caps for unmarried women, leaving the young folk means adopting the church cap of a married woman. For example, among the Swartzentruber Amish, girls in their teens adopt the white adult cap for everyday use, but they continue to wear black caps to church. When a Swartzentruber woman leaves the young folk without marrying, she begins to sit with the married women instead of with the young girls, and she puts on the white church cap of her married counterparts. In larger settlements where there is a critical mass of single women, they may continue to meet socially after leaving the young folk. One Lancaster woman, for example, told me that her community had an “older group of youth” who get together regularly to enjoy a meal and fellowship. A single woman now living in New York told me, “Down in Ohio [in the larger settlement where she had grown up], there are a lot of single girls, and they get together, but up here there are not really so many.”

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Single Girls Newsletter began publication in 2013. Photograph by the author.

The Challenge of the Single Life Not dating and no longer anticipating marriage, women in the “older group” find that they are regarded differently. “They are members of our church, and in our community we would frown on anyone saying unkind things,” an Andy Weaver Amish man told me. But, he acknowledged, “there are some who are less sensitive than they should be” in talking about older single church members. As one single woman told me, she and her counterparts “mingle and are involved and people look at you and say they enjoy you,” and yet “we [single people] are just not normal people.” Indeed, single women are often the objects of pity. A married Swiss Amish housewife, talking to me about an unmarried niece, claimed that females are born with a desire to mother, for “even as little girls, they play with their dolls.” Noting how

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much single women give up by not marrying, she asked, “What woman wouldn’t want to have children?” “A lot of Amish are so focused on family that it’s hard for single girls,” another Amish housewife told me sadly. A letter writer to the Amish publication Family Life mused, “I have often wondered if we truly appreciate these single girls as we should. Maybe we take them too much for granted. We should take time to thank them for the little things they do for us. We should lend an ear when they need someone to talk to about their problems. We should make them feel needed and wanted in the church and the community. This should be a challenge for all of us.” 7 Certainly, single women feel the challenge, for they struggle to find their place in a community built around married couples. Writing in the Single Girls Newsletter, for example, one woman revealed, “I had a jolt recently when I was at a wedding dinner. It was the first I realized it is becoming [the Amish] style to seat husband and wife across the table from each other. It hit a sore spot for me, but there was also another single and a widow there so we could sit together. It is the same in a van while traveling. The men used to take the back seats and the women sat in front. Now couples sit together. Where shall we sit then?”8 Acceptance of God’s Plan Concerns about the difficulties faced by single women in their church communities led to a remarkable exchange in Family Life.9 A letter to the “Problem Corner” from a woman writing under the pseudonym “A Fulfilled Mother of Marriageable Daughters” asked what to do to help her daughters either find husbands or adapt to a single life. Worried both about her daughters’ happiness and about their future in a community of eight church districts in which the ratio of unmarried and unattached young folk over the age of twenty was twenty-nine men to forty-eight women, she lamented: Many of these girls can expect to remain single, as most of the boys their age will probably choose girls who are under twenty at this time, with the girls of more popular families being chosen first. God has planted in every normal girl a desire for a husband and children to love and cherish, and to be loved and cherished in return. This desire is right and proper and necessary. So my question is, how can we mothers help our daughters cope with the strong probability of singlehood and the agony of shattered or unfulfilled dreams and of thwarted motherhood? The single life, of course, can be fulfilling but

Women Out of the Ordinary   139 generally it is better to marry, unless someone like the Apostle Paul chooses not to in order to serve the Lord better. Should we encourage more of our girls to go to other communities to teach school, etc. where they may find companions? Our young men, of course, could seek companions in other communities better than girls, and besides, no girl wants to be accused of looking for a husband!

Highlighting the expectation that Amish women should marry and raise families, she implored readers to tell her what she could do to help her daughters lead “fulfilled” lives.10 The responses from both single and married women emphasized acceptance of God’s will in the matter. For example, “Mother of a Happy Single” wrote, “In general, there are more girls than boys, so we can only conclude that God has not meant that all girls shall marry. The important thing is finding fulfillment in Christ. If we find that, we will be happy single or married. As singles learn to serve others, life can be full, rich, and rewarding. As we submit to God’s will, we will find contentment and enjoy singlehood. By bringing sunshine to others, you will spill it on yourselves!” She went on to suggest that by giving up to their single state, the young women provide an example for others to follow: “As I observe the singles in our community, I am thankful and rejoice to see the contented looks on the girls’ faces as they reach out and work in God’s vineyard. They are well accepted in our area, with no shame attached to them.”11 Similarly, a single Amish woman from Lancaster County wrote, “God never planned for women to seek men for themselves or for their daughters. Man was not made for woman—woman was made for man. (See 1 Cor. 11:9.) Being single is not a serious problem if one gives Christ first place in her heart, and in most cases the single woman can serve the Lord just as well or better.”12 A Canadian Amish woman wrote that she had been raised to be a “keeper at home, to love little children, to be submissive to my parents and my church” and felt she was single only because there were not enough men for every woman to have a husband. “Let us simply face this fact,” she asserted, “and live the lives God wants us to.”13 Others advised “Fulfilled Mother” that she herself needed to submit to God’s will so that she could help her daughters do so. One reader, for example, urged her not to give her daughters “a stone when they ask for bread”: If you can’t accept singlehood for your daughters, how can you teach them that seeking God’s will is the answer to a fulfilled life, not marriage? After all, we are

140   The Lives of Amish Women married or unmarried because it is God’s will, not because of how many good points we have. Nowhere in the Bible can we read that single women who serve the Lord receive fewer rewards than the married women. The self-sacrificing jobs of teaching school, caring for the elderly or invalids, hired girls, etc. are as beloved in the sight of God as the work of a mother.14

“A Pennsylvania Mother” wrote of her “respect and admiration for the older girls who accept God’s will and gracefully fill their place in the community. Much more so than for some of the married women who were chosen while young and never learned to fully yield to God’s will.”15 Her sentiment was echoed by “A Grandmother in Iowa,” who expressed surprise at the question and noted her feeling that “our attitudes as parents will make it easier or harder for our ‘marriageable’ daughters to accept their status should they be called to the single life.” The grandmother went on to assert that it should be “much more important to be serious-minded Christian girls and upbuilding church members, whether married or not” and recalled “the submissive attitude of an elderly unmarried aunt whom I respect deeply. She said, ‘If my salvation depended on being married, I’d be out diligently seeking a partner. But it simply doesn’t!’ She instilled lasting values in the lives of her many nieces.”16 Other letter writers in the Family Life exchange went beyond asserting that being single was God’s will to argue that their single status gave them a unique opportunity to serve God. “Let’s use our time and energy to serve others,” urged a single woman, addressing all her single friends: “Instead of dwelling on what we don’t have, let us thank God for what we do have and remember God has given us everything we really need. When we’re lonely, let us see that as God calling us closer to Himself. If we are faithful, we will all one day be brides when our Bridegroom Christ Jesus returns. So whether we’re single or married, let’s live for that day.”17 Another reader warned “Fulfilled Mother” that sending unmarried girls to teach or work in other communities in hopes of finding a partner would be “stepping out of God’s order” and that “trying to push our girls to the front to find companions could hardly be a good example of humility and meekness, as becometh a godly woman.”18 Similarly, “A Pennsylvania Mother” asserted, “I feel you are running ahead of God. Leave it in His hands whether your daughters will marry or not and be content.”19 Finally, others warned that “having an unhappy marriage because of being

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afraid you won’t get a better chance is much worse than being single,” and one counseled “Fulfilled Mother” to “pray that [her daughters] will find (or be found by) godly, Christian men if it is God’s will.”20 “You spoke of shattered dreams from not having one’s own family,” wrote another reader. “Would it not be an even greater dream shattered if the partner were not what we expected of a Christian?”21 A third reader, calling herself “Just Another Mother,” advised “Fulfilled Mother” to “teach your daughters that a single can be blessed, too, and they can lead a fulfilled life in that state if that is God’s will for them. Marriage isn’t always the answer to happiness, and to observe some of the family situations among us, we have to wonder if it wouldn’t be better if they were still single, as often it is the innocent children who suffer emotional scars.”22 Still another added, “My own marriage has been a blessing. But from what I have seen, not every married girl is happy, nor is every single girl unhappy. But the ones who have given themselves up and accepted their lot in life are the ones who are happiest, whether married or single. It helps no one to wallow in self-pity.”23 The message of the Family Life exchange—that unmarried women should give up and accept their single status as part of God’s plan for their lives—is echoed by women in diverse Amish communities. As “Satisfied Spinster” wrote, “I am still single, because that is God’s plan for my life. When I chose to lay down my own selfish will and take up the cross, I also chose to follow God’s will. Therefore, even if my flesh desires marriage, I am content to remain single since that is God’s plan.”24 Similarly, a Lancaster Amish woman acknowledged, “Being a homemaker is the most important job a woman can possibly have, but I also know that God chose for me to be single.”25 Writing to Single Girls Newsletter, another woman asserted that single girls had much to offer and that they should accept their status and move on: “We all have our ups and downs, our glad times and our sad times. As a single there may be times when the married folks have their social gatherings and we are not invited. We then have a choice to make. Are we going to let thoughts of pain and bitterness fester, or are we going to get busy making someone else glad? There are many ways a single person can brighten the day for someone.”26 In short, Gelassenheit means accepting God’s will without question and giving up egocentric dreams. Being single may present challenges, but one should not be bitter or wallow in unhappiness for that would be a rejection of God’s plan for one’s life.

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Against Expectations Not all single Amish women see their status as a bitter pill to be swallowed or find it hard to accept that God’s plan is for them to remain unmarried. In fact, some Amish women suggest that they are much better off single, and they point to the unknown future a newlywed faces. For example, a Swartzentruber Amish woman in her fifties told me that she would “rather be single than have a bad life after marrying.” She drew particular attention to cases in which one spouse wants to leave the church community. “Some [single girls] don’t realize how nice they have it. You hear of couples where the man leaves or the man wants to take a different path. That’s really bad; it’s sad. So many times, the man wants to go [leave the church,] and the woman doesn’t. You’re better off being single than marrying bad.” Similarly, another single woman in the same settlement told me, “We’re better off unmarried than just to do it [marry] with anyone and not have a nice life.” Looking on the bright side, she added, “I probably have it too nice. We singles wouldn’t take church [i.e., host church services in their home]. We have it easier.” Still others simply reject the expectation that they will marry. For example, a young Amish woman in her mid-twenties from western Pennsylvania joked about her single status, insisting that she had no desire to be tied down. Talking with me later, her aunt commented that this young woman had had her chances but had turned down every potential suitor. There was one fellow, the aunt continued, that she said she liked “but not enough to spend her life with him.” Some women, of course, remain unmarried because they have no desire for men. The Amish consider homosexuality a sin, and those who have same-­ sex desires must hide them to live truly Amish lives. As one Amish father told me, “I think most Amish people would see that [being gay or lesbian] as a choice. They would need to make the choice or keep it in the closet. In that area, we’re still very Victorian, and I make no apologies whatsoever.” He added, “To our credit, we wouldn’t beat them up or harass them. But there would be a lot of sadness.” In a Family Life article entitled “The Silent Struggle,” the author discussed homosexuality without ever using the word. Acknowledging that many “have been this way” since they were children, the author advised gay and lesbian Amish to pray for God’s help to change. Those who cannot should remain single rather than marrying just to be socially acceptable: “You will not be happy and it would be unfair to your partner.”27

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If a homosexual relationship becomes known in the church community, the couple has to separate, make confession in church, and perhaps be placed under the Bann for a specified period.28 It is impossible to live openly as gay or lesbian and remain Amish, which is not to say that there are no lesbian Amish couples. Women have a far easier time than men to have such a relationship, simply because it is more acceptable for women to remain single and not unheard-of for two single women to live together.29 Serving the Wider Community Although being single is neither the ideal nor the norm for Amish women, many argue that being single serves a purpose in the wider church community. A Swartzentruber man, talking about his unmarried sister who lives with their elderly parents in Ohio, told me, “It’s for something she didn’t get married. It sure helps out at home.” In a letter that was part of the Family Life exchange, one woman mused: I have many single friends who are truly happy and a joy to be around. I am sure they also had dreams at one time of having homes of their own. But most of them have dedicated their lives to serving others. Some are school teachers. Others take care of aged parents or other elderly people. Still others baby-sit or sew for busy wives and mothers. A few who have health problems write cheery letters, and their prayers have helped many. They face life with a smile and a song. They have proved that singlehood can be a blessing.30

Expressing both acceptance of her single state and confidence that her life had purpose as she cared for her aging mother, a single woman from Pennsylvania noted that her mother had been a “great blessing.” “She prayed for God’s will for my life and gave me to Him for His service. No doubt she too would have wished for me to have what she had . . . [but] she allowed the Lord to plan my life, and in return I could give her more in her last days on earth than if I would have given her a son-in-law and grandchildren.”31 There are not many single Amish men. As Meyers noted, more men than women leave the Amish, and men are more likely to leave the church community than to remain single within it.32 This results in more Amish women hoping to marry than there are men to marry them. Moreover, given the pressure to marry, most men wed soon after being baptized and turning twenty-one. “It’s harder for boys [to be single],” one man told me. “Boys can easily hitch up a wagon and go, more easily than girls, but then they come home and [if they live alone] they have to cook, clean, and take care of

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clothes. Those things come more naturally to girls. A girl can teach school or bake or have a small store and can stay home.” Similarly, a Swartzentruber woman asserted that it is easier for women to be single than it is for men because “Amish men don’t know anything about cooking or clothes. Our work is different. Women are more used to helping men.” In other words, in Amish eyes, a single man will be lost if he has to fend for himself. Ironically, a single woman is more self-sufficient; she has options. Changing Conditions of Singlehood Without a spouse, a single woman is responsible for supporting herself by herself. At the same time, she has a flexibility with her life that married women with children lack. For example, married Amish women observe that single women can teach or start businesses more easily, and as church communities have moved away from farming, employment opportunities for single women have improved. Writing to Family Life, a reader from Lancaster County noted, “Years ago, there wasn’t much employment opportunity for girls. That is no longer true, at least not in our area. The single girls have good jobs, buy their own homes, their own horse and carriage, and they are respected members of the community. They are often found caring for older people, teaching school, or babysitting. They do useful work and are considered pillars in the church.” The only thing lacking in the lives of single women, he went on, was “masculine strength to do heavy jobs such as hauling manure or putting on a roof,” and he counseled “brothers, uncles, cousins, or neighbors” to “give your single neighbor lady a helping hand.”33 In conservative, agriculturally based communities, single women generally continue to live with their parents as they age, sewing for and otherwise helping married siblings and engaging in many of the same money-generating activities as their married counterparts, including quilting or running a small shop. Others may leave their parents’ home to work for married siblings or take teaching positions in communities far from their own, but this is a rare occurrence in the most conservative groups. In the most progressive communities, single women find employment in a variety of settings, from assembly lines to the hospitality industry. But living away from parents does not always mean living alone. Single women who are helping married siblings or neighbors might board with them. For example, one Swartzentruber woman lived with a married sister during the summers and helped her sister with her produce business. During the school year, however, she boarded with another family close to the school

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where she taught. In more conservative affiliations, when a woman has her own dwelling, it is likely to be much like a dawdy house, attached to or next to a neighboring home. For example, while underage Swartzentruber girls working as teachers generally live at home or board with the family of one of their pupils, a teacher who was over twenty-one moved into a “skid house” on the property of a married sister.34 Others move out of their parents’ home but remain closely connected to their community. As one single woman wrote to Family Life, “It was hard for my mother to let me purchase a home of my own when I was of a mature age and longed to be a homemaker in my own domain. But now she sees the wisdom of that and would not wish it to be otherwise. I have spent twenty-one years teaching school and have been blessed by being an integral part of the communities in which I have lived.”35 Women working at a distance as teachers may share an apartment with another teacher attached to the school where they work. In the large Elkhart-­ LaGrange settlement in northern Indiana, for example, teaching provides singles with a social life as well as a living. Living separately in apartments attached to the schools in which they work, teachers meet monthly throughout the term for suppers, which provide an opportunity to socialize with their peers, share experiences, learn new songs and games to teach their students, and find support.36 Usually teachers from six to eight schools come together, and the suppers rotate from school to school. Parents of children attending the school are expected to furnish the meal when it is their school’s turn to host the meeting, and the teachers at that school plan it. As one teacher described these get-togethers to me, “We take turns to furnish the evening meal at our school. Then we . . . visit (not always about school-­ related subjects either!) and perhaps play a game. It’s the teachers’ night out. These evenings are a highlight for me to get out and let loose of the responsibilities for a bit.” Women are much more likely than men to teach, with some even making a career out of it. The longer teachers work in the community, the more authority they gain in such gatherings. Fulfilling the Woman’s Role For single women, employment not only provides a means of support but also offers a way of fulfilling the biblical injunction to “be in behavior as becometh holiness, that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children. To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not

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blasphemed” (Titus 2:3–5). Without husbands, they are obedient to their parents and the teachings of the church community. Without children of their own, they serve as an example to the children of others, often hiring them to do chores. Finding that their single status gives them greater freedom and opportunity, many women have taken on work outside their communities or become entrepreneurs. A woman in Michigan, for example, began to clean houses as a teenager, finding it more profitable than teaching. Further, as a housecleaner she could set her own hours and work near her home. As her reputation spread among her non-Amish clientele, she began to take on other kinds of cleaning jobs, and by her early thirties, she employed a cleaning crew of several young girls from her church community. Her business supported her and her mother and helped to cover her mother’s medical bills.37 Further, by employing young members of the community, she took on a mothering role, teaching young women as the biblical text Titus 2 instructs. Other single women use their work or their business to contribute to their church community. In her book Amish Women: Lives and Stories, Louise Stoltzfus reported her conversation with “Rebecca” (a pseudonym), a single woman living with her brother and his family. Considering herself a career woman, Rebecca noted how important it was to her to be useful: her work as a medical assistant enabled her to take an active role in “keeping children well.”38 Similarly, a single woman in Lancaster County who took over her parents’ variety store continues to provide her church community with necessary items, such as the type of stockings mandated by the Ordnung, which are not easily found elsewhere: “The store building, which also includes three rooms serving as [a] residence, has merchandise displayed everywhere. Small, narrow aisles allow one to wander through the displays. But the remaining space is maxed out with a variety of goods. Gaslights cast a warm glow on the merchandise. Fabric for Amish and non-Amish customers, all types of sewing notions, toys, games, puzzles, books, glassware of colors and types appealing to Amish folks, greeting cards, stationary, etc. are to be found here.”39 With her business, she supports herself and serves her community, and by mentoring her young employees, she instructs others in the tasks she learned as a child. Even in the most conservative communities, single women earn a living, contribute to their church community, and set a church-approved example by training up the next generation. A single Swartzentruber woman in up-

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state New York who runs a busy produce stand employed her young niece for many summers, beginning when the girl was not yet in school. The child quickly realized that she was likely to receive tips from English customers when she carried bags of vegetables to their cars, and she eagerly waited for her aunt’s signal that the customer was ready to leave. When the niece grew old enough to do other jobs, the woman hired neighbor children, employing them not only at the stand but in her produce garden. Interestingly, as communities have allowed greater opportunities for entrepreneurship, some women seem to be opting for the single life or at least putting off marriage. In a letter to Family Life, one writer complained: “Some single girls resist their calling and say they’re not going to spend the rest of their lives ‘cleaning up other people’s dirt.’ So off they go to the factory, the restaurant, or the town job that offers big money. How sad! They lose the shamefacedness and sobriety, the meek and quiet spirit that are blessings to all Christian women, and they reap only sorrow and regret in return. . . . Help your single daughters to use their earnings wisely. Excess clothing and frequent travel do not bring peace and satisfaction.”40 As another woman noted, “In recent years it is changing, with the girls being more content [to be single] even in their upper twenties. Jobs are more available to support themselves.”41 Not all are so accepting of the willingness of single girls to send away suitors. One woman noted that her mother told her that it was the man’s role to break off a courtship because “he’s the leader and it’s his place to stop.” Beth Graybill writes of Barbara, a “maiden woman,” who told her that “it’s not the Lord’s will to stay single if you can get married,” even though her sister had recently rebuffed a suitor, a middle-aged widower.42 More common, however, is the Lancaster mother who told me that young people need to be their own person, to know themselves. Nevertheless, she acknowledged that “being single” is still not the most accepted or popular choice. A young person “doesn’t set out to be single.” Married but Childless Children are part of every Amish gathering, and in every Amish home there is a box of toys ready for them. Ericksen and Klein have suggested that the Amish view children as one of the most important contributions women make to the church community.43 While much has changed in the Amish world in the four decades since Ericksen and Klein conducted their research, it is still the family and not the individual that is central to Amish

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life. Stoltzfus recounts a story told by an Amish woman of an Amish minister who paused in his sermon to ask, “Who has the most important role in the church? The deacon? The minister? The bishop?” Answering his own question, he declared, “No, it is not the deacon, the minister, or the bishop; it is the mothers with babies on their laps who have the most important task in our church.” According to Stoltzfus, “It was a special blessing to hear a church leader give colloquial voice, during what is usually a formal presentation, to this fundamental truth of Amish faith and understanding. The family is central. To be a mother is a high and holy calling.”44 For the Amish, marriage means children, and parents eagerly wait for grandchildren, which in the most conservative communities may number in the high double digits. In a 2002 study of the large Geauga County, Ohio, settlement, Lawrence Greksa found that the mean number of births for married women was 7.7, and 28 percent had 10 or more births.45 In short, children are the point of family, and parenting is a God-given task. When children do not arrive, those without them often gravitate to the children of siblings and friends. Like their unmarried sisters, married women without children find a mothering role in helping with the children of others and comfort in exchanges with their childless peers. A New York woman told me that one of the four circle letters in which she took part was for “childless ladies”; it brought together seventeen other women across six states, many of whom she had never met.46 She added that she “used to be the youngest,” but that was no longer the case. One of the correspondents left the circle letter when, after eighteen years, she had a little boy. Another, she notes, just had a baby and likely will not remain in the group. “She thinks the others won’t understand.” Later, talking about a circle letter she had with her cousins, she noted, “They write about what they’re doing and what the children are doing. I was thinking about it when I was bringing in wood, and I wondered what they would think if I wrote them asking if they remembered feeding the fire [i.e., a task for the children]. I felt kind of low.” Adoption is not unheard-of among the Amish, particularly in more progressive groups. For example, during a relatively short-lived (1968–1978) Amish settlement in Honduras, several families adopted children from Honduras and nearby Belize. When the settlement was abandoned, at least some of these children came to North America with their adoptive families and were raised to be Amish.47 More recently, a single woman wrote to Family Life’s “Problem Corner” column and noted that she was planning to adopt “a child who needs a home” and that while some questioned the wisdom of

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her choice, her family was supportive and encouraging.48 In their study of the Holmes County, Ohio, Amish settlement, Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell found that although adoption agencies were at first hesitant to place children with Amish families because of their perceived lack of technology, “attitudes have changed” and a small number of adoptions have taken place.49 Although Hurst and McConnell suggested that adoption is acceptable only for childless couples, in other settlements some families with children have adopted. For example, a Lancaster County couple who already had five biological children were in the process of adopting a seven-year-old when I spoke with them, an outcome of their involvement in a nonprofit organization that provided care for children whose parents were unable to look after them. They had gotten to know their new daughter when she was an infant and cared for her for increasingly longer periods before the child came to live with them full time. When I asked if adoption occurred frequently in their community, the mother said that she was acquainted with seven or eight families in the Lancaster area that had adopted, but there were more she did not know, adding that she had a middle-aged cousin who was adopted.50 However, the majority of childless couples appear to accept God’s will and find fulfillment in participating in the life of the community. For example, one married but childless woman is known in her church community for being able to calm crying babies and for treatments that help others in her community feel better. She has also become the go-to person for her sisters and neighbors whenever they need someone to watch children while they are shopping or on a trip. Other childless women, like their single counterparts, work with nieces and nephews in family businesses or on the farm. “We have no children, so that cuts down on the housework,” noted a Lancaster County woman who runs a stand at the Bird-in-Hand Market and employs her nieces during the busy summer tourist season. A story in Family Life, “The Barren Has More Children,” celebrates the contribution of childless couples. As the story unfolds, a young woman watches a man tenderly holding a sleeping toddler at church while a six-yearold leans against him, and she marvels at the bond between father and children. Later she watches a woman carry out a screaming child followed by a four-year-old and muses, “She has a true mother-heart.” Finally, she is astonished to learn that the man and woman are in fact childless: “I digested this chunk of information. Surely, with such an obvious love for children, this couple often yearned for little ones of their own. Perhaps no one would

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ever call them ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ and yet they were filling the place of parents in these children’s lives. They were planting love and reaping a child’s trust.” The story concludes with the message, “For truly, there are times when the barren has more children than she who is fruitful.”51 “Sometimes I wonder if we childless couples’ biggest problem might be hurt pride,” a letter writer to Family Life mused. “Do we feel odd or outcasts because we can’t have what most couples have? If we can’t be happy without children, what makes us think we’d be happy with them? If we can’t meet the challenge of not having children, what makes us think we’d be capable of meeting the challenge of having children?”52 Of course, taking care of the children of others means that ultimately you can hand them back, a fact on which several women commented. “In some ways we’re blessed that we don’t have children,” asserted a Swartzentruber Amish woman, reflecting on the enormous moral responsibility the church places on parents. “We don’t have to bring them up.” Citing three nephews who had recently left the Amish, she told me how difficult it was for their parents and “how hard the hearts of those boys are. We’re blessed that we don’t have that.” This woman is not alone in preferring her childless state to that of parents whose children have left the church. For the Amish, faith must be lived. In striving together to keep the church community strong, members are expected to support each other, and they hope that in fellowship with each other, they will achieve the complete surrender to God’s authority and trust in God’s will that makes them worthy of salvation. A baptized church member who leaves the Amish breaks a promise to God, and other church members have no option but to shun the offender, for to do otherwise would be to break their own sacred vows to God. Although the Amish do not claim to have knowledge of their own salvation nor do they presume to judge whether others are saved or not, they believe that leaving the church community puts one’s immortal soul in jeopardy.53 Some parents even suggest that having a child die would be better than having a son or daughter leave the church. For example, writing to Family Life, one single woman noted that her dream of having a family had been shattered but added, “Would it not be an even greater dream shattered if . . . a child is stillborn? Or born handicapped? Or rejects Christianity?”54 Talking about the 2006 shooting at the West Nickel Mines School in Lancaster County, a Pennsylvania Amish woman expressed her belief that the parents of those who were killed were

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“luckier” than the parents of some of the survivors. “They know where their children are now.” In short, many childless couples believe that in accepting what they take to be God’s plan, they may have been spared a different kind of heartache. Going On Alone Without children, couples must lean on each other, each helping with the other’s work. “We do a lot of work together,” one woman told me. “I like working with him.” This couple has a quilt shop and works together to piece quilts and sew them. “In wintertime, we’ll sew. It’s fun,” she said. “I can do chores [alone], but I like to do them with him.” Similarly, a flower shop owner in Lancaster County told me how much her husband had helped her. “He wasn’t a cook, but he helped. We never had children, so he never had to pitch in [with childcare], and [I] was never sick that he had to take over. He’d rather help in the shop.” This flower shop owner continues to keep her store, although her husband has died. “My husband encouraged me and built the shop. We were married over thirty years when he passed away. The shop is not near what it was. The church is happy and thankful that I have a business and can support myself. I feel blessed.” For women without children, widowhood looms as a frightening prospect. As one woman put it, “If you don’t have children, you’re completely alone.” Talking about a young mother whose husband had been killed in a highway accident, a childless woman asserted, “She’d probably have rather lost a little one. It would definitely be a loss, no matter what, but you’d know where they are [a child would be with God, safe from worldly dangers]. If I would have to part with him [her husband], how lonely it would be. I would have no help.” At the same time, she worried more about her husband, who would be left behind if she passed away first. “You’d have visitors, but you [the woman] would have work. If it was him, who’d cook for him? I wouldn’t want to be alone. I don’t think I could live without him. But I’d feel sorrier for him alone than I would for myself.” When her husband dies, a woman takes on a marginal position in the church community. She knows that death is part of life, evidence that our earthly time is temporary. Her hope is that her spouse will have everlasting life after death, and even in her grief she knows that she should rejoice that the time of earthly suffering has passed.55 She is supported and cared for by

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friends and relatives who, while recognizing that death offers a spiritual victory over worldly existence, nevertheless know that it is also the profound loss of a loved one.56 But her status in the community changes. Without a spouse, even with children at home, one is not part of a family. In a 1982 letter to the Budget about a new settlement, the scribe reported that there were “10 families here and 3 widows.”57 Similarly, in a 2015 letter to the Diary, a monthly magazine that publishes news about migrations, births, weddings, and other community events, the scribe from Clarissa, Minnesota, noted the community had “49 households, three church districts, two widows, one death, four schools, 17 babies born, two families moved out, and one moved in.”58 Another Diary letter writer noted his settlement’s population as “21 household[s], 2 widows, 18 young folks, 2 schools, 4 baptisms, 4 births, and 3 boys moved out.”59 In the same issue, a scribe from Michigan gave the statistics for one church district as “24 families, 13 young folk boys, 2 young folk girls, 1 widower, 1 older boy and 3 older girls.” Adding the statistics for a neighboring district, he wrote, “21 families, 4 young folk girls, 2 older boys, 1 widow.”60 Clearly, each letter writer made a distinction between family or households and the widowed. As in the mainstream world, the death of a spouse may mean a change in living circumstances. If the surviving spouse has been residing in a dawdy house, close or even attached to the main house in which one of their children lives, then the widowed grandparent continues to live there and plays an active role in the lives of the children and grandchildren. In agrarian communities, if the surviving spouse has not yet moved to a dawdy house and if there are married children old enough to take over the farm, then one may do so, moving the widowed parent and underage children to a dawdy house. Much, however, depends on the age of the surviving spouse. If the widow is young, for example, and particularly if she has no children, then she is likely to move back in with her parents. Only a few months before the husband’s death, one young New York couple had taken over his parents’ farm. After a tragic accident left her widowed, the young wife, who was in her early twenties with three small children, moved in with her in-laws. A Swartzentruber Amish woman, widowed in her forties when her husband died in a drowning accident, remained in the family home, relying on her older sons to help her keep the farm going. One neighbor said, “She’s raising the children alone.” The period of mourning following a death may be up to a year, during which the community provides support for the bereaved through visits and

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letter writing. In an early study of the Amish way of death, Kathleen Bryer discussed a widow who reported that “she and 15 other widows maintained a circle letter that made its rounds every four months throughout several states”; she “found this communication a great source of help to her in sharing the special problems [she experienced].”61 The widow also told of a regular get-together of sixty Amish widows to discuss their experiences; she looked forward to the next gathering. Decades after Bryer’s study, a Lancaster woman told me about the support she had received, via anonymous gifts, after her husband’s death following a lengthy illness. “I’ve gotten money already that I don’t know where it came from. . . . There are widow groups. I didn’t get together yet [with any big groups]. I’m more comfortable with other recent widows. We don’t feel better sharing with a big group. In October there were thirty [new] widows this year and a few more since.” Grieving is never easy, but the difficulty is exacerbated by the need to take on unfamiliar tasks. For example, a young widow who suddenly lost her husband found that she needed to guide both her daughter’s work in the house and her son’s chores in the barn. Noting that her husband had passed away after a long illness, another widow told me that since death had come so gradually, she had been able to adjust to each change, taking over tasks when he could no longer do them. “I grieved for him even when he was still here.” She contrasted her experience with “another widow who lost her husband suddenly,” who was bereft of all he had done for her. Being widowed is different from being left alone because one’s spouse has chosen to leave the Amish, a rare but not unheard-of event. Even if the spouse leaves the Amish world and obtains a divorce, the one left behind is still married in the eyes of the church and so is doomed to remain alone unless the errant partner returns or dies. Commenting on her status in the church community after her husband left her, one woman noted, “The church had no clue what to do with me. . . . The widows and single girls all say they would never want to trade places with us ‘grass widows’ (our hubbies are still on this side of the grass—unburied).”62 The Amish consider any spouse who obtains a divorce in the mainstream world and then remarries to be an adulterer and the marriage to be invalid. There can be no other marriage for the one who remains Amish. Widowhood, however, is not stigmatized in this way, and those who are widowed are free to remarry. Nevertheless, in most Amish communities there are likely to be more widows than widowers, a “marriage squeeze” similar to that affecting young single women. In their study of the Holmes County, Ohio, settlement, for

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example, Hurst and McConnell found that 5.3 percent of the women were widows, while only 0.4 percent of the men were widowers.63 This is not because, as in the non-Amish world, women live longer than men, for the lifespans of Amish women and Amish men are similar.64 Rather, because women are more likely than men to join the church, there are always more eligible women than there are suitors. Further, research suggests that some men are hesitant to take on stepchildren and to deal with the complications of blended families. Widowers simply have more options for remarriage than widows do.65 Like a single girl, an Amish widow has to be asked for her hand. According to Gayle Livecchia, there are two kinds of remarriage: “companion marriage” and “family formation marriage.”66 A companion marriage takes place when a widower marries a widow or single woman who is roughly his age in order to have companionship and someone to keep the household going. For example, following the death of his wife a Swartzentruber Amish widower with eleven children and four grandchildren married a woman who, like him, was in her late forties. She picked up all the strings of her predecessor’s life: caring for the children, several of whom were still in school; looking after the garden; and filling in as grandma to the grandchildren. In short, she provided stability for the family. Her own parents having passed away, she took on the responsibility of caring not only for her new in-laws, but also for the aging parents of the first wife. Similarly, an Ohio man who lost his wife to cancer remarried the following year. “My children needed a mother,” he told me. A family formation marriage, on the other hand, occurs when a widower chooses to marry a woman who can bear children. For example, one New York man in his forties with children ranging in age from preschool to late teens (including one married daughter) married a single woman in her twenties and started a second family. Hurst and McConnell cite a man in the Holmes County, Ohio, settlement who had twenty-two children with four different wives, remarrying after each passed away.67 As in mainstream families, having a stepparent is not easy, and families do not necessarily blend smoothly. A Family Life story entitled “My Dad’s Second Wife” begins with a daughter detailing the difficulties of life with a new stepmother: “She wasn’t at all like our first mother. Dad did whatever she wanted him to. They often went to family gatherings on her side. When our first mother’s relatives gathered, they were late, or then [sic] didn’t come at all. So many negative thoughts went through my mind.” Although they

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eventually all adjusted, the daughter acknowledges, “There are still some subjects we don’t discuss. Not being raised the same way, we will always have differing opinions. Since she was in her forties when she entered our family, how could she change all of her viewpoints for ours?” Later the daughter comes to “realize the challenges” that her stepmother “faced to support Dad, to be among our family as she adjusted to married life. Poor Mom often battled alone, feeling out of her place . . . pleading for God’s guidance to live with and accept her new family’s ways.” “How do I know all these things now?” the daughter continues. “Because I was also chosen to be a stepmother. With fear and trembling I answered God’s call. (I had been satisfied with singlehood. Why, God, why me?)”68 Courtship is as private for a second marriage as it is for the first, and when the man and woman are in different settlements, they may even conduct their courtship by mail. In second marriages, however, there are conflicts not necessarily evident in first marriages. Both parties are usually older and, as the stepdaughter quoted above suggests, more set in their ways. Moreover, while single women are accustomed to their state, widows have lost support on which they had perhaps come to depend. Perhaps for that reason, a writer to Family Life who titled her article “Lonely Widows” suggested that it was selfish of widowers to choose single women to marry instead of widows. “No one knows better than a widow,” she wrote, “how lonely life is without a companion.”69 Not surprisingly, “Lonely Widows” drew sharp responses from single female readers. Signing herself “Obviously Single,” one correspondent wrote: Oh? What about the single girls? Do they have companions? They have longings, too. Most widows have children to love and to love them in return. Single girls have nieces and nephews to love and be loved by—but it is not the same. Selfish? No. Why is it selfish if a widower chooses to give his love to someone who has never had [love] than to give to a widow who has had [it] and lost? There is an old saying: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Single girls have more time to adjust to their loneliness than widows. But it is still there. Most single girls try to be content with their lot in life, but that does not stop all the tuggings of the heart.70

Another letter writer wondered if it were not also selfish of the lonely widow to “think she should be asked instead of a single girl. . . . After all, in order to be a widow, she must have been married once before.” She went on to note that single girls also get lonely without a companion: “I realize some

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girls (as well as some boys) may prefer to remain single, but I think quite a few would have a longing for a partner. I have absolutely nothing against widowers and widows remarrying, but I do think second marriages—as well as first marriages—should be based on the Lord’s will, not just on our own judgment.”71 A third writer, calling herself “Grateful Wife and Stepmother,” suggested that not all widows want to remarry. Her husband, she said, had been turned down by two widows before asking her, a “single girl,” to be his bride. “Some widows are so close to their families, they could not think of accepting a new one. Bringing two families together is not always easy.” She went on: God has a way of bringing two people together, and in second marriages it is often more wonderful than for the first ones. My last five or ten years of being single were a nightmare of health problems, hurts, misunderstandings, and failures. I had decided I could never be any man’s wife because of my weaknesses. What a wonderful gift was awaiting me! . . . I had to learn to reach out and help his and also my children. But with love and prayers and time, I am enjoying it. I thank God that one widower was led to a lonely, lowly single girl.72

Without the support of a husband, widows turn to relatives. Remembering the early days of widowhood, one woman recalled, “The children were wonderful. I would talk about a lot of things with them.” Still, she told me, “You need someone to talk to about your teenage children, and I don’t have that. My brother-in-law helps. He’s very helpful.” Widowhood, like being childless or single, is something to accept. “We’re human, just like everyone,” one widow said. “It’s just my life. [Sometimes] I go to my basement and cry. I hashed out a lot of things in the basement.” Then she added, smiling, “I see how the English [non-Amish] look at us. They think we have such a laid-back life.”

Ch apter Six

Homemakers and Breadwinners

My mother owned a quilt shop for years, so it was nothing new for me to have a business. [My husband] encouraged me and built the shop. —Owner of Country Road Flowers, Ronks, Pennsylvania

Amish women have always contributed to the economic security of their families. As Gertrude Enders Huntington pointed out, “There is no taboo against a woman earning cash.”1 In a 1988 article in Family Life, a Pennsylvania writer asserted, “For more than a hundred years it has been accepted for our women to earn money by selling or bartering eggs and butter. Or even milk and cheese and some did hand sewing or washing or baking. Others sold vegetables or linen. . . . And if we study Proverbs 31, we find that women making linen and selling it goes back several thousand years. . . . For women to work is nothing new.”2 In the twenty-first century, Amish women continue to be mainstays of the social and economic well-being of their church communities, albeit in different ways. While some have remained on the farm, others have established businesses that reach beyond the boundaries of the church communities, and still others have become employees, working in diverse non-Amish businesses. In some communities, as their husbands have taken wage-paying jobs outside the church community, Amish women have become keepers at home (Titus 2:3) in a more literal sense, maintaining a distinction between “men’s work” and “women’s work” that is quite different than the one used by their farming counterparts.3

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Huntington asserted, “The growing economic opportunities for women have served to maintain the Amish family’s independence from the dominant culture and contributed to the cohesiveness of the nuclear family.”4 As groups redraw the boundaries between their church communities and mainstream society, redefining in community-specific ways what it means to be Amish, women have embraced traditional Amish notions of womanhood even as they enact them in new ways. Amish women in diverse communities talk of gardening, homemaking, and other activities common to their foremothers, but they also engage in particular ways with the non-Amish world at farm stands, on the assembly line, in retail businesses, or as stay-at-home wives and mothers, working both at the forefront of innovation and at the heart of resistance to change. Staying on the Farm At the beginning of the twentieth century, most Amish families were rural, and their lives were much like those of their rural non-Amish neighbors, many of whom also lived without electricity, telephones, and indoor plumbing. Amish children and their non-Amish friends learned to read together in the local one-room schoolhouse to which they all walked, and they shared many of the same expectations about the work they would do. By the middle of the century, however, a technological revolution was changing the farming communities of North America. While most rural non-Amish began to leave the fields behind, those who stayed on the farms adopted industrial farming practices, brought tractors into the fields, mechanized production, and expanded the size of their farms and herds. Their Amish counterparts, particularly those growing up in the larger, long-established settlements, found it difficult to compete with the productivity of large mechanized farms. Faced with growing populations and increasingly expensive farmland, Amish church communities struggled to stay economically viable in a changing world. For the most conservative Amish, the challenge was to maintain the old ways while keeping the church and family going. Regarding farming as essential to an Amish life, they limited technology in favor of retaining an agrarian lifestyle. As one Swartzentruber bishop put it, “We don’t like to change. When you change, that’s when you get into trouble.”5 A conservative Andy Weaver Amish member was less blunt but equally adamant about what change would do to his community: “We really encourage farming because it will influence the Amish a few generations down the road. If we

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branch out into other things, we get into areas where we feel it’s necessary to have new things. Then we can no longer see eye to eye on what’s necessary to make a living and what can we do without.” While acknowledging that “the price of the farms” made their more progressive counterparts seek to support their families in non-agrarian ways, the Andy Weaver Amish man told me sadly, “They don’t care for their children and the future. Small farms—produce, flowers—can keep families all working.” To maintain their agrarian lifestyle as land becomes more expensive and less available, conservative Amish are establishing new settlements in Maine, Vermont, and Prince Edward Island, Canada. As one woman put it, “I wouldn’t say we’ve changed really a lot because we keep our religion, [but] expectations are different.” In traditional Amish farming communities, women and men work jointly with children and perhaps grandparents in gendered but mutually dependent ways. While the father and his sons till the earth, harvest the crop, and tend the livestock, the mother and her daughters can the produce, take care of the home, prepare meals, sew clothes, and tend the small garden for the household. But as noted in earlier chapters, both men and women are at home and can help each other as needed. Huntington writes, “The Amish woman’s sense of worth and economic importance was demonstrated when women were asked how much money they earned during the preceding year and they not infrequently responded, ‘How much did my husband say the farm brought in? Half of that is mine.’ ”6 Hired Hands Writing in 1977, John A. Hostetler noted, “The Amish ideal of work is not to get rid of it, but to utilize it in giving every member an opportunity to develop his faculties.”7 Certainly, the most traditional Amish consider work as offering the education for life that Amish children must have, and all children are expected to lend a hand with chores. In keeping with tradition, children under the age of twenty-one who are not needed for work at home are often employed in the church community, their wages going into the family coffers. “Hiring out”—working for neighbors, aunts, and married siblings in the church community—is seen as an extension of doing chores at home, and Amish parents routinely send their children out to work for others. As a result, most Amish girls and women in farming communities have been “hired girls” or “maids” outside the home at some point in their lives.

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As early as ten years old, a girl may be sent to help a neighbor pick produce or to watch children while the parents are busy with other chores. Her pay generally goes to her parents, particularly in the most conservative communities, and they pay her expenses.8 Older girls may be hired to help an aunt who has only young children to do her canning, to help a busy housewife who is trying to get ready for church during the middle of strawberry season, or to babysit for children while their parents are away. By the time they are out of school and available to work all day, girls are in particular demand. A mother with several girls out of school noted that she found it hard to keep any of them at home to help her. During busy times, she often received requests from several families at a time for a girl to help out.9 Staying in the home of the new mother or mother-to-be, the maid not only helps with the couple’s other children, but she also takes over most of the chores, including laundry, cooking, and seasonal work. If the wife is having a difficult pregnancy, the maid is there to help her rest. If there’s a newborn, having a maid means that the wife can devote attention to the baby and recover from childbirth. Meanwhile, the young girl gets hands-on experience in the running of a household and in caring for children, and her wages help her family. Because conservative Amish communities have more strictly limited the use of technology, both the importance of women’s work in the community and the value of the hands-on experience for young girls are reinforced. Washing, sewing, cooking, and canning, all without the benefit of electric appliances, require a particular and valued knowledge. A woman who can do all of these things, care for children, and be a thrifty household manager earns the respect of her family and church community. Indeed, Hostetler writes, “the status of Amish women is positively related to the degree to which they produce economic goods and services essential to the family.”10 Quoting an Amish mother, Huntington writes that a daughter should know how to keep house without going to the store. Let dad bring home the few things needed when he must go to town on an errand. Let her learn to save, to bake bread, to make cheese, to grow food in the garden, to grow teas, to make cereal, to help butcher, to make soap, to clean without expensive cleaners from the grocery store, to make butter, to sew, to can, and never to frown at certain jobs: “Our attitude toward work can determine whether our children enjoy their tasks or not.”11

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In working with others, the young Amish farm girl becomes proficient in the skills she needs to be a wife, a full participant in the life of her community. Moreover, in working for others, she helps to strengthen bonds between families, reinforce community ties across generations, and reify the values of submission, hard work, and devotion to family and community for another generation. When asked by an older unmarried woman to help her clean out her garden, two young Swartzentruber girls spent a morning working hard before being treated to ice cream for lunch. Before they left, the older woman gave each girl a nice flowered bowl, a dish towel, and a small plastic container filled with candy. All but the candy went into the trousseau each girl was putting together in preparation for marriage and housekeeping. The girls also received gardening knowledge from a woman who supports herself by raising produce, as well as a better acquaintance with an adult member of the community they will eventually join, one who can provide them with advice and support. Remembering her time as a maid for a new mother, one anonymous Amish woman wrote: I wonder whether the poor mother could rest if she knew what a trembling greenhorn was invading her kitchen. I doubt it, but hope that by the time she realizes how inexperienced I am, she will be stronger. Poor mother, stuck with a clumsy girl who doesn’t know where things are, and who doesn’t get the diapers washed out clean. She has a hired girl whose tears drip into the wash water because she’s lonely for mom and home. She has a hired girl who sometimes scolds, nags, and threatens her poor darlings when their mom is sleeping.

After recalling such (mis)adventures as mixing cornstarch with water for the schoolchildren’s lunches (she thought it was lemonade) and burning or oversalting the food she cooked for her employers’ meals, she added, “If I ever need a hired girl, I hope I can be as nice to her as some mothers have been to me. Thank you, patient moms.”12 In conservative agrarian Amish communities, Amish girls have little access to work in the non-Amish world, and any work they do find with nonAmish employers is strictly regulated. While young girls might do housekeeping for English neighbors or help in an English garden, they do not work alone, nor in the most conservative groups do they do so on a regular basis. A non-Amish friend of mine, seeking to hire a girl to weed her garden, ended up with three: two sisters and their cousin. Neither family was willing to have a daughter work alone at an English house.13

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Farm-Based Entrepreneurship Many conservative farm women also start small businesses, usually based on work the woman would otherwise be doing and located in or near the home so that they can continue the tasks of wife and mother. For example, many women have small roadside stands that cater to a passing non-Amish clientele, and others post signs offering eggs or seasonal produce like potatoes and pumpkins for sale. With a produce stand in the yard, children are likely to be put to work stocking shelves or helping carry things to cus­ tomers’ cars.14 If she does not have children or grandchildren of her own to help out, then she employs those of her neighbors. As one woman told me, “Women mostly work at home, baking, [raising] produce, helping with the farm, sewing. The younger girls pick blueberries.” In addition to produce stands, some women run small stores that offer to the church community a variety of products, including bulk foods, household items, fabric, and sewing notions. Generally small and hidden from non-Amish eyes, these stores are usually located in a spare room, in the cellar, or in an outbuilding close enough to the house that a wife can easily be there to talk with a customer and, at the same time, keep an eye on a baby or on bread baking in the oven. One Swartzentruber housewife makes dentures in her home, while a neighboring woman, the owner of a small health food shop set up in an old chicken coop behind the house, makes salves and repackages various teas bought in bulk. Her children are too young to wait on customers, but they can summon her if someone comes. When another shop owner first began her bulk food business, she put items in a small shed next to the house. When winter arrived, she moved things into her cellar, and customers entered the shop through the washhouse. Finally, her store found a home in a room adjacent to her husband’s furniture shop, approximately ten feet from the house. Although it is less convenient because someone must go outside when a customer arrives, the store owner and her husband can easily talk to each other when working, and customers of one business often stop at the other. As long as businesses remain within the guidelines of the church, a woman has considerable freedom in her work.15 Commenting on an Amish woman who frequented auctions to stock her used dishes store, a Swartzentruber couple told me that “her manners aren’t like a lot of women,”16 but that did not stop them from frequenting her business. What is important is to respect the religious and cultural expectations of the church community.

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For women in more conservative communities, this means keeping businesses small and minimizing interaction with the world beyond the church’s boundaries. Their lives remain bound by the social network of shared work, chores, and childrearing. In other words, a woman’s business is not supposed to replace the traditional activities of a wife and mother. This was important to an Amish woman in a conservative, rural settlement, who told me that her butchering business allowed her to be a “stay-at-home mom” and not a “working mother.” By running her produce and butchering operations out of a small building that also serves as the family washhouse, she was able to keep up with her cooking, canning, sewing, and cleaning. As she told me, “We all can help. If you have a family, it’s better to incorporate them into it [the business] or you put it [the business] above your family.” She also noted that the business helped her to teach her children to work hard, for each had particular responsibilities, and they quickly learned that if they did not do their assigned tasks, all suffered—an important lesson for future church members. Her sister had started a greenhouse. “She could do it right on the farm,” she said, adding that “a bakery [is] also OK—something [to] do together . . . at home.” Other women run bookstores or small stationary businesses: as one woman put it, “something they can do out of their home.” Favoring entrepreneurial ventures that reinforce traditional tasks and social ties, many conservative Amish women find in their small shops and businesses a fulfillment of their role as helpmeet. It is, after all, a wife’s duty to help her husband when he struggles. One Swartzentruber Amish mother told me about her newly married son, who was having difficulty finding work: “His wife can bake. She’ll just have to help him.” Another, thinking about the difficulties a newlywed couple would have with the harness shop they had just bought, told me that the husband had never sewn before, and so “he should bring his wife along. She can help him. Women learn quicker than men. She knows how to sew.”17 Women’s businesses may also be seen as a variation of the labor exchanges that mark conservative Amish life and benefit the church community. One woman, for example, began selling herbal teas and health supplements. “I had the time,” she told me, adding that there was no one nearby offering such goods. Similarly, a Swartzentruber housewife suggested to me that the bulk food store she had started in a vacant dawdy house attached to the family home was a way to serve the families who lived at her end of the settlement. There were two other bulk food stores in the community, she noted, but

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both were at some distance from her farm, and it took her and her neighbors at least an hour by horse and buggy to reach them. Still other women have started shops offering hard-to-find items of particular interest to their Amish neighbors. One woman, for example, has a shop in which members of her community and neighboring Amish communities can find pocket watches, copies of the Ausbund and German-language Bibles, and women’s hosiery that meets the specifications of the local Ordnungs. Not only are these businesses not there to meet the demands of a mainstream clientele, they are often deliberately hidden even from non-Amish neighbors. For example, one unmarried Swartzentruber woman runs a dry goods store that serves only family members—an extended social network that includes hundreds of relatives.18 Sisters, aunts, cousins, nieces, and wives of various male relatives arrive regularly to purchase fabric, thread, and other sewing notions. In the same community, another housewife runs a shop selling health supplements and a variety of dishes, books, boots, and trinkets. “Our shop is not open to [the] English,” she told me. “It’s a service for the community. It’s fun to have things for teachers and for wedding gifts.” Similarly, a woman whose shop offers a variety of vitamins and cures, many of which she makes herself, expressed her displeasure that “higher” (more progressive) Amish from a neighboring settlement would bring their English drivers into her store while they shopped. She had taken pains to post signs indicating that the treatments she offered were not meant to “diagnose, treat, or cure” specific ailments (signs her Amish customers were likely to ignore) out of fear that one of the English drivers might bring in officials who would shut her down. Noting that a neighboring bulk food store had been closed by health officials for selling cheese and meat without adequate refrigeration, a Swartzentruber woman whose shop sold surplus food and other discount grocery items told me bluntly that her business did not sell to “the English.” The value the Amish place on serving others in the church community empowers women to become entrepreneurs, and even those who do not need to supplement a husband’s income may start a business if it serves others in the settlement. The bulk food shop owner made it clear to me that if her husband and family had needed her to do farm or house work, the venture would never have gotten off the ground. “I wouldn’t do it if we were still milking cows, but we got rid of the cows. We had the idea in our heads for a while already. It was a long way to go to the other store. It was something I figured I’d enjoy, but I didn’t think I’d ever get to do it.”

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The income generated by conservative women is important to maintaining the economic health of the community, but their goal is not to be rich. For example, talking about Amish in Ohio from the main Old Order affiliation, who had sold the mineral rights on their farms to an oil company interested in fracking the land, a man from the ultraconservative Swartzentruber affiliation told me derisively that some “are getting as much as $45,000 a month ‘royalties’ for doing nothing.” His wife added in a disgusted tone, “What do Amish people need with that much money?” This question comes up often in the most conservative settlements, and economic actions are often curtailed to ensure that there is no temptation to “crowd the fence” (to push against Ordnung guidelines). Certain Swartzentruber churches, for example, allow men to engage in carpentry for non-Amish employers, but they cannot take jobs in which they would be working inside a village’s or town’s limits. Similarly, while all Swartzentruber groups permit farm stands, some forbid members to set up stands at farmers markets. A conservative Amish woman explicitly linked her profits from raising blueberries to her faith and to the Golden Rule: “People say I should ask more. I think I should ask what I would like to pay. That’s what the Bible says.” A member of a family that owned a bulk food store told me how necessary it was to keep the business subservient to family and farming, and he noted how good it was that another bulk food store had opened on the other side of the community because “there was too much pressure to serve everyone. The help [the children, who take turns waiting on customers] are growing up, and it takes too much away from farming.” Unwilling to advance any further than they have to, more conservative Amish communities have rejected much of the technology that now shapes the lives of their more progressive counterparts. Lacking gas refrigerators, electric irons, and other labor-saving devices, women in those communities have less time for leisure activities, but the work they do is often social, bringing family members together in the everyday tasks that keep the household running smoothly. Importantly, they continue to privilege the labor exchanges that bring neighbors and extended family members together in regular face-to-face interaction, which are preferred to other activities, such as grocery shopping, or income-generating enterprises, such as carpentry, craft production, or home-based shops. In short, women’s businesses take second place to home and community events and will close if there is something else a woman needs to do, including preparing the home for church, cooking meals for a threshing team, or canning produce.

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A Changing World In their insistence on doing things in the same way their mothers and grandmothers did them, conservative Amish women play an important role in helping their communities to resist change. As an Andy Weaver church member noted, “There are a lot of things that are in a gray area, but history and our experience tell us if we don’t make a line somewhere we’ll lose our way of life. Our way is not the only way, but we feel there’s a value to it. If some members don’t agree and just do as they please, it will bring disunity and we’ll lose our way of life.” Hoping to open a greenhouse, a conservative Swiss Amish woman I know explored government funding sources designed to underwrite small businesses. She ultimately decided that it would be far better to raise the money within her community, even though it would take longer to establish the business, and it would likely grow more slowly. Nevertheless, even as life within conservative Amish communities remains grounded in preindustrial, agrarian practices, families interact with a world in which commerce is increasingly carried on via the internet, and changing social expectations are challenging entrenched Amish ways of rearing children, raising livestock, and farming produce. “The economy was stronger when there were lots of small family farms,” one Swartzentruber farmer, the father of eight boys, told me. Now, although he wants his sons to grow up to be farmers, he worries that there will not be enough land in his community for each to have a farm of his own. One Swartzentruber mother, telling me that some young couples in her community were relying more on income from carpentry work, which took men away from their farms and families, worried about the impact on a family when the father was not home at mealtimes. Shaking her head sadly, she said, “Land is getting too crowded.” To engage with a more expensive world, women in such communities have joined their menfolk in developing new sources of income. “We quilted before in Ohio, but not like we do here [in New York],” a Swartzentruber housewife told me. Indeed, Swartzentruber women in one community had always produced quilts for home use, but after moving to a new settlement where the growing season was shorter and local markets less developed, they found themselves not only quilting much more to sell, but also producing a variety of craft products. Now, aprons, candles, homemade soaps and lotions, and handwoven baskets, all products of women’s labor, are on offer next to baked goods and produce at the ubiquitous farm stands. These ev-

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The workshop of a Swartzentruber Amish quilter. Photograph by the author.

eryday skills create business opportunities. An Old Order woman whose family had moved from Kentucky to upstate New York so that they could return to farming told me that since the move, she had become far busier selling home-baked bread, rolls, and pies than she had ever been in Kentucky, where she had not sold baked goods “to the public.”19 Becoming Entrepreneurial As more conservative Amish groups have explored new territory and founded new settlements to keep families on the farm, other Amish church com­ munities have sought economic stability in non-agrarian labor. In the mid-­ twentieth century, more than 90 percent of Amish families were financially dependent on farming, but by the end of the century, the percentage of those farming was much lower: 50 percent in Ashland, Ohio; 12 percent in all of Delaware; 17 percent in Holmes County, Ohio (the largest Amish settlement); and 7 percent in Geauga County, Ohio.20 In the large Elkhart-­ LaGrange, Indiana, settlement, approximately 25 percent of families were headed by farmers in 1995, but by 2002 only 17 percent were.21 The wife of a Lancaster Amish minister told me that when she was a child, hers was the

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only family in their church district not farming. “Now, there are only three families, out of twenty-six or twenty-seven, that still farm.” Many Amish, notably in the large Lancaster County settlement in Pennsylvania, have embraced an entrepreneurial lifestyle, fostering the establishment of home-based, Amish-owned enterprises that have adopted and adapted state-of-the-art technology in order to compete with mainstream businesses in a twenty-first-century world. For example, Lancaster Amish business owners market such diverse products as solar panels, hydroponically grown lettuce, and furniture, all produced in family industries spread across the settlement. Stoves made in Amish factories are marketed across North America, and Amish popcorn can be purchased on the internet. Women too have established commercial enterprises, and since the early 1970s, businesses owned and operated by women have come to make up at least 15 percent of Amish businesses in Lancaster County.22 Amish quilt stores, flower shops, restaurants, and bakeries have sprung up to market products to tourists from around the world, and female Amish entrepreneurs have become an economic force in their communities. Traditionally, Amish girls have not sought to be businesswomen or have careers. After all, in the Amish world, women learn early that their place is in the home, helping their husbands and raising their children. Nevertheless, by establishing home-based businesses that, as Huntington pointed out, are generally run “in such a way that Amish values are reinforced, gender roles are not disrupted, the nuclear family continues to be the primary institution, and the economic needs of the family are met with a minimum of personal interaction with the outside culture,”23 Amish women entrepreneurs have redefined the boundaries of home, work, and church community. Like their more conservative counterparts, women entrepreneurs in progressive Amish communities have turned traditional skills into home-based businesses, employing family members and neighbors and contributing to the social and financial stability of their home and their church community.24 In doing so, they continue to act as helpmeets and keepers at home. Traditional Roles, Reinterpreted Like their more conservative, agrarian counterparts, progressive Amish women are not limited to women’s work. As an Old Order woman in Lancaster County told me, “There are no church rules. They can have a hardware business. If they’re widowed, [they] can run the business their husbands

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built.” Nevertheless, as in more conservative communities, Amish business women “typically follow traditional gender roles—making food products, selling quilts and fabrics, and making handcrafts of all sorts, but not selling farm equipment, managing plumbing operations, or traveling with construction crews.”25 The only requirement for Amish women entrepreneurs in more progressive settlements is that they respect the Ordnung. Asked about her church’s view of women owning businesses, a variety store owner in Lancaster County replied, “They don’t say anything about it if we aren’t doing anything that they don’t want.” A greenhouse owner I talked with said simply, “I never felt discouraged by the church.” When I asked if she had ever felt any criticism because she was a woman in business, she immediately answered, “No.” In an interview with one of Lancaster County’s first female Amish business owners, Erik Wesner asked Sadie Lapp if she had encountered resistance from fellow church members when she established her quilting business, and she replied that some had given her “a hard time.” But, she said, the “church leadership was understanding of her desire to open a company, [although] they felt it important that her business be located in the home, reflecting universal concerns over the importance of family.”26 As Lapp’s response suggests, what is important for Lancaster women and other progressive Amish women is not the work they do but rather, in doing that work, whether they support the religious and cultural expectations of the church community. In other words, success can only come when one stays within the Ordnung of the church, an understanding that applies equally to male entrepreneurs. As the greenhouse owner told me, “As long as they [women] are not operating their business in a way that breaks church rulings, there is no problem.” Similarly, the owner of a stamp shop told a Lancaster-based researcher, “If they [women] are within the guidelines, then there is no problem.”27 A Lancaster County artist—whose paintings command up to several thousand dollars each—noted that the only time members of her church reproached her for her work was after an article about her artwork appeared in a local newspaper. “Our minister came, quite kindly, and asked that I do not speak with reporters. But he did not ask me to discontinue painting.”28 Although these businesses are larger and may compete in mainstream markets and generate thousands of dollars in profits, they, like the businesses of conservative Amish women, are generally run from the home or a building located close by, allowing their owners to remain housewives and keepers at home. One woman, for example, runs a quilt shop across the drive

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from her house. Over a garage attached to the quilt shop, she has a small bed and breakfast. Another runs a bakery from her home. A long-time Lancaster quilt shop owner told a researcher: “When I wanted to start my business, the bishop who was my uncle said that I could have this business as long as I had it in the home. I could not open a shop elsewhere. The church wanted their women to be at home. My uncle understood why I was needing to open the business, but yet he didn’t want me away from home. And now I am glad that’s the way it worked out. That way I was here when the children were small.”29 Writing about her life as “an Amish mother,” Ontario native Marianne Jantzi, who taught school before marrying, describes how her husband put up a large shop on their homestead and framed part of it for a shoe store “lest his schoolteacher wife should miss her challenges too much.” Now, she writes, “I could face the test of starting my own business and keep figuring and working with students by helping them find quality footwear at fair prices.” The rest of the shop building in which Jantzi has her shoe store provides space for the family’s “evening, weekend, and rainy day work.”30 Rather than usurping her husband’s position as head of the family, an Amish woman often frames her business as something her husband and she have together; it is not her business but a family business. “It isn’t difficult for a woman to have a business,” I was told by a Lancaster County woman who serves dinners to tourists in her home. “It’s a family business. . . . I don’t have any outside help, though sometimes my granddaughter comes.” Another woman in the same business described her venture to me as something she shared with her husband, although his only role seemed to be to eat with the guests. “It’s my business,” a quilt shop owner told me, “but we [she and her husband] share things.” Similarly, the owner of a lunch stand in Lancaster County told researcher Flo Horning that her business was “in both of our names, but basically it is my business. My husband has his own business.”31 In other words, although they work independently of their husbands at tasks that bring them into regular contact with the non-Amish world, Amish women entrepreneurs cast themselves as working with and in support of their husbands, as good wives should in accordance with Amish religious teachings and values. In establishing successful businesses that reach outside the boundaries of the church community, Amish women risk losing the respect of their families and the appreciation of the church community. Kraybill and Nolt point out, “Full-time businesswomen sometimes feel the stigma of tradition. So-

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A small bulk foods store in a conservative Amish community. Photograph by the author.

cialized in a culture that frowns on independent careers for married women, older females, especially, sense disapproval.”32 Perhaps for this reason, even when they own businesses that have become family mainstays, Amish women generally talk about their work as just something they do to keep busy or to bring in “extra” cash. A woman who bakes for a living, supplying many Amish families with donuts for weddings, told me that she had baked for the first three years of her marriage “just for something to do,” and she still describes herself as “a widow who bakes.” Similarly, an Amish flower shop owner in Lancaster County told me that her goal in starting the shop “was just to have something to do . . . [and] pay bills.” Denying that their businesses are the result of an urge for a career or a desire for a professional life outside the home, which is unacceptable for an Amish woman, Amish business owners often credit a past hardship for their entry into commerce. For example, one quilt shop owner recalled, “Our farm was not as large as some, and there was not as much to do. I also had rheumatic fever before this, and this gave me time to sew quilt patches [which] gave me the idea that perhaps I could sell quilts here on the farm.”33 Her quilt business grew, and she now employs Amish women in other communities to quilt the tops she pieces together.34 A Lancaster County Amish woman told me that the small bakery business she started early in her marriage to supplement the family income became the family’s mainstay when

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The menu for a “farmer’s meal” at an Amish home. Amish women often go into business by leveraging what they already know. Photograph by the author.

her husband fell ill. As she recalled, “We needed some cash money. So, I started to bake things to sell.” Her mother-in-law helped her, taking over the baking when the farm began to take up too much of her daughter-in-law’s time. When it became clear that the husband would no longer be able to farm, the mother-in-law gave the business back to her daughter-in-law, who became the primary breadwinner in the family. Importantly, Amish women entrepreneurs find their home-based businesses offer the opportunity to extend their mothering responsibility to teach children to work hard and be responsible to others in their family and community.35 Indeed, Kraybill and Nolt point out that, like farming, home-based enterprises “encourage parent-child interactions in the context of work.” Moreover, such enterprises “permit parents not only to teach their children the skills required to operate a successful establishment but also to socialize them into the work ethic that is engrained in Amish culture.”36 Many Amish women confirm this, saying that their businesses provide work for children and others who would be idle without farm chores.37 For example, the owner of a greenhouse business noted that she had grown up working in her parents’ greenhouse and so “I grew up knowing the business.” She added that since her husband worked away from home and the family did not live on a farm, “I needed something to keep my children busy.”38 One Lancaster

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County quilt shop owner hires her grandchildren to help package quilt pieces, and another, whose youngest child is eighteen, employs the neighbor’s daughters, noting, “We will have six or seven girls in . . . strictly for cutting fabric” on days when she expects tour buses to stop. In this context, businesses run by single and childless women play an important role, enabling them to acquire financial stability so that they will not be a burden to others and allowing those without children to contribute to the community by employing the children of others and fulfilling the motherly role by mentoring young employees. As one single woman told me, talking about her herb business, “four girls help off and on with bulk herbs, schoolgirls that wanted something to do.” She added, “If I had a family, I probably wouldn’t do this. I can’t see how ladies do this and have families.” Learning by Doing Like conservative Amish girls, who work with others at home and as hired hands while they learn the ways of their community, Amish girls in more progressive settlements learn by working for and with others how to be Amish women. Huntington suggested that businesses and industries in an Amish community “can have the same sociological place in the culture as does farming.”39 Nevertheless, little girls following their mothers into family businesses or working in a neighbor’s shop are learning to interact in a world that is quite different from the ones their conservative counterparts inhabit: there is a growing class divide as some women become business owners and others become employees. Moreover, there is a growing diversity in what little Amish girls in progressive communities learn by doing as they grow into Amish women. Amish girls growing up in agrarian communities acquire a common set of behaviors, skills, and expectations, which are reinforced by shared labor in a variety of seasonal contexts. A child who follows her mother into a baking business, however, acquires different skills than a child who works in her mother’s greenhouse or in her grandmother’s quilt shop. Even though they may live in the same church community, subject to the same Ordnung, the daughters of entrepreneurs and their employees learn different work habits and behaviors, and as they head into diverse types of employment, daughters no longer necessarily learn work skills from their mother. In sharp contrast to the work environments of their conservative counterparts, progressive Amish girls learn to straddle the divide between the Amish and non-Amish worlds. Safe in an Amish environment and in the company

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of other Amish women, they learn to work hard. At the same time, they encounter the non-Amish world on a daily basis, interacting with customers and using the technology of the mainstream society. Unlike a little girl at a small stand in a conservative rural community, who makes change from the cashbox for the occasional customer, a young woman in a Lancaster quilt store is meeting busloads of tourists, operating a cash register, and scanning credit cards while her employer may be making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.40 Kraybill and Nolt write, “As families open retail shops to non-Amish customers and tourists, they expose themselves and their children to frequent interaction with the larger outside world. Indeed, they invite outsiders to interact with them inside the Amish world, and the very success of their business depends on it.”41 They point out, however, that while interacting with a worldly clientele may make young Amish employees more outgoing and less willing to accept traditional authority, it may also “inoculate” them against the outside world. Amish employers certainly hope so. One woman expressed the opinion that home-based businesses provide a work environment that is “an extension of the home.” Others agreed, even though this location might adversely affect business. Employing a number of young, unmarried women, a Lancaster Amish woman told me that her employees do not work full time: “Girls in the Amish world are not away from home every day unless they are teaching. I don’t want to change their contentment with that. They grow up thinking of home and family, and when they get married, they quit their jobs.” She added that this was “unhandy” for her, but “that’s how it is. I’d give [an Amish girl] a full-time job, but she probably wouldn’t want it.” Her business provides the girls in her community with part-time employment in a safe environment, a chance to earn money and keep busy until they take on the real work of marriage and children. Importantly, Amish women’s businesses also employ a number of older women, who can help to buttress the Amish workplace against outside influences by modeling appropriate behavior. But the very presence of adult women working for wages suggests a blurring of the boundary between the community and the world. As communities cease to be agrarian, women often find that housekeeping and childrearing take up less and less of their time. Freed from the chores that fill the days of their more conservative counterparts, middle-aged married women in more progressive Amish communities are likely to find other ways to occupy their time, including homebased businesses or even jobs away from the home. A Lancaster Amish woman

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told me, “It’s not unusual for a woman to have a job outside the home,” and she noted that her part-time work at a business run by a neighboring Amish woman helped her keep busy: “At my station in life . . . when you don’t have toddlers, you need something to do.” “There is a lot of cottage industry,” she added, “and it’s no longer a full-time job to keep house.” Her grandmother “wouldn’t have dreamed of working away [from home], but it took her all day to do things like washing clothes.” With appliances, such as a diesel-­ powered automatic washer, this woman can get her chores done quickly. That adult women are establishing businesses or going to work for neighbors who have done so suggests that for many Amish women the world has become far more individualistic than it was for their foremothers. Community members act alone or in much smaller groups to accomplish tasks that used to require many hands. Even those still farming may no longer participate in the activities associated with farm life in the most conservative groups. One Lancaster woman recognized that the farmers in her community “don’t farm like they did twenty years ago.” Whereas in times past, harvesting would likely have brought together men from neighboring farms to share the labor of each other’s threshing or husking, and farm wives would have worked to feed the hungry men, “now they just get custom harvesters with big equipment in to do the harvest because there’s no one around to help.” These changes bring others. After all, a household increasingly dependent on technology requires more cash income than a subsistence farm where the entire family labors and neighbors come together to help each other. Machines that do the work people are no longer doing have to be paid for. Further, if food is no longer being produced and preserved with household labor, then it has to be purchased. Unsurprisingly, with more free time and more bills to pay, women in the more progressive communities that have fostered Amish enterprises often look for paying work. One Lancaster Amish businesswoman told me that “most Amish women have jobs, have a business at home, or work in shops.” Another noted that many women have a source of income on the side, generally something that balances well with chores at home, such as tailoring or part-time employment in another Amish woman’s business. As one Lancaster woman put it, “Most women do sewing or painting. I guess it would depend on what kind of business [interests them].” The work they are doing is not necessarily something new, she added. “It’s that there are more opportunities to do sewing, baking, or craftwork” for profit. Contrasting her life with her grandmothers’, another woman told me, “Over the years, long ago,

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Amish women do a steady business at their bakery stand. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

the women wouldn’t have thought they needed to do things to make money. They would have been on the farm.” Entrepreneurship and Change A number of researchers have argued that the development of Amish entrepreneurship has opened church communities to the world, potentially “forcing the realignment of Amish life to accord with the dictates of commerce.”42 In starting businesses or going to work outside the home, women in more progressive Amish church communities have options their more conservative counterparts cannot imagine. They often have the cash to buy what they would have grown, manufactured, or done without in the past, and by making these purchases, they further support their neighbors’ businesses. Discussing the Iowa community in which her daughter-in-law had grown up, one woman commented that “a lot of families out [there] don’t even have a garden. They get their things from the produce growers.” While their conservative Swartzentruber counterparts still make almost everything the fam-

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A “department store” in Pennsylvania (run by a mother and her daughters) offers a variety of goods, including premade children’s clothes, household items, and books. Photograph by the author.

ily wears, including caps, underwear, and straw hats, more progressive Amish housewives can find men’s shirts at local department stores, get tailoring done by their Amish neighbor, and buy clothing, including caps and bonnets, at Amish retail establishments. But that only hints at the changes that have come as families have moved from farming into entrepreneurship. For Amish businesses to compete successfully in the non-Amish world, they must use technologies that blur the line between the church community and the world. Interviewed in the cellar of her home, where she sat at her computer, one woman told me that “only the business part of the house is wired for electricity. For business reasons, we had to have it.” Similarly, the owners of a bed and breakfast serving non-Amish guests had wired the upstairs bedrooms with electricity—but not the kitchen because it was used for young-folk gatherings. Rather than severely limiting technology as their most conservative brethren have, progressive communities have attempted to tame it, restricting instead where it can encroach on the church community. The result, Kraybill and Nolt suggest, is that “entrepreneurs who strad-

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dle the worlds of tradition and modernity often feel pulled in conflicting directions. Always tempted to use more and more advanced technology, they also realize that the restraints of their culture have bestowed on them a satisfying way of life.”43 Further, progressive Amish businesses must accommodate the world in ways that conservative ones do not. For example, businesses that serve a non-Amish clientele cannot shut down for every community event or work frolic, for their customers rely on them. The tour bus operators must be able to count on the quilt shop being open. For some Amish, the choices that business owners and the church community must make are stark, putting the very future of the church at risk. Writing in Family Life, “Amish Minister” worried about those who were “progressive-minded rather than conservative.” “In our church circles,” he wrote, the progressive “shows up in an increasing conformity to this world’s thinking and eventually to practice. This is the core reason why the computer and its sister [the cell phone] are so threatening to us as plain people. . . . If a business is so large that it demands a computer for internal management, it is nearly always in conflict with principles that maintain us as horse-andbuggy people. In other words, it is too big. The business needs downsizing or simplifying.”44 Confronting the same pressures as men to make use of new technology and make business accommodations, each Amish woman must determine for herself how to work within the Ordnung. A Lancaster County herb shop owner noted that she has “had lots of chances [to use the internet] but . . . [is] not interested. Why start on something the church wants to stay away from?” A flower shop owner has a phone in her store and advertises on the Intercourse, Pennsylvania, website. Yet like the herb shop owner, she has drawn the line at using the internet herself, noting that all her business is done face-to-face. Nevertheless, even as some Amish women reinforce community ties through their businesses, others are engaging in commercial ventures that reach beyond the boundaries of their church communities, challenging traditional understandings of what it means to be a helpmeet, homemaker, and nurturer. In figuring out how to accommodate a growing individualism and a widening divide between home and work and parent and child, women entrepreneurs in progressive communities are helping to chart a future for their families that will be quite different from the one envisioned by their more conservative sisters. In the office of the business she inherited from her

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mother, the owner of a gourmet popcorn company noted that she felt bad because her use of electricity and computers “is not the way they [the church] want it,” and she is concerned that “if it gets too much, then someone will fuss.” Commenting on how much things had changed, the owner remembered that her own mother “was popping corn by hand when she started. She had a machine, and when it broke down, she’d pop by hand. We [have] started packaging for wholesale, gift items, and the website.” The company now employs a number of single and married women, all working part time, and its line has expanded to include candy, nuts, and other snacks, which are shipped nationally. While her plain neighbors still visit her shop, much of her product is sold elsewhere, and she has little direct interaction with customers. Change can bring more change. When I asked one Lancaster man about the impact on his community of the shift from farming to business, he asserted that life had become a lot more complicated. “With farming,” he said, “we had a couple hundred years of tradition that no longer applies. Those with businesses realize that there are exceptions and learn how to bend the rules. . . . It’s difficult to draw the line once an innovation begins to be accepted.” A Lancaster Amish businesswoman seemed to agree. Talking about her decision to accept credit cards in her quilt shop, which required her to install a system that runs on batteries and solar power, she said simply, “That’s what it means to have a business. Everything changes.” Using the internet to reach outward to a non-Amish market, some Amish entrepreneurs are even rethinking what it means to be Amish and in business. In extreme cases, this may motivate a different attitude toward the church and what some may come to see as arbitrary rules. One successful Lancaster County businessman wondered why the church didn’t “just stick to church things on Sunday and let businesses alone during the week.”45 Echoing some of the businessmen in her community, one Amish businesswoman asserted, “I’ve never been discouraged by the church. I’ve never heard that anyone [in the church] has a problem with my business. And if they have a problem with my business, well that’s their problem, not mine.”46 As change turns Amish women’s businesses and Amish women’s lives away from the community and toward the English world, the risk is that the boundaries of the church no longer keep the world out. At the extreme, Amish women run their businesses as entrepreneurs, not as wives, mothers, and sisters, with regular hours, deadlines, and decision-making based on what is good for the business and the woman who owns it.

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Working for Others A quilt shop owner in Lancaster County told me that she had “started out making quilts for others” but now employs at least 40 women to sew for her. “If I counted everyone that worked for me [over the years], it’s probably 200 people.” But not every Amish woman who wants a job heads to a shop. Perhaps the most common wage-paying job for girls and women in Amish communities is teaching. Since the 1972 US Supreme Court decision in the case of Wisconsin v. Yoder et al., which freed the Amish from compulsory education after completion of the eighth grade and for all intents and purposes legitimized the Amish preference for educating their children in small, community one-room schoolhouses, teaching has been an important source of income for girls and single women.47 Unlike non-Amish women, who decide to go into teaching and prepare to teach, most Amish girls do not look to a career in teaching. Because marriage and children are the socially approved norm for Amish women, and working full time outside the home, especially when one’s children are small, is not accepted in most communities, teaching has traditionally been an occupation of young and single women, most of whom remain in the classroom only a few years before leaving to marry. Communities are always on the lookout for teachers to staff the schools, and so a family with girls at home and out of school is not surprised to be approached by a local Amish school board to see if one of them would be interested in teaching. The role of the teacher varies considerably from community to community.48 In the most conservative communities, teacher pay is low, and teaching is primarily an occupation for young girls who are under the age of twenty-one and still living at home under the supervision of her parents. In such cases, a girl’s father negotiates her salary with the school board, and she turns most of it over to her parents. Often as young as sixteen or seventeen, a teacher in a conservative Amish school rarely teaches for very long. Still, as she gets older and more experienced, a teacher can command a higher salary, and when she turns twenty-one, if she has no plans to marry, she can negotiate her own salary and become self-supporting. In Amish communities that have ceased farming, fostered larger Amish businesses, and permitted wage employment, families have more cash income, and the single women have greater access to outside employment where they can earn more money. These communities have had to raise teachers’ salaries, making teaching a more viable way to earn a living and

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perhaps support a family. As a result, teaching positions have become attractive not only to single women, but also to older boys and even married men. Widows and married women whose children are grown might also find work in the classroom. One older widow supported herself by teaching school in northern Indiana. Writing in early December, she noted, “We are into tests the 3rd 6 week semester, also 1st half year semester, and then it will be averages to figure and report cards to fill out. Guess I’ll take it home to do it when I have my Christmas Vac[ation] although we only have one week. What a relief it will be when Christmas is past. Seems now it is just busy, busy, busy. Have 167 tests to do and check.” At least, “I do have all my gifts and have them wrapped for 22 pupils,” adding, “School is as usual. I am back with my 22 pupils and 4 grades. That makes a lot of classes, but I enjoy it.”49 (Many Amish schools have two teachers, one for grades one to four and another for grades five to eight.) Other women return to the classroom later in life, particularly in communities that no longer have the farm chores and labor exchanges that continue to keep women in agrarian settlements busy. “Her girls are grown, and she wanted something to do,” one woman told me, talking about her cousin’s wife who had gone back to teaching. “Wanting something to do” was also the phrase used to describe a woman in a small community whose pupils included several of her grandchildren. While her unmarried daughters earned more cleaning houses and doing chores for their non-Amish neighbors, the grandmother returned to the classroom to answer both the community’s need for a teacher and her own need for an interesting occupation to fill her hours. Married women with preschool and school-age children can be pressed into service if there are no other potential teachers around. This might be the case, for example, in a new settlement or one in which there are few older families. Writing from Poland, New York, not long after the Swartzentruber community there was founded, a Diary scribe noted that two families were homeschooling because they did not live “close to the school house.”50 In another new community, the school was established in a family’s basement, and the mother took on teaching chores while her daughter cared for the children who were not yet in school. A third new community built the schoolhouse as an addition to an existing residence. Asked how it was to have the schoolchildren on the other side of the curtain that covered the entrance from the kitchen into the classroom, the mother replied simply, “We don’t find out much about them. Unless they’re noisy. But we have to

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make sure the young ones [children in the family not yet in school] don’t make too much noise.” As teachers, women help to reinforce social relationships. In many communities, teachers board with one of the families whose children attend school; sometimes they take turns and stay with different families.51 Living away from her own family, a boarding teacher joins in the host family’s activities, blending in as an older daughter who can help the mother, who may not be much older than the teacher. Families also invite the teacher to take meals with them. One former teacher, faced with homeschooling her older children because several of the younger ones were suffering from whooping cough and the parents didn’t want it to spread in the community, was pleased when the teacher offered to come and work with the schoolchildren in the evening. While the children were quarantined at home, the teacher came weekly to tutor them. Looking at the school desks set up in the family’s living room, the mother noted, “Last week, they were right on schedule with their lessons, but this week they’re behind.” She hoped they would be able to be back in school for the first set of tests, six weeks after the start of the school term. Close relationships between teachers and the families of those attending the school also strengthen the bonds between church members. After all, teachers and pupils often attend church together, and the teacher may participate in the activities of the young folk with older siblings of her scholars. When a teacher marries, she often invites her former pupils and their parents to her wedding. One teacher indicated that she preferred to teach in a school close to her home so that she would not need to board with a family during the week. The neighborhood was happy to oblige her, assuming this likely meant she would be getting married at the end of the term and needed to be home to help her family get ready. She was replaced with a teacher who had been able to return to her own home each evening during the previous school year and was excited about boarding with a family in her new school. She and her sister, a new teacher and also boarding away, were eager to compare teaching notes on their first weekend home. The movement of girls and women into the classroom has not gone unquestioned in the Amish world, particularly in communities in which social and economic changes have given Amish men far greater access to wage labor in non-Amish settings than those changes have given their wives. When men have economic power that women at home with children are denied, then, as Jane Marie Pederson puts it, “male headship becomes a different reality.”52

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As women become more economically dependent on men, their submission to male leadership in all aspects of daily life is increasingly part of their gendered role. This has even led some to question the appropriateness of hiring women in teaching positions. For example, writing to the Blackboard Bulletin, an Amish publication dedicated to teaching, one man argued: In thinking of the great responsibility teaching carries, we think of the three most important parts of the Christian community—the home, the church, and the school. . . . In the home it is God’s order and will for the man to be the head and to lead . . . and also in the church we recognize God’s will to lead through ministers, deacons, etc. . . . When I think of the seriousness of teaching and training children, why would we want to choose a “weaker vessel” to teach and to be an example to our children?53

The editors of the Blackboard Bulletin replied that although there might be some danger in asking women to “lead” by teaching school, “a teacher in school does not have authority over other men and women, but only over the pupils she teaches. She herself is under the authority of the school board, and she has been hired by the board to be a teacher and example for the children in the school.”54 Indeed, even a widow in her sixties, who had raised ten children and had taught for many years, was expected to take the advice given by her board. Working in the World Not every Amish employee works in an Amish setting. In Amish settlements where Ordnungs have allowed wage labor in non-Amish businesses, many young, unmarried Amish girls ignore the classroom and head for jobs in offices and on assembly lines, which pay more and give them greater economic independence.55 In finding employment outside the church community, men and women often follow traditional paths. For example, Stevick suggests that men are more likely to do shop work or construction or go to work on an assembly line, while women take jobs as housekeepers, clerks, or waitresses.56 Similarly, in her book Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia Susan Trollinger points out that in businesses that cater to Ohio’s tourist trade, women cook dinners, bake muffins and pies, and wait on customers, while men do carpentry.57 Access to income-generating opportunities is hardly uniform across the

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Amish world, and in communities that have seen the movement of church members into non-Amish workplaces, women’s labor has become both more gendered and more proscribed. As Huntington notes, single women have been free to take on wage-paying positions and “are employed on a regular basis . . . or work in small factories,” but the job opportunities for their married sisters are much more limited.58 With the arrival of the first baby, wives and mothers are expected to be keepers at home, in the home. As men and unmarried women take non-Amish jobs, the consequences can be far-reaching and affect many aspects of Amish life. For example, working for non-Amish employers takes church members away from their families and gives them access to technology that may be forbidden in Amish homes. Further, as Huntington points out, the jobs they do are “untraditional, gender roles are frequently blurred, and daily interaction with non-Amish, often on a fairly intimate level, is inevitable.”59 Perhaps most important, working outside the church community means that Amish people are unable to contribute in the same way to church and home life as their counterparts in farming or entrepreneurial communities. When a father works on an assembly line, his children are unable to learn by working with him, and his wife is unable to assist him in his labor. Moreover, the traditional skills passed down from parent to child are not useful in worldly businesses. As a result, Amish young people in the most progressive communities are turning to book learning to acquire the skills they need for employment. Old Order schools have traditionally prepared students to function in the Amish world of their parents, but as curricula have expanded in different settlements, they have often done so by introducing texts that discuss the broader non-Amish world or that bring religion overtly into the classroom, a marked change for the most conservative groups.60 But even as the number and type of subjects taught in Amish schools expand, some Amish educators suggest a broader expansion is necessary. As one noted, “Do I look for more grades being added? . . . Yes, eventually I look for more grades. I don’t think we’ll be a better community for it, but it will very likely happen. Already a factory has this policy: you must have a high school diploma to apply here . . . unless you are Amish! I don’t think that is a very good plan. It is not fair and will result in bitter feelings toward the Amish.”61 Acquiring computer skills has become especially important for young Amish women, who are finding them useful in office work. Reporter Grace Miller discusses the case of one young Amish woman in the large Holmes

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County, Ohio, settlement who regularly used the computer to track inventory as part of her work at a shop in Berlin, Ohio. “I love this job,” the woman said, noting further, “I wouldn’t have gotten the job if I didn’t already know how to use the computer.” The shop’s non-Amish owner joked that the Amish employee knew more about her business than she did.62 For a woman without a husband or children to care for, entering the nonAmish workplace can be lucrative and empowering. Describing her job as a receptionist at a long-term mental health facility for women, one midwestern Amish woman wrote me enthusiastically, “I enjoy my work here as a receptionist. . . . I truly LOVE my job.” In her letter she noted that she usually worked “five days a week, Monday [through] Friday, 6 am to 2 pm,” and wrote poetry in her spare time. Having had to find work outside the home (“which I would not normally do”) after separating from an abusive husband, she said, “This is where God has put me, and I will do the best I can.”63 Yet as sociologist Judith Nagata points out, by entering non-Amish workspaces and surrendering Amish work traditions, the Amish “face the problem of remaining different and apart from the world.”64 Writing about Amish workers with non-Amish employers, Miller suggests that church leaders have no objection to church members, including women, using technology. Further, she writes, “Church members seem to be able to separate their work lives from their home culture, and have no desire to bring home the electronics that could corrupt their chosen way of life.”65 This suggests that Amish homes remain untouched by the movement of church members into non-Amish employment, yet the separation of work and home is alien to Amish tradition and values. For both agrarian and entrepreneurial Amish, home and workplace are one and the same. In farming, husband and wife work together and with their children, albeit in complementary rather than identical tasks. In communities that have encouraged entrepreneurship, women and men have established their businesses in the home so that, ideally, children can work with their parents. In allowing employment in non-Amish businesses, church communities are defining the workplace and the home as separate spaces, highlighting a distinction new to Amish life with important implications for social and familial relationships. As Nagata argues, when boundaries between the Amish and non-Amish worlds blur, the Amish feel compelled to erect new ones,66 and distinguishing the worldly workplace from the home has meant the drawing of new boundaries to protect the home and those in it. The home continues to be central to Amish identity. It is, after all, where important life events occur,

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where children are raised, and where church meets. In all Amish communities, homes reflect Amish values and thus what the church community considers appropriate ways of being Amish. As men and unmarried women leave the church community for work, the home becomes the last Amish space, a refuge of faith from the English world where so many church members spend their days. Further, the wife and mother as the keeper at home in communities in which husbands are working away takes on a unique role as protector of the home and the children in it. Unlike her agrarian or entrepreneurial sister, whose work is complementary to her husband’s, she works alone in the home to meet the expectations of being a wife and mother. As I noted in chapter 3, the families of those working for non-Amish employers are likely to have a more financially stable life, but with the father gone, the mother is now responsible for many of the parenting chores that used to be shared. Writing to me from the large Amish settlement of Elkhart-LaGrange in northern Indiana, where hundreds of church members work in factories assembling recreational vehicles, one woman noted the difficulties: When Dad works away and is only at home part time it puts more of the burden on Mom to discipline, to manage the jobs of keeping the children occupied and busy if [they’re] old enough. Of course, then Mom and Dad don’t work together either or as much. That can quickly create a crack in the family structure. If Dad gives instructions to the children what he wants them to do but then Mom has to oversee that it does get done and done right . . . lots of pressure. This can create a lot of dysfunction within the family as Mom is super busy with gardening, canning, freezing, keeping a decent house and making time to teach her little children as well as the older ones, also. It truly is a heavy load for “the weaker vessel.”67

In this woman’s community, the Ordnung allows labor-saving devices that make chores easier. However, such devices have eliminated the need for hired girls (who are able to find more lucrative employment away) or for the regular gatherings of neighbors and extended family to prepare and preserve food and accomplish other household tasks, which regularly bring her more conservative sisters together. She may even lack generational support. Because they are less needed to help with household labor and have cash earned from factory work, many Amish senior citizens from the most progressive church communities head to the Pinecraft community in Sarasota, Florida,

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which welcomes almost 4,000 Amish “snowbirds” a week during January and February.68 As men and unmarried women work outside the community and their earnings help motivate greater technological innovation, Amish lives have become much more like those of their non-Amish neighbors. To remain separate from the world, these progressive Amish church communities have increasingly come to see the world not in terms of Amish and non-Amish, but rather in terms of Christian and non-Christian.69 Arguably, this has meant a greater emphasis on the roles of wife and mother as scripturally defined. No longer learning what it means to be an Amish woman by interacting with other women in a variety of social contexts, stay-at-home mothers and wives turn to scripture to learn their parts, and their roles are reinforced in the context of the church community. As one Amish text puts it, their task is “to be a wife and mother,” which is “one of the most noble and rewarding callings upon earth,” and they understand that they should not be seeking “employment outside the home, or seeking fulfillment in a ‘career,’ [for] it is one of Satan’s lies to . . . think that a career outside the home would be more fulfilling.” They are encouraged to “be subject to [their] husbands [and] to support [them] in every way,”70 and they endeavor to do so. Enacting in new ways the religious ideals of womanhood, particularly the necessity of yielding themselves up to God,71 they accept a subordinate role in the financial health of the family, which enables them to maintain their religious role as keepers at home. Successful Amish Women The variety of Amish women’s work reflects growing differences in how women identify as Amish. For the most part, women have lagged behind men in their adoption of technology for business purposes, but many, particularly in the most progressive communities, are well aware of the dangers and possibilities offered by changing patterns of social interaction. A Swartzen­ truber woman whose family works together to make and sell baskets from a stand in front of their home says simply, “If we sell enough to pay the rent and buy groceries and buy feed for the chickens, I’m happy. It would be nice to get ahead a bit, but we do OK.” Similarly, many women in the more progressive Amish community in Lancaster County prefer to keep their businesses centered in the home and away from the eyes of tourists or to limit advertising and commercial exposure. As one shop owner put it, “We have

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church on Sundays, and we’re not involved so much with things. It’s more about community. We keep our business simple. We’re here as a community to help each other. If there’s a wedding or funeral, we just take off.” In contrast, growth-oriented Amish firms use web-based marketing to reach a national audience. As church communities make decisions that open the doors to new technology and as the church’s authority becomes less restrictive, women, like men, gain access to a wider world and must decide how far they can go without straining church and family bonds. Many work in a complementary fashion with their husbands, and they support each other as they contribute to the economic stability of family and community. Some are straining the relationship between business and church. Others are leaving the financial health of their families to husbands who work away from home, finding in their role as homemakers the means of being good Christian wives. Researchers Sarah D. Dodd and George Gotsis have argued that the more marked the religious beliefs of entrepreneurs, the more likely it is that religious criteria inform their decision-making, even to the detriment of commercial interests.72 In the Amish world, however, similar traditions and beliefs have resulted in very different ways of being Amish and interacting with the world. In communities devoted to maintaining their traditional farming lifestyle, Amish women and Amish men work together with their children and grandchildren to support the family and the church community. Some Amish turning to an entrepreneurial lifestyle have continued to emphasize the importance of working at home, and Amish women have established businesses that employ their children in an Amish setting. Permitting wage labor outside the community, other Amish church communities allow the workplace to be separated from the home, redefining income-­ generating labor as appropriate for men and unmarried women, but not for wives and mothers. Embracing a new understanding of being keepers at home, women in these communities see housework and childrearing even more intensely as a religious calling. In short, in the diverse Amish world, the traditions and beliefs of each Amish church community and its local context shape how women participate in the economic interactions between the church community and the non-Amish world, which undergird the economic stability of their families. Recounting her struggle to maintain her priorities, an Amish artist argued that as a Christian, she could be an artist “but not a great artist.” Her Amish life had to come first. She said, “I realized at one point that my painting was

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my working thought. I didn’t want to do my daily chores. I put in time till I could get back to the easel. So I backed off entirely—cold turkey—so to speak. It was very, very hard. Later I decided it was not wrong for me to paint as I do believe it is a God-given talent, but I’ve never again and probably never will become as involved as I was at that time.”73 Amish women create their identities within the structure of their church and its Ordnung and, in doing so, play a key role in the social, economic, and religious health of their church community. They help to maintain the old ways and to redefine them as the church goes forward. Others are challenging the old ways and pushing the boundaries of their Ordnung. Faced with changing social circumstances, limited and empowered in different ways and to different degrees by the Ordnungs of their communities, Amish women enact what it means to be Amish women in the work they feel compelled or choose to do.

Ch a pter Sev en

Reading Amish Women

I will enclose a subscription of Ladies’ Journal along. Yes, there’s quite a few women who get these. It’s good inspiration for busy young mothers. —Letter from a Pennsylvania Amish woman to the author

The moment a little girl is born and her mother or grandmother puts a cap on her head, she begins her education in how to be an Amish woman. As she grows up, she will go to school like her brothers and perform many of the same chores as they do (and vice versa), but in her everyday interactions with parents, siblings, and others she will come to understand that as a female, she plays a different role and has different responsibilities. She will learn that there are things she is expected to do and things she will never do. At each stage of her life, she will be rewarded for her gender-appropriate behavior. As adults, Amish women play an active role both in the preservation of particular ideals in gendering each new generation and in reaffirming each day what Amish women should be, what they should do, and what they should strive for. The books and magazines they read create and reinforce these ideals. In the act of reading, Amish women engage with the issues they face in everyday life and find both a supportive community and validation for the choices they make. For most Amish women, the absence of broadcast and digital social media makes print sources especially significant.1 In this chapter I explore how Amish print media reinforce gender expectations and parental teachings. Indeed, I argue that reading material is acceptable in Amish homes only if it confirms Amish values. Yet Amish women

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are not all reading the same books and magazines, and not all publications reinforce the same understanding of womanhood. The differences between publications—the stories they tell, the scriptural content they share, and the way they invite readers to participate—reveal diverse notions of how girls should act and what kind of women they should become. Amish Reading and Writing Born into a trilingual world, Amish children live in a reality in which community members speak differently than outsiders. They learn to use Pennsylvania Dutch to speak with others in the church community, English to interact with worldly society, and High Amish German to participate in religious rituals. However, the English language plays a more complex role in the Amish world than this suggests. As one Old Order Amish man has written, spoken English is the language associated “with the business world, society and worldliness . . . the forces that have become dangerous because they make inroads into our churches and lure people from the faith.”2 Nevertheless, since Pennsylvania Dutch is not a written, standardized language, English serves as the primary language for written communication within the Amish world. When Amish people write letters to each other or copy recipes, they use English. The Amish newspapers the Budget and Die Botschaft are printed in English, as are all Amish publications with the exception of the Ausbund, the Amish hymnbook; various prayer books; collections of religious writings; and the German Bible used in worship.3 All Amish children are raised to be literate. When Amish children start school and begin to acquire the language skills they need to interact with the mainstream world, they first learn to read in English. Beginning in the third grade, most also learn to read in German and to decipher the Fraktur script so that they can read the Amish hymnbook and the German Bible. Nevertheless, they become far more fluent readers and writers of English than they are of standard German. Amish literacy reinforces Amish values just as their patterns of language use reinforce the visual and pragmatic boundaries between the Amish and non-Amish worlds established by dress, horse-and-buggy transportation, and the selective use of technology in each community. Andrea Fishman has argued, “Like all else in their way of life, reading and writing are defined by the central religious themes of Amish life. The skills and texts promoted by their religious perspective ‘count’; abilities and forms that are irrelevant, counterproductive or potentially antagonistic to their Logos-centered view

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do not.”4 In other words, Amish literacy is culturally defined to meet particular cultural and religious goals, most notably that of reinforcing the social, religious, and economic health of the church community. At a minimum, Amish children need to be able to understand printed materials in order to interact successfully in the mainstream market, and they must be able to read and follow directions.5 Fishman argues that the Amish do not particularly value literary criticism or literary technique, but they do appreciate the ability to read and synthesize material in a text with what they may already know. However, she also notes that “individual synthesis is potentially divisive and destructive, so group synthesis often literally or figuratively replaces it.”6 The Amish may be reading alone, but they reach conclusions in the context of norms they have internalized through interaction with others in the church community. Fishman also argues that “the most important and certainly the most characteristic reading ability that counts among the Amish is the ability to empathize with characters in a text and to apply the lessons discerned through such empathy.”7 Amish education does not encourage critical thinking nor does it prepare Amish girls and boys to be knowledgeable citizens of a broader society. It does, however, prepare Amish children to read the literature that defines Amish values. Amish literature is didactic, and Amish authors write to an Amish audience to emphasize shared values, not individual ones. An early editorial in Family Life argued that “the power to read is a power indeed” but also pointed out that it can be dangerous: “Today we are putting this power, this tool, into the hands of our children. Discouraging them from using it is negative and is not the answer. If we do not wish them to use it, we had better not give it to them in the first place. But we do want our children to read. Time spent in reading good books is time well and wisely spent.”8 In homes and schools, Amish children learn to read in culturally appropriate ways the texts that reinforce the norms and traditions that guide their lives. They learn a gendered narrative and interact with it to become Amish women and men in ways approved by their church community. Reading Children The gendered narrative begins with letters to the Budget or Die Botschaft announcing the birth of a little “woodchopper” or “dishwasher.” When they enter school and learn to read, children become active participants in a literate Amish community, reading from texts that reflect community-based notions of what it means to be Amish and to live an Amish life.9

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The most conservative Amish children are likely to begin their formal English education with reprints of nineteenth-century McGuffey’s Readers, which feature images of little girls in petticoats and ruffled bonnets, little boys in knee-length trousers and short coats, women in floor-length skirts, and men in bowler hats. They read of little boys who help other children whose fathers are too poor to send them to school and little girls who help their mothers. These texts reinforce a traditionally gendered view of life in which the mother is at home, children mind their parents, all work hard, and family is important. At the same time, these archaic readers shield little girls and their brothers from modern events, technological advances, and religious and cultural differences. Less conservative church communities educate children for an Amish life in which they are more likely to depend economically on entrepreneurship, wage labor, or even factory employment in a non-Amish workplace. Offering a more expanded curriculum than the schools of the Swartzentruber and other very conservative Amish, these relatively more progressive schools prepare girls and boys for an adult life in which they may interact with the non-Amish world on a daily basis. After all, as one parent told me, “Times change, and so education must change for the times.” Amish schools allow the community to control children’s introduction to the world and to limit and shape the world’s influence. Many Amish schools use texts discarded by public schools. Many of them, such as the Dick and Jane series, date to the 1950s and 1960s, a period during which a large number of private Amish schools were founded. Like the McGuffey’s Readers, the Dick and Jane series and other reprinted texts from the mid-twentieth century show a nonAmish world that vanished long before theories of feminism entered the classroom. In the books Amish children read, mothers are mothering, fathers go off to work, and children are respectful and work hard. All Amish children read the same texts and learn that men and women have different roles to play—in the English world as well as in their own. This lesson is reinforced by texts produced specifically for Old Order classrooms, such as the reading series developed by the Old Order Amish’s Pathway Publishers. The Pathway Readers contain no images of people, presenting instead drawings of farm life, Amish household interiors, and one-room schoolhouses. The readers for the upper grades present carefully chosen selections from authors such as Samuel Pepys and Louisa May Alcott and stories about the early Anabaptists and Amish children who behave as Amish children should.10

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The textbooks on a teacher’s desk reflect and reinforce the values of the church community. Photograph by the author.

If there are books in the home, everyone reads them. Just as parents do not discourage a child who attempts a particular chore or who wants to help, they do not discourage young readers from looking at books that may be too advanced for them. If a father or mother is reading a novel, then the child will likely read that novel too at some point. Consequently, most Amish parents keep a close eye on the reading material that comes into the home. Parents take seriously the need to guide their children’s reading outside the classroom, eschewing fantasy and other suspect literature in favor of books about real life, though not necessarily the contemporary real life outside of their communities. Works that do not meet parental standards generally end up in the woodstove or the trash barrel. Religious material from non-Amish sources is particularly suspect, for it might lead impressionable minds to challenge parental and church authority. I watched one Amish father thank an English neighbor for the gift of a children’s book of illustrated Bible stories. After the neighbor left, the Amish man threw the book into his woodstove, clearly determined that his children would learn the Bible from family devotions and church sermons. Literature from the nineteenth century is widely accepted, perhaps because it reflects a time in which technology was not omnipresent and men

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and women played clearly different social roles. In search of wholesome reading, parents often look through the stacks of books in thrift stores or used book shops, seizing upon works by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Lucy Maud Montgomery. The Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder is especially prized. When I told one Swartzentruber Amish family that Wilder was indeed a real person, the children crowded around me to look at pictures of Wilder and the famous “little house on the prairie” on my smartphone. In another Amish community, one mother asked me to order a set of the Little House books to give her family for a Christmas present.11 Pleasure Reading The archaic Westerns, adventure stories, and novels of bygone days present Amish readers with a mainstream society that reflects the traditional values and notions of gender still espoused by the Amish. Men do daring, rugged, outdoor activities, while women take care of the household; evil is evident, and good triumphs. Such reading offers interesting adventures while reinforcing the Amish view of how life should be. Similarly, Amish-themed romance novels offer young girls and grown women a glimpse of the mainstream world, and they titillate with hinted-at transgression. In various story lines, the young woman faces issues that might challenge her faith, makes the correct decision, finds strength in a good man, and honors her parents. Women in diverse Amish communities happily read novels by authors such as Wanda Brunstetter and Beverly Lewis.12 Many of them become engrossed in the different story lines and care deeply about the characters. More than one married Swartzentruber woman has recounted to me the plot of the book she just finished, labeling it a “true story.”13 Two young sisters were delighted with the popular Amish-themed novels I brought them, whereas their husbands told me that they preferred the Hardy Boys series. Amish readers especially value the novels of Amish author Linda Byler, perhaps because they more authentically represent Amish life. Nevertheless, the women reading Amish-themed fiction do not seem to worry that the Amish characters they read about are not exactly like the Amish they know. For example, when I asked one woman whether she thought the Amish characters in the book she was reading were really Amish, she responded, “Some people wouldn’t think so. They’re higher-class people.” Another woman I talked with called them Sotleit, the Pennsylvania German word

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used to refer to more progressive Old Order Amish. A third woman I talked to noted, “[The characters] are not like us.” Also referring to the characters as “higher-class Amish,” she added, “They don’t do things like us.” A Swartzen­ truber Amish woman noted that the Amish in the novels “had phones in their shops, and couples go out together in public before they’re published,” behavior unheard-of among the Swartzentrubers. Nevertheless, this difference from their own reality does not seem to affect how many Amish women feel about the books.14 “They’re good stories,” one woman told me. “I like them.” Janice A. Radway found that mainstream women characterized their reading of romance novels as a means of escaping the tedium of daily life.15 Similarly, Amish women speak of novel reading as something they do instead of household chores. A mother of eight to whom I had just brought a box of Amish-themed romance novels culled from the shelves of a local library told me that she often found it hard to stop reading and do her work. She forced herself to “wait until Sunday” to enjoy her novels, an explicit recognition that her reading was not work and so was an appropriate activity for a day of rest. Another woman told me that she had found the story in one of the books a friend had given her too sad to read and so had put it down. She then teased her older sister, noting that the sister certainly was not putting any books down. It seems the sister, unable to stop reading, had stayed up very late the night before and had had difficulty getting up that morning. Even the more titillating Amish romance novels reinforce Amish gender values. There is no premarital sex; young girls may have their heads turned by a stranger, but generally, in the end, they recognize the wisdom of parental advice and the value of the security of family and church. In these ways, the novels reassure their readers about what is important in their own lives. “I like when they go back,” a Swartzentruber woman told me, referring to Amish heroines nearly lost to the world. If, by chance, a novel turns out to be too transgressive, it will likely end up in the trash bin or the fire. Moral Texts, Wholesome Fiction, and Personal Advice In addition to archaic novels, Westerns, and Amish-themed fiction, Amish readers eagerly read literature explicitly produced to reinforce Amish values. For example, prized in all Amish communities are books published by the Amish-owned Pathway Publishers, including Pathway founder and publisher Joseph Stoll’s Shagbark Hickory and A Michigan Summer, tales about growing up Amish, and the Benjy and Lizzie books, two series about Amish

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children who learn important lessons about the importance of home and community. Older children are likely to read stories about the challenges others like them have faced. For example, His Protecting Hand by Molly Zook and David Luthy tells the story of a young girl who remains faithful to Amish ways despite the hardships she encounters as a pioneer in North Dakota. Susie Wagler’s Language of My Heart, an “Amish girl’s journal,” tells of the struggles faced by a young girl in a contemporary Amish community. Parents want their children to read texts that reinforce the teachings of home and church, and for many the magazines published by Pathway— Family Life, Blackboard Bulletin, and Young Companion—fill the bill nicely. In the first issue of Family Life, the editors proclaimed the mission of the magazine, asking rhetorically, “What is Family Life?”: “Family Life is the name of the magazine you are holding in your hands. But it is much more. The family is the heart of the community and the church. Even a nation is made up of families. If there is a strong family life, then the church, the community, and the nation will be likewise. If family life degenerates, then all will suffer.”16 The new magazine, the editors asserted, would be a means of disseminating thoughts and ideas about strengthening the family and making everyday work and family interactions a means of serving God. This latter point has made the Pathway magazines less acceptable to the most conservative Amish. When I asked Joseph Stoll about this, he responded, “One thing that might come up—too much religion. They might be afraid of Pathway influence. There’s the threat of more progressive influence.” For the most conservative Amish, outside reading materials can be more acceptable than texts prepared by more progressive Amish groups, whose literature may be perceived as threatening because it is too overtly religious.17 Nevertheless, in the majority of Amish communities, the Pathway Readers and Pathway-published magazines, novels, and children’s books—filled with stories that emphasize traditional roles for both men and women—are eagerly read.18 Reading Family Life and Young Companion, for example, children are told how important it is to honor their parents and to emulate them. Boys learn to work hard and not waste time daydreaming. Young girls are guided into an adulthood in which they will be wives, mothers, helpmeets, and keepers at home. Tomboys turn from rough-and-tumble activities to embrace cooking and sewing. Young women in particular are warned against worldly ways. Recognizing that many readers confront the non-Amish world daily, the Pathway mag-

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azines target seemingly innocent behaviors and set boundaries. In “Horse and Buggy Morals,” for example, the author directs his comments to young women: Scriptural standards of morality require modest behavior and dress at all times. Do our women adorn themselves after the manner of the holy women of olden times who trusted in God and were in subjection to their husbands? If so, then we will have no use for low-cut necklines, short dresses, flesh-colored stockings or roll-down socks. The expression on a woman’s face and the condition of her hair are signs by which we can usually ascertain the state of her heart. A woman with the peace of God in her heart will show meekness and modesty and her hair will be covered with a devotional covering. Those who are proud and haughty of heart will have pride on the face, with the hair done up in a fashionable hair-do. (What is worse than a beehive?) Of course it is possible for the heart not to be right, and the outside appearance not show it. But if the outward appearance is unscriptural, then it is a reliable indication of the condition of the heart.19

He then continues to address his female readership directly: Girls, do you think of what you are doing when you follow the fashions of this world? . . . The purpose of cosmetics and immodest dress is seduction. To seduce a man means to persuade him to do things which are not proper. Before putting on that form-fitting dress, or using perfume or cosmetics, think what you are advertising to the world. When you are willfully exposing your body, whether it be the head, feet or any other portion, so as to be noticed [by] men, you are saying that you want men to admire you and lust after you. Perhaps you have never thought of it in this way before, for surely you would not want to do this.20

“Be on your guard,” the author concludes.21 As the linguist Joshua Brown points out in his study of Amish young adult literature, the stories young Amish women read are different from mainstream young adult fiction, for they lack “the increasingly prevalent ‘autonomous, assured, and self-determining heroines.’ ”22 Instead, the young girls of Amish fiction become quiet, obedient, church-affirming women. Avidly consuming Amish fiction, young Amish girls learn to be Amish women and to play the role their church community has set out for them.23 Importantly, both young girls and young boys learn not only what they should be and how they should act, they learn what to expect in the behavior of the opposite sex. While articles and stories portray the ideal male as gentle, honest, and hardworking, the ideal woman is presented as a “meek

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and quiet spirit.”24 Both should be yielding and submissive, demonstrating the Gelassenheit that is a core value of Amish life. Thus, as Brown notes, while traditional Amish narratives are male-dominated, men do not have the freedom to exercise absolute power: “For the Old Order Amish, both men and women are empowered and constrained in their society. Power in the ‘negotiation of policy and the daily interaction of church members’ is not hierarchical, exhibiting both male and female influence.”25 In fact, as Brown points out, Amish fiction presents a paradox for its young female Amish readers. On the one hand, it reinforces the traditional gender roles of their church communities, highlighting yielding, hardworking female protagonists who faithfully serve their families and communities. On the other hand, through a variety of narratives on topics as diverse as joining the church or the temptation of worldly things, Amish fiction pre­ sents readers with other possible actions and outcomes. There are protagonists who have doubts and conservative Amish girls in the company of more progressive ones who wonder how far they can go in adopting more worldly ways. There are girls who do not like to sew, who tire of watching children, who want to wear bright-colored dresses. As they read, young female readers are challenged to reconcile their individual doubts, yearnings, and fears with the lessons of home and church. And just as the protagonists, often guided by the counsel of older (and wiser) women, learn to give up and accept what the church teaches as God’s plan for their lives, readers learn to give up and become Amish women as their families and church hope they will be. A single issue of Young Companion offered young female readers a variety of lessons on appropriate Amish behavior. For example, “Hot Bricks and Corn Bags” tells of a young girl who does not want to go out in a snowstorm to help a neighbor but eventually does so and feels rewarded.26 In “Lily Condemns Herself,” sixteen-year-old Lily is appalled at the outgoing, boisterous behavior of two other girls at a young-folk singing but then realizes that she is behaving in the same unacceptable way at a frolic and prays that she will not talk too much or so loudly in the future.27 “The Road to River Run” tells the story of a young girl who feels guilty after criticizing her friend publicly but later takes to heart the words of a sermon about fellowship and makes peace with her friend.28 In “The Hard Way and the Easy Way,” readers are presented with two cousins who are raised differently, one by a family that routinely hires drivers to go even the shortest distances and the other, the narrator, by a family determined to keep the traditional horse-

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and-buggy culture. After coming of age, the cousin raised with hired drivers leaves the church, while the cousin who was raised to appreciate the traditions of her community learns that “we risk losing so much when we start looking for ways to make the path easier and smoother.”29 Lest the reader still be tempted, the story concludes with the narrator’s sad thoughts about her cousin: I wanted to tell her that she was healthy and strong and perfectly capable of driving a horse when she wanted to go away. I wanted to tell her that our precious heritage of faith and our way of life was worth preserving even if it did take some extra effort. I wanted to tell her that she was so used to looking for the easy way out of every situation that she forgot what we were striving for. I wanted to ask her if she didn’t feel a concern for her children’s future if she taught them to seek the easy way, no matter what the consequences.30

Stories such as these empower young women both by acknowledging the importance of the struggles they face and by offering them solutions to worldly problems. Importantly, the stories emphasize that they are not alone. Emphasizing the need to give up, to yield to God who acts through the church, the stories reassure young readers that in fellowship with other church members, they can be strong in their faith and pleasing in the eyes of God. At the same time, the stories reinforce the importance of the role young women play in the church community by suggesting that if they do not yield, if they act in ways that undermine the church’s teachings and values, then they may be responsible not only for their own downfall, but also for the downfall of others. Contrasting her own family to that of her cousin, the steadfast narrator of “The Hard Way and the Easy Way” realizes: It was hard to believe that Dad and Uncle Levi were brothers. They certainly had different ways of living their faith. However, when I really thought hard about the differences in our families, I had to admit it was likely the women the two brothers had married who made the most difference. Mom was down-to-earth, hard-working, and concerned. Concerned about the future of her children, concerned about living within the boundaries of the church rules, and concerned about teaching her children to do the same. Where Mom was wholeheartedly devout about serving God and building up the church, Aunt Alma . . . liked to take the easy way in everything she possibly could.31

Taking the easy way, being loud and boisterous, being judgmental, or being lazy will doom not only women but their families as well.

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Presented with an everyday issue, the young Amish reader is led to see the problem and to work it out in a way consistent with the values of her community, reinforcing her identity as a member of her community. Writing to “Can You Help Me?”—an ongoing feature of Young Companion magazine—one young teen asked how she could be “friendly with young men without flirting.” Writers from church communities across North America provided solutions. She should be “reserved around boys, but nevertheless friendly,” wrote “Epaphras,” who added, “a humble friendly attitude is not flirting.” “Samuel” assured her that she “can be friendly without flirting” but to “keep in mind that ‘the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit’ is in the sight of God of great price.” He counseled “friendliness with moderation.” Validating the young girl’s concerns, another writer assured her of the seriousness of her question: You see, this is not about the boys and what they think. This is not about being a flirt or not being one. This is not even about me or how I feel. It goes far deeper than that. This is all about learning to live our lives as God intended us to. This is about discovering who I am. This is all about my relationship with God. Because, you see, purity is not “touch not, taste not, handle not.” Purity is not about avoiding the boys, refusing to smile at them, or to talk with them. Purity is not about the boys at all. Purity is a soul at peace with God. In our young souls, we bear an image of God that no one else shares exactly the same. There is a special peace that comes with discovering that image, and with being the person God meant us to be.32

These writers confirmed that her problem was a valid one and that many cared enough to offer her advice. She then had to decide whether to take the church-approved path or to go against God’s teachings. As they read the fiction by Amish authors and others approved by their parents and church communities, young Amish women are consistently presented with the messages that maintaining an inner purity and a meek, submissive spirit honors God, that assertive behavior does not, and that a correct inner attitude and faith will result in right actions. Further, they are taught that to follow the teachings of one’s parents is to obey the commandment to honor one’s father and mother. Gender roles, in this view, are not cultural inventions that young people learn but rather part of the divine order. When women desire to be something other than what God has ordained, then, they are taught, trouble will surely follow. As girls approach marriage, Amish fiction continues to instruct and re-

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assure. A short story in Family Life tells of a widow whose only daughter, Rachel, was “grown to womanhood” and yet continually rejected suitors. When asked why, Rachel replied, “I guess I’m just scared. It frightens me to even think of marriage. You know what the Bible teaches about the wife submitting to her husband. It says he is supposed to ‘rule’ over me. Why, I would be completely at his mercy! He could treat me any way he wanted to.” The story goes on to reassure her that boys and young men must also submit and be taught to take the place God has set for them, that they must care for their wives as Christ cares for his church.33 Amish women are reminded that patience and trust are key and that their inner character is much more important than the actions they take. Writing to Family Life’s “Problem Corner,” one young woman expressed doubts about the young man she had been dating for some time. “I respect my friend and he seems like a sincere Christian. But . . . he does seem to have a problem managing his work and his money. There is some laziness involved, too.” Signing herself “Wavering,” the young woman asked bluntly, “Should we quit?”34 In response, a contributor calling herself “Happily Married” wrote, “There are things in life that are more important than how much work one gets done, or how good a manager he is. Does he have a true Christian character? How is his relationship to his church and family? Is he willing to accept advice and correction?” Confessing that her first response to the initial problem was to counsel “Wavering” to “run for the hills,” a contributor who signed herself “God Bless You Either Way” advised “Wavering” that if she did wed, she should “not nag” but rather “take his hand and never look back.” Another correspondent suggested that the doubts were “red flags” that “Wavering” should heed, adding, “I am a wife who married in spite of my doubts, and we have had some very rough years. My husband is not lazy, but I regret to say he is self-centered. I have had to raise his children without much input from him. Our children have been ridiculed and slighted because of their father’s behavior.” Nevertheless, she was still with her husband, and “our marriage is better than it has been.” Similarly, “Loving, but Hurting” wrote “from inside a marriage such as you’re concerned about.” She offered no answers but reminded “Wavering” that “the final choice is hers” and advised her “to seek God’s will.” In other words, “Wavering” had to make the choice and would be complicit in the result. For a successful outcome, she should seek God’s help. As “Postmarked in Lancaster” wrote, “Stop wavering. Make a decision one way or the other, then stick to that decision and make the best of it. Do not look back. The question is never, ‘Should I

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get married or not?’ It is always, ‘How can I best serve God and my fellowman? How can I seek first the kingdom of God?’ ”35 The key to serving God is to yield to him and not to sin, a message spelled out explicitly in a Young Companion piece entitled “To My Dear Niece.” Aunt Dorcas tells her young relative, who is about to join the young folk, that “for every choice and decision you make, a reaping will follow” and that she should look to Jesus as “your perfect example to follow.” “You, too, will meet with many temptations,” Aunt Dorcas writes. “You will be tested, even by your friends.” The solution, Aunt Dorcas makes clear, is to think of others and read and meditate on God’s word. After all, the aunt reminds her niece, “A meek and quiet spirit is loved by God and man. Accept yourself for who you are. God made you to be you.”36 The message is clear. A woman is made by God to be meek and quiet and to help others and pray for them. Her strength comes in following the “straight and narrow way,” in which case she will be pleasing to “God and man.” If she attempts to be a different kind of woman, she will pay the consequences. In a Family Life essay entitled “The Joy of Submission,” the author, “A Husband’s Helpmeet,” talks about the difficulty of learning to be submissive, evoking the struggle that Aunt Dorcas presents to her niece: Have I always been submissive by nature; is that a gift I was born with? I doubt if any of us are naturally submissive. We all have too much of Adam’s nature for that. My parents could readily testify that I have not always been submissive. I had plenty of my own ideas, and I wanted to do things my way. Thinking back, I suppose I did learn a few things about submission before marriage. After all, teaching school for a number of years gave me some real-life lessons concerning the need for submission. But to my shame, I cannot honestly say I experienced the joy of submission back then.37

Still, the author concludes, trusting in one’s spouse and praying to God to give him wisdom will bring joy in submission. If young girls work hard, accept their place in the home and in the church community, and put their faith in God, then they will find joy. Giving oneself up to God’s will, becoming baptized, marrying, and following the example of one’s parents are cast as difficult but necessary choices for Amish women. But readers are also reassured that if they choose the right path, they will be rewarded, not necessarily with a happy life here on earth but with the hope of the salvation and everlasting joy that comes with pleasing God.

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Magazines for Women Amish adults read a variety of materials published for their communities, including Plain Interests, a monthly magazine offering articles written mostly by Amish on health, gardening, history, and spiritual reflections; the Diary, a publication that, like the Amish newspapers the Budget and Die Botschaft, largely consists of letters from Amish communities; and The Connection, which features regular articles from columnists in different Amish communities.38 There are also specialized publications, such as Single Girls Newsletter, a quarterly publication of letters from single women; Plain Communities Business Exchange, with news and advertisements of and for Old Order businesses; and Life’s Special Sunbeams, a monthly journal offering stories and articles for and by parents of children with special needs.39 For women, there are Little Red Hen News, Ladies’ Journal, and Keepers at Home, three magazines that Amish women repeatedly recommended to me when I asked them what they liked to read.40 Magazines written explicitly for women, like other reading materials, must reinforce the values of the church community or they go in the fire or trash can. Yet, like the textbooks used in Amish schools, the magazines women read vary with the community. Little Red Hen News, Ladies’ Journal, and Keepers at Home are all read by Amish women, but they are not read by the same Amish women, and the gendered messages they present, while largely consistent, vary in subtle but important ways. Little Red Hen News Little Red Hen News is choice reading among Swartzentruber and other conservative Amish women who, with their husbands and families, maintain the agrarian lifestyle that was once the norm throughout the Amish world. When I told one woman that I had heard about the magazine from her sister and had gotten a subscription, she asked if I would share it with her because she could not afford her own subscription at the time and her sister took too long to pass on the magazine. First published in 2008, Little Red Hen News is a quarterly magazine written and edited mostly by Amish women, although there are a few Old Order Mennonite contributors and even occasionally a letter from a Hutterite reader.41 It is a homely production, the contents typed on plain paper and photocopied. Often there are handwritten corrections, charts in which the entries are done by hand, or even whole pages filled with handwritten

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The busy hen on these covers of Little Red Hen News works for her family. Photograph by the author.

text. There are no photographs, only line drawings. The pages are white, and the cover page is the same paper stock, although in a different color. Much like the Amish newspapers and the Diary, contributions from readers come mostly in the form of letters, some with no salutation, but others addressed variously to particular readers, indicating that the article is a

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response to an earlier publication. Many are addressed to “Friends,” “Hens and Chicks,” “LRHens,” and even “My Dear Little Red Hens [sic] Friends,” suggesting a community of readers who feel comfortable with each other. That many letter writers provide addresses further reinforces the feeling that Little Red Hen News is as much a circle letter as a magazine. Little Red Hen News is a magazine for hardworking Amish housewives, a fact emphasized by the publication’s mascot, a line drawing of a hen wearing the apron and bonnet of a housewife. Sometimes the hen is cooking on a woodstove. The cover drawing of the spring 2014 issue, for example, shows the hen with an earthen oven, pulling out bread on a long wooden peel. There is a handwritten caption telling the story of the magazine’s hardworking namesake: “Little Red Hen found seeds. She planted them, she worked with it . . . and it became food for her family.” Two issues later, the hen is using potholders to take her bread out of a woodstove. Behind her, the window features a single-panel curtain pulled to one side, as in most conservative Amish homes. The caption, again handwritten, says, “And it became bread for the family!” Like the archaic texts in conservative Amish schools, Little Red Hen News shields readers from contemporary society by simply not mentioning it. Nor is there discussion of religion; the magazine assumes a shared faith on the part of its audience. Recommended and read by Amish women who, with their husbands, maintain an agrarian lifestyle, Little Red Hen News expresses the fears of many that church communities are abandoning the traditions that have made them strong. As Mrs. T.S. writes in “Our People Make a Living”: Our people have always striven toward close-to-home family relationships where everyone helps each other in making their living. Although there is also some outside work which has been acceptable, the emphasis has been strong against working too closely with the world, working in towns, or building homes of the modern type. Building things beneficial to mankind is a beauty, and such carpentry is certainly acceptable, where the home and children are not neglected, and it can be done with a good conscience and approval of the brotherhood. Needless to say, this does create a challenge, for in today’s world the dangers are many and the temptations manifold. Our ways of doing things may appear queer and impractical, but after all, true Christianity has always been a challenge. So, let’s face it. Through the years the Amish have faced many challenges in their quest for making a living simply, yet practically.

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For Little Red Hen readers, the real concern is that “sad to say a lot of our ideals are being either forgotten, neglected. Or completely lost. . . . It has never been an easy route to work toward that which is pleasing to God and beneficial to the church as a whole. Let us never lower ourselves to saying, ‘I’ve got to do this to make a living.’  ”42 For readers of Little Red Hen News, the world has always been dangerous, but Christians can overcome its temptations by relying on others in the church community, keeping the traditions and practices of their forebears, and leaning on God. To stray from one’s traditions is the real threat to one’s faith; one need remember that this life is a pilgrimage to life everlasting. In a note in the summer 2015 issue, the editor wrote that “our ladies [contributors] share more than just soaps, tinctures, herbs, and being a doctor. . . . It gives the magazine more interest to also include anything that could happen at home.” Yet the editor rejected the notion that Little Red Hen should expand its circle of writers. “If we have too many writers outside of our circle we will become vulnerable to a different reasoning about living simply. The world’s reason is more to improve the present world. Our reasoning is to make it easier for those around us as we pass through this ever declining world, pointing to a better life beyond. We want the reading material in Little Red Hen to reflect this back to our own people first, then also to others if they wish it.”43 Issues of Little Red Hen News generally begin with a story or an article, sometimes about nature but often one that teaches a lesson. The fall 2014 issue, for example, opened with “The Honey Bee,”44 which encouraged the reader to consider beekeeping as a way to learn more about these “amazing creatures.” The winter 2015 issue began with “Leah Needs to Learn,” a story about a young girl who learns to wait to harvest the produce until she is sure it is ready. As “Leah Needs to Learn” demonstrates, the stories in Little Red Hen News are pragmatic ones about doing things properly in the home and on the farm, and mothers play a key role in nurturing children and teaching lessons that have stood the test of time. “Little Red Hen and Today,” for example, tells of young Jesse, whose grandparents have passed away. His mother reminds him about Little Red Hen, who had been devoted to Jesse’s grandmother and how she—Jesse’s mother—had protected the hen after his grandmother had died. “I think it is better not to hold onto the past too long,” Jesse’s mother says. “We miss too much of ‘today’ by clinging to the yesterday too hard. I actually could relax and go on with life better once

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Little Red Hen was gone!” When Jesse seems surprised at this, his mother teaches him: Animals are given to us to care for, and use for their eggs, milk, meat and even companionship at times. . . . But we must remember they are just animals. They have no souls to be responsible for as we do. But as for Grandpa and Grandma, they lived a life of hard work with many concerns for not only their souls, but their children’s as well. They were tired and weary, not only in body, but in mind and spirit as well. And it is comforting to trust in the precious Hope they lived and died with. We, too, can have that Hope every day.

Jesse is comforted, secure in the memories he has of his grandparents and the knowledge he gains from his mother that the day will come when he can “fondly think of the memories without clinging to them too much.”45 The stories, letters, and columns in Little Red Hen News offer an affirmation of truths known rather than a choice to be made. For example, “Our People Make a Living” contrasts the lives of two boys, Daniel and Clifford. Whereas Daniel works with his parents and his brother to do chores without receiving any remuneration, Clifford gets paid a princely sum for everything he does—for example, $25 for mowing the lawn—and spends his money as fast as he gets it. Although he does not covet the easy money Clifford makes, Daniel finds it hard to understand and seeks guidance from his parents. His mother responds that she feels sorry for Clifford, for he will “likely expect his living to be handed to him on a silver platter,” and she adds, “That is why Dad and I do not want you to grow up thinking [that] being paid in money for a job well done is the most desired for reward. . . . The greatest payment we receive is God’s provisions for us as a family. A warm house, wholesome foods, plenty to wear, not to mention the privileges we have been granted to go to school and learn, go to church together, and have neighbors and friends to share our lives with.”46 Daniel’s father agrees: “As one of our Bishops recently stated, ‘Unser leben ist Jesus (our ‘living’ in [sic] Jesus).’ . . . Our life here is soon gone, but life in Jesus endures eternally.” “I’m glad I’m not Clifford,” Daniel’s brother, Joseph, asserts. “His Mom isn’t even home when he gets home from school.”47 Clearly, life for Clifford has its rewards in this world, but Daniel (and the Little Red Hen audience) can easily see that their rewards will come in the next, which is the living they should earn. God’s teachings are evident, and acceptance is key. One does not have to fret about choices so much as one simply has to take as given certain re-

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alities. For example, “Stay Close to God” reminds readers, “We cannot find perfection in a church on earth for that is unattainable. ‘If you find the perfect church, don’t join it.’ It is a humbling, grateful feeling to know that although neither we nor our church is perfect, we can have peace with God anyway, through the grace of His precious Son, Jesus Christ. We need not be upset when someone doesn’t see eye to eye with us.”48 From an author who identifies herself as “just a mother,” “Lessons for Our Children” told readers that “being a wife and a mother is a blessing in itself,” reminding them that “a mother can make life for herself miserable or enjoyable. It is her choice to accept or not whatever God sees fit to send her way.” Whatever comes is from God, and “there is no way we can lead and live a Christian life without His help—His grace and strength. We are all here to help each other.”49 Little Red Hen News affirms a communal faith, not one in which church members struggle alone. The women who read the magazine know that they have a purpose, that they are there to help others, who will in turn help them, and that together, with prayer and God’s guidance, they will be strong. It is not a faith that needs examining. For example, in “Mothering Communications: Recipes for Little Red Hen’s Loaf-a-Bread . . . Especially for Mothers and Their Little Chicks,” a continuing feature of Little Red Hen, Grandma Sue offers the wisdom of one who has raised a family and is now at the point of enjoying her grandchildren. Reminding mothers that they are raising God’s children, Grandma Sue writes, “We are all here on earth for a divine purpose. It is so rewarding, so refreshing to help others in their troubles and in their pilgrimage. If we were ever put into a situation where we would be all alone and no one needed our help and comfort, life would feel rather empty.” Mothers are also encouraged to seek help from others in their church community. Acknowledging the frailty of human beings, even church members, Grandma Sue adds, “But let us not be so taken up with our zeal for helping others that we cannot accept help when our turn of ‘affliction’ comes. Almost everyone, sometime in our life, will experience the need to be lifted up and comforted by our fellow pilgrims. Let us then be gracious receivers so that others may reap the blessing of giving.” Even in affliction, the reader can help others by accepting help. Finally, Grandma Sue offers the most important reminder: “However weak you may feel in yourself, however rough the road you may need to travel, however heavy the burden you may need to carry, God will supply you with sufficient strength.”50 In short, one is never alone. As befits a magazine that encourages its readers to rely on each other,

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Little Red Hen News offers many recipes and how-to letters. The fall 2014 issue, for example, offered recipes for such diverse products as denture cream, herbal wine, whipped body butter, and paint and varnish remover. Unsurprisingly, given its agrarian readership, letters talk of gardening, seed saving, and useful herbs. The magazine’s writers assume that women are raising their own crops, so the recipes contain no references to store-bought goods or packaged foods. Significantly, Little Red Hen also assumes a world in which women and men work together, sharing both tasks and interests. Although the magazine is overtly aimed at women, the “hens,” there is a continuing column for male readers, “Roosters’ Observation Post: The Men’s Page.” But many of the contributions the men submit could easily appear elsewhere in the magazine since they do not differ much from the contributions of their female counterparts. In the fall 2014 issue, for example, a male correspondent urged soapmakers to use oils that could be pressed on the farm instead of exotic and tropical oils. He also noted that the juice of green pokeberries was ideal for removing pokeberry stains. Often contributions come from couples. For example, Amos and Ella Borntrager answered questions that had appeared in an earlier issue about the definition of “USP” (the United States Pharmacopeia), chicken breads, and the benefits of soy lecithin to clean arteries of cholesterol. The wisdom of both mothers and fathers is celebrated. In “Jesse’s Unexpected Responsibilities,” young Jesse raises ducks and a goose and becomes responsible for a sow that decides to have her piglets in Jesse’s coop. Jesse handles it all and is rewarded with three of the piglets to start his own herd. Doing what he has been taught to do by his parents brings success.51 On the other hand, “A Fox’s Sad End” tells of a fox that, forgetting its mother’s advice, grows bold and comes to a bad end.52 In reading Little Red Hen News, women are assured of their place in the community. They are not isolated in their labor nor in their faith. They are encouraged to work hard, to maintain their traditions in the face of worldly temptations, and to rely on their fellow church members, female and male, in times of need. Women speak up, and their strength and wisdom are acknowledged. Ladies’ Journal “We did get ‘The Little Red Hen News’ once,” a woman from an Amish community in northern Pennsylvania community wrote to me. “But I guess that

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wasn’t so much my interests.” She added that she and others in her area read Ladies’ Journal, and she included a subscription form in her letter.53 The contributors to and the readers of Little Red Hen News pay little attention to women in nonfarming communities and even less to mainstream society. In contrast, the women who turn to Ladies’ Journal are drawn from more diverse Amish and other plain communities, and the magazine explicitly offers “inspiration and encouragement to women of faith” without defining the faith communities from which they come. Although the Ladies’ Journal’s editor is Old Order Amish, different writers make reference to realities outside the traditional horse-and-buggy world. For example, a full-color advertisement for a cookbook shows the cookbook’s author and her daughters sitting down to a meal. The mother and the older daughters wear the smaller coverings of a conservative Mennonite church; their dress is modest but fashionable. Ladies’ Journal has a very different look from Little Red Hen News, with a glossy, multicolored cover and typeset pages. Color photographs accompany recipes submitted by readers, and signatures appear in a cursive font to mimic handwriting. In contrast to Little Red Hen News, Ladies’ Journal is explicitly a magazine for women, and unlike the readers of Little Red Hen News, the Ladies’ Journal readers are less likely to come from an agrarian world in which husbands and wives work together. Although the short biographies of the authors emphasize husbands, children, and grandchildren, most suggest that the author is home during the day while her spouse is away at work. The articles are aimed at women who are stay-at-home mothers and homemakers. Recurring columns cater to mothers (e.g., “Reflections of Motherhood,” “Mary’s Musings,” “A Note while Baby Is Napping”) and other caregivers (“A Message from a Caregiver”). There is a regular feature called “Inspire, Create, Live,” which offers inspirational notes, things to make, and recipes to try, and another entitled “Marital Enlightenment,” which has advice for wives. There are also articles on foster care and cooking (each month presents a new cookbook), and a page with word search and other games: “For the Young and Young at Heart.” Articles and letters in Ladies’ Journal are longer than those in Little Red Hen News and talk little about food preservation or the production of home remedies and soaps. In “Inspirational Insights,” Bonnie Smith writes about how much easier it is to just go to the store and buy things than it is to can them. She takes the time to can produce not because she must in order to feed her family, but “because it’s an exercise in identity, faith, gratitude, and

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Ladies’ Journal addresses itself to “women of faith.” Photograph by the author.

personal discipline.”54 Implying that readers have both extra time and disposable income to spend on hobbies, Ladies’ Journal presents such recurring features as the “Stampin’ Station,” for those who make greeting cards, and “Sewing and Quilting (Katie’s Hints and Stitches),” which dispenses advice for occasional stitchery projects. “Gardening Gems” is for those who like to garden. “When shopping for plants,” author Mary Alice writes, “pay attention to when they flower. Early varieties can blossom in March, late ones into July or even fall.”55 As in Little Red Hen News, there are no articles about sex, contraception, pregnancy, or childbirth, nor is there advice about how to choose a good midwife or doctor when expecting. There are no articles about pampering

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oneself, nor are there beauty tips beyond the advice given in “Marital Enlightenment” that a woman should take the time to be as attractive as she can be.56 There are articles about health and eating right, as well as occasional pieces on depression, but few articles that focus on women’s health during pregnancy or on gynecological disorders. An article called “What It Really Means to Have Endometriosis” briefly describes the disease and talks of the pain women suffer, advising readers to treat sufferers with “compassion and respect.” However, there is no discussion of treatments.57 Nor does Ladies’ Journal address issues of women entrepreneurs or women working outside the home, although many of the columns support women’s home businesses. In the March–April 2017 issue, for example, “Sewing and Quilting” begins with a quotation from Matthew 28:6 and discusses the meaning of the folded cloth that was wrapped around Jesus’s head in the grave. It also includes directions for making “Pampers-style diapers,” color photos of the completed project, and an advertisement for “DIY Soft Baby Books,” which invites readers to order fabric book panels from the author. The September–October column of the same year tells of the author’s trip to New York, where she and her husband found friends of the same faith miles from home. The column also pictures a diaper stacker project, with the plans available to purchase from the author. An article entitled “Do You Have Parasites” includes an advertisement for the nutritional needs business the author runs with her husband.58 In Ladies’ Journal, husbands are partners, there to talk to, to travel with, and to care for when sick. A recurring feature, for example, is “A Walk through a Deep Valley,” in which a wife describes her husband’s diagnosis and ongoing treatment for leukemia. Husbands can also be joked about. “Ladies’ Lines,” a column featuring letters from readers, offered one woman’s take on the Beatitudes: Blessed are men who endure over-done food for they shall be comforted with the hope of better food tomorrow. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after white potatoes and unscorched hot dogs, for they shall inherit great patience. Blessed is the man who can eat scorched food, for he shall visit Subway often. Blessed are they who are persecuted with their wife’s cooking, for they shall inherit a slim waistline. Blessed is the man who after all this, still loves his wife, for they will remain happily married.59

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In Ladies’ Journal, husbands are present in the evening, playing with the children while their wives are washing dishes. Religion plays an overt and important role in Ladies’ Journal. The readers of Little Red Hen News accept the teachings of their church without discussion or debate, and Little Red Hen in turn takes the faith of its readers for granted, but the readers of Ladies’ Journal seek and find reassurance in its pages for the decisions they make in their attempt to lead Christian lives. For example, “Crumbs and Cocoa,” a recurring column, reaffirms the choice of its readers to “be mothers.” In one column, the author, Barbie Stoltzfus, recounts a visit with her mother to a greenhouse, where the clerk complimented her mother about one of Stoltzfus’s sisters, who runs a well-known paper-crafting business. The clerk then asked what her other daughter, the author, does. Mom, I was sure, must be at a total loss of words; I felt sorry for her. She was not the kind of woman (bless her heart) to want to publicly embarrass anyone. Now if Mrs. Clerk would have asked Mom about my other siblings, she would have been able to give a glowing report. My brother was a noted businessman in the community; my other sister lived on a large, well-kept dairy farm. But me? I, my mother’s youngest child, did not have any business or special quality.

Stoltzfus’s mother told the truth: “My youngest daughter is a mother.” The author reports that her mother’s tone of pride as she said this transformed her life into “something extraordinary.” Being a mother is “the best job.” Not that every woman can be a mother or a wife, Stoltzfus notes, assuring those who are single or childless that the world needs them as well. “Truly, God does all things well. May we rest assured that His plan for us is perfect.”60 Unlike the readers of Little Red Hen News, the readers of Ladies’ Journal appear to be largely on their own as they raise their children, cook, sew, and clean. They attend church and have periodic get-togethers with other women, but for much of their time they are housewives and mothers who are alone both during the day and in their attempt to live Christian lives. Ladies’ Journal serves to bring these readers together and provides them an opportunity to raise issues, confront problems, and draw strength from other women. Readers are reassured that they are not alone as they face hardship. For example, like the characters in Family Life and Young Companion stories, some of the contributors to Ladies’ Journal tell of overcoming self-doubt. In “An

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Encouraging Word,” Lill tells of sitting in church and feeling “empty and washed-out.” My life felt so out of control with an overwhelming workload, a teething toddler, and an uncommunicative husband. Really, why do I bother explaining? Haven’t we all been there at some point in life? But I was letting my thoughts spiral downward dangerously fast. “I’m an awful mom; I snap at the children; I snap at hubby; I snap at the cat; . . . I have no management skills; I can’t even get my house clean for Sunday! My family doesn’t need my bad moods; they’d be better off without me.”

Pleading with God “to fill her heart,” Lill is restored by a comment from another church member about how much a mutual acquaintance had enjoyed a visit to Lill the week before. Taking it as a sign of God’s answer to her prayer, Lill reminds her readers to “help each other along life’s way” and not to underestimate encouraging words.61 More often, the stories and articles encourage readers to strive to do and be more. “Regardless of how much work you have to do, you still won’t be happy unless you have a purpose in life,” contributor A. Yoder asserts in “Points to Ponder.” “Let’s strive to make life brighter for others and to live for God; then, our lives will have a lasting, satisfying purpose.”62 Readers are repeatedly assured that God has a plan for their lives. All they have to do is be strong in faith and look for the signs. For example, talking about how difficult she found it to leave the classroom after teaching for twenty-­ eight years, an author writes that she is once more waiting on God for direction, although she does not like the lost feeling and the doubts she is experiencing as she waits for God to make his plan for her clear. Nevertheless, she assures her readers, “We have a reason for pressing on. We must pray, work, wait, and have patience; we must love, forgive, and keep on blooming for God. Because He loves us and we love him.”63 Ladies’ Journal articles reassure women that little events signal God’s love for them and that they should be open to his message. Writing about waiting for a new foster baby, Edith Baker tells of having a nagging feeling that something is wrong, and when she feels no relief from praying, she puts her concern on her church’s prayer hotline. She realizes in the end that the ­baby’s healthy birth is a sign of God’s grace and the survival of the baby’s mother after a dangerous delivery an indication that God has given the woman another chance to repent. “God speaks through a whisper at times,”

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Baker concludes. “Are my spiritual ears so clogged with the wax of earthly care that I can’t hear Him speak? Or do I regularly visit my heavenly Physician for a spiritual ear flush?”64 Ladies’ Journal does not take the faith of its readers for granted, nor does it allow for a passive believer. Rather, it emphasizes that women must actively seek, pray, and wait. Moreover, Ladies’ Journal gives readers agency as Christian women. Although they are not preachers, nor are they meant to be, their lives can be a witness to the most unfortunate, and they should offer their personal testimony and example as God presents the opportunity. Visiting her missionary daughter in a large city, Hope Byler tells her daughter’s drug-addicted neighbor that she is a special person and that Christ died for her sins. As the addict takes the proffered handout of food, Byler prays, “Jesus was that You? Do You sometimes wear scuffed sneakers? And lisp? And sit on doorsteps?” She has the realization that “I’ve done for one what I wish I could do for a million. One drop—in an immense bucket. One drop—to assuage the thirst of a parched million. Only one. But as I’ve done it unto [her], I’ve done it unto Him.” She concludes with a prayer: “Lord, my hands are Yours to use. My time, Yours to interrupt. My fridge, Yours to empty.”65 In sharp contrast to Little Red Hen News, with its emphasis on maintaining the traditions of the community and protecting the community from the dangers of the world, Ladies’ Journal features women whose actions provide a witness of their faith to those outside the church community. Every month, for example, columnist Mary Ellen Beachy recounts her experiences in Kenya in the column “Out of Africa.” “I have many opportunities to encourage American and African women,” she writes. “I want my tongue to be one that speaks health and life.”66 In a later issue, Beachy talks about a funeral she has just attended and notes the clash of cultures: “There is much to ponder. . . . But these facts remain: Jesus loves them [the Africans] and Jesus died for them. Heaven is for the Africans as much as for the Americans.”67 While not overtly presenting assurance of salvation, Ladies’ Journal does feature essays in which authors wait for the time when they will have the joy of heaven. Writing from Paraguay, Elfreda R. Showalter tells of dealing with debilitating claustrophobia and the joy of receiving gifts from family and friends back home. Like Beachy who, following the funeral of a child, dreams of going to “that awesome place, where I shall see my Savior face to face,”68 Showalter desires “the wonderful day” when, no longer concerned about

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thieves and barred windows, she “shall ever be with the Lord.” Showalter concludes, “I will have plenty of pure air to breathe. Good-bye forever to claustrophobia.”69 Looking forward to a wedding in her home, Teresa Flora casts Christ as a bridegroom and asks her readers, “Are we as excited about attending the marriage supper of the Lamb as we are about attending a wedding here below? Do we talk frequently with the Groom? Do we share our life’s details with Him? He is preparing a mansion for us even now. Are we getting ready for the wedding? We dare not be late.”70 Women are advised that a “grateful attitude” is one of the qualities of “an emotionally stable person,” and it can be developed by allowing Christ to control one’s life. A wife should “design a plan” if she hopes to meet her responsibilities, looking to God for direction. Arguably, Ladies’ Journal is much like other popular media in its emphasis on family and appropriate feminine behavior. Indeed, it could be described as “postfeminist” in highlighting “the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference.”71 “Your role as a wife involves developing a relationship that will bring joy to both of you,” asserts one of the contributors to the “Marital Enlightenment” column. “A career would involve spending time updating your skills. In the same way, your identity as a woman requires you to spend time making and keeping yourself attractive.”72 Cleanliness is important, the author argues, and “your diet should also be a factor in pleasing your husband.” Those with small children, she suggests, should take time for a nap: “It will help you stay alert through the evening when your husband and older children are at home. Their day may be coming to a close while yours may last until late at night. . . . Look to God to direct you.” Readers are advised to “keep in mind your priorities: a relationship with Jesus Christ, husband, children, personal care and rest, household responsibilities, outside ministry, etcetera,” a list that puts Christ above all, and husband and children before self.73 In Ladies’ Journal, faith is personal, individual, active, and home-based. Jesus only—not obedience to parents, traditions, or church—is the answer to all problems, and women have a very important role to play in God’s plan. Importantly, the magazine promotes an understanding of womanhood in which being a wife is a religious calling. “If you are a wife, you are also a minister,” Katie Smucker writes in her “Sewing and Quilting” column. “Our

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ministry is directed toward our husbands and then our children. Every day and night we need to be ready to minister to his [the husband’s] needs,” she adds, concluding that to be a submissive wife takes faith but “the emphasis is not on women submitting to men, but rather on women showing here on earth the heavenly pattern of the Son submitting to the Father.”74 While Little Red Hen News presents the home as a place where wives, husbands, and children work together, Ladies’ Journal makes it the domain of women. More important, women define it and protect it. “A home,” Smucker writes, “is not a home unless the lady is there making it a home. A young mother’s place is in the home, keeping it, guarding it, watching over those entrusted to her care. To do otherwise will surely cause the Word of God to be blasphemed.” She goes on: “A good woman is a helper, not a hindrance. Men value hard-working women who are eager to learn new things,” and she defines a “good woman” as “a Proverbs 31 woman”: It is a general blueprint of how a woman seeking to honor God should fashion her life. It is the kind of woman a man most admires. “The aged women likewise, that they be in behavior as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God not be blasphemed” (Titus 2:3–5).

Apart from anything else, Smucker tells her readers, “It is a woman’s duty to place her full attention and interest upon her husband, and she is to be under his rule. Her place under him is God’s design for her own spiritual, emotional, and physical safety. It is the only position where she will find real fulfillment as a wife.”75 Ladies’ Journal presents “womanhood” as a full-time occupation and marriage as a partnership in which a housewife delights in serving her spouse, while he takes pleasure in bestowing favors on her. Wives are submissive because that is what the Bible teaches, and even if their husbands fail them or prove to have feet of clay, women must continue to follow the biblical plan for their lives. Importantly, each is responsible individually for the submission that leads to salvation. Smucker writes, “Don’t worry about the quality of his leadership, for he is under the oversight of Jesus. You must answer to God for how you obey the one He placed over you. It takes faith, but remember this: God is focusing our attention on the heavenly pattern.”76 “As married women, do we have any chance for romance?” Mary Troyer asks in

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her ongoing column, “Mary’s Musings.” Yes, she answers, “romance is real, for we can read many stories that display it in the Bible.” Arguing that God created romance while Satan spoiled it with storybook versions, she asserts that women need to “focus on becoming more radiant for Jesus. Seeking Him first brings all good things our way.” A husband might not be all his wife hoped for at their wedding, but a wife who trusts in the Lord will be rewarded: “Seeking Him [Jesus] first brings all good things our way. Instead of trying to turn our husbands into the romantic men from our dreams, let’s delight ourselves in the Lord . . . and our reward shall be great. . . . May the Lord be the answer to our prayers, to our hopes, and to our romance— whether our husbands respond warmly to our godliness or not.”77 In short, being a housewife and a mother requires hard work and self-­ denial. “Deny thyself makes so much more sense since I’m a mother,” writes Joy Zimmerman in “Gleanings of the Home.” “True love provides energy to care for others’ needs first.”78 Those without a husband and children may still find purpose in helping others. In “Dear Single Friend,” the author thanks the single woman who helped her with laundry and caring for the children. She ends with a promise to pray for her single friend and to ask God to give her purpose in her everyday duties.79 Unlike Little Red Hen News, Ladies’ Journal suggests little dependency on church communities for the strength to be worthy of salvation. Rather, the message for the reader is that her faith should be active, revealed in the way a woman approaches her family, home, and husband. The Bible shows the way, Jesus provides the example, and each woman must work daily to be worthy. Her faith will not necessarily mean her home is always clean, the children always well behaved, and her husband always sweet and attentive. After all, as “A Sister in Faith” writes, “There are still problems. What do you do when your lap has shrunk and two babies need to be held and cuddled? There’s only you, for Dad is at work.”80 But if she is patient, humble, submissive, and trusting in the Lord, she will find signs of God’s favor. What she cannot do is give up. The Ladies’ Journal articles are both hierarchical and patriarchal. The power women have is that of submission. However, men too must submit, for as Pathway founder and author Joseph Stoll put it, “Life is full of authority. Being a woman means there is one more level of subjection than being a man. That is all. It doesn’t mean that a woman is thereby being degraded, cheated, or despised. It is simply a fact of life, like being born a girl in the first place.”81 Unlike the readers of Little Red Hen News, the women who

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read Ladies’ Journal likely do not labor side by side with their husbands or work with them to raise children or do tasks in the same way as their parents and grandparents did. Nevertheless, Ladies’ Journal readers are working with their spouses to reinforce a religious understanding of family life. In one installment of “Our Children, Our Gems,” for example, the wife watches her husband playing with their son and her heart “grieves for the mothers who see their husbands disinterested in their children.” Later, the two stand together by their son’s crib, musing at their shared responsibility for his upbringing. When the wife expresses the desire that God take a child “Home” while still “innocent and pure” if God sees that the child will stray in adulthood, her husband agrees. “While it is not profitable to worry about the future, we do need to be diligent in training our children for God, and then rest in God’s omnipotence.”82 As individuals, the women who read Ladies’ Journal have an active faith that leads them to see their lives as a personal ministry. They teach and witness their faith, submitting to husbands but above all to God. Keepers at Home An Amish woman in Indiana first introduced me to Keepers at Home, a women’s magazine in which faith is hierarchical and patriarchal, women are understood to serve a very different role in God’s plan than men do, and salvation awaits those who give themselves up to God’s will. Like Ladies’ Journal, the magazine is targeted at women and overt in its religious content, yet Keepers at Home assumes a married audience, focuses on a woman’s role in marriage and motherhood, and defines womanly submission in a way that gives women both a heavier burden and greater responsibility and power. Keepers at Home announces that it is published “in the spirit of Titus Two,” a biblical chapter that begins, “Speak thou the things which become sound doctrine.” Taking an explicit position on the role of women in the church, Keepers at Home presents a straightforward statement of what the editors “in our role as women” believe at the beginning of every issue: •

•

•

That God wants wives to love and obey their husbands and be subject to them (1 Peter 3:1) That our adorning is not to be outward, but rather “the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4) That women are to wear a head covering (1 Corinthians 11:5)

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That children are a blessed gift from God (Psalm 127:3–5) That we are to help our husbands train our children (Proverbs 29:15, 17)

According to the editors, the magazine’s goal is “to help Christian women catch a vision for the sacred calling God has for their lives. Mothers are the vessels that God uses to carry a little soul and bring it into this present world. It is our goal to encourage mothers in the varied duties of motherhood.” Moreover, “God needs women who are willing to work behind the scenes . . . willing to love, honor, and obey their husbands . . . who pray earnestly . . . that God will lead their husbands according to His will, as leader of their homes.” Contributors to Keepers at Home are encouraged to have their husbands read over their proposed articles and give their approval. First published in 1993, Keepers at Home was founded by members of a New Order Amish church. Initially, some in the New Order community were uncertain whether the new publication would be in keeping with church teachings. Writing to editors at Pathway Publishers, a member of the Walnut Creek (Ohio) Lower District of the New Order Amish asked whether it was “proper and scriptural for sisters to edit and publish a magazine. . . . We as a ministry have turned to publishers with experience of the printed page for your opinion.”83 In response, one of the Pathway editors wrote that although women could edit a magazine aimed only at women, they should not play that role for publications also read by men: Keepers At Home began as a women’s magazine. Personally, I see nothing wrong with women having their own magazine if it deals with what Amish women are doing: sewing, cooking, gardening, raising children. But a family magazine is another thing. We would not have a woman editor of Family Life. We did in the past have a woman editor (Sarah Weaver) of the 1-W [the Selective Service classification for conscientious objector] magazine Ambassador of Peace. We eventually question[ed] both the need for a 1-W magazine and also whether a woman should be an editor of such a magazine. Thus, when it changed to Young Companion in 1971, we had a male editor and still do.

The Pathway editor went on to assert, “We would not feel it is out of place for women to have a women’s magazine but they should do as we have done and have a male board of directors. But we would not feel women should edit and publish a family magazine. Even a women’s magazine has potentials for women to go out of their ‘Beruf ’ [role or place; occupation]. For example,

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Keepers at Home is published “In the Spirit of Titus Two,” a reference to the biblical text Titus 2:3–5, which calls on women to be loving and submissive. Photograph by the author.

what if women write ‘husband bashing’ articles? As long as they keep it strictly on ordinary women’s interests, there should be no problem.”84 Current issues of Keepers at Home introduce the editors’ husbands and children and characterize the editors as “full-time homemakers.” In sharp contrast to the Little Red Hen News focus on protecting Amish “traditions,” Keepers at Home targets a diverse Christian audience that hap-

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pens to include many Amish readers, particularly in communities such as the large Elkhart-LaGrange settlement. It is not a magazine for singles, except as they might be preparing to marry and start a family, which the magazine assumes Christian young women will do. Unlike Ladies’ Journal, Keepers at Home has no regular features for those who are childless or fostering the children of others. Gatherings of women, while enjoyable for fellowship, are opportunities to encourage others and to serve God. Indeed, some columns model the behavior of Christian women. In a “Gleanings from Grandma” column, Edith S. Witmer offers “The Tale of Three Families,” one of which has a mother who gently teaches her daughter to respect her teacher and acknowledge her own shortcomings; a second in which the mother takes her daughter’s side in a dispute with a teacher, without attempting to teach her child how her behavior was unacceptable; and a third in which the mother and father refuse to listen to a child who has been blamed without cause. The failure of the second mother to set limits results in the loss of the daughter to the world, while the third child is saved only through God’s blessing and is not close to his parents. The first child, however, grows up to be a godly woman with a good husband and a large family because “she has been able to see God as He has been written in the lives of her parents, and she seeks to abide in His presence.” The article ends with a challenge to the reader: “What kind of home do you have? Or more importantly . . . what kind will you build today?”85 For readers of Keepers at Home, home is a refuge created and protected by the wife and mother, a sanctuary from the world. Husbands return to the home from days spent working out in the world, and housekeeping and childrearing are unfamiliar tasks to them. Like Little Red Hen News and Ladies’ Journal, Keepers at Home accepts submissions from men, but there is no regular feature authored by a man, and articles that do appear reveal men to be ill at ease in a women’s world. In “Daddy’s Dilemma,” for example, Andrew Hostetler is completely out of his depth after reluctantly agreeing to care for his two offspring while his wife is away. Changing a diaper turns into a major fiasco, and while cleaning up, the author thinks of how wonderful his wife is to do all she does without complaining. He concludes, “She is the Queen of her domain, and I will be the first to crown her. Not only do I crown her Queen of the house but far more important and above all others, I crown her the Queen of my heart.”86 The mother is queen in Keepers at Home, and the articles are devoted to helping her achieve that for which the Bible teaches her to strive.

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The articles in Keepers at Home are a bit longer than those in Ladies’ Journal, many running more than a page. Each issue offers a number of regular features, including “Gleanings from Grandma” and “Birth Announcements.” There is also “Child’s View,” in which readers share touching, funny, or wise things their children have said, and “Our House to Yours,” a column that usually begins with a short anecdote or description of an event in the author’s life, which leads to biblical teaching and advice. “Letters from Our Readers” includes comments on articles that appeared in earlier issues, and “Readers in Touch” solicits help from the magazine’s audience to solve health or other problems, providing home addresses so that those with answers can write directly to them. “Care to Share?” also posts problems but offers a variety of responses in the magazine; no addresses are provided. In one issue, that column included a request from a reader wanting “something that really works for serious cases” of poison ivy, another from a mother asking how to instill in her children a love for prayer, a third from a woman needing help overcoming morning sickness, and a final one from someone wondering about stevia. Each had at least two responses. Like Ladies’ Journal, Keepers at Home celebrates motherhood and does not mention sex, pregnancy, or—beyond a few letters to “Care to Share?”— nursing babies, morning sickness, or gynecological concerns. The first issue of Keepers at Home featured a midwifery column, but the editors later felt this was inappropriate. In the Keepers at Home articles, a husband may be one’s love but not one’s lover. The focus of Keepers at Home is on marriage and what women should do or be to create the conditions for a godly marriage. While the magazine offers advice about how a woman should present herself, there is no discussion about what she should hope for in her man, other than that he be godly. Witmer writes, for example, “The life blood of a godly marriage lies in a trusting relationship that is based on biblical principles and directions.” In vignettes of couples who encounter difficulties in their marriage, Witmer instructs her readers to talk over issues, ending with the lesson that “warmth blossoms in our marriages when we care more about our spouses than we do about ourselves. As we learn to love and live selflessly, we grow into the character of God.”87 Although Amish literature generally reinforces Gelassenheit (submission to God’s will), the articles in Keepers at Home reinforce womanly submission in particular. In contrast to Ladies’ Journal, which emphasizes a notion of faith in which men and women both must submit to God’s will and hus-

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bands and wives together share responsibility for the religious health of the family, the message of Keepers at Home is that a Christian wife must support her husband and be his helpmeet so that he can reach all God has planned for him. Her own reward will be in her submission to God’s plan for her. A recurring feature is the Proverbs 31 series, which expands on the experiences of biblical women and others to help readers understand what it means to be a Christian woman. For example, in one installment, contributor Gina Martin begins by talking about Noah’s wife and her response when Noah told her he would build an ark. “Did she balk at obeying God’s command to build an ark? Did she compare her husband with the other men and wish she was married to one who wasn’t so radical in his obedience to God?” Clearly, no. Turning to herself, Martin reveals that she has not always been so understanding and supportive: “I wasn’t a safe place for my husband to share his dreams and ideas.”88 In a later issue, Martin turns to Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose “mind was probably full of dreams for the future. With the promise of marriage to a godly man, she had many reasons to anticipate happy days to come.” Of course, Mary’s life changes when the angel brings her word that she is favored of God and will bear a son (Luke 1:28 and 21). Pointing out that “Mary showed no hesitancy” in yielding to God’s plan for her, Martin writes that she herself does not always meet disappointment by praising God, nor does she generally make sacrifices without desiring that they be acknowledged. Nevertheless, she concludes, her goal going forward will be “to embrace God’s calling upon my life with joy,” which “will change my attitude from drudgery to blessing” for “God is still looking for women who will say, ‘Your will be done,’ stoop to the hard tasks, and sing.”89 A recurring theme in Keepers at Home is the notion that women are able to make their own choices. This is consistent with Gill’s description of post­ feminist discourses, “which present women as autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances whatsoever.”90 Stories and articles present to women the choices they should make, acknowledging at the same time that the proper choice is not always the easiest one. The message to readers is that being a Christian woman often requires sacrifice. If one’s life as mother and wife is difficult—housework is drudgery, the children cry, and the husband is unappreciative—the Christian woman will nevertheless sing because she finds joy in her submission. In “Hannah, a Woman Who Seeks,” Martin notes that Hannah, who gave up her much longed-for son, Samuel, to God’s service, provides an example of what God wants: “a heart that seeks God and hands that seek to serve.”91 Most impor-

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tant, as Miriam notes in “Across My Kitchen Table,” “Obedience to God will always bring a blessing. It will always bring peace. It will always bring us into a place of safety.”92 For those who are depressed or downhearted or feeling abandoned by God, who does not seem to hear their prayers, Keepers at Home offers reassurance. God has not abandoned them. They must simply try harder to follow him, for God’s silence is a means of drawing their attention to the error of their ways.93 God is there, and sacrifice and obedience will be rewarded, if not in this world, in the next, everlasting one. As Stephanie J. Leinbach writes in another installment of the Proverbs 31 series, “I can’t be a perfect woman, but with divine help, I will be as diligent, compassionate, and wise as I can be. Most of all, I will fear the Lord, because that alone will usher me into a world where perfection isn’t an ideal, but a breathtaking reality.”94 Sheila Petre compares the Christian life to marriage, for it is “choosing to belong to Someone who loves you”; to housekeeping, for it is “a series of mind numbing tasks done for the Master of the house”; and to gardening, for it is a “battle against weeds in . . . circumstances outside of your control.” Finally, she writes that it is like a trip that turns out to be nothing like you prepared for or expected. “You think, tomorrow will be easier. . . . And finally all you can think is When can we just go Home?” The reward is in the life to come.95 It is clear in the Keepers at Home articles that women must be vigilant for it is easy to lapse into resentment or to waver in one’s faith. In “Dishes,” the author describes how upset she was when her husband brought up her tendency to let dishes pile up. In the end, however, she “tearfully knelt and pleaded for God’s forgiveness,” vowing to ask for her husband’s the next day.96 Characterizing this “makeover paradigm” as an explicit message of postfeminist media, Rosalind Gill suggests that it “requires people (predominantly women) to believe first that they or their life is lacking or flawed in some way, and second that it is amenable to reinvention or transformation by following the advice of relationship, design or lifestyle experts, and practicing appropriately modified consumption habits.”97 The women who read Keepers at Home are encouraged to submit to God’s plan, and those who do so will be able to forgive, to change, and to be pleasing to God and their families. Ironically, such essays may empower women by putting the choice to be submissive Christian wives into their hands. In “A Man’s Dream,” by an

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author who calls herself “an ordinary, run-of-the-mill wife,” a woman learns that her husband is happiest with her being present but silent, giving him her full attention. Men and women have different needs, she realizes, and to make their marriage stronger, she decides to “watch for more opportunities to sit with [him]” and determines “to try not to feel like a bother to him . . . to not think of all the motherly, wifely duties that never all go away.”98 Keepers at Home also makes it clear that women have the power and responsibility to influence the lives of others. After all, as Martin points out, “A wife’s attitude can encourage or hinder her husband.” Unlike Ladies’ Journal, which encourages women to follow God’s plan for their own salvation, Keepers at Home teaches the reader that she has the power as a submissive wife to ensure her husband’s salvation as well. As Martin writes, “We women have the power to undermine our husband’s ministry. Every man wants and needs a wife who respects his leadership.”99 To the extent that she carries out her everyday duties as a submissive wife, the woman who reads Keepers at Home is fulfilling her scriptural responsibilities.100 If she fails, so might her husband. In short, a woman’s power comes with consequences. Failing to be obedient risks luring others away from God, dooming both the errant woman and her family. Immodesty in dress, for example, causes others to be tempted. In “Across My Kitchen Table,” Miriam writes, Christian women “need to come to grips with the reality of our responsibility to walk in integrity and to show a better way to a confused generation of women who have lost their way.”101 Yet Keepers at Home also makes clear the limits of women’s judgment. Family Life, Young Companion, and Ladies’ Journal all encourage women who are struggling with their faith or with events in their lives to pray and be submissive. Keepers at Home suggests that women must turn to men if they hope to understand the struggle. For example, Miriam advises women who want to be sure that they are truly modest to ask the men in their lives. “They are a better judge of modesty than we are because they understand the struggle to maintain a pure thought [in] life.”102 Men understand more than women and so are better judges of the struggles women face. Writing about her husband’s desire for more children and his wish that the family host more travelers to the community, Sheila Petre questions whether she is “taking the loving service out of my God-ordained duty” by complaining. “Michael knows that when I resolve to complain less, I find less to complain about,” she writes, and she resolves to obey him with a smile.103 Women may

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have power to undermine men, even if they do not mean to do so, but by yielding to the advice of men in their lives, women can find the strength to help others follow Christ. Creating Amish Women Like the textbooks in Amish schools and the fiction read in Amish homes, women’s magazines reflect and reinforce particular notions of the church community and what it means to be Amish. Little Red Hen News, Ladies’ Journal, and Keepers at Home each provide Amish women with a place for themselves and a template for who and what they should be. As women choose, read about, and enact the roles laid out for them in the magazines, they are Amish women in diverse ways. In the pages of Little Red Hen, as in life, readers draw on their communities for support and fellowship, knowing that individuals are too weak on their own to live lives worthy of salvation. Theirs is a life of tradition, set patterns of interaction with others, and sameness that reassures, for the strength of their faith is evident in how clearly the strict boundary they have drawn between their community and the world keeps mainstream society at bay. The readers of Ladies’ Journal are women and church members in a different way than their Little Red Hen News counterparts, for the magazine defines them as “women of faith” rather than as Amish women. Articles emphasize faith, not tradition, and they validate women’s choices biblically. The church is certainly there, and of course one has friends and family, but women are more likely to be cooking, cleaning, and childrearing alone. In reading Ladies’ Journal, they become part of a community that includes single women, childless women, homemakers, and entrepreneurs, and together they find in the pages of the magazine the strength to carry out God’s plan for their lives, whatever it may be. Through Keepers at Home, readers become part of a larger group defined explicitly as Christian rather than narrowly Amish or Anabaptist. This magazine’s readers are vessels for new souls, and it glorifies their motherhood and the tasks they do as wives and homemakers. Like the Ladies’ Journal readers, those perusing the pages of Keepers at Home likely stay home to take care of children and manage the household, and they work in the hope that their daily activities make life easier for the husbands who earn the family’s income. Theirs is, perhaps, a weightier submission, for in giving themselves up to God’s plan they take on responsibility for the salvation of their husbands

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in addition to their own. Only in yielding to their husbands can they realize God’s plan for their lives and make it possible for their husbands to do so as well. In return, Keepers at Home readers are reassured that, however difficult their lives, through prayer and submission, they will earn God’s blessing. Both Ladies’ Journal and Keepers at Home reveal Amish worlds more intertwined with mainstream culture than is the Amish world of Little Red Hen News. Aimed at women who interact routinely with non-Amish society, their glossy formats, advertising, and accessibility to non-Amish readers reflect non-Amish production values and demonstrate the porousness of the boundary they erect around their readers as magazines devoted to Anabaptist, or at least Christian, values. More important, Ladies’ Journal and Keepers at Home demonstrate a postfeminist treatment of women and men, particularly in the assertion of a natural difference between the genders, that puts them in the mainstream. As these magazines demonstrate, Amish women are reading and actively choosing to be particular kinds of women. The choices they make have resulted in a diverse Amish world, and in some cases Amish women and nonAmish women are not so different. While Little Red Hen News has only a minor presence on the web,104 both Ladies’ Journal and Keepers at Home are easily available to women outside Amish communities through a variety of Christian websites. Keepers at Home also can be ordered through Amazon, thus reaching far beyond the plain churches. As one customer reviewer wrote to the Amazon website, “I look forward to every issue I receive of Keepers of the Home [sic]. While I am not Mennonite or Amish, I find the articles to be very supportive and encouraging to mothers who strive to raise their children to love and know God and women who strive to love and respect their husbands. In our society mothers are encouraged to work and thought to be lazy if they work in the home. This magazine brightens my heart without fail after reading it.” Another commented, “A clean, uplifting message for Women. Tips for homemaking, and child rearing. Idea, and recipe sharing. A Christian message that can be enjoyed by everyone!”105 Clearly, as Amish women read Ladies’ Journal and Keepers at Home, they share in creating an individualistic notion of womanhood that is grounded in faith and not their church community. As noted, most of the women reading Ladies’ Journal and Keepers at Home no longer work alongside their husbands, parents, or children on the farm, and they are less involved in the labor exchanges that mark agrarian life. Many have husbands who work in jobs away from home, and a cash econ-

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omy means that for the most part, women no longer spend so much of their week in food preservation and preparation. They have the leisure time to read the longer articles of Ladies’ Journal and the even longer articles of Keepers at Home. In her 1989 study of changes in the Arthur, Illinois, Amish community following a shift from agriculture to a wage economy, Judith Nagata observed “a changing ethic that pervade[d] many aspects of their behavior.” She noted in particular a change in religious attitudes, commenting that “more conservative Amish”—whom she also calls “hard-core”—“are generally intolerant of [both] economic innovations . . . and probing into their religion on a personal level.” In contrast, “those Amish who are more liberal in their support of technical innovations” support more “spontaneous and personal prayer” and encourage more discussion of the faith.106 To maintain nonconformity even as their lives increasingly resemble those of their non-Amish neighbors, progressive groups challenge traditional Amish understandings of womanhood, submission, and worldliness.107 As these magazines show, what it means to be an “Amish woman” is complicated and varied, and in their reading and responding to these magazines Amish women both reinforce and redefine their identity in a changing Amish world.

C h a p t e r E ig h t

Change, Diversity, and Amish Womanhood

I don’t think anyone can understand the Amish unless they stop trying. We’re individuals. It would be like trying to put all Mennonites in a box. —An Amish woman in Michigan

In writing about Amish women, one faces the difficulty of trying to define who they are, when the reality is that they are diverse. Moreover, the diversity is increasing, for as the most conservative Amish move to ever more remote corners of North America to maintain their agrarian lifestyle, Amish at the opposite end of the spectrum establish businesses with international reach, go to work for non-Amish employers in various industries, and adopt new technology to create a way of life not much different from that of their non-Amish neighbors. The lives of Amish women reflect this diversity, and the choices they make contribute to it. As I have shown in this book, Amish women have been powerful players at each phase of Anabaptist and Amish history, from the martyrdom of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the establishment of an Amish presence in North America, to the foundation of twenty-first-century settlements. They farm with their husbands and maintain the integrity of the Amish home. Or they maintain the integrity of the home even as their husbands go out into the world. They have collaborated in creating disparate Amish identities. Is there a core gendered identity that is common to all Amish women? Certainly, for all Amish women draw on a common history of religious per-

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These young Amish women on their way to church reflect the values of the Amish world in which they are growing up. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

secution and Anabaptist faith. They wear plain dress, speak a German dialect, rely on the horse and buggy for local transportation, and most important, with their male counterparts, they reject “worldliness.”1 They see the dominant society as fallen and their church as necessarily separate, for as the Bible says of Christ and those who follow him, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:14). Paul’s letter to the Romans commands them explicitly to “be not conformed” (Romans 12:2).2 During baptism, Amish women all renounce “the world, the devil with all his subtle ways, as well as [their] own flesh and blood” and affirm their “desire to serve Jesus Christ alone.”3 This rejection is captured in the simple phrase “that’s not our way,” used by many of the Amish women to whom I spoke to refer to non-Amish things or practices. Worldliness entails an individualism that Amish women also reject, yield-

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ing themselves to God’s will and the church community. Although they see themselves as equal to men in God’s eyes and as church members, they believe that God has given them a different role to play than God has given men, one with different responsibilities. Finally, owing obedience to God, Amish women understand the need for submission to men, for the Bible tells them that “the head of the woman is the man” (1 Corinthians 11:3). When they marry, they know that they should submit to their husbands “as unto the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22). At the same time, they believe that the men in their lives also have a God-given role to play and responsibilities to fulfill, for the Bible tells men to “love your wives even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). In diverse ways, all Amish women take responsibility for some aspects of life, leave other responsibilities to men, and see this division as God’s plan. Same yet Different As members of church communities that define themselves in opposition to secular society, Amish women understand that to be an Amish woman is to be unlike the worldly women with whom they interact. But as a church community’s relationship with the non-Amish world changes, and as Amish women increasingly engage in the same practices as their non-Amish counterparts and share similar lifestyles, the basis on which they establish difference shifts. In other words, that which all Amish women have in common increasingly makes them diverse. Clearly, as Joan W. Scott writes, “woman” is “an unstable category.”4 As I have argued, Amish females are raised to be women in ways that reflect the view of their respective church communities of women’s place in the home and church community. As children, they may be tasked with bringing in wood for the stove so that the house can be heated and meals cooked. They might learn to pump water and heat it for weekly baths, to light lanterns in the evening, and to butcher and can meat. Or they may grow up in homes with stoves and refrigerators, gas heat, hot and cold running water, and propane lamps. They may grow up never speaking on the telephone and watching their parents ask an English person to place a call and relay a message, or they may grow up in a home with a landline not far from the house or even a cell phone in a parent’s pocket or handbag. They may grow up laboring with their father and mother to do the work of home and farm. They may work in a business founded by their mother, grand-

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mother, or aunt. Or they may grow up in a home in which their father works in a factory for an English employer, while their mother remains in the home to keep it running smoothly so that it may be a haven for her spouse. Some Amish girls are educated in schools that use archaic textbooks that serve to stress the continuities between their community and that of their parents and grandparents and offer little information about mainstream society. Others go to schools in which the curriculum is produced by Amish and Mennonite publishers to teach children to interact in the wider world in church-approved ways. Young women grow up in communities that are diverse in the ways they supervise youths as they begin to make the important decisions of adulthood. In the young-folk groups, young women may gather on a church Sunday once every two weeks to sing German hymns and eat popcorn. Or they may gather more frequently to play volleyball and go ice skating. Some will go to youth gatherings that are strictly supervised by adult couples. Some of them, however, will join gangs of like-minded youths from other districts to drink, smoke, dress in non-Amish clothing, and dance. Historians Susan Reverby and Dorothy Helly point out that “our public and private lives are integrated and take their meaning from historical circumstances, cultural contexts, individual identities, and actions.”5 As the diversity of the Amish world demonstrates, Amish women have grown up ex­periencing distinctly different social realities, and their relationships demonstrate different social meanings.6 In shifting from an agrarian economy to one grounded in entrepreneurship or wage labor, Amish church communities have not only changed the nature of their relationship with mainstream society but also altered the way men and women work together, how they raise children, the way the church influences their activities, and, ultimately, the understanding Amish women have of themselves and their place as church members. In agrarian Amish church communities determined to uphold the traditions of farming and daily life passed down from earlier generations, Amish women and men maintain the distinction between men’s work in the barn and fields and women’s work in the house and garden. Small family farms, the shared labor of family and neighbors, and limited technological innovation ensure that traditions are learned through doing, and faith is lived rather than studied. To the extent that each new generation perpetuates the practices and relationships of the one before, the church remains strong. It does not matter when a particular practice or style of cap was introduced;

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what matters is that their forebears, people of strong faith, thought it was worthy. The maintenance of traditional practices, the willingness of church members to give themselves up to the Ordnung, and the unity of the group are signs of the church community’s strength and its ongoing commitment to God’s will. Agrarian Amish see in the stability and unchanging traditions of farm and church community a stark contrast to the ever-changing, tumultuous outside world. As Little Red Hen News makes clear, the world is a dangerous place, worldliness is physical and tangible, and any practice or device that may tempt the unwary to new ways is something to be avoided. Determined to keep the world at bay, the community turns inward, reinforcing its boundaries through shared labor and frolics that integrate the family and the church community. Even businesses with a non-Amish clientele (e.g., harness shops, sawmills, farm stands) close not only on Sundays or for religious holidays, but for community events. Within their church communities, through the ongoing practice of chores and frolics, Amish girls become Amish women by learning at every stage of life to give themselves up to God, a yielding demonstrated in their growing proficiency at tasks, a willingness to work hard for and with others, and an obedience to their parents and the Ordnung. Determined to remain in the world but apart from it, agrarian church communities generally remain adult-centered, each generation of girls conforming to the dress and behavioral expectations of adult members of the community. They learn to perform the same activities as their mothers, joining in all ritual functions. As infants, they go to church services, weddings, and funerals, and they are included at frolics and other gatherings. They are carried around by other little girls and admonished by their parents and other adults. Their friends are other young people in their church community who are raised with the same expectations, and they attend the youngfolk gatherings in their church district. Likely, they join the church with their age group, marry someone approved of by their parents and others in the church community, and begin married life by farming or working together in home-based businesses, much like their parents did. In this context, women contribute tangibly to the economic well-being of the family and the strength of the community. Submissive to the Ordnung and to God’s intended hierarchy in the organizational structure of the church community and the family, they nevertheless understand themselves to be members of Christ’s church in which there is no male or female. As I

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have argued, while men and women in agricultural communities may have different responsibilities in the home and on the farm, their tasks are interconnected and complementary, and women influence men and share responsibility and power with them in directing the day-to-day activities of the church community.7 Women consider themselves equally responsible with their husbands for their faith and for the well-being of their families and the church community.8 With the movement of the largest Amish communities away from agriculture and a lifestyle of multigenerational labor and community frolics and toward greater economic dependence on entrepreneurship or even employment in mainstream enterprises, the Amish have generally become wealthier and more loosely tied to their neighbors, living in ways that bring them into close contact with the outside world. Like their agrarian counterparts, entrepreneurial Amish communities continue to define the house and domestic activities as the domain of women, but Amish homes, having become sites of businesses that reach out to mainstream clients, are now also where the church community meets the outside world. In such settings, the church becomes less salient, and the Ordnung controls far less of the minutiae of daily life. I was once visited by two Swartzen­ truber bishops early one summer morning. Sitting on my porch swing, one of the bishops asked the other, who was perched on the porch railing, why they could not have such swings on their porches. I pointed out that my swing had been made by a Swartzentruber carpenter (a close neighbor of one of them and a member of his church district) and suggested lightheartedly that they ask their bishops! The two just laughed, knowing I was well aware that change was unlikely. The Swartzentruber Ordnung governs even the members’ porch furnishings. In more progressive entrepreneurial communities, families have far more leeway for household furniture and decoration. Homes in these communities reflect individual taste, and numerous small items speak to change. In one Lancaster woman’s kitchen, for example, I observed not only a blender but her child’s drone. The community members exist in a liminal space between the church and the world, with the line between the two distinguishing activities, space, and relationships. As entrepreneurs in mainstream businesses or working as wage laborers for their Amish sisters, women help to mediate the community’s interactions with the mainstream. In this book I suggest that Amish women in entrepreneurial communities separate the world and the church community much like their agrarian

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This Amish woman has far easier access to the technology of the mainstream world than do her less progressive counterparts. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

Amish counterparts do. A key difference is the extent to which the world may be allowed to intrude. With the entire household subject to Ordnung guidelines, agrarian families may limit reading material, for example, and keep businesses that have a worldly clientele (e.g., a harness shop or farm stand) some distance from the family home. In contrast, entrepreneurial Amish women may bring their business into the home itself, isolating it from the family by skirting or suspending rules of the Ordnung within the workspace. For example, one Amish businesswoman uses electricity and the internet in her basement office, while upstairs in the family kitchen she works with access to neither. Similarly, the Amish owner of a bed and breakfast has installed electricity in the bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchen that she rents to non-Amish guests, but she has retained propane lighting in the common room where the young folk gather. Ironically, at the same time as they weaken or suspend the Ordnung within domestic spaces, entrepreneurial Amish women view their businesses as extensions of the home, sites where they can keep young people busy within church guidelines. Raised to be wives and mothers, entrepreneurial women are also comfortable with earning an income—as long as they are understood to be helping their husbands. They work more independently than their agrarian counterparts and in a more public way, charting a course between church commu-

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nity and business in a way that more conservative Amish women have no need to do. As church members, some women entrepreneurs accept the lack of comment by church leaders as evidence that they are acting within the Ordnung while others are willing to challenge the Ordnung itself. Much less likely to experience frolics and to be involved in the daily lives of their extended families and neighbors in the church community, little girls born into entrepreneurial communities live in a setting defined by the nuclear family. They rely on their parents to model appropriate Amish behavior, and consequently there is less homogeneity in what they learn, for their parents are engaged in diverse enterprises. School rather than the broader church community of shared labor increasingly serves as the locus of community socialization, a place where children encounter others and learn what they need to know. Importantly, their peers in school are likely to have experienced different practices, which a handbook for teachers recognizes in advising, “Each family is entitled to being itself, to doing things their way, and it’s your and my Christian duty to love and respect them as they are—their convictions, their standards, their weaknesses and strengths.”9 As they become Amish women, girls learn to confront difference and change, to be comfortable in the mainstream, and to be members of a church community in which tradition may have to give way to better business practices. In contrast to entrepreneurial communities that have allowed the world into the home, albeit in a carefully circumscribed way, church communities that permit members to work for non-Amish employers have made the home a refuge from both the world and the economic labor that sustains the family. Outside of the house, men and women may work together at the same tasks, but at home men are not expected to labor at women’s work. Kaufman suggests that when men and women live highly segregated lives, men “provide women with the symbols and social resources on which to build their own systems of meaning.”10 In wage-labor communities, Amish women self-­ consciously adopt the identity of helpmeet, wife, and mother, carving out a spiritual role as well as a worldly one as they invest their activities as mothers and wives with religious importance. Arguably, in wage-labor communities, Amish have come to see their faith defined as much by particular interpretations of Christian scripture as by the traditions and practices that define more conservative groups. For example, studying the Arthur, Illinois, Amish community, Judith Nagata observed changes in religious attitudes in particular. Whereas more conservative Amish eschewed technological innovation and the questioning of

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religious beliefs, those more accepting of innovation tended to encourage more personal expressions of faith and more discussion of personal belief.11 As Pederson puts it, “The church and the family, once the basis of community building and the locale of separation from and resistance to the worldly, function in quite a different way as those communities lose their agrarian base.”12 As Amish church members work side by side with non-Amish laborers and as their families increasingly live lives similar to those of their non-Amish neighbors, Amish church communities redefine what it means to be Amish: in the world but not worldly. The Amish identity embraced by women in wage-labor communities critiques both their counterparts in other types of Amish communities and women in the mainstream by scripturally redefining both worldliness and submission. As stay-at-home mothers and wives, women in wage-labor communities identify as Christian, take on a biblically mandated role, and overtly reject feminism and other worldly ideologies, thus distinguishing themselves from worldly women. They distinguish themselves from other Amish women by taking responsibility for their husband’s spiritual well-being in addition to their own, an implicit rejection of the understanding that all are equal in Christ. Indeed, unlike their agrarian and entrepreneurial counterparts, they bear a double burden, for only with their submission can the husband truly be all he has been created to be. But they also have a double power, for they make possible not only their own salvation but their husband’s. Thus, in contrast to their sisters in agrarian and entrepreneurial communities, they reify spiritual submission in the marital relationship, bringing the patriarchy of the formal church structure into daily life. In wage-labor communities, little Amish girls learn who and what they should be as they watch older sisters, brothers, and fathers leave the community to work while mothers remain keepers at home. Like other Amish girls, they do chores and learn how to manage the home, but unlike their agrarian or even their entrepreneurial counterparts, their work experience is likely to include a stint in a non-Amish business, perhaps as a waitress in a restaurant, a clerk at a hotel, a typist in an office, or a worker on an assembly line. They interact regularly with the English world and come to feel at home in it, with only their self-conscious identity as Amish Christians to distinguish them from those with whom they work. Like their agrarian and entrepreneurial sisters, wage-labor Amish girls take steps toward adulthood by joining the church and become full adults upon marriage and motherhood, but when they marry, they give up economic power in a way the others do not.

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Stevick suggests that the peer-centered Amish youth culture has evolved hand in hand with the greater wealth and lifestyle changes that have accompanied the move away from subsistence farming. While adult-centered communities reinforce the traditions, practices, and world view of parents and the church community, peer-centered communities provide young folk with greater freedom to explore the world (see chapter 2). Certainly, those growing up in peer-centered communities have greater opportunities to choose friends outside their immediate church district, experiment with worldly ways, and travel well beyond the borders of their church community in the company of other youths. More important, when they join the church, they may have had experiences quite different from those of their parents at the same age, and when they choose to marry, they will likely not be working alongside their spouse. This discontinuity between generations, along with the willingness of some young folk to put off joining the church until their twenties,13 marks a more individualistic approach to becoming Amish. For women in wage-labor communities, who also embrace greater spiritual, social, and economic submission, it marks a very different understanding of the woman’s role as wife, mother, and church member. Ordnung, Scripture, Authority, and Patriarchy Michelle Rosaldo defines “gender” as “the product of social relationships in concrete (and changeable) societies.”14 As I have shown in this book, how the Amish understand womanhood is shaped both by historical events and by the concrete activities of contemporary Amish church communities. The varying responses of church communities to social and economic pressures render the relationship between tradition, Ordnung, and faith fluid across the Amish world. As a result, women in each church community negotiate an identity that marks them as church members, defining in community-­ specific ways who they are and what they should be. Simply put, most Amish women believe that despite their spiritual equality as Christians, God has given them a different role to play and different responsibilities to fulfill than he has given to men, and these beliefs underlie how they live their lives. To the extent that church communities function efficiently as communities of practice, Amish girls come to embody these beliefs in their ongoing interactions during frolics and shared labor, working with others under the guidance of mothers, other female relatives, and community members. As women come to live more solitary lives, however, a conscious awareness of and dependence on scripture encourages a more

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submissive relationship. In other words, a faith embodied in the increasingly proficient enactment of one’s place in the church community is supplanted by a faith in biblical precepts that proscribe particular behaviors and actions. Womanhood becomes a more personal and independent construct. I have suggested that an important distinction evident in the diverse ways of being an Amish woman is between “doing and so becoming” (the unconscious embodiment of knowledge gained through repeated action) and “learning and so doing” (the conscious study of rules or laws that results in particular behavior). In other words, one can learn something by simply doing it over and over, copying others who do it well, or one can learn it by turning to an informed source that provides instruction. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive. Exploring the lives of newly Orthodox Jewish women, for example, Debra Kaufman notes, “They equate their religious duties with their everyday activities as women, mothers, and wives,” enacting an ethical system that connects their public and private lives.15 The women Kaufman studied were keeping kosher homes, practicing Orthodoxy even though they did not always understand the scriptural bases for their actions. They became Orthodox as much by doing Orthodoxy as by studying scripture, often becoming adept at the practices that would define them before they understood the religious underpinnings of those practices. As one woman put it, “I found meaning in the ritual.” She added, “Our discipline is in the everyday actions of our lives in our intuitive understanding of what is right.”16 Similarly, Saba Mahmood describes Muslim women returning to religious orthodoxy who were participating in classes while at the same time attempting to translate “worship into everyday practices so that these are always directed toward God.”17 Mahmood writes, “The consummation of a pious comportment entails a complex disciplinary program, but at a fundamental level it requires that the individual perform those acts of worship made incumbent upon Muslims by God, as well as Islamic virtues and acts of beneficence that secure God’s pleasure.”18 In the end, “the repeated practice of orienting all acts toward securing God’s pleasure is a cumulative process, the net result of which is, on one level, the ability to pray regularly and, on another level, the creation of a pious self.”19 In short, the doing and studying come together to create a particular kind of religious being. Amish women are gendered both by “doing and so becoming” and by “learning and so doing,” but not all in the same way.20 The Amish, unlike their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, do not have an elaborate system of

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written rules governing all aspects of behavior, with hundreds of years of commentary and a tradition of biblical exegesis that applies to all who practice the faith.21 Each Amish church community has only its Ordnung, its traditions, and the Bible. And as traditions change and Ordnungs cover less and less of the minutiae of daily life, scripture and the texts that explain it have become a more important influence on women’s lives. Importantly, as groups interact with the world and are increasingly confronted with and sometimes persuaded by scriptural understandings alien to their more conservative brethren, the distance between Amish church communities grows.22 It is perhaps no surprise that women from predominately wage-labor communities recommended Keepers at Home to me, for this magazine emphasizes scripture in its discussions of womanly submission as God’s will and a submissive attitude in daily life as evidence of one’s obedience to Christ’s teachings (see chapter 7). Keepers at Home was founded by New Order women, and as noted earlier, the New Order Amish believe that one may have a personal knowledge of salvation. Old Order Amish do not make this claim, but they may peruse articles in Keepers at Home that teach them “what is” so that they may “know what to do.” In other words, the magazine cultivates a particular understanding of submission and the behaviors that characterize one who has truly committed to following Christ’s example. Keepers at Home suggests an Amish identity that is less embodied in the habits acquired and reinforced through interactions and practice and more grounded in texts and examples that reify abstract scriptural authority and so promote particular behaviors.23 These different ways of becoming and being Amish women are captured in the larger distinction that Kaufman, citing sociologist Herbert Danzger, makes between “traditional” and “modernist” authority.24 A traditional authority works through “powerful communal ties and customs” to exercise control of life beyond the rules that scripture or religious texts might call for. In contrast, a modernist authority sticks to the letter of the law, allowing greater latitude for personal decision-making.25 Agrarian Amish church communities employ traditional authority: church members are guided by traditions handed down from generation to generation, which are reinforced through frolics, shared labor, and comprehensive Ordnungs. As a result, even what seem (to outsiders) to be small changes can divide once-fellowshipping districts.26 Faith is expressed in the unchanging patterns of daily life. As the Amish leave farming behind and move into lines of work without much accumulated tradition, Ordnungs govern fewer daily details, church

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members are less involved in each other’s lives, the needs of the individual and the nuclear family are highlighted at the expense of the extended family and the broader church community, and the practice of faith becomes more personal. Within the Amish world, the greatest contrast to the traditional authority of an ultraconservative, subsistence-farming church community is offered by a modernist progressive community that has sanctioned wage labor. The former functions as an efficient community of practice in which, sheltered from the world, infants are raised to be productive and obedient church members through constant interactions in the social context of family, neighbors, and church. The latter type of community no longer provides the same context for learning by doing, instead privileging schools, the nuclear family, and formal authority. The most progressive groups increasingly use the language of evangelical Protestant Christianity to talk about their faith, suggesting “a shift in moral authority from the group to the individual” and encouraging a customized personal spirituality with thinner communal links.27 In more conservative, agrarian communities, both women and men are successful to the extent that they embody their traditional roles and perform their traditional tasks. Their growing mastery of the ways of their church community is evidence of their acceptance of God’s will and the Ordnung. Men and women succeed in progressive communities to the extent that they fulfill biblical expectations. The Future of Amish Women Saba Mahmood argues against a narrow understanding of religion as “a set of beliefs expressed in a set of propositions to which an individual gives assent.”28 For Amish women, religion has been traditionally a lived faith, and Amish womanhood has been created in the practices and behaviors of Ordnung-directed Amish life. As the changing social context militates against the embodiment of faith through diverse shared experiences within the community, scriptural authority increasingly shapes behavior and defines Amish womanhood. The diversity of ways of being Amish women suggests an ongoing negotiation within a religious framework for an identity that gives life value.29 What it means to be an Amish woman will only become more complex as Amish church communities renegotiate their social and economic relationships with the non-Amish world by adopting more technology, shifting from farming to manufacturing or entrepreneurship, and engaging with

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This little girl’s path to Amish womanhood will be shaped by the practices and behaviors of her lived Amish faith. Photograph by Dennis L. Hughes. Earl H. and Anita F. Hess Archives and Special Collections, Elizabethtown College.

more mainstream understandings of what it means to be Christian. Increasingly, as the home comes to symbolize Amish separation from the world, the boundaries of the church community are weakened. Church still meets, drawing together those in a defined church district, but church members may be more likely to question assumptions about how the members, male and female, should be or act. In communities where homes are landscaped and solar power drives companies that do business on a national scale, economic interests may even come to rival the influence and importance of the church community. For example, one successful Amish businessperson in a progressive community asserted, “Business is business and church is church.”30 Comments such as these suggest a much narrower understanding of the church community and a reevaluation of the Ordnung that encodes its values as simply a collection of arbitrary rules. Already, life for many Amish is no longer strictly defined by the Ordnung or contained within the boundaries of the church community or its network of fellowshipping congregations. Reflecting the very nontraditional

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notion that one can simply take a break from the Ordnung, a young Amish woman visiting relatives at Pinecraft, Florida, where Amish snowbirds flock, commented, “When you come down here, you can pitch religion a little bit and let loose.” Gesturing at her rhinestone-studded sunglasses and her tank top, which did not hide the straps of her bikini underneath, she added, “What I’m wearing right now, I wouldn’t at home.”31 In sharp contrast to the most conservative Amish, whose ties to the broader Amish world are generally fostered through circle letters or personal correspondence, more outward-looking progressives have established links well outside the church community through special interest groups defined by hobbies such as bird-­ watching and magazines such as Keepers at Home.32 As the Ordnung ceases to exert discipline on those who have made a baptismal pledge to uphold it, the social boundary framing the church community is weakened. The Ordnung has always served the Amish as a guide to living a moral life. Evolving within each church community, strengthened by the community’s traditions, and resistant to the pressures exerted from the outside society, the Ordnung has been, as one Amish man called it, a Zaun, a protective fence between the church community and the world (see chapter 2). The Ordnung makes the church a pervasive force in the community. Indeed, only through the Ordnung is there a church community. Ironically, as women come to depend for spiritual validation on the larger, more abstract (and not necessarily Amish) spiritual community defined by magazines aimed at “women of faith,” they breach the limits of church and Ordnung, powerfully reshaping the significance of both in their Amish world. This poses interesting challenges for any attempt to understand what it means to be an Amish woman. Today, fewer women than men leave the Amish. Yet whereas women, particularly in church communities where husbands are working away from the home, are carrying more of the responsibility for raising future Amish church members, the evolving religious understandings of their role in the church community may increasingly limit how they can act. Wives who work with husbands, children, and grandchildren on a family farm in a more conservative church community enact one way of being Amish. Their sisters who own businesses, serving their church by employing children and other women, enact a different way of being Amish. Those who remain home, submissive to spouses who bring home paychecks from worldly employers, are Amish in yet another way. Already, variations of these three themes are revealing “proliferating brands of Amish-

246   The Lives of Amish Women

ness.”33 As mainstream society changes and as Amish church communities react and evolve, the picture will only become more complex. Ultimately, in considering the future of Amish women, the question may be more properly how to define the term “Amish.” Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt argue for an operational definition that includes any group that affirms the tenets outlined in the 1632 Dordrecht Confession of Faith, uses horse-and-buggy transportation, speaks a German dialect, and considers itself Amish.34 In the growing diversity of the Amish world, these elements may be the only ones that bind disparate self-identified Amish communities. For Now The late Louise Stoltzfus ended her short homage to Amish women by noting, “They are daughters. And sisters. And wives. And mothers. But, most of all they are Amish women with the indelible marks of Amish ways and understandings imprinted on their mannerisms, their styles, and their grace.”35 Stoltzfus wrote that she was “glad once to have been Amish” and added that it was a life she “still sometimes long[s] for. One I do not have—nor ever will have—but one which I treasure and from which I have learned much. In both its transcendent benevolence, and its broken shards.”36 Some Amish women have suggested to me that Amishness is something that endures even after one leaves the church community. One woman even told me that being Amish was something that stuck, whether one joined the church or not. “What makes someone Amish is they’re born that way. My sisters [who are no longer church members] are still Amish in ideas and ways of cooking. A culture, I would say. It’s so different with the non-Amish, their attitudes in the home. Maybe if you raised a child Amish, they would be. When you meet people, you can just tell.” Writing to me that she had left one Amish church community to join a Beachy Amish church, one woman mused, “My life has taken an unexpected turn. Such freedom I have never experienced. It feels funny or odd? To tell others I’m no longer Old Order Amish, but this is definitely where God has led me. My testimony for my decision is quite precious to me.”37 Amish women—and those who have chosen not to be Amish women— are actively defining who and what they are through the choices they make. Certainly, like all women, they are constrained by the options available to them in the communities of which they are a part, and, as Pederson points out, “Closed cultures, such as the Anabaptists often aspired to be, can marshal powerful strategies of emotional manipulation and both physical and

Change, Diversity, and Amish Womanhood   247

emotional violence to maintain their Ordnung.”38 Nevertheless, in their daily lives, Amish women honor what they have been taught and live as they have determined they must to be good Christians, church members, and women. As mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters, they pass on their conceptions and practices of being Amish women.

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No t e s

Preface 1. Klein, Women and Men, 176. 2. Bender, Plain and Simple, 18–19. 3.  Kevin Williams in Eicher and Williams, Amish Cook at Home, xi. Williams is the editor of the popular syndicated “Amish Cook” recipe column. 4.  Quoted in Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, 190–191. 5. To use David Weaver-Zercher’s term, Amish women have been “domesticated”: imagined and interpreted to serve the purposes of a non-Amish public. Amish in the American Imagination, xi–xii. 6.  Hope Fillingim, “Roles of Amish Women,” Serendip Studio, November 14, 2008, https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/hope/roles-amish-women. 7. Hostetler, Amish Society, 15. 8.  When Amish church communities “fellowship” with each other, it means that the rules governing behavior in each community are similar enough that ministers of one group may preach at services of the other and that young people may marry across church district lines. It also suggests that the groups share values and goals. 9.  De Beauvoir, Second Sex. 10.  Qualitative Research Methods. 11.  Some of my research on Amish publishing has appeared elsewhere. See, for example, Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, chap. 8, which looks at the development of texts for Amish schools by Pathway Publishers, Schoolaid (an Old Order Mennonite publisher), and Study Time. Other articles include “Publish or Perish”; and “Language and Otherness.” 12.  Wolf, “Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork,” 4. Wolf admits to lying about herself during the course of her research in Java, Indonesia, including claiming a religious identity and marital status that were not hers. This is something I would not feel comfortable doing. The most conservative Amish generally do not ask about religion. After all, if you are not Amish, then you are worldly, and that is all they need to know. More progressive Amish have asked me, and the resulting conversations have been quite interesting. I have answered all questions about my family, and many Amish friends have visited my home. It would have been hard to keep any secrets. 13.  Enninger, “On the Organization of Sign-Processes,” 149–150.

250   Notes to Pages 2–8 Chapter 1

•

The Dynamic Worlds of Amish Women

1.  Anonymous, “One Day in the Life,” 1393–1398. 2.  Letter to the author, May 11, 2016. 3.  Letter to the author, May 3, 2016. 4.  Letter to the author, June 12, 2017. 5.  Quotations without sources are from personal interviews I conducted in Amish communities. In order to protect their anonymity, I do not name the individuals. 6.  “Rebersburg, PA; East Brush Valley,” Die Botschaft (February 5, 2016): 65. 7.  “Westover, PA,” Die Botschaft (October 16, 2015): 1. 8.  See Johnson-Weiner, “Technological Diversity.” Research by Victor Stoltzfus conducted nearly fifty years ago, when most Amish still lived an agrarian lifestyle, suggested that Amish farmers might spend as much as thirty days in labor exchanges, including joining with other families in the neighborhood to do the threshing. One Swartzentruber farmer told me that he worked with several other families, going from farm to farm to harvest oats. Families join forces to butcher pigs and cows, to husk corn, and to build houses and barns. Women’s participation in group activities is discussed in greater detail in chapter 4. 9.  Stephanie A. Carpenter suggests that women have long provided labor on mainstream farms and continued to do so even when postwar propaganda encouraged them to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. Carpenter, “Women Who Work in the Field”; cf. Kessler-­ Harris, Out to Work. 10. Nagata, Continuity and Change, 141. 11. Yoder, My Life as an Amish Wife, 31. 12. Jantzi, Simple Pleasures, 251–254. 13.  This letter was sent by an Amish woman in Maine to a relative in New York, June 12, 2016. It was given to me by the recipient and is in my possession. 14.  Wyntjes, “Women in the Reformation Era.” 15.  At this time, Switzerland was more a loose confederation of thirteen cantons or autonomous regions than a unified country. While some cantons joined the reform movement, others remained loyal to the Catholic Church. 16.  As Harold S. Bender notes, the story of that first rebaptism is found in the chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, known as the Grosses Geschictes-­ Buch which has been maintained by that group from the year 1534 to the present day. In that account of the epochal meeting in the house of Felix Manz, when fifteen brethren were gathered in prayer after the mandate of the Zurich council proscribing the further propagation of their faith, we are told that as they arose from prayer, moved by the Spirit of God, George Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him on the confession of his faith, thus recognizing Grebel as the spiritual leader of the little company. This Conrad Grebel did, thus performing the first adult baptism in Reformation times, the model for millions of similar baptisms since that day. (“Conrad Grebel,” 159n2) See also Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren. 17.  Adrian, “Women of the Martyrs Mirror,” 4; Schmidt and Reschly, “Woman’s History for Anabaptist Traditions,” 30. 18.  Huebert Hecht, “Speaking Up and Taking Risks,” 240.

Notes to Pages 8–11   251 19.  Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, 44, see also 52n4. 20. According to Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, 52, although Margret Hottinger was eventually released, she was rearrested in 1530 along with her father. They were en route to Moravia, where they had decided to flee. Her father was beheaded, and Margret was drowned. 21.  Sattler had been arrested in the group that included Margret Hottinger of Zollikon. Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, 47. 22.  Van Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 418. Compiled by Thieleman J. van Braght, the complete title is The Bloody Theater; or, Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, from the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660. This book collects the tales of those, beginning with the apostles, who were willing to die for their Christian faith. In particular, it tells the stories of European Anabaptists who were martyred between 1524 and 1660. It was originally published in Dutch. All quotes in this book are from the eighth English edition. 23.  Van Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 418. 24.  “Sattler, Michael (d. 1527): 1958 Article,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Sattler,_Michael_(d._1527), accessed October 20, 2015. 25.  “Weynken, a Widow, Daughter of Claes, of Monickendam, Burnt to Death in The Hague, the 20th November, AD 1527.” Van Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 422–424. There are many other examples, including those on 434–435, 437, and 1060. 26.  In “Speaking Up and Taking Risks,” 240, Huebert Hecht writes that approximately 40 percent of the Anabaptist martyrs in the Tirol between 1527 and 1529 were women. As others point out (Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women; Joldersma and Grijp, Elisabeth’s Manly Courage), much of what we know about Anabaptist women comes from court records and stories of martyrs, and so we cannot know about the lives of Anabaptist women who were not arrested. Further, the number of Anabaptist women who suffered at official hands varied from region to region. Joldersma and Grijp quote Huebert Hecht, who noted that research “based only on the cases of women who were executed does not tell the whole story; it neither provides evidence about the total number of women involved in Anabaptism in a given area nor does it shed light on the role of those women who were not executed” (Elisabeth’s Manly Courage, 15n16). 27. Irwin, Womanhood in Radical Protestantism, 136–138. 28.  “How to Proceed against Anabaptist Women,” reprinted in Irwin, Womanhood in Radical Protestantism, 63–66, quotes on 64. 29.  “How to Proceed against Anabaptist Women,” 65–66. 30.  Quoted in Goertz, Anabaptists, 115; cf. Bloch, “Untangling the Roots.” 31.  Of those women arrested in the Tirol between 1527 and 1529, “more than fifteen were lay leaders and missionaries, engaged in preaching, teaching, and proselytizing.” Huebert Hecht, “Speaking Up and Taking Risks,” 240. 32. Goertz, Anabaptists, 116; cf. Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology, 275–298. 33.  Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, 11. See also Boulding, Underside of History, 548. 34.  Joldersma and Grijp, Elisabeth’s Manly Courage, 13–14. As they note, there were differences in how the sacraments were viewed, the nature of baptism, and whether the apocalypse was at hand and a kingdom of heaven was to be established on earth.

252   Notes to Pages 11–16 35.  Joldersma and Grijp, Elisabeth’s Manly Courage, 16. 36.  Wyntjes, “Women in the Reformation Era,” 175. 37. Irwin, Womanhood in Radical Protestantism, 200–203. 38.  This work suggests that the distinction between a formal, male ministry and more egalitarian interactions in the church can still be seen among the most conservative Amish groups and others. See Johnson-Weiner, “Role of Women.” 39.  Snyder points out, “While Anabaptist women were not ‘equal’ to men in terms of the ‘official leadership roles’ within the movement, they did experience far more freedom of choice than was the social norm, especially in the earlier more pneumatic stages of Anabaptist development.” Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, 9. 40. Goertz, Anabaptists, 116. 41.  Cf. Boxer and Quataert, Connecting Spheres, 31–32. 42.  Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, 58–63; quotation from Boulding, Underside of History, 548. 43.  Van Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 980, 982. 44.  Van Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 514–515. The entire exchange of letters is on 504–522. 45. Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture. 46.  All biblical quotations are from the King James Version. 47.  Van Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 5. 48.  Adrian, “Women of the Martyrs Mirror,” 6. 49.  For a fascinating look at the role Martyrs Mirror has played for Anabaptist groups over time, see Weaver-Zercher, Martyrs Mirror. 50.  Adrian, “Women of the Martyrs Mirror.” 51.  “Maria of Montjoie (d. 1552),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Maria_of_Montjoie_(d._1552) (accessed October 30, 2019). Her death is remembered with a song in the Ausbund, a hymnbook containing songs from the sixteenth century, many of which were composed by Anabaptist martyrs. The Ausbund, which is used by all Amish congregations, is the oldest Protestant hymnbook in continuous use. 52.  Adrian, “Women of the Martyrs Mirror,” 11. 53.  “Excommunication, ban or separation,” in Simons, Complete Works of Menno Simons, book 2, 69. 54.  “Explanation of the true apostolic separation or excommunication,” in Simons, Complete Works of Menno Simons, book 1, 248. 55. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 104. 56.  Menno Simons, excerpt from “The True Christian Faith,” reprinted in Irwin, Womanhood in Radical Protestantism, 55–63, quote on 63. 57.  The Alsatian congregations largely accepted the Dordrecht Confession, but it was not until 1660, nearly a generation later, that a number of Alsatian ministers actually signed it, perhaps in the mistaken belief that their counterparts in Switzerland were doing so as well. See Nolt, History of the Amish, 18–20, 46. 58.  For further information on the schism that divided the Amish branch of the Anabaptist movement from the Mennonite branch, see Nolt, History of the Amish; Kraybill, JohnsonWeiner, and Nolt, Amish; and Hostetler, Amish Society. Roth in Letters of the Amish Division translates correspondence between parties involved in the schism, including Jakob Ammann. 59.  Harold S. Bender, “Women, Status of,” in Krahn, Mennonite Encyclopedia, 4:972–

Notes to Pages 16–18   253 974, cited by Snyder, “Introduction,” in Snyder and Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, 9. See also Bender et al., “Women,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Women (accessed December 14, 2019). 60. In History of the Amish, author Steven Nolt notes that a “somewhat surprising feature of Amish family life in this era was the number of mixed marriages between Amish and non-Amish partners.” He adds, “Because the Amish insisted that marriages could take place only if both partners were members of the Amish church, it seems these religiously-­ mixed marriage situations resulted when one spouse within a state church household converted to the Amish later in life and the other spouse remained a state church adherent” (60). 61. Gerlach, My Kingdom Is Not of This World, 54–55. 62.  Werner Enninger explores the evolving role of language in these patterns of distinction in “Linguistic Markers of Anabaptist Ethnicity.” 63.  For the Amish, separating oneself from the world and its ways (worldliness) is a rejection of the values of the dominant society. Key for Ammann and his descendants have been such biblical texts as “be ye not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2); “that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15); and “know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4). In 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life, a text written by Mennonite bishop Daniel Kauffman in 1907 and revised and kept in print by the Amishowned Pathway Publishers, the anonymous editors argue that “ ‘World’ in the sense that James uses the term was the sum total of the ways of the wicked” (122). The editors go on to cite 1 John 2:15–16, which asserts, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” See the section “Nonconformity to the World,” 120–124. 64.  The prohibition against mustaches likely evolved somewhat later as elaborate mustaches became a military fashion. See “Beard,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Beard (accessed October 30, 2019). 65. Guth, Amish Mennonites in Germany, 3. 66.  Baecher, “ ‘Patriarche’ of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines”; and Miller Bates, “Insubordinate Anabaptists in Virtuous Clothing?” 67. Hostetler, Amish Society, 39. 68. Nolt, History of the Amish, 49. 69.  Sources provide conflicting numbers. MacMaster, Land, Piety, Peoplehood, says that “the Charming Nancy . . . had at least nineteen Amish families on board” (71), while Hostetler, Amish Society, says the ship “brought numerous families whose residence and genealogy can be established as Amish . . . enough to make an assembly or congregation possible” (56). Nolt, History of the Amish, puts the number of Amish families aboard the Charming Nancy at twenty-one (63). 70.  Cited in Gerlach, My Kingdom Is Not of This World, 65. Richard K. MacMaster also refers to this diary in Land, Piety, Peoplehood, 71. 71. Guth, Amish Mennonites in Germany, 315. 72. Fisher, Bedenklich Happenings, 179. 73. Guth, Amish Mennonites in Germany, 241.

254   Notes to Pages 18–25 74. Yoder, Family Record of Jonas M. and Carolina (Yoder) Swartzentruber, 8. 75.  Gerber, “Pioneer Home,” 4. 76.  Nappanee Amish Directory, 18. 77. Schlabach, Peace, Faith, Nation, 60. 78. Schlabach, Peace, Faith, Nation, 35. 79.  Bender, “Some Early American Amish Mennonite Disciplines,” 92. 80.  Umble, “Memoirs of an Amish Bishop,” 102. 81.  Bender, “Some Early American Amish Mennonite Disciplines,” 92. 82.  Bender, “Some Early American Amish Mennonite Disciplines,” 94–95. See also the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, which notes, “As protection against change in the strange environment of the New World they traditionalized the dress styles they brought with them, while the world about them accepted the changing styles.” John A. Hostetler and Thomas J. Meyers, “Old Order Amish,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Old_Order_Amish&oldid=143686 (accessed January 17, 2017). 83.  Bender, “Some Early American Amish Mennonite Disciplines,” 94. 84.  Bender, “Some Early American Amish Mennonite Disciplines,” 95. See also Reschly, “Parents Shall Not Go Unpunished.” 85.  Ohio Amish Directory, xvi. 86.  A schism developed between the two factions, which by 1854 were worshipping separately. See Nappanee Amish Directory, 19. The Ringenberg group became known as New Amish or Amish Mennonites. The two factions never reconciled. 87. Stoltzfus, Mennonites of the Ohio and Eastern Conference, 158, notes that forty of the seventy-two participants at the 1862 meeting were from Ohio. 88.  Bender, “Some Early American Amish Mennonite Disciplines,” 92. 89.  Gingerich, “Ordinance or Ordering,” 198. 90.  Gingerich, “Ordinance or Ordering,” 198. 91.  For more on the Diener-versammlungen and the Amish divisions of the nineteenth century, see Hostetler, Amish Society; B. Hostetler, “Formation of the Old Orders”; Nolt, History of the Amish. 92.  “Amish Population, 2018,” Amish Studies, Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, http://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/statistics/population -2018 (accessed October 30, 2019). 93.  See Nolt, History of the Amish, 330–331. There is variation among different New Order communities, with the so-called Electric New Orders permitting public utility electricity in homes, while the main New Order affiliation does not. 94.  It is the ultimate expression of pride, or hochmut, most Amish say, to assert that one absolutely knows one is saved, since only God can hold such knowledge. In claiming personal knowledge of salvation, one is, in a real sense, suggesting a minor role for the church community. Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 71. 95.  See Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 148–149. 96.  See Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, for an in-depth exploration of the similarities and differences among Amish affiliations. 97.  Johnson-Weiner, “Role of Women.” 98.  Interview with Louise Stoltzfus, 1995.

Notes to Pages 25–29   255 99.  “In Our Role as Women, We Believe,” Keepers at Home (editorial information provided in every issue). The publication Keepers at Home is discussed in chapter 7. 100.  See Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, esp. chap. 4, for an exploration of Swartzen­ truber origins, subgroups, and daily life. See Hurst and McConnell, Amish Paradox, for a good explanation of the differences between the Old Order Amish and the Swartzentrubers in their Holmes County, Ohio, homeland. 101.  Cf. Huntington, “Amish Family.” 102.  Cf. Hostetler, Amish Society, 108. 103.  If a woman chooses not to shun her banned husband, then she herself becomes subject to the Bann for violating her baptismal vow (this is also true in reverse). She may shun her husband but continue to live with him. However, she is expected to refrain from unnecessary social interaction (and, by implication, marital relations). Hostetler notes, “In most cases the innocent spouse of an accused party will request excommunication so that shunning need not be practiced between them, for in shunning not only must there be avoidance at the table but abstention from sexual relations.” Amish Society, 347. 104.  Cf. Rogers, “Woman’s Place.” 105.  Cf. Bossen, “Women in Modernizing Societies.” 106.  Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family. 107. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 23. Cf. Wilkie, “Changes in U.S. Men’s Attitudes.” Wilkie notes that changes in gender roles and expectations about who is responsible for tasks are linked. She suggests that when wives’ employment is not seen as important in supporting the family, then husbands are less likely to take on household tasks or give up control over household decision-making, and wives are less likely to expect them to do so (262). Wilkie finds that “the lower their income, the more likely men are to disapprove of married women earning money,” and “this relationship is in contrast to actual experience, wherein, as husbands’ income decreases, married women’s employment increases except at the very lowest levels” (276). She suggests that the importance to a sense of masculinity of being the family provider might be greater for low-income earners, who may have less power and privilege in the workplace than those who earn more (276–277). Noting that married men are more likely to hold traditional attitudes, she suggests that this might be linked to how men “see these changes affecting enactment of and responsibility for domestic roles” (277). This study does not explore the effects of religious belief on attitudes. 108. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 20. 109. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 46. 110.  Cf. Bloch, “Untangling the Roots.” 111.  For more on Amish dress, see Scott, Why Do They Dress That Way? 112.  Olshan and Schmidt, “Amish Women and the Feminist Conundrum,” 220. 113.  Joseph Stoll, “Men and Women,” Family Life (October 1971): 7. 114.  Elmo Stoll, “Daughters of Sarah,” Family Life (March 1977): 10. 115.  1001 Questions and Answers, 59. 116.  As it says in article 4 of the 1527 Schleitheim Confession, still a key document for the Old Order Amish, “He calls upon us to be separate from the evil and thus He will be our God and we shall be His sons and daughters.” Gerlach, My Kingdom Is Not of This World, 23. 117.  Schleitheim Confession, article 4, 23–24, in Mennonite Confession of Faith, 20–31.

256   Notes to Pages 30–33 118.  E. Stoll, “Daughters of Sarah,” 9. As another put it, “Who would say that a mother’s role is of less importance in eternity than a father’s? Although women are not called to be leaders or set in places above men, their work is of equal worth before God.” J. Stoll, “Men and Women,” 8. 119.  Cf. Sanday, “Female Status.” 120.  The quote is from Wilcox’s website, http://www.wbradfordwilcox.com/book.htm (accessed January 1, 2020). See also Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, New Men. Cf. Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 194. 121.  Ortner, “Too Soon for Post-Feminism,” 545. Ortner is specifically referring to systems of power in an advanced capitalist society. As I show, the patriarchy of the Amish world varies according to the extent and nature of the integration of the community’s economy with mainstream society. 122.  Schmidt and Reschly, “Woman’s History for Anabaptist Traditions,” 36. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris has called gender “a complex and multilayered system of social organization,” suggesting that it evolves to help order relationships. Reflections on a Field, 20. 123.  Loewen, “Household, Coffee Klatsch, and Office,” 278. 124. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 42. 125. Klein, Women and Men, 24. Cf. Rosaldo, “Use and Abuse of Anthropology.” 126.  West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” 125; Butler, Gender Trouble.

Chapter 2

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Becoming an Amish Woman

1.  Rosaldo, “Use and Abuse of Anthropology,” 416. 2. Klein, Women and Men, 147. 3.  Burke, “Identity Control Theory,” 1. 4.  Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning, 29. While the term “community of practice” is often used to describe groups that share a particular craft, profession, or passion, it more broadly applies to a group of people who “engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor.” Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, “Introduction to Communities of Practice.” See also Wenger, Communities of Practice. Amish communities certainly share practices. In communities of practice, including the Amish, newcomers enter and gradually take up the practices and, increasingly, the community’s identity. In this approach, knowledge—including knowledge of gender—is not an individual possession but is constructed by people in context and in relation with each other, through the sharing of stories and through working together. See Hoadley, “What Is a Community of Practice?” 5.  Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, “Introduction to Communities of Practice,” 2. 6. Wenger, Communities of Practice, 54. 7. Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters, loc. 334, Kindle. 8.  Mahmood, preface to the 2012 edition, Politics of Piety, loc. 186, Kindle. 9.  Collier and Yanagisako, Gender and Kinship, suggest that “families . . . both reproduce and recast forms of gender inequality along with forms of class inequality at the same time that they nurture children” (3). In the Amish world, the family is grounded in the larger church community. In discussing the community of practice, I am considering not only individual families but all who participate in social interactions within the church community and are considered members or potential members (given that membership is gained through adult baptism) of the group. The larger community of practice that is the

Notes to Pages 34–41   257 Amish church community may be analyzed as smaller communities of practice along gender lines. Arguably, the ministers constitute yet another community of practice since, as in the larger group, newcomers join more experienced members to construct knowledge in context and in shared interaction. 10.  Interview with Mennonite historian Arlene Yousey, July 25, 2006. 11. Simons, Complete Works of Menno Simons, 274. 12.  “Strong Families Make Strong Communities,” Family Life (October 2014): 20. 13.  Burke, “Identity Control Theory,” 2. 14.  A writer to the Amish teachers magazine, the Blackboard Bulletin, noted, “It is a serious matter that our youth be shown the right way, so that after they leave school, bad companions and the world’s many temptations do not take the upper hand.” Mrs. J. D. Byler, “To Have Them Seek Jesus,” reprinted in Challenge of the Child, 28–29. 15.  Often, mothers report, they will take children out when they are fussy, but children learn in the context of home prayers not to fuss. 16.  Reprinted in Byler, Linda’s Life and Lines, 153. 17.  Cronk, “Gelassenheit”; see also Hostetler, Amish Society, 306; Kraybill, Johnson-­ Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, esp. 98–101. 18.  See Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 97–101. 19.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 99. 20.  Jutzi, “Responsibilities of Parents toward their Children,” reprinted in Challenge of the Child, 43. 21.  “How to Ruin a Child,” reprinted in Challenge of the Child, 42–43. 22.  Elmo Stoll, “Parents Set the Example,” reprinted in Challenge of the Child, 46–48. 23.  “Teaching Religion to the Child, by ‘A Grandfather,’ ” Family Life (February 1998): 30. 24.  “Teaching Religion to the Child,” 30. 25. As “A Grandfather” writes, “Since under normal and ideal circumstances the mother cares for the baby the first few months, she is the one wielding the greatest influence on the infant during that period. She nurses and feeds him, changes and bathes him, cuddles him in her arms to soothe him, and to put him to sleep. When he awakens, she picks him up and presses him to her bosom. There is a bonding between mother and child that is preparing the seedbed for the future.” “Teaching Religion to the Child,” 30. 26.  “Teaching Religion to the Child,” 31. 27.  1001 Questions and Answers, 101. 28.  “Teaching Religion to the Child,” 30. 29.  “The Stronger Vessel,” Family Life (June 2007): 13. 30. Stevick, Beyond the Plain and Simple, 16. 31. Byler, Linda’s Life and Lines, 28. 32.  B.R., private journal shared with the author in the fall of 2015. 33.  On “full participants,” see Wenger, Communities of Practice, 36. 34.  Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, Language and Gender, 17. 35.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 194. 36.  Schwieder and Schwieder write, “In infancy and the early formative years, this sense of being Amish is clearly delineated in the home. In all ways the child is instructed in what is not acceptable. . . . During maturation, the young become more and more immersed in Old Order symbolism and traditions and thus systematically exclude any alternatives not acceptable to their life-style.” Peculiar People, 69.

258   Notes to Pages 41–49 37.  See Nolt and Meyers, Plain Diversity, 65–67. The practice of giving two initials (the first letter of the father’s and the mother’s name) occurs informally in crowded settlements, particularly in conservative groups, where the limited number of given and family names results in many individuals with the same name. 38. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 95. 39.  In many Amish communities, little girls begin to wear prayer caps as soon as they’re born, in keeping with the teachings of Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:5 that “every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head.” In some communities, however, little girls wear the cap only at church, wearing it all the time only as they adopt adult-style clothing. 40.  1001 Questions and Answers, 59. 41.  Such gendered expectations are hardly unique to Amish parents. See, for example, Mesman and Groeneveld, “Gendered Parenting in Early Childhood.” 42.  See Scott, Why Do They Dress That Way?, 101–103. 43.  Sometimes a teacher will braid some of her pupils’ hair during recess to help out a mother who has lots of young daughters. 44.  This may suggest an assumption that boys, destined for leadership in families and church communities, mature—or need to mature—faster than girls. However, I found little in what parents told me to support this. 45.  To some extent, the Ordnung defines which toys are appropriate. For example, in the most conservative communities, families do not have stuffed animals or store-bought dolls with faces. 46.  Interestingly, little Swartzentruber girls tend to mimic older girls and not their mothers by wearing the crossed cape of adolescence rather than the adult cape. 47.  In Swartzentruber communities, girls begin to wear the crossed cape to church at age eight and a half and an adult cape to church at age fifteen and a half. Whether girls wear these for everyday dress depends on the family. One mother I know wondered aloud “why the half ” but then, answering her own question, said, “I guess that’s just how they [the church] like it.” 48. In Plain Secrets, author Joe Mackall quotes a Swartzentruber friend talking about the “surprises” he had when he married, including the fact that his wife menstruated. “I had no idea. . . . I only had two sisters, so I didn’t get the chance to see a bunch of sick girls all the time” (77). 49.  See chapter 3. For more on Amish sexuality, see James Cates, Serpent in the Garden: Amish Sexuality in a Changing World. 50.  Jonathan Scholles, “Technology Implemented into Schools with Amish Population,” Daily Record (Wooster, OH), January 5, 2015, http://www.the-daily-record.com/local%20 news/2015/01/05/technology-implemented-into-schools-with-amish-population. 51.  Scholles, “Technology Implemented into Schools,” writes that the school used computers and smartboards in the classroom before introducing LearnPads, tablet computers similar to the Apple iPad. But while Mount Hope Elementary School has one LearnPad for every six students, every student at nearby Winesburg Elementary, where 60 percent of the students are Amish, has one. 52. Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, esp. chap. 6. 53.  For an in-depth look at Amish schools, see Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child. See also Dewalt, Amish Education.

Notes to Pages 49–58   259 54.  The images themselves are not always obviously gendered. For example, in one school, boys colored pictures of a large decorated Easter egg, while girls colored a picture of a basket full of eggs. What is important is that boys and girls color different pictures. 55. Hostetler, Amish in American Culture, 4. 56. Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 174 (see also 357n25), attributes this quote to Aaron E. Beiler. See also Lapp, Pennsylvania School History, 321. 57.  See Wenger, Communities of Practice, 46. 58.  As I show in later chapters, schooling is more important in communities in which parents, particularly fathers, take on employment outside of the church community since it is more difficult for children to learn the skills they need to earn a living by working closely with their parents. 59.  Quoted in Fisher, Bedenklich Happenings, 128. 60. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 61–62. 61. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 17–19. 62.  Because the distinction focuses on the expectations and actions of parents and the church community, one cannot say that all conservative communities are adult-centered and all progressive or change-minded communities are peer-centered. Stevick notes that “the plainer youth groups in large settlements” may exhibit more adult-centered characteristics. Growing Up Amish, 18. 63. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 31. 64. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 62. 65.  “Stripping” tobacco refers to carefully removing the leaves from the plant’s stalk and is one stage in the process of readying the crop for market. Stripping the leaves generally takes place in the winter months after the tobacco plants, which are harvested in late summer, have thoroughly dried. The Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have grown tobacco as a cash crop since the nineteenth century, but few other Amish settlements grow it. 66.  For more on this settlement, see Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, chap. 5. 67. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 31. Stevick also notes that young folk in smaller, isolated settlements join the church earlier than those from larger settlements, and he adds that “a significant minority of young males have even been delaying membership instruction beyond their mid-twenties, a trend that seems to be growing in the large settlements” (31). See also Meyers, “Old Order Amish.” 68.  Numerous other Bible verses reinforce this commandment. See esp. Deuteronomy 5:16 and Ephesians 6:2–3. 69.  Delbert Farmwald, “To Honor Our Parents,” Family Life (August–September 1994): 7–8. 70.  Interestingly, she also spoke of converts to the Amish church as rejecting the teachings of their parents. 71.  Ira Wagler begins his 2011 memoir, Growing Up Amish, with a short narrative about leaving home in the middle of the night at age seventeen; he returned home and left again four times before finally leaving the Amish at age twenty-six and joining a Mennonite church. He writes in the epilogue to his narrative, “And even though they no longer claim me as one of their own, I deeply respect the people connected to me by blood or background—the Amish. Their culture and their faith. With all their flaws. And all their strengths. They are still a part of me and will always be. Even so, I would never dream of returning” (270). 72.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 162–165.

260   Notes to Pages 58–67 73. Furlong, Why I Left the Amish. 74.  Hurst and McConnell, Amish Paradox, 84–85. 75.  Meyers, “Old Order Amish.” See also Faulkner, “Gendered Motivations,” esp. 16. Faulkner notes that men complain about restrictions on technology, while women complain about restrictions on dress. 76.  Faulkner, “Gendered Motivations,” 15. 77.  Faulkner, “Gendered Motivations,” 14. 78.  By this, she means that the church denies that one can know that one is saved. The Amish say that one can have a hope of salvation, but only God can know if one is saved. 79.  While the brother returned to his community after several weeks, eventually joining the church, marrying, and raising a family, the sister and her husband moved their family to Pennsylvania to be closer to the headquarters of the church they had joined. 80. Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, 48. See also Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 165–168. 81. Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, 48. As noted in chapter 1, the New Order Amish affiliation formed in 1966 when different Amish congregations began to emphasize spiritual values and a more individualistic belief in the assurance of salvation. 82.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner K.S., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. 83.  For more on this case, see Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, “Amish Must Serve Shunned Customer”; Bonta, “Does Amish Shunning Violate Civil Law?” See also Garrett with Farrant, Crossing Over. Many in more conservative Amish communities keep their small shops out of the public eye to avoid problems with mainstream society (e.g., inspectors, English customers with complaints). 84.  Apparently, the young woman used the term “bodyguard” because she planned to walk along a public road in the dark. 85. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 189. 86. Hostetler, Amish Society, 148. See also Hostetler, “An Amish Beginning,” esp. 18–20. 87.  A daughter settlement is a community established by Amish who trace their roots to the Lancaster Amish church. Daughter settlements retain many of the characteristics of the parent community, but they have not necessarily evolved in the same way. Some, for example, are more conservative than the Lancaster settlement itself. 88.  Huntington, “Dove at the Window,” states that only marriage and children make one a “complete, full member of the church” (902). 89.  One interesting twist on this occurred in a Swartzentruber community when a girl who was over twenty-one married her sweetheart, who was a year younger. The girl’s brother, also just twenty, married the sister of his new brother-in-law; she was over twenty-one. Each man went to work for his new father-in-law, taking the place of his new brother-in-law. 90.  A study of Amish demographics noted that “we still lack accessible and reliable metrics on key demographic indicators such as fertility, mortality, age structure, sex ratios, and so forth. The current state of Amish demographic studies reflects a paucity of useable micro data.” Colyer et al., “Reviving the Demographic Study of the Amish,” 97. 91. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 212. 92.  Meyers and Nolt, Amish Patchwork, 87–88, includes occupational data on single women in the Nappanee settlement.

Notes to Pages 68–75   261 Chapter 3

•

Marriage and Ever After

1.  1001 Questions and Answers, 51. 2. Hostetler, Amish Society, 16. 3.  Nafziger, “Marriage,” in Hostetler, Amish Roots, 117. This selection is excerpted from a longer essay: Bender, “Bishop Nafziger’s Letter.” The marriage section is 143–146. 4.  1001 Questions and Answers, 54–55. 5.  Nafziger, “Marriage,” 117–118. 6.  “Building a Christian Marriage,” Family Life (May 2004): 7. 7. Hostetler, Amish Society, 16. 8.  Nafziger, “Marriage,” 118. 9. Yoder, Rosanna of the Amish, 165–181. 10.  See Julia Spicher Kasdorf ’s introduction to Yoder’s Rosanna of the Amish, 11–23. Kasdorf noted that although Yoder was born on an Amish farm, “he was too worldly, too boastful, too flamboyant to be construed as an Amish person” (12). According to Kasdorf, Yoder was moved to write the story of his mother because he was unhappy with contemporary portrayals of the Amish, which were often quite negative. Kasdorf cited the research of S. Duane Kauffman, who found that much of what Yoder presented as fact was likely fabricated or inaccurate (17–18). This is not surprising since, as Kasdorf pointed out, “by the time Rosanna was printed [1940], Yoder’s childhood was at least fifty years behind him, and Rosanna McGonegal Yoder had been dead for forty-five years” (17). 11.  Tobit (also called the book of Tobias) is part of the Apocrypha. A noncanonical text for Jews and most Protestants, it remains part of the Catholic and Orthodox canons. 12.  “Amish Population, 2018,” Amish Studies, Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, http://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/statistics/population -2018 (accessed October 30, 2019). 13.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 282. 14.  Cooksey and Donnermeyer, “Demographic Foundations of Amish Society.” 15.  Hurst and McConnell, Amish Paradox, 108. 16.  MacAllister, “Change or Continuity?,” 7. 17.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 233. 18. Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 148. 19. Stoltzfus, Das Hochzeit Buchlein, 3. The Stoltzfus family has requested that the booklet never be copyrighted. A printed insert in the 2011 edition updates the booklet to 2015. 20.  “Elizabeth’s Wedding Day Brings Sacred Vows and 1,000 Meals Served,” Lovina’s Amish Kitchen, August 28, 2015, http://www.lovinasamishkitchen.com/2015/08/. 21.  See Kopf, “Rental ‘Wedding Houses’ Fill a Need.” 22. Scott, Amish Wedding, 9. 23.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 174. 24.  Lovina Eicher, “Published! What That Means for the Eicher Amish Home,” Lovina’s Amish Kitchen, June 26, 2015, http://www.lovinasamishkitchen.com/2015/06. 25.  In Lancaster County and daughter settlements, all the upcoming weddings in a church district are published at one time (on the church Sunday after fall communion church), though they may now be published at the end of the communion service itself. Spring weddings in Lancaster are still published randomly a couple of weeks before the wedding. 26.  There is no formal or religious reason for them to leave early. It is tradition.

262   Notes to Pages 75–90 27. Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, 67. 28. Stoltzfus, Das Hochzeit Buchlein, 13. 29.  As was once traditional in mainstream society, the parents of the bride are responsible for paying for the wedding. Among the Amish, this has meant that they get to invite the majority of the guests. 30.  One Swartzentruber mother was dismayed to find that the invitation she received to her son’s wedding did not include an invitation to be a cook. She was later assured that this had been an oversight. 31. Scott, Amish Wedding, 11. 32. Stoltzfus, Das Hochzeit Buchlein, says that these first roasts should be done by 11:00 a.m., “and the rest put in ovens” (37). To ensure that the roasts are sufficient to feed all the guests, Das Hochzeit Buchlein advises ordering “30 roasts [roasting chickens] or 3 turkeys & 22 chickens or 10 25-lb turkeys” (8). 33.  In Meiner Jugend, 208–227, offers English translations of the wedding questions used in different communities. 34.  Hark, “The Ambrosial Feast,” 120–122. 35.  Lapp is a gas appliance service in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 36.  This is not the case when a single woman marries a widower. 37.  The Amish say a silent prayer before and after every meal. 38.  A note from an Amish friend in Pennsylvania referred to a tradition in “the southern states or the Ozarks [where] it is said that, when a couple wanted to marry, they would step across a broomstick, and then when either a priest or minister (not sure which) was in the area, they went to him to finalize it or document it. After they had stepped across the broomstick, they considered themselves married. So I have this theory that our tradition of stepping across the broomstick derives from that or something similar” (personal communication, September 21, 2017). Certainly, the broomstick plays a role in other cultures. Denied formal marriage, enslaved couples in the South would “jump the broom” to signify their commitment to each other, a ritual that may have its origins in western Africa. “Jumping the Broom: A Short History,” African American Registry, https://aaregistry.org/story /jumping-the-broom-a-short-history/ (accessed December 28, 2019). The custom may perhaps also have Celtic or Romany roots. See “Jumping the Broomstick,” Beliefnet, http:// www.beliefnet.com/love-family/relationships/weddings/jumping-the-broomstick.aspx (accessed September 25, 2017). 39. Stoltzfus, Das Hochzeit Buchlein, insert. 40. In Horse-and-Buggy Mennonites, Kraybill and Hurd describe the two-page section “The Reproductive System” in Mankind Marvelously Made as “unusual.” They note that the section emphasizes reproduction as part of God’s order. “Science and intellectual knowledge do not challenge religious faith. . . . They are subsumed under the rubric of God’s divine plan” (167). 41. Mackall, Plain Secrets, 77; Hostetler, Amish Society, 160; Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 199. 42.  Letter to Family Life (May 2004): 4. 43.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 199. 44.  Letter to author, November 23, 2016. 45.  For an in-depth look at the issue of premarital sexual activity and its consequences for Amish young people, see Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 224–228.

Notes to Pages 90–97   263 46.  Stevick writes, however, that “both a deacon and a minister told me that they had never heard of such a last-minute, pre-wedding confession in their lifetimes,” one noting that he would not want to say that any of the couples had lied but rather that they might have been unable to face the truth. Stevick also reports that a bishop’s wife told him that most would confess to premarital sex earlier and not wait until the wedding day. Growing Up Amish, 253–254. 47. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 226. 48.  Cooksey and Donnermeyer, “Go Forth and Multiply,” 17. Importantly, this study was based on data from community directories, and because the ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish do not contribute to such directories, they were not included in the analysis. 49.  James Cates, personal correspondence, October 31, 2017. 50. Stevick, Beyond the Plain and Simple, 96. 51.  Another Amish woman expressed similar concerns about Allen County, Indiana, suggesting that “their young folk there are so out of hand. They have parties there and drink.” Rowdy young folk may provide motivation for some families to start new settlements in which the activities of the youth can be more tightly regulated. A New York Amish woman, for example, asserted scathingly that the young folk in the community she had left “drink and lie.” See Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, esp. 117–121. In response to concerns about partying and unacceptable young-folk behavior, some communities are increasing the adult supervision of young-folk activities and encouraging hands-off courtship. In the Clarion, Pennsylvania, community, for example, hands-off courtship is expected; perhaps unsurprisingly, the courtship period there is much shorter than in other communities. 52.  Schwieder and Schwieder, Peculiar People, 63. 53.  “Building a Christian Marriage,” Family Life (May 2004): 6. 54.  The term “weaker vessel” comes from 1 Peter 3:7: “Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.” A contemporary English version reads, “Treat her with honor, because she isn’t as strong as you are, and she shares with you in the gift of life.” https://biblehub.com/1_peter/3-7.htm (accessed January 8, 2020). 55.  “The Husband’s Role,” Family Life (May 2004): 5. 56.  Steven M. Nolt, personal communication, July 2018. 57.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 116. 58.  This woman actually used the name of her brother-in-law who, in her opinion, was the epitome of a “bossy man.” 59.  The mention of Eve and the apple is a reference to the events of Genesis 3, in which Eve, fooled by Satan in the form of a serpent, eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had explicitly denied to Adam and Eve. Eve then gave the fruit to Adam, who also ate it, and both were expelled from the garden of Eden for their sin. The “forbidden fruit” is popularly thought of as an apple, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise is known as the Fall. 60.  God-Centered Marriage, 7–9. 61.  Although only men can be ordained, for a man to actively seek church leadership or prepare for a ministerial office would be considered prideful and worldly. That said, in making his baptismal vow every man agrees to accept nomination or selection to a church

264   Notes to Pages 97–104 office. Hostetler writes that there is often weeping at services to select a new church leader, “a ritual mourning, expressing deep sympathy for the heavy burden placed on the chosen servant.” Amish Society, 110. One Old Order wife whose husband had just been made a minister told me that she was in shock when he was chosen. “It’s not a bad job,” she said, “but it’s just so hard.” Another woman told me how glad she was that her husband had not been chosen. Similarly, another woman told me that “women are saved from being a minister, and I’m glad. Women say they’re glad. I’ve heard that a lot. They’re not smart enough or something. I guess it’s just made like that—that’s not something women should do.” Then she added, “The men would say they’re not smart enough too if they could get away with it.” 62.  If there is dissension at Ordnungsgmay, then the communion service cannot be held. All must be in agreement. 63.  L. Stoltzfus, personal communication, April 1995. 64.  In her letter to me, this Indiana Amish woman is quoting from Traits of a Lasting Marriage by Jim and Sally Conway, who are in turn quoting from Jerry and Barbara Cook’s Choosing to Love. 65.  Letter to the author, August 23, 2016. 66.  Sewing Circle, Doorway to Hope, 3. 67. Nagata, Continuity and Change, 125. 68.  See Klein, Women and Men, 232. One woman told me that she thought some men took advantage of this: “If [a problem] can be covered with a cloak of religion and plain clothes, it can be very difficult to bring it out and express it for what it is.” 69. Hostetler, Amish Society, 152. 70.  Schwemmlein, “The Weaker Vessel?,” citing “Seven Rules for Young Husbands (if They Want a Happy Married Life, Both Now and in the Years to Come),” Family Life (November 1975): 27. 71. Moore, Space, Text, and Gender, 112–113. 72.  In her study of Italian women in the nineteenth century, historian Donna Gabaccia found that while women relegated to “domesticity” suffered severe restrictions, they also benefited from an “autonomous world of female solidarity and an exalted, morally superior sphere of their own.” “In the Shadows of the Periphery,” 175. 73.  Anna L. Martin, “The Heartbeat of the Home,” Keepers at Home (April 2017): 14–15. 74.  Mary Troyer, “Mary’s Musings,” Ladies’ Journal 8:2 (April 2017): 68–69. 75.  “Through the Eyes of a Daughter-in-Law,” Ladies’ Journal 8:4 (July–August 2017): 70.

Chapter 4

•

Events That Bring Women Together

1.  See, for example, 1001 Questions and Answers, 96. According to British researcher Frances M. Handrick, the only women who used the term “keepers at home” were New Order women who told her that they were intent on being keepers at home (personal communication, February 6, 2016). This issue is discussed further in chapters 5 and 6. 2.  Hostetler suggests that the Amish find a “sacred power . . . in the community pattern.” Amish Society, 209. 3. Wenger, Communities of Practice, 52. 4.  1001 Questions and Answers, 33. 5.  1001 Questions and Answers, 33.

Notes to Pages 104–113   265 6.  Events such as childbirth or illness may move a family ahead or back in the rotation. 7.  This may reflect a tacit acknowledgment that there is more work involved in getting the house ready, or it may reflect the fact that the service and the meal most often take place in the home. 8.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 78. 9. Stevick, Beyond the Plain and Simple, 27. 10.  See Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 78. 11.  This is a good example of what Lave and Wenger describe as moving from the periphery of the community toward “more-intensive participation.” As they note, learning is “an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world.” Situated Learning, 36. “Peripherality suggests that there are multiple, varied, more or less engaged, and inclusive ways of being located in the fields of participation defined by a community. Peripheral participation is about being located in the social world. Changing locations and perspectives are part of actors’ learning trajectories, developing identities, and forms of membership” (35). Infants are increasingly integrated into being in church, and children increasingly enact the behaviors appropriate for their participation. 12.  The overwhelming majority of Amish congregations meet for a fellowship meal after the church service. The Dover, Delaware, Amish are an exception in that only the extended family of the host gathers for the meal. Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 432n16. 13.  “A Letter to a New Minister,” reprinted in Brad Igou, Amish Voices, 141–144, quote on 143. 14.  See Patterson, Sound of the Dove. 15.  Fisher, “Butchering,” 63. 16.  By “help,” she meant the children who were not yet twenty-one years old, who worked for their parents without pay. 17.  Not all families have smokehouses. Those that do not make arrangements to use a neighbor’s. In asking for help, Amish men, like Amish women, expect that they will be able to return the favor at another time. 18.  Some Amish church communities permit gas freezers. 19.  She credited patience for her feat, telling me that she had patience and most of the men didn’t. Many Amish women also enjoy fishing. One older unmarried woman told me of plans she had made to go with her niece. “We just fish from the shore,” she said. “I don’t like boats.” 20. Hostetler, Amish Society, 156. 21.  In many communities, one family takes responsibility for ordering fruit that cannot be grown in the settlement itself. Peaches, for example, are likely to arrive at one family farm in bushel boxes, and a steady stream of families arrives to pick them up. One woman told me she had ordered twenty bushels and was glad that she would not get church before they had to be canned. Because everyone gets their fruit and needs to process it at the same time, fathers and sons help mothers and daughters. See chapter 1. 22.  One young girl handed me a fresh loaf of bread that she had baked herself that morning while her mother sewed. Her mother’s habit was to leave fresh loaves out on the table after they came out of the oven, but the girl had put my loaf in plastic. She knew how to bake, but she was unaware that wrapping a hot loaf in plastic would make the bread soggy. Her mother said only, “Let’s unwrap that until it cools.”

266   Notes to Pages 114–124 23. Heiberger, Buggy Seat, Bare Feet, 29–30. 24. Weaver-Zercher, Thrill of the Chaste, 12. 25. Trollinger, Selling the Amish, 36. 26. Bender, Plain and Simple. Roy Buck noted that the expectations tourists have of Amish behavior are far more rigorous than the rules by which most Amish live. One of Buck’s Amish informants, “aware of what she aptly named a ‘blown up’ picture of the Amish,” expressed the desire that someone “send us some of those Amishmen that they talk about. We could use some.” “Bloodless Theatre,” 10. 27.  Some Swartzentruber Amish claim that wringer washing machines are also good for getting the scales off fish if you have many to clean at one time. Of course, whether one is working with fish or potatoes, the machine needs to be thoroughly cleaned before laundry day. 28.  Stoltzfus, “Amish Agriculture,” 198. 29.  Logsdon, “Barn Raising,” 79. 30.  As in mainstream society, cooking on a grill outside appears to be men’s work. When a more progressive Old Order group held a chicken barbecue to raise money to build a schoolhouse, the men barbecued the chicken outside while the women made salads, mashed potatoes, and cooked the vegetables inside. 31.  Arthur Bolduc, “Meet the Ice Breakers: Amish Ice-Cutting Frolic,” Farm and Dairy, February 8, 2015, https://www.farmanddairy.com/news/meet-ice-breakers-amish-ice-cutting -frolic/240204.html. 32.  Barry Adams, “On Wisconsin: The Winter Bounty Here Is Stored Away for Summer,” Wisconsin State Journal, December 29, 2013, http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local /columnists/on-wisconsin-the-winter-bounty-here-is-stored-away-for/article_dbd806ef -07af-5f10–8acf-fb4d91ced2df.html. 33.  Bolduc, “Meet the Ice Breakers.” 34.  This paragraph appeared in slightly different form in Johnson-Weiner, “Ice Harvesting in New York’s North Country,” Amish America, March 6, 2015, http://amishamerica .com/ice-harvesting-in-new-yorks-north-country. 35. Hostetler, Amish Society, 166. 36.  Varick Chittenden, n.d., field notes. As minors, children work within the family and are fed, housed, and cared for; as noted in chapter 2, they owe their parents their labor until they are twenty-one, even if they marry. 37.  Varick Chittenden, n.d., field notes. 38.  Hostetler notes, “With the increasing popularity of quilts as decorative objects and art objects, quiltmaking has become a source of economic subsistence for Amish families. Quilts made for sale reflect the tastes of customers and need not have any relationship to the makers’ own quilts.” Amish Society, 167. See Smucker, Amish Quilts, for an in-depth look at how Amish quilts have been transformed into commercially valuable products and collectors’ items. In chapter 5 I look at quilts in connection with Amish women’s businesses. 39. Milne, Amish of Harmony, 83. 40.  Smucker, “Destination Amish Quilt Country.” 41. Jantzi, Simple Pleasures, 130. 42. The Budget and Die Botschaft are weekly Amish newspapers. With news consisting of letters from scribes in Amish communities across North America, they help Amish families keep up with events far outside their own region.

Notes to Pages 125–138   267 43.  Schwieder and Schwieder, Peculiar People, 62–63. 44.  Letter to the author, December 10, 2016. 45.  The Mennonite Central Committee is a global nonprofit relief organization supported by some Amish. See https://mcc.org/learn/about. 46.  Letter to the author, December 10, 2016. 47.  In most Amish communities, the dead are embalmed. In communities that do not permit embalming, there is a shorter time between death and burial, and so friends and relatives living far from the deceased have less opportunity to attend the funeral. See Scott, Amish Wedding, 100. 48.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 248. 49. Miller, Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith, 321. 50.  There are many sources for those wishing to know more about Amish funerals. For a start, see “What Is an Amish Funeral Like?,” Amish America, http://amishamerica.com /what-is-an-amish-funeral-like (accessed October 30, 2019). Hostetler describes an Amish funeral in Amish Society, 200–208; and Hurst and McConnell talk about differences in customs in Amish Paradox, 253–256. See also Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 247–249.

Chapter 5

•

Women Out of the Ordinary

The epigraph is from “Blessings,” Single Girls Newsletter: For the Girls . . . by the Girls 2 (Summer 2014): 53. 1.  Keepers at Home, published in Sugarcreek, Ohio, is a New Order Amish magazine, but it has a following among Old Order Amish women. In fact, I was introduced to this magazine by Old Order Amish women in Pennsylvania. Two married couples are listed as the editors; the writers and design staff are all women. See chapter 7 for more about this and other Amish women’s magazines. 2.  This statement about the publication’s purpose and subscription information are found on the first page of every issue. See also “The Purpose,” Anabaptists.org, http://www .anabaptists.org/places/kah.html#purpose, accessed January 22, 2018. 3.  Meyers, “Old Order Amish,” 384. 4.  As one Lancaster County Amish woman put it, “The pressure is on the boys to ask, and the girls must wait to be asked.” 5.  Hostetler and Huntington, Amish Children, 14. 6.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 98. 7.  Family Life (March 2001): 29. See Brown, “On Being Amish and Single,” for an exploration of articles in Young Companion by and about single men and women in Amish society. 8.  Letter from Meyersdale, PA, to Single Girls Newsletter (Summer 2014): 26–27. 9.  This was not the first time Family Life focused on singles in the community. For example, in April 1981 the magazine published an article entitled “A Place for Singles” (10–17), which was a response to a question submitted by “An Anonymous 31-Year-Old.” “Anonymous” said that “being the unchosen one in my circle of friends has caused me to feel inferior and to lose confidence in myself. . . . Is this God’s will?” (10). Although “singles” could refer to either men or women, the responses to “Anonymous” in the April 1981 issue and the two that followed all addressed single women and were very similar to the responses noted in the 2001 “Problem Corner” series discussed below.

268   Notes to Pages 139–145 10.  The initial article and the responses are found in the “Problem Corner” of the February and March 2001 issues of Family Life, 30–34 and 30–32, respectively. The responses in the February issue are from single readers, while those in the March issue are from married readers. 11.  Family Life (March 2001): 30. 12.  Family Life (February 2001): 33. 13.  Family Life (February 2001): 34. 14.  Family Life (March 2001): 30. 15.  Family Life (March 2001): 30. 16.  Family Life (March 2001): 30. 17.  Family Life (March 2001): 31. 18.  Family Life (March 2001): 30. 19.  Family Life (March 2001): 30. 20.  Family Life (March 2001): 30. 21.  Family Life (February 2001): 33. 22.  Family Life (March 2001): 29. 23.  Family Life (March 2001): 29. 24.  Family Life (March 2001): 31. 25.  “Rebecca,” in Stoltzfus, Amish Women, 82. At the time of the interview, “Rebecca” was working for Dr. Holmes Morton as a medical assistant at the Clinic for Special Children in Lancaster County. 26.  Anonymous, “A Choice of Contentment,” Single Girls Newsletter 3 (Winter 2015): 10. 27.  “The Silent Struggle,” Family Life (May 1988): 32–33. 28.  Of course, leaving the church to continue the relationship would result in excommunication and shunning. 29.  See Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 206. A Swartzentruber woman appeared to take the notion of a lesbian relationship in stride, asking a non-Amish visitor whether she knew that two mutual English friends had married. She wondered which “would be the husband,” and when told that each would be a wife, she appeared to find that acceptable. Asked about such cases in her own community, she talked about women living together but not getting married, which she said they couldn’t do. It was unclear if she was acknowledging a sexual relationship between the women, although her use of spousal terms suggested she was. She added that she had never seen a case with two men and wondered if they could drive up to her produce stand someday like a husband and wife. She laughed at the notion that there could be a couple with “two husbands.” 30.  Family Life (March 2001): 29. 31.  Family Life (February 2001): 32. 32.  Meyers, “Old Order Amish,” 385–386. 33.  Family Life (February 2001): 32–33. 34.  A skid house is a temporary dwelling that can be moved to different sites. Often, newlyweds have a skid house that they set up on land owned by the farmer (Amish or nonAmish) for whom the husband is working. This allows the couple to save up enough money from the husband’s wages to buy their own farm. When this teacher did eventually marry, she sold her skid house to newlyweds in her neighborhood. 35.  Family Life (February 2001): 34.

Notes to Pages 145–149   269 36.  See Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, chap. 7, for a detailed look at schools in the Elkhart-LaGrange settlement. Because teaching pays higher wages in this settlement, largely to attract young people who might be lured by more lucrative factory work, young men are more likely to take teaching jobs than they are in smaller, more rural, or more conservative communities where work in non-Amish enterprises is far more limited. 37.  This woman continued to operate her cleaning business after marrying, but she gave it up when her first child was born. 38. Stoltzfus, Amish Women, 82. 39.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner A.F., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. 40.  Responding to “A Fulfilled Mother of Marriageable Daughters,” this writer signed herself “Another Mother Wearing Your Shoes,” which suggests that she also had at least one daughter still not married. Her letter indicates that the daughter was showing no sign of wanting to be wed. Family Life (March 2001): 31. 41. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 212. 42.  Graybill, “Amish Women, Business Sense,” 125. 43.  Ericksen and Klein, “Women’s Roles and Family Production.” 44. Stoltzfus, Amish Women, 64–65. 45.  Greksa, “Population Growth and Fertility Patterns,” 195. 46.  In a circle letter, each correspondent writes her news and then sends it on to the next person on the list, who adds her own letter and sends it on. When the circle letter comes back to the first letter writer, she reads all the other letters, takes out her original letter, replaces it with a new one, and sends the whole packet on to the next person. In the Amish world, circle letters may help cousins in a single extended family keep in touch, unite siblings in distant communities, or bring together mothers of twins. Along with the circle letter for childless women mentioned in the text, this woman participated in a circle letter for her immediate family (fifteen participants), one for her and her sisters (three participants), and one that united cousins (ten participants). 47.  Cory Anderson and Jennifer Anderson note, “The adopting out of Honduran babies to North America, begun while the settlement was still Amish, would continue after they left and through the 1980s among those remaining.” “Amish Settlement in Honduras,” 19. Although Anderson and Anderson say nothing about the fate of the adopted Honduran children after the demise of the Honduran settlement, I am personally aware of two who joined the Amish church. For at least one of these, racial differences may have made complete integration into the Amish world difficult. At an end-of-the-year school picnic, an Amish woman pointed out this adoptee to me and commented sadly, “Who will marry her? She’s black.” The other Honduran adoptee married and is raising a family in a midwestern Amish settlement. She has also renewed contact with her birth family. 48.  Family Life (February 2001): 34. 49.  Hurst and McConnell, Amish Paradox, 101. The group in Holmes County is both the largest and the most diverse Amish settlement. 50.  Adoption is sometimes noted in Amish directories and obituaries. When Mary Ann Riehl passed away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 2009 at the age of seventy-eight, her obituary stated that she had been adopted in infancy and raised by her parents and four

270   Notes to Pages 150–159 aunts. Riehl never married; instead, she worked for many years helping her unmarried aunts with produce and later was employed at Lancaster General Hospital. “Mary Ann Riehl,” April 27, 2009, https://lancasteronline.com/obituaries/mary-ann-riehl/article_87e1848c -a8b4-54ef-9df4d82c6d854e27.html. 51.  “The Barren Has More Children,” Family Life (June 2014): 21. 52. Igou, Amish in Their Own Words, 107. 53.  In this way, the Old Order and their Amish affiliations differ from the New Order and from more assimilated groups. 54.  Family Life (February 2001): 33. 55. In Amish Society, Hostetler writes, “For all people who cling to life and enjoy it to the fullest, death is the greatest menace. The Amish, who profess not to have conformed to this world, turn to the promise of life beyond death. Their belief in the divine order of all things, including immortality, is a source of comfort to the mourning family and community” (208). 56.  Bryer, “Amish Way of Death.” 57.  “Black Creek, NY,” Budget, October 27, 1982, cited in Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, 50. 58.  Diary (January 2015): 97. 59.  Diary (January 2016): 83. 60.  Diary (January 2016): 113. The phrase “older boy and 3 older girls” is a reference to unmarried church members who are no longer with the young folk. 61.  Bryer, “Amish Way of Death,” 260. 62.  Letter to the author, June 12, 2017. 63.  Hurst and McConnell, An Amish Paradox, 130. 64.  Sorkin et al., “Exploring the Genetics of Longevity,” 349. 65.  Hurst and McConnell, Amish Paradox, 131. 66.  Livecchia, “Anabaptist Remarriage.” 67.  Hurst and McConnell, Amish Paradox, 131. 68.  “My Dad’s Second Wife,” Family Life (March 2014): 22–23. 69.  “Lonely Widows,” Family Life (December 2000): 2–3. 70.  Family Life (February 2001): 2. Words are missing from the letter as published. 71.  Family Life (February 2001): 2. 72.  Family Life (February 2001): 2.

Chapter 6

•

Homemakers and Breadwinners

This chapter draws on two of my previously published works: “Technological Diversity”; and “Keepers at Home?” 1.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 117. 2.  “Working Women,” Family Life (December 1988): 35. 3.  See Nelson and Smith, “Economic Restructuring.” Their research suggests that men respond to challenges to their identity as the family “breadwinner” by reasserting “traditional masculinity.” 4.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 115. 5.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 315. An elderly bishop noted with some satisfaction that he “could count the new devices on six fingers.” See also Johnson-Weiner, “Technological Diversity,” 6. 6.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 116.

Notes to Pages 159–169   271 7.  Hostetler, “Old Order Amish Survival,” 358; also quoted in Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 126. 8.  At twenty-one, the offspring keep all their earnings but become responsible for their own food, clothing, and all other bills. 9.  One young Swartzentruber couple was forced to give up plans to visit together the husband’s ill sister because they could not find a girl to watch their children. The wife stayed home while her husband made the trip. 10. Hostetler, Amish Society, 150. 11.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 117. 12.  “Confessions of a Hired Girl,” 100–101. 13.  Men’s work outside the church community is also regulated by the Ordnung. For example, in some church communities, Swartzentruber carpentry teams do not work on projects “in town.” 14.  This situation resulted in tragedy in the summer of 2014 when two Swartzentruber girls were abducted from their farm stand while the rest of the family was in the barn milking. After a massive search, the girls were returned to the family, and the kidnappers are now serving prison terms. The stand, which had stood some distance from the house on a main street, was later moved much closer to the house. 15.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 117. 16.  They added that “she talks on the phone by herself,” something most Swartzentruber men do not like to do. 17.  As suggested by the example in chapter 5 of the childless couple who quilted together, tasks may be gendered, but men and women help each other as needed, and there is no taboo against a man doing a woman’s work and vice versa. A wife who knows how to sew is a helpmeet to her husband when she teaches him to use the sewing machine. Interestingly, in the same community, another harness maker claims that he taught his wife to use the sewing machine. Johnson-Weiner, “Role of Women,” 240. 18.  Because Amish churches do not permit birth control, Amish families tend to be large, and families with ten to fifteen children are not unheard-of, especially in the most conservative settlements. An Amish obituary may put the number of direct descendants in the hundreds. 19.  For an in-depth look at this community, see Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, esp. chap. 7. 20.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 282. 21.  Nolt and Meyers, Plain Diversity, 87. 22. Wesner, Success Made Simple, 12; Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 305. 23.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 117. 24.  Cf. Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities.” 25.  Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, 208. 26. Wesner, Success Made Simple, 13. 27.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner B.S., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. 28.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, artist S.L.R., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009.

272   Notes to Pages 170–181 29.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner H.B.S., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. 30. Jantzi, Simple Pleasures, 17–18. 31.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner V.E., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. This woman added that her husband trained racehorses. 32.  Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, 209. 33. Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner H.S., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. 34.  Interestingly, quilting tops from Lancaster County is a primary money-making activity for women in more conservative communities. See chapter 4. 35.  As Igou points out, employing young people in family businesses also keeps them working with church members, away from outside influences. Amish in Their Own Words, 136. 36.  Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, 212. 37.  As Kraybill and Nolt put it, “The development of cottage industries provides work for children and supports larger families more readily than does factory employment.” Amish Enterprise, 210. 38.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner A.K., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. 39.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 117. 40.  One quilt shop owner reported an income of $300,000 to $400,00 a year. Unpublished interview with H.B.S., 2009. 41.  Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, 213. 42.  Olshan, “Amish Cottage Industries,” 146. See also Meyers, “Lunch Pails and Factories.” 43.  Kraybill and Nolt, Amish Enterprise, 222. 44.  “A Fire in the Land,” Family Life (April 2010): 11–12. 45.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 410. 46. Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner V.E., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009. 47.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities.” Some Amish have told me that teaching is good preparation for motherhood. 48.  See Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, which compares Amish schools in a variety of different communities. 49.  Letter to the author, December 9, 1996. Finally retiring in her late sixties, this woman noted that she “had too much work all the time. No free time but Saturdays and Sun. Sometimes my Sat. was full of school work when report card time arrived.” Her daughter had, by that time, found work cleaning non-Amish houses, which supported the household. 50.  Diary (February 2010): 27. On the role of gender in Amish publications, see Zimmerman Umble and Weaver-Zercher, Amish and the Media, 188–189.

Notes to Pages 182–189   273 51.  In some communities, a teacher may room with another teacher in an apartment attached to or upstairs from the school. Groceries are generally paid for as a supplement to the teacher’s salary (some teachers may receive higher salaries, with the understanding that they will do their own shopping). Sometimes families take turns supplying the teacher, who sends home a shopping list to the appropriate family each week. In communities like this, regular meetings between the school board, parents, and the teacher help to ensure that all work together, and parents are expected to visit the classroom regularly. At the same time, teachers’ meetings bring teachers together to exchange ideas and to socialize. See Johnson-­ Weiner, Train Up a Child, esp. chap. 6. 52.  Pederson, “She May Be Amish Now,” 347. 53.  Quoted in “From the Staff,” Blackboard Bulletin (December 1992): 14. See also Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, chap. 6. 54.  “From the Staff,” 14–15. 55.  Nolt and Meyers, Plain Diversity, 87. 56. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, 59. 57.  Trollinger’s work suggests that Amish women working in restaurants and gift shops play a key role in marketing popular notions of Amish life, including the place of Amish women as mothers at home. Ironically, even as such enterprises sell a nostalgic notion of the Amish as representatives of a nineteenth-century past, Amish women are employed in industrial kitchens and waiting on tables to serve a twenty-first-century non-Amish clientele. 58.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 119. 59.  Huntington, “Occupational Opportunities,” 119. 60. Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, esp. chaps. 6 and 9. 61. Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, 241; also quoted in Johnson-Weiner, “Technological Diversity,” 14. Interestingly, many Weaverland Conference (Old Order) Mennonites are now attending schools that go to the ninth or tenth grade, with options for finishing high school. Johnson-Weiner, “Negotiating the Old Order.” 62.  Miller, “Amish and Technology”; cited also in Johnson-Weiner, “Technological Diversity,” 15. 63.  Letter to the author, October 3, 2016. 64. Nagata, Continuity and Change, 142. 65.  Miller, “Amish and Technology.” 66. Nagata, Continuity and Change, 142. 67.  Letter to the author, June 12, 2017. 68.  This is explored in depth in Johnson-Weiner, “Technological Diversity.” 69.  See Nagata, Continuity and Change, 340–344; cf. Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, 130–166. 70.  1001 Questions and Answers, 97–98. 71.  “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God” (Romans 6:13). 72.  Dodd and Gotsis, “Interrelationships,” 102. 73.  Unpublished interview with Lancaster County, PA, business owner S.R., conducted by Flo Horning for the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, 2009.

274   Notes to Pages 190–195 Chapter 7

•

Reading Amish Women

1.  While not all Amish women have access to the internet, many do. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, notes that his research has led him to believe that “each of the three big Amish settlements in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania currently have more than 1,000 Facebook Youngie” (x). I interviewed one Amish businesswoman in Lancaster County while she was sitting at her computer in the basement office of the business she owned and operated. In contrast, most Swartzentruber Amish are uncomfortable even talking on the phone and prefer to have a non-Amish person do any calling they might need (e.g., to summon a taxi). 2.  Joseph Stoll, “Editorial,” Blackboard Bulletin (May 1969): 208. 3.  For more on the language situation in Amish communities (as opposed to linguistic research on Pennsylvania Dutch), see Johnson-Weiner, “Keeping Dutch”; “Group Identity and Language Maintenance”; “Community Identity and Language Change”; and “Teaching Identity.” See also Kraybill, Nolt, and Burdge, “Language Use among Anabaptist Groups.” Louden, Pennsylvania Dutch, provides a fascinating history of Pennsylvania Dutch and its role in US history. 4. Fishman, Amish Literacy, 133–134. 5.  The extent to which individual Amish church members are able to read complicated texts varies considerably, not only with the individual but with the church community. The more conservative the Amish group, the less likely the members are to be fluent in English beyond the minimum needed to engage in casual social and economic interactions. In contrast, in communities in which many adults work for non-Amish employers, children tend to grow up with native English fluency. M. Lois Huffines has written, “As Amish are forced to seek alternative occupations to farming and as they establish extensive cottage industries and develop new marketing strategies in order to survive in the modern economic climate, they increasingly embrace English.” “Language Contact and the Amish,” 64. 6. Fishman, Amish Literacy, 135. 7. Fishman, Amish Literacy, 135. 8.  “Give Attendance to Reading,” Family Life (December 1963), reprinted in Challenge of the Child, 57–59. 9.  See Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child; and Dewalt, Amish Education. For an Amish perspective, see Fisher and Stahl, Amish School. 10.  See Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, esp. chap. 8. 11.  A new settlement in the Malone, New York, area was announced in a 2002 letter to the Budget by a scribe from a Clyde, New York, community who wrote, “Another group from KY is looking near Malone, which is 30 miles east of where we used to live. It is not uncommon to see 30 below zero up there. Almanzo Wilder [Laura Ingalls Wilder’s husband] grew up near Malone. I have seen the homestead.” Budget (February 20, 2002): 22. 12. Weaver-Zercher, Thrill of the Chaste, chap. 8. Some of Weaver-Zercher’s informants insisted that most of those reading these novels were young girls and teens (184). Weaver-­ Zercher quotes one teenager who admitted to reading Amish-themed romance novels when she was in early adolescence, noting that “you’ll just kind of read anything. Especially if it’s romance.” Weaver-Zercher goes on to say, however, that this same young woman told her that her grandmother had many such novels on her bookshelves (184). 13.  This notion of a “true story” is important, especially for the most conservative Amish. These Amish do not prize fairy tales because they do not want to waste time on unreal stories. In conversations with many Amish readers, I have come to discover that

Notes to Pages 196–203   275 “fiction” seems to be defined as anything “not true,” while works (even romance novels) are seen as “true” if they pass the test of verisimilitude and could be true. 14.  Similarly, Janice Radway notes that few of the women readers of romance novels she interviewed found that the fictional characters greatly resembled those they met in real life, but many seemed to identify emotionally with the novels’ heroines. Reading the Romance, 98. 15. Radway, Reading the Romance, esp. chap. 3. 16.  Family Life (January 1968): 1, quoted in Igou, Amish in Their Own Words, 19. See also Igou, Amish Voices, 16. 17.  The most conservative Amish generally do not subscribe to the Pathway magazines and are reticent to use Pathway textbooks in the lower grades (which, unlike texts for the upper grades, were written specifically for Amish schools). In these communities, formal religious instruction is limited to the family devotions led by the father and the sermons, prayers, and baptismal instruction led by the ministers. Faith is lived, rather than read about, and parents worry about the messages conveyed by texts prepared by outsiders or more progressive Amish. See Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, esp. chap. 8. 18.  Brown, “Gendered Stories.” 19.  D. W., “Horse and Buggy Morals,” Family Life (February 1968): 14. 20.  D. W., “Horse and Buggy Morals,” 15. 21.  D. W., “Horse and Buggy Morals,” 20. 22.  Brown, “Gendered Stories,” 87. 23.  See also Brown, “On Being Amish and Single,” which explores the way that Young Companion treats Amish men and women who are not married. 24.  E.g., “Staff Notes,” Family Life (January 2004): 4. 25.  Brown, “Gendered Stories,” 89. 26.  “Hot Bricks and Corn Bags,” Young Companion (March 2009): 17–18. 27.  “Lily Condemns Herself,” Young Companion (March 2009): 19–20. 28.  “The Road to River Run,” Young Companion (March 2009): 21–22 29.  “The Hard Way and the Easy Way,” Young Companion (March 2009): 24–28. In the same issue of the publication, there are also stories directed at young men. In “Mark and His Conclusion” (1–5), young Mark is uncomfortable with the dancing and harmonica playing that are going on among the young folk and gains the strength to associate with other youths who feel like he does. In “The Drive to Excel” (8–9), young Eli learns to curb his competitive nature so that he can work in fellowship with others. 30.  “The Hard Way and the Easy Way,” 28. 31.  “The Hard Way and the Easy Way,” 24. 32.  Young Companion (March 2009): 13–16. 33.  While young Amish girls are instructed to be quiet, submissive, and pure of thought, young men are reminded that being a “Christian husband is a weighty responsibility, not to be taken lightly. It is only with God’s help that we husbands can be enabled to fill our place in the home as God intended—not as lords over the household, but as leaders ‘who show the way.’ ” “Staff Notes,” Family Life (April 2004): 5. See also Johnson-Weiner, “Katie,” 209. 34.  “Problem Corner,” Family Life (June 2007): 31. 35.  “Problem Corner” (June 2007): 31–32. 36.  “To My Dear Niece,” Young Companion (March 2009): 25. 37.  “The Joy of Submission,” Family Life (January 2004): 9–11.

276   Notes to Pages 204–216 38.  These publications appear in Erik Wesner, “5 Amish Publications You Might Enjoy (and How to Get Them),” Amish America, May 22, 2015, http://amishamerica.com/5 -amish-publications-you-might-enjoy. 39.  See “Amish Publications,” Amish Studies, Elizabethtown College, https://groups .etown.edu/amishstudies/resources/amish-publications (accessed March 9, 2018). See also Wesner, “5 Amish Publications You Might Enjoy.” 40.  In considering each of these publications, I have drawn on a year and a half of issues. 41.  The Hutterites are an Anabaptist sect that traces its origins to sixteenth-century Moravia. In contrast to their Amish and Mennonite brethren, contemporary Hutterites are known for living communally. For more information, see http://www.hutterites.org. 42.  Mrs. T.S., “Our People Make a Living,” Little Red Hen News (Fall 2014): 50, emphasis in original. 43.  Editor’s note, Little Red Hen News (Summer 2015): 58. 44.  This article was reprinted from Country Trails (for Children), which is published in Remsen, New York, and is an Amish publication affiliated loosely with Little Red Hen News. 45.  “Little Red Hen and Today,” Little Red Hen News (Summer 2015): 1, 3, 2. 46.  Mrs. T.S., “Our People Make a Living,” 49. 47.  Mrs. T.S., “Our People Make a Living,” 50. 48.  Melissa Horst, “Stay Close to God,” Little Red Hen News (Summer 2015): 8. 49.  Mrs. David C. (Lizzie) Schwartz, “Lessons for Our Children,” Little Red Hen News (Summer 2015): 55. 50.  Grandma Sue, “Mothering Communications,” Little Red Hen News (Spring 2014): 43. 51.  “Jesse’s Unexpected Responsibilities,” Little Red Hen News (Spring 2014): 1, 5–7, 37. 52.  Melvin Beiler, “A Fox’s Sad End,” Little Red Hen News [Summer 2014], p. 1, pp. 6–7. 53.  Letter to the author from Millheim, PA, January 19, 2017. 54.  Bonnie Smith, “Inspirational Insights,” Ladies’ Journal 8:5 (September–October 2017): 11. 55.  Mary Alice, “Gardening Gems,” Ladies’ Journal 8:2 (March–April 2017): 52. 56.  Darien Cooper, “Marital Enlightenment,” Ladies’ Journal 8:4 (July–August 2017): 3. The author adds, “Of course, you should not spend all of your time, thoughts, and money on this.” 57.  “What It Really Means to Have Endometriosis,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1 (January–­ February 2018): 41. The article is accompanied by an advertisement for an endometriosis center. 58.  “Do You Have Parasites,” Ladies’ Journal 8:5 (September–October 2017): 55. 59.  Letter to “Ladies’ Lines,” Ladies’ Journal 8:4 (July–August 2017): 39. 60.  Barbie Stoltzfus, “Crumbs and Cocoa,” Ladies’ Journal 8:2 (March–April 2017): 37–40. 61.  Lill, “An Encouraging Word,” Ladies’ Journal 8:2 (March–April 2017): 61. 62.  A. Yoder, “Points to Ponder,” Ladies’ Journal 8:4 (July–August 2017): 7. 63.  M. Burkholder, “Joyful Single’s Life,” Ladies’ Journal 8:4 (July–August 2017): 16. 64.  Edith Baker, “Foster Baby,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1 (January–February 2018): 64. 65.  Hope Byler, “Refreshment,” Ladies’ Journal 8:5 (September–October 2017): 48.

Notes to Pages 216–223   277 66.  Mary Ellen Beachy, “Out of Africa,” Ladies’ Journal 8:5 (September–October 2017): 53. 67.  Mary Ellen Beachy, “Out of Africa,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1 (January–February 2018): 50. 68.  Beachy, “Out of Africa,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1: 50. 69.  Elfreda R. Showalter, “While My Heart Lies South,” Ladies’ Journal 8:4 (July–­August 2017): 21. 70.  Teresa Flora, “Food for Thought,” Ladies’ Journal 8:5 (September–October 2017): 9. 71.  Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 150. 72.  Cf. Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture.” Gill writes, “In a shift from earlier representational practices it appears that femininity is defined as a bodily property rather than (say) a social structural or psychological one. Instead of caring or nurturing or motherhood being regarded as central to femininity (all, of course, highly problematic and exclusionary) in today’s media it is possession of a ‘sexy body’ that is presented as women’s key (if not sole) source of identity” (153). While the author of “Marital Enlightenment” does not talk about women’s bodies in terms of sexiness, there is no doubt that bodily image is being promoted to help a wife be more attractive to her husband. In addition, according to Gill, “The body is presented simultaneously as women’s source of power and as always already unruly and requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and remodeling (and consumer spending) in order to conform to ever narrower judgments of female attractiveness” (153). 73.  Cooper, “Marital Enlightenment,” 3. 74.  Katie Smucker, “Sewing and Quilting (Katie’s Hints and Stitches),” Ladies’ Journal 9:1 (January–February 2018): 35. 75.  Smucker, “Sewing and Quilting,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1: 35, emphasis in original. Smucker argues that Proverbs 31 provides the blueprint for a “good woman” but uses Titus to provide the actual description. Interestingly, the good woman as described in Proverbs is engaged in a variety of outgoing activities, including the buying of land and the planting of crops (v. 16) and the making and selling of linen (v. 24). 76.  Smucker, “Sewing and Quilting,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1: 35. 77.  Mary Troyer, “Mary’s Musings,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1 (January–February 2018): 69. 78.  Joy Zimmerman, “Gleanings of the Home,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1 (January–February 2018): 66. 79.  “Dear Single Friend,” Ladies’ Journal 9:1 (January–February 2018): 54. 80.  “To All of My Childless Friends,” Ladies’ Journal 8:5 (September–October 2017): 23. 81.  Joseph Stoll, “Men and Women,” Family Life (October 1971): 7–9. 82.  R. Chupp, “Our Children, Our Gems,” Ladies’ Journal 8:5 (September–October 2017): 50–51. 83.  Letter from Ivan L. Miller to “Fellow Pilgrim” at Pathway Publishers, October 29, 1993, Heritage Historical Library, Aylmer, ON. A note on the letter identifies Miller as a deacon in Walnut Creek Lower District of the New Order Amish. 84.  Letter from David Luthy to Ivan L. Miller, November 6, 1993, Heritage Historical Library, Aylmer, ON. Luthy’s suggestion that the magazine focus “strictly on ordinary women’s interests” suggests a world in which these are clearly separate from men’s interests. 85.  Edith S. Witmer, “Gleanings from Grandma: The Tale of Three Families,” Keepers at Home 24:1 (Spring 2016): 7–9. 86.  Andrew Hostetler, “Daddy’s Dilemma,” Keepers at Home 84:3 (Fall 2016): inside front cover.

278   Notes to Pages 224–232 87.  Edith S. Witmer, “Gleanings from Grandma: The Soul of Marriage,” Keepers at Home 24:3 (Fall 2016): 7–9. 88.  Gina Martin, “Noah’s Wife, a Woman of Submission,” Keepers at Home 24:3 (Fall 2016): inside back cover. 89.  Gina Martin, “Mary, a Woman of Surrender,” Keepers at Home 25:2 (Summer 2017): inside back cover. 90.  Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 159. 91.  Gina Martin, “Hannah, a Woman Who Seeks,” Keepers at Home 25:1 (Spring 2017): inside back cover. 92.  Miriam, “Across My Kitchen Table,” Keepers at Home 24:3 (Fall 2016): 38. 93.  Miriam, “Across My Kitchen Table,” 38–40. 94.  Stephanie J. Leinbach, “The Perfect Woman,” Keepers at Home 24:1 (Spring 2016): inside back cover. 95.  Sheila Petre, “The Christian Life,” Keepers at Home 24:1 (Spring 2017): 10. 96.  M. Graber, “Dishes,” Keepers at Home 26:4 (Winter 2018): 27. 97.  Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 163. 98.  “A Man’s Dream,” Keepers at Home 25:2 (Summer 2017): 23–24. 99.  Martin, “Noah’s Wife,” back cover. 100. Kaufman writes that newly Orthodox Jewish women see religious values “as rooted in a stable social setting which . . . honors the social practices associated with the female. They equate their religious duties with their everyday activities as women, mothers, and wives. This congruence provides many of them with an ethical system that connects their public and private lives.” Rachel’s Daughters, loc. 455–464, Kindle. 101.  Miriam, “Across My Kitchen Table,” 38. 102.  Miriam, “Across My Kitchen Table,” 38. 103.  Sheila Petre, “Mother of Many,” Keepers at Home 25:3 (Fall 2017): 11–12. 104.  It is included in “Amish Publications,” Amish Studies (website maintained by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA), http://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/resources/amish-publications (accessed March 16, 2018). 105. Quotes are from reader reviews of Keepers at Home: https://www.amazon.com /Carlisle-Press-Keepers-at-Home/product-reviews/B000BT4GR8/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show _all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews. 106. Nagata, Continuity and Change, 125. 107.  See Johnson-Weiner, “Technological Diversity.”

Chapter 8

•

Change, Diversity, and Amish Womanhood

1.  Hostetler defines “worldliness” as “1. seeking comforts (convenience), 2. the love of material things, and 3. self-enhancing activity.” Amish Society, 22. Nagata argues that although “the specific content of Amish culture has changed in numerous ways . . . most of the underlying principles remain the same, notably, the core-value of separation” from the world. Continuity and Change, 142. 2.  1001 Questions and Answers, 120–124, provides a number of other scriptural references to reinforce the understanding that God’s church must be separate from the world, including 1 John 2:15–16 (“Love not the things that are in the world”); Luke 16:15 (“That

Notes to Pages 232–241   279 which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God”); and James 4:4 (“Know ye not that friendship of the world is enmity with God?”). 3.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 227. As Hostetler puts it, they “say ‘no’ to the world and ‘yes’ to Jesus Christ and his Gemein [church] here on earth.” Amish Society, 79. 4.  For example, commenting on the gender fluidity of medieval spirituality, with Christ seen as feminine (mothering) and viragos as masculine, Scott asserts, “ ‘Women’ in the Middle Ages were not ‘women’ as we think of them today; and this has important implications for the way we study women and write their history. It is not enough to illuminate material life in all its facets. Social histories of family structure or religious institutions or economic exchange are incomplete without attention to the question of how the collectivity named ‘women’ comes into existence, who counts as included in that collectivity, and when its nature and behavior become a matter of concern.” “Unanswered Questions,” 1426. 5.  Reverby and Helly, “Introduction: Converging on History,” 23. 6.  Cf. Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters, loc. 1855, Kindle. 7.  Cf. Sanday, “Female Status.” 8.  As it says in article 4 of the 1527 Schleitheim Confession, still a key document for the Old Order Amish, “He calls upon us to be separate from the evil and thus He will be our God and we shall be His sons and daughters.” Mennonite Confession of Faith, 23. 9.  Schoolteachers’ Signposts, 25. Schoolaid is an Old Order Mennonite publishing company founded by Alta Hoover in Lancaster County. Its books are widely used in progressive Amish communities. In the Lancaster County settlement and others, Old Order Amish children and Old Order Mennonite children may attend school together, and Mennonite teachers may instruct Amish pupils and vice versa. See Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, esp. chaps. 7 and 8. 10. Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters, loc. 1540, Kindle. 11. Nagata, Continuity and Change, 340–344. See Johnson-Weiner, Train Up a Child, 130–166, for an analysis of the ways in which progressive Amish schools are more overtly religious. 12.  Pederson, “She May Be Amish Now,” 354. 13. Stevick, Growing Up Amish, chap. 2, esp. 31. 14.  Rosaldo, “Use and Abuse of Anthropology,” 393. 15. Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters, loc. 464, Kindle. Most of the women whom Kaufman studied had been raised in Jewish homes but were not Orthodox. In adopting Orthodox Judaism, they had much to learn about Jewish dietary laws and the laws regulating women’s behavior, as well as the customs of the particular community they joined. Kaufman quotes one newly Orthodox woman: “Everytime [sic] I buy food, dress myself, prepare for almost anything, I’m reminded that there is a different way for me to do things than there is for others.” Rachel’s Daughters, loc. 676, Kindle. 16. Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters, locs. 578, 590, Kindle. 17. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 46. Like the women who were the focus of Kaufman’s study, the participants in the mosque movement were all raised Muslim and then chose to follow a more rigorous religious lifestyle. In doing so, many had to study aspects of the faith in order to make religiously appropriate choices. 18. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 122.

280   Notes to Pages 241–247 19. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 126. Pious women, Mahmood argues, “learn to analyze the movements of the body and soul in order to establish coordination between inner states (intentions, movements of desire and thought, etc.) and outer conduct (gestures, actions, speech, etc.)” (30). According to Mahmood, the women she worked with “described the condition of piety as the quality of ‘being close to God’: a manner of being and acting that suffuses all of one’s acts, whether religious or worldly in character” (122). 20.  Importantly, the Amish women who are the focus of this book are not converting to a more rigorous understanding of their faith. While the newly Orthodox Jewish women and the mosque movement participants often encounter resistance from friends and family for their adoption of a more self-consciously religious lifestyle, Amish women please their families by maintaining the religious lifestyle of their parents. Most Amish are baptized in the church community in which they have grown up. Once baptized, Amish church members risk excommunication and shunning if they leave for either a non-fellowshipping church community or one that is not Amish. 21.  Nor do the Amish have a historical tradition of Bible study, and attempts to institute Sunday schools or other regular Bible study have proven divisive. See Kraybill, Johnson-­ Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 48–49. 22.  See Hostetler, Amish Society, 306–315, for a short history of Amish interaction with mainstream evangelical Protestant groups. 23.  Interestingly, in contrast to their more conservative counterparts, some more progressive Amish often distinguish between groups that (like their own) are “more spiritual” and those that are “formalistic” and reliant on “man-made rules.” 24. Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters, loc. 1603, Kindle. 25. Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters, loc.1603, Kindle. 26.  See Johnson-Weiner, New York Amish, chap. 3, for an example of a schism in Swartz­ entruber communities. 27.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 411. 28. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, xiii. 29.  Spanò, “Review of Politics of Piety,” writes, “Even the most aggressive and, let’s say, demoralized post-structural theory always ends up thinking of agency as entrapped by the opposite poles of subordination and subversion. Certainly, negotiation itself renders this framework much more porous, showing the transitivity and the radical contingency between these two poles and all the subjective positionings that can be found along the infinite range of concrete situations historically and locally occurring between them” (192). 30.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 410. 31.  Miki Meek, “Where Amish Snowbirds Find a Nest,” New York Times, April 13, 2012, http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/travel/pinecraft-fla-an-amish-snowbirdmagnet .html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 32.  Johnson-Weiner, “Technological Diversity,” 20. 33.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 411. 34.  Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt, Amish, 15. 35. Stoltzfus, Amish Women, 122. 36. Stoltzfus, Amish Women, 118–119. 37.  Letter to the author, December 2017. 38.  Pederson, “She May Be Amish Now,” 356.

Bi bl io g r a ph y

Citations of articles and letters from the following Amish periodicals appear in full in the notes: Blackboard Bulletin, Die Botschaft, the Budget, the Diary, Family Life, Keepers at Home, Ladies’ Journal, Little Red Hen News, and the Single Girls Newsletter. Adrian, Marlin. “The Women of the Martyrs Mirror: Paradigms in Anabaptist/Mennonite Mythology.” Mennonite Life 52:2 (1997): 4–11. Alesina, Alberto, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn. “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128:2 (2013): 469–530. “The Amish in Alsace in the Eighteenth Century.” Musée Protestant. http://www.musee protestant.org/en/notice/the-amish-in-alsace-in-the-18th-century (accessed October 30, 2015). Anderson, Cory, and Jennifer Anderson. “The Amish Settlement in Honduras, 1968–1978: A (Half) Failed Attempt to Develop an Amish Understanding of Mission.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 4:1 (2016): 1–50. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream /handle/1811/78020/JAPAS_Anderson-Anderson_vol4-issue1_pp1-50.pdf. Anonymous. “One Day in the Life of an Amish Woman.” Independent 55:2845 (June 11, 1903): 1393–1398. Baecher, Robert. “The ‘Patriarche’ of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 74 (January 2000): 145–158. Barlett, Peggy F., and Katherine J. Conger. “Three Visions of Masculine Success on American Farms.” Men and Masculinities 7:2 (2004): 205–227. Bender, Harold S., ed. “Bishop Nafziger’s Letter to the Ministers in the Netherlands.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 4 (April 1930): 140–148. ———. “Conrad Grebel, the Founder of Swiss Anabaptism.” Church History 7 (1938): 157– 178. ———. “Some Early American Amish Mennonite Disciplines.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 8 (April 1934): 90–98. Bender, Sue. Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Bloch, Ruth H. “Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A Survey of Four Centuries of Change.” Signs 4:2 (1978): 237–252.

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I n de x

Page numbers in italics signify photographs. abuse, 58, 89, 98–99, 185 Adams, Barry, 119 adoption, 133, 148–49, 269n47, 269n50 Adrian, Marlin, 8, 23, 24 adult-centered communities, 53, 54–57, 235, 240, 259n62. See also peer-centered communities adulthood, 39, 61, 65–67, 69, 132, 134, 197, 234, 239; versus “on age,” 66 affiliation, xiii, 24, 58, 106, 145, 165. See also Amish agency, 6, 30, 216, 280n29 Alsace, France, 16, 17, 18, 252n57 Amish: Mennonite schism, 16–17, 252n58. See also Andy Weaver Amish; Beachy Amish; Byler Amish; Lancaster Old Order Amish; Nebraska Amish; New Order Amish; Swartzentruber Amish; Swiss Amish; Troyer Amish Ammann, Jakob, 16–18, 252n58, 253n63 Anabaptist, 7–15, 23, 34, 57, 193, 228, 229, 231–32, 246, 251n22, 251n26, 252n39, 276n41; beliefs, 8–9, 12–13 Andy Weaver Amish, 24, 35, 56, 65, 137, 158, 159, 166 Ausbund, 84, 106, 164, 191, 252n51 authority, 12, 31, 36, 38, 40, 92, 101, 145, 174, 183, 219; church, 30, 59, 97, 188, 194; of God, 9, 11, 150; scriptural, 15, 242, 243; secular, 7, 9; traditional versus modernist, 242–43

Baker, Edith, 215–16 Bann. See excommunication baptism, Amish understanding of, 7, 57; adulthood and, 28, 39; adults and, 8, 9, 17, 250n16, 256n9; church membership and, 13, 23, 29, 30, 55, 57, 66; infants and, 7; marriage and, 61, 69; rebaptism (believer’s baptism), 7–8, 9, 11, 250n16; worldliness and, 232 barn raising, 107, 117–18, 120, 125 Beachy, Mary Ellen, 216 Beachy, Moses (Bishop), 23 Beachy Amish, 23, 25, 60, 246 bed courtship (bundling), 63–65 Beiler, David (Bishop), 20, 21 Bender, Harold S., 16, 250n16 Bender, Sue, viii, 114 birth control (contraception), 212, 271n18 Blackboard Bulletin (magazine), xv, 183, 197, 257n14 Blaurock, Georg, 7, 250n16 Bolduc, Arthur, 119, 120 Botschaft, die (newspaper), xv, 2, 35, 124, 191, 192, 204, 266n42 Boumgartner, Elsy, 8 Braght, Thieleman J. van, 13, 251n22 Brotli, Johannes, 11 Brown, Joshua, 198–99 Bryer, Kathleen, 153 Budget, The (newspaper), xv, 124, 152, 191, 192, 204, 266n42

294  Index bundling (bed courtship), 63–65 Burke, Peter, 33, 34 butcher/butchery, 19, 26, 45, 52, 103, 109–13, 120, 160, 163, 233, 250n8; social change and, 4, 77, 125 Butler, Judith, 31 Byler, Linda, 35, 39, 195 Byler Amish, 65 change, x, xi, 1, 3, 254n82, 278n1; Amish diversity and, 23–26, 64, 72–73, 100, 158–59, 175, 179, 230, 233, 234, 238, 240, 242, 259n62; economic power and, 182; entrepreneurship and, 176–79; technology and, 5, 20, 128, 132, 175; women at forefront of, 19, 21–22, 158, 168, 179, 238, 245 Charming Nancy, 18, 253n69 childbirth, 40, 99–100, 160, 212, 265n6 childlessness, 145–51 childrearing, xiv, 2, 27, 35, 39, 100, 163, 174, 188, 223, 228. See also parents/parenting children, 29, 39–46, 125–26, 147, 221; childhood, 38–39, 44–47, 233; church and, 108–9; as focus of women, 3, 5, 15, 27, 24, 100, 133; goals for, 35–39, 50–57, 135; play and, 45, 118; school and, 48–50; work and, 2, 5, 24, 26, 45–46, 66, 116, 133 Chittenden, Varick, 121 church / church community (Gmay), x–xi, 23–24, 39, 40, 41, 51, 67, 69, 81, 87, 103, 117, 132, 133, 183, 232, 242–43, 245, 249n8, 278n2; Anabaptist understanding of, 7–9, 10–11, 12–13, 15–17, 251n34, 252n39; business and, 162–63, 164, 165, 168, 169–70, 173, 176, 177, 178–79, 184, 185, 244; district, 41, 54, 72, 76, 235, 244; diversity of, 3, 24–27, 53–56, 58, 71, 77, 80, 91, 100, 157, 158, 187–88, 211, 219, 234–39, 240, 245; gender and, 22, 29, 30–31, 45, 47, 57, 67, 69, 96–97, 104, 126–27, 133, 199, 252n38; hosting and, 104–9, 133, 142; literacy and, 192, 193, 197; marriage and, 68–69, 70, 72; members of, 28, 35, 39, 60, 66, 69, 90, 150, 163, 228, 235, 237–38, 240, 239, 280n20; nineteenth-century understanding of, 19–20, 21–22; service, ix, x, 74, 108, 265n12

circle letter, 148, 153, 206, 245, 269n46 class/income disparity, 4, 7, 71, 72, 100, 165, 173, 175, 180, 183, 196, 212, 255n107, 256n9 community of practice, ix–xi, 33, 50, 126, 243, 256n4, 256n9, 265n11 computers, 117, 118, 177, 178–79, 184, 185; school and, 258n51 Cooksey, Elizabeth C., 71, 91 Cott, Nancy, 27 covering (prayer cap), 25, 29, 32, 42, 43, 44, 67, 82, 129, 134–36, 190, 198, 211, 220, 234, 258n39 Cronk, Sandra, 36 Danzger, Herbert, 242 dating, 54, 59, 61–65, 75, 86, 90, 92, 118, 134, 137, 202 dawdy house, 66, 108, 110, 115, 128, 134, 145, 152, 163 deacon, 19, 28, 70, 97, 109, 148, 183, 263n46 death, 128–32, 151, 267n47, 270n55; versus defection, 150–51; marriage and, 81, 96, 151–54 defection (leaving the Amish), 57–61, 142, 143, 150, 153, 200, 245, 246, 259n70, 259n71, 260n75, 260n79, 280n20 Diary, The (magazine), 152, 181, 204, 205 Dircks, Lijkwen, 12 divorce, 10, 68, 153 Dodd, Sarah D., 188 Donnermeyer, Joseph F., 71, 91 Dordrecht Confession, 16, 57, 246, 252n57 dress, ix, x, 28, 227, 232, 254n82; age and, 42, 44, 47, 51, 258n39, 258n47; church community and, 21–23, 53, 55, 135, 234, 235; defection and, 59, 260n75; expectations for women involving, 15, 198, 211, 227; identity and, 16, 17, 55, 106, 191, 245, 279n15; weddings and, 73, 82, 83 Eck (corner table), 76, 82, 83 Eckert, Penelope, 39 education, x, 48, 51, 59, 159, 180, 190, 192, 233; religion and, 37, 51, 259n56; versus schooling, 50–51, 113, 121, 184; sexual, 47, 88; social change and, 184, 193; vocational, 26. See also schooling

Index  295 Eicher, Lovina, 72, 74 endogamy, 16, 61, 68 English (non-Amish), 55, 76, 80, 81, 95, 114, 123, 130, 147, 156, 161, 164, 179, 186, 191, 193, 194, 233, 234, 239, 260n83 English language, 84, 191, 193 entrepreneurship, 20, 26, 27, 71, 72, 176, 177, 188, 243; farm-based, 162–67, 171; non-agrarian, home-based businesses, 167–68, 172, 188, 193, 236–38; single women and, 146, 147; social change and, 176–79, 228, 234, 236, 238; traditional roles and, 168–73, 213 Ericksen, Julia A., 147 excommunication (Bann), 15, 57, 60–61, 90, 97, 143, 255n103, 268n28, 280n20 faith, 68–69, 140, 148, 165, 186, 195, 200, 201, 203, 211, 240–41, 243, 280n20; “active” faith, 214–20, 224, 226, 229, 230, 239, 245; “lived” faith, x, 9, 23, 28, 39, 58, 150, 200, 206, 209, 210, 234–36, 242, 243, 244, 275n17; martyrdom and, 9, 10, 231–32, 251n22; social change and, xi, 17, 39, 186, 214, 238, 241, 242–43; tradition and, 207, 228, 240; versus worldliness, xii, 19, 191 family, 16, 17, 32–33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 51, 68, 76, 120, 138, 147, 148, 152, 160–61, 186, 193, 197, 238, 269n46; church and, 29, 58, 59, 87, 97, 104–5, 107, 133, 158, 196, 235, 237, 238, 243, 256n9; entrepreneurship and, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 172, 174, 178, 272n35; farming and, 100–101, 158–59, 165; religion and, 23, 29, 39, 197, 202, 206, 219–20; shared labor and, 26, 27, 116, 117, 119, 120, 234, 235; social change and, 25, 27, 71, 125–28, 166, 228, 237–38, 245 Family Life (magazine), xv, 34, 37, 38, 69, 89, 92, 93, 96, 101, 178, 192, 197, 202, 214, 221, 227, 267n9; on childlessness, 148, 149, 150; on homosexuality, 142; on remarriage, 154, 155; on single women, 138–41, 144, 145, 147; on working women, 157 farming, ix, 2–4, 27, 51, 152, 158–59, 173, 234, 250n9; Amish settlement and, 18, 19, 21; church and, 28, 75, 77, 101, 157, 184, 188, 231, 233, 242, 245; decline of, 71, 72,

102, 103, 126, 132, 144, 166, 167–68, 175, 179, 229, 235, 242–43, 274n5; entrepreneurship and, 162–66; marriage and, 63, 68; shared labor and, 103, 113, 117, 118, 119–20, 185, 229, 236, 250n8; technology and, 2, 24, 101, 158, 165, 166 Farmwald, Delbert, 57–58 fathers, 3, 19, 33, 41, 42, 44, 49, 80, 101, 109, 110–11, 126, 159, 180, 210; childrearing and, 27, 39, 89, 108, 131, 149, 194; role of, 34, 37, 38, 67, 89, 104–6, 186, 256n118, 265n21, 275n17; social change and, 39, 58, 102, 166, 184, 186, 233–34, 239, 259n58 Faulkner, Caroline, 59, 260n75 fellowship, ix, x, 8, 15, 23, 45, 57, 60, 65, 68, 104 fellowshipping, x, 61, 68, 92, 242, 244, 280n20 femininity, 272, 277n72, 279n4 feminism, viii, 193, 217, 239, 249n12; post-, 217, 225, 226, 256n121, 277n72 fiction, 195, 196, 228, 274n13, 275n14; Amish-authored, 196, 197–203; Amishthemed, 114, 195, 196 Fisher, Gideon L., 109 Fishman, Andrea, 191, 192 Flora, Teresa, 217 food, 5, 28, 40, 47, 49, 88, 105, 106, 111–14, 117, 119, 127, 160, 161, 206, 208, 210, 213, 271n8, 279n15; childrearing and, 45, 160; church and, 51, 53, 55, 106–7, 108, 109; entrepreneurship and, 77, 126, 144, 162–67, 169, 171, 172; preservation of, 4, 24, 71, 112, 113, 119, 211; social change and, 4, 27, 77, 175, 186, 230; stereotypes and, 114; tradition and, 69, 78; weddings and, 70, 71, 76–79. See also frolics frolics (work parties), 3, 45, 100, 103–4, 120, 121, 125, 135; barn raising and, 117–19; butchery and, 109–13; community and, 116–19; community of practice and, 126, 240; family and, 109; food preparation and, 113–16; harvest and, 119–20; social change and, 100, 126, 132, 178, 235–36, 238, 242 funerals, 41, 54, 61, 128–32, 188, 216, 235, 267n47, 267n50 Furlong, Saloma Miller, 58

296  Index gangs, 55, 234. See also young folk gardens/gardening, viii, ix, 2, 6, 67, 98, 101, 124, 147, 154, 158, 159, 160, 161, 176, 186, 204, 212, 221, 226, 234 Garrett, Ruth Irene, 61 Gelassenheit, ix, 9, 36, 135, 141, 199, 224. See also giving up; submission; yield/ yieldedness/yielding gender, vii, x, 3, 7, 11, 29, 31, 39, 40, 44, 69, 117, 129, 192, 195, 196, 204, 229, 231, 240, 241, 255n107, 256n122, 256n4, 256n9, 259n54, 279n4; activities and, 54, 76, 101, 104, 109, 116, 120, 159, 184, 271n17; defection and, 58, 59; dress and, 28, 44; expectations and, 30, 33, 45, 55, 67, 108, 118, 134, 190, 192, 193, 258n41; play and, 45; power and, 30; roles, viii, xii, 28, 30, 32, 42, 168, 169, 183, 184, 199; school and, 49; submission and, 96; technology and, 5 German language, ix, 23, 41, 53, 84, 94, 191, 195, 164, 232, 234, 246. See also Pennsylvania Dutch Gill, Rosalind, 225, 226, 277n72 giving up (uff gewwe), 36, 97, 141, 199, 200, 203. See also Gelassenheit; submission; yield/yieldedness/yielding Goertz, Hans-Jűrgen, 11, 12 Gotsis, George, 188 Graybill, Beth, 147 Grebel, Conrad, 7, 250n16 Greksa, Lawrence, 148 Grijp, Louis, 11, 251n26 Gűngerich, Johannes, 18 hair, 21, 32, 43, 44, 47, 198; braiding, 43, 135, 258n43 Hark, Ann, 81 Heiberger, Rose, 113 Helly, Dorothy, 234 helpmeet, 28, 43, 93, 133, 134, 163, 168, 197, 203, 225, 238, 271n17 hen parties, 127, 128 hierarchy, 218, 219, 220, 227, 235; divine, 42–43, 96, 103, 108, 201, 217, 235, 262n40; formal versus informal, 96–97, 199; marriage and, 94–95, 96, 140; social change and, 100–101, 182, 183. See also patriarchy

Hochstetler, Tobias, 22 Hochzeit Buchlein, Das (The Wedding Booklet, Isaac Stoltzfus), 71–72, 75, 78, 81, 88, 261n19 home, ix, x, 41, 68, 113, 218, 223, 233, 234, 236; diversity of, 4, 24, 105, 184, 206, 233–34, 236, 244, 254n93; entrepreneurship and, 162, 165, 168, 170, 174, 178, 187, 237, 238; as separate from social change, 4, 184, 185–86, 236; as space, 25, 185, 188, 223, 238; symbolism of, 27, 163, 168, 169, 171, 183, 185–86, 206, 218, 219, 228, 223, 231, 236, 237, 244; worship in, 21, 27, 29, 33, 96, 104, 129–32, 134, 142, 186 homemakers, vii, 2, 12, 26, 51, 92, 100, 102, 141, 145, 158, 178, 188; women’s magazines and, 211, 222, 228, 229 homosexuality, 142–43, 268n29 Hoover, Alta, 88, 279n9 Horning, Flo, xiv, 170 Hostetler, Andrew, 223 Hostetler, John A., vii, ix, 51, 68, 101, 113, 121, 159, 160, 253n61, 255n103, 263n61, 264n2, 266n38, 270n55, 278n1, 279n3 Hottinger, Margaret, 8, 251nn20–21 Huebert Hecht, Linda, 8, 11, 12, 251n20, 252n26 humility, 135, 140; being humble, ix, 15, 36, 67, 68, 201, 219 Huntington, Gertrude Enders, vii, 93, 157, 158, 159, 160, 168, 173, 184, 260n88 Hurst, Charles E., 58, 71, 149, 154, 255n100, 267n50 husband, role of, 25, 30, 59, 92–94, 96, 97, 99, 101–2, 109, 213–14, 223, 227; at frolics, 103, 106, 111, 114, 117 Hutterite(s), 204, 276n41 ice harvesting, 119–20 identity, x, 17, 31, 33, 34, 211, 234, 243, 249n12, 256n4, 265n11, 277n72; Amish, xii, xiii, 53, 127, 179, 185, 187, 189, 201, 230, 231, 239, 240, 242, 246; dress and, 17, 44, 136; gender and, 69, 217, 232, 238, 192, 270n3 individualism, 5, 20, 40, 93, 120, 147, 186, 192, 229, 232, 240, 243; shared faith and,

Index  297 23, 24, 92, 217, 218, 220, 228, 260n81; shared labor and, 125, 126, 175, 178, 243 infants/infancy, x, xi, xii, 25, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 88, 135, 243, 257n25; baptism and, 7; death and, 129; social gatherings and, 45, 79, 105, 106, 116, 235 Jantzi, Marianne, 5, 123, 126, 170 Joldersma, Hermina, 11, 251n26, 251n34 Jutzi, George, 36 Kaufman, Debra R., 238, 241, 242, 278n100, 279n15, 279n17 Kaufmann, Hans Jacob, 18 keepers at home, 28, 103, 145, 157, 168, 169, 184, 187, 188, 197, 218, 239, 264n1 Keepers at Home (magazine), 102, 133, 204, 220–28, 229, 230, 242, 245, 267nn1–2 Klein, Gary, 147 Klein, Laura, vii, 31, 32 Kraybill, Donald B., vii, ix, 170, 172, 174, 177, 246, 272n37 labor exchanges, 82, 100, 103, 116, 117, 118–19, 125, 128, 163–65, 175, 181, 229, 250n8 ladies’ day, 127 Ladies’ Journal (magazine), xv, 102, 210–20, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229, 230 Lancaster Old Order Amish, 1, 2, 34, 72, 93, 94, 95, 97, 149; dating and, 62, 63, 65; dress and, 43; entrepreneurship and, 167–80, 187; naming and, 41; shunning and, 61; social change and, 125, 127, 144, 236, 274n1; submission and, 93–97, 101; weddings and, 71–86, 90, 261n25; young folk and, 55–56, 64 language: spoken versus written, 191 Leinbach, Stephanie J., 226 literacy, 49, 191–92 Little Red Hen News (magazine), 204–10, 205, 211, 212, 214, 216, 218, 219, 222, 223, 228, 229, 235 Livecchia, Gayle, 154 love, 39, 94, 219, 224; children and, 28, 35, 36–37, 53, 138, 139, 145, 149–50, 155, 218; discipline and, 35, 60; God and, 215, 216; marriage and, 69; spouse and, 28, 30, 84,

93, 94, 99, 102, 133, 138, 145, 155, 213, 218, 220, 221, 224; worldliness and, 13, 39 Luther, Martin, 7 Mahmood, Saba, 33, 241, 243, 280n19 Manz, Felix, 7, 250n16 marriage, 7, 16, 59, 61, 63, 68–88, 92, 93–94, 95, 99, 134, 139, 141, 174, 180, 253n60, 260n88; Amish literature on, 201–3, 218, 220, 224, 226, 227, 239; children and, 91, 148; companion versus family formation, 154; remarriage, 153–56; shunning and, 16; young folk and, 54, 66, 67 Martin, Gina, 225, 227 martyrdom, 9–14, 251n26, 251n31 Martyrs Mirror (Thieleman J. van Braght), 1, 9, 10, 12, 13–14, 251n22 McConnell, David L., 58, 71, 149, 154, 267n50 McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 39 Meidung. See shunning Mennonites, 15, 25, 40, 56, 60, 88, 90, 126, 127, 204, 211, 231, 234; Amish Mennonites and, 16–17, 19–23; Amish origins from, 16–18; Weaverland Conference and, 273n61 menstruation, 47, 88, 89, 258n48 Meyers, Thomas, 59, 134, 143 Miller, Grace, 184 Milne, Drucilla, 123 ministers, 16, 19, 21, 22, 28, 41, 57, 59, 69, 70, 81, 90, 94, 98, 99, 109, 131, 148, 169, 178, 249n8, 252n57, 256n9, 263n46; women’s role in selection of, 19, 25, 26, 97, 263n61 ministry, 7, 11, 19, 67, 109, 221, 252n38; women’s lives as, 217–18, 220, 227 mission work, 23, 126–27, 216 Monjou, Maria von, 14, 14, 252n51 Moore, Henrietta, 101 motherhood/mothering, 3, 12, 28, 33, 36, 40, 43–44, 51, 96, 133, 186, 193, 214, 219, 221, 223, 224, 246, 256n118, 279n4; defection and, 58, 60; entrepreneurship and, 162, 163, 172–73, 237; farming and, 159, 235; role of, 34, 37, 38, 39, 67, 89, 102, 109, 113, 135, 146, 148, 172, 186, 207, 209, 218, 219, 257n25, 273n57, 278n100; shared labor and, 4, 101, 104–5, 229, 265n21;

298  Index motherhood/mothering (cont.) social change and, 21, 27, 39, 102, 125, 127–28, 158, 175–76, 179, 240; wage labor and, 186, 188, 238–39 Muslims, 241–42; mosque movement and, 279n17, 280n20 Nafziger, Jakobine (wife of Peter), 18 Nafziger, John (Bishop), 68, 69, 70 Nagata, Judith, 4, 100, 185, 230, 238, 278n1 naming, 41–42, 258n37 Nebraska Amish, 24 New Order Amish, 23–24, 25, 60, 91, 221, 242, 254n93, 260n81, 264n1, 267n1, 270n53 Nolt, Steven M., vii, ix, 170, 172, 174, 177, 246, 253n60, 253n69, 272n37 non-conformity, x, 230, 232. See also separation from other Amish; separation from the world; world, separation from; worldliness obedience, 29, 58, 93, 135, 217, 226, 227, 233, 235, 242; childrearing and, 34–35 Oesch, Catherine, 20 Old Order (Alte Ordnung), formation of, 22–23 Ordnung (discipline/rules governing daily life in church community), 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 39, 43, 55, 57, 67, 69, 106, 107, 108, 135, 146, 173, 186, 189, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240–47, 264n62; marriage and, 71; work and, 100, 164, 165, 168, 169, 178, 183, 186, 271n13 Orthodox Judaism, 33, 241, 278n100, 279n15, 280n20 Ortner, Sherry, 30 parents/parenting, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 50, 66, 70, 121, 140, 145, 159, 194, 201, 203, 266n36; authority and, 34–35, 55, 97, 139, 193, 235; changes in, 125–26, 128, 174, 184–86, 193, 220, 229, 233, 240, 259n58; dating and, 63–65; goals of, 36, 49, 51, 53, 197, 208, 210; role of, 23, 36, 37–39, 57–58, 67, 89, 148, 150, 172–73, 194, 238, 262n29, 273n21; shunning and, 60; weddings and, 79–80 participant observation, xiii–xiv, 31

Pathway Publishers, xv, 193, 196–98, 221, 249n11, 253n63, 275n17 Pathway Readers, 193, 197 patriarchy, viii, 12, 16, 28–31, 93, 219, 220, 239, 240, 256n121; economic integration and, 256n121; formal versus informal, 239, 252n38; gender and, 30, 255n107; soft, 28–30. See also hierarchy Pederson, Jane Marie, 182, 239, 246 peer-centered communities, 53, 54–56, 57, 240, 259n62. See also adult-centered communities Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania German), xiii, 28, 191, 274n3 Petre, Sheila, 226, 227 Pinecraft, FL, 24, 186, 245 play, xiii, 2, 32, 86, 41, 42, 44–46, 50, 53, 55, 118, 120, 124, 125, 126, 131, 137, 145; fathers and, 35, 214, 220; weddings and, 83; work and, 45; young folks and, 64–65, 92, 234 postfeminist media, 217, 225, 226, 229 pregnancy, 12, 89, 112, 160, 212, 213, 224; premarital sex and, 90–91 published, being (announcement of upcoming nuptials), 70, 73–75, 76, 81, 82, 118, 196, 261n25 quilting bees, 45, 123–25 quilts/quilting, viii, 2, 52, 66, 118, 121–25, 167, 212, 213, 217, 271n17; as income source, 123, 144, 151, 157, 168, 169–70, 171, 173, 174, 178, 179, 180, 266n38, 272n34, 272n40; mutual aid and, 121, 123, 127 Radway, Janice A., 196, 275n14 Reformation, 7, 9, 11, 12, 250n16 Reschly, Steven, 8, 30 Rat der Gemein (council of the membership), 26, 97 retirement. See dawdy house Reverby, Susan, 234 Ringenberg, John (Minister), 21–22 romance, 218–19; novels, 195, 196, 274n12, 274n13, 275n14 Rosaldo, Michelle Z., 32, 240 Rumspringa, xii, 52, 53. See also young folk

Index  299 salvation, 9, 15, 24, 28, 140, 150, 203, 219, 220, 228, 242, 254n94, 260n78; hope versus assurance, 24, 58, 59, 203, 208, 216, 227, 260n81; submission and, 220, 227, 228, 239 Sattler, Margaretha, 9–10 Sattler, Michael, 8, 9, 10, 250n21 Scharnschlager, Anna, 12 Schlabach, Theron F., 20 Schleitheim Confession, 8–9, 11, 15, 255n116 Schmidt, Kimberly, 8, 30 schnitz pie, 107 school, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 5, 44, 48, 49, 50, 80, 88, 113, 121, 126, 145, 180–82, 191–92, 204, 206, 208, 228, 273n51; change and, 158, 134; diversity and, 48–50, 193, 234, 238, 243, 259n58, 273n61, 279n9; gender and, 49, 144, 183, 193, 259n54, 269n36; religion and, 257n14, 275n17, 279n11; technology and, 48, 258n51; textbooks and, 49, 194, 204, 228, 234, 275n17 Schoolaid (publishing company), 88, 249n11, 279n9 schooling, ix, xi, 58; dangers of, 59; versus education, 50–51, 113, 121, 238, 259n58 Schwemmlein, Susanne, 101 Schwieder, Dorothy, 92, 257n36 Schwieder, Elmer, 92, 257n36 Segers, Jerome, 12 separation from other Amish, xi, 23; gendered, 16, 29, 30, 54, 99, 117, 277n84 separation from the world, x, xi, 8, 16, 17, 19, 173–76, 177, 179–80, 187, 206, 228, 235, 253n63, 278nn1–2, 279n8; Bann and, 15; diversity and, 237; social change and, 185, 188, 236, 239, 244. See also world, separation from; worldliness; worldly sex education, 47, 88–89, 262n40, 262n45, 263n46 sexes, 11, 42, 47, 54, 143, 198, 217, 260n90; premarital sex and, 90–92, 196; shunning and, 16, 255n103 sexual activity, 212, 224, 277n72 Showalter, Elfreda R., 216–17 shunning (Meidung), 15, 16, 57, 59, 60–61, 90, 97, 150, 255n103, 260n83, 268n28, 280n20 Simons, Menno, 15, 16, 34

singings, 53, 55, 62, 64, 65, 118, 136, 199 Single Girls Newsletter, 137, 138, 204, 141 single women, ix, 9, 29, 59, 66–67, 68, 69, 108, 123, 127, 133–47, 153, 154, 155, 214, 260n92, 262n36, 267n9; changing nature of, 144, 147, 175; employment and, 180–81, 184; rejection of bad marriage and, 140–41, 142; 138, 143–44, 156; service to community and, 139, 140, 143, 146, 173, 219; versus single men, 134 skid house, 145, 268n34 Smith, Bonnie, 211 Smucker, Katie, 217, 218, 277n75 snowbirds, 186–87, 245 Snyder, C. Arnold, 11–12, 251n20, 252n39 Sotleit (more progressive Old Order Amish), 195 Stahly, Barbara, 20 stereotypes, viii, xiv, 114, 273n57 Stevick, Pauline, 38, 106 Stevick, Richard, 53, 55, 66, 90, 183, 240, 259n62, 259n67, 263n46, 274n1 Stoll, Elmo, 36 Stoll, Joseph, 28, 196, 197, 219 Stoltzfus, Barbie, 214 Stoltzfus, Louise, 146, 148, 246 Stoltzfus, Victor, 117 submission, 28, 29, 36, 44, 96–98, 109, 161, 202, 219, 220, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228–29, 239, 241, 242; abuse and, 98–99, 264n68; importance for men of, 30, 95, 96; marriage and, xii, 93–95, 139, 203, 228, 239–40; salvation and, 218, 225, 228, 229; social change and, 100–101, 183, 230, 239. See also Gelassenheit; giving up; yield/ yieldedness/yielding Sunday schools, 23, 280n21 Swartzentruber, Daniel and Barbara, 18–19 Swartzentruber Amish, xv, 2, 4, 24–26, 29, 40, 42, 47, 48, 66, 88–89, 97, 99, 129, 150, 152, 154, 158, 181, 195, 196, 204, 236, 258n48, 260n89, 263n48, 266n27, 268n29, 271n9, 271nn13–14; childbirth and, 40; defection and, 58, 59; dress and, 43, 82, 136, 258nn46–47; education and, 193; entrepreneurship and, 161–67, 187; frolics and, 106–7, 111, 117, 120, 124, 250n8; quilts and, 121, 123; shunning and, 60, 61;

300  Index Swartzentruber Amish (cont.) singles and, 142–46; social change and, 101, 158, 176; submission and, 93, 94; technology and, 271n16, 274n1; weddings and, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78–79, 80, 85, 262n30; young folk and, 53, 54, 62–65, 75, 89–91 Swiss Amish, 68, 91, 112, 137, 166; naming and, 41; weddings, 72, 74, 78 teachers/teaching, 49, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 164, 170, 174, 180–83, 194, 203, 215, 238, 269n36, 272n47, 273n51, 279n9 technology, viii, x, 24, 26, 48, 114, 149, 165, 174, 191, 193–94, 237; business and, 168, 177, 178; church control of, 100, 119, 125, 158, 160, 177–78, 185, 188; defection and, 58, 260n75; gender and, 5, 101, 128, 160, 165, 178, 187, 188, 243; labor and, 5, 119, 165; social change and, 3, 4, 19, 20, 72, 132, 165, 175, 177, 184–85, 230, 231, 234, 250n8 Tilly, Louise, 27 tobacco/smoking, 55, 56, 86, 259n65 Tobit (book of Tobias), 70, 81, 261n11 tradition, ix, x, xi, 1, 5, 18, 22, 28, 40, 62, 64, 73, 84, 92, 95, 132, 178, 240, 254n82, 261n26, 262n29, 262n38; church and, 25, 69, 72, 74, 159, 163, 174, 207, 210, 234–40; community of practice and, xi, 243, 257n36; food and, 77–79, 105, 107, 108, 114; gender and, 5, 11, 15, 44, 97, 109, 158, 168, 169, 170, 178, 183, 243, 255n107; identity and, xii, 53; Ordnung and, 22–23, 242–43, 245; skills/tasks and, 121, 128, 184, 243; social change and, 27, 57, 72, 77, 179, 185, 188, 216, 217, 228, 230, 242; texts and, 193, 195, 197, 206 Trollinger, Susan, 114, 183, 273n57 Troyer, Erma, 61 Troyer, Mary, 218 Troyer Amish, 24, 56 wage labor, 67, 71, 72, 99, 125, 144, 171–73, 174, 176, 180, 182, 193, 234, 236, 238–40, 242, 243, 269n36; for non-Amish employers, 26, 27, 52, 100, 102, 157, 183–84, 188, 268n34; young folk and, 66, 159, 160 “weaker vessel,” 93, 183, 186, 263n54

wealth, ix, 34, 68, 165, 185, 187–88, 236, 240 Weaver-Zercher, Valerie, 114, 274n12 Weber, Max, 15 weddings, 41, 54, 69–86, 117, 128, 129, 132, 171, 182, 188, 217, 219, 235, 261n25, 262n29; change and, 71–73, 74, 77, 81–86, 138; cleanup and, 87–88; dress and, 73, 74; food preparation and, 78–79; gifts and, 84, 85–86, 164; jokes and, 82–84, 262n38; meals served and, 77–78, 86, 262n32; premarital sex and, 90–91, 263n46; roles during, 76, 79–80, 84, 85, 87, 134; service for, 81; supply businesses for, 71–72, 77, 79, 81–82, 87, 171; trailers and, 79, 81, 87; young folk and, 86 Wenger (Wenger-Trayner), Etienne, ix, 33, 104, 265n11 Wenger-Trayner, Beverly, 33 Wens, Maeken, 12, 13 West, Candace, 31 West Nickel Mines School shooting, 150 Weynken (widow in Martyrs Mirror), 10 widows/widowhood, 10, 18, 20, 61, 77, 95, 133, 138, 151–56, 168, 171, 181, 183, 202; versus defection, 153; gatherings of, 153; grass, 153 Wilcox, Bradford W., 30 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 195, 274n11 Wisconsin v. Yoder et al., 180 Witmer, Edith S., 223, 224 wives, 87, 92, 95, 96, 100, 101, 105, 111, 161, 184, 209, 214, 263n54, 272n17, 277n72; Anabaptist origins, 10, 12; business and, 26, 162–63, 164, 166; as church members, 25, 97, 109; role of, 27, 41, 69, 92–94, 95, 117, 119, 186, 187, 202, 217–18, 223, 225, 226, 227; shunning and, 16, 26; social change and, 102, 184, 185, 238, 240; submission and, 28, 94–96 world, separation from, 12–13, 15, 16, 29, 49, 60, 97, 153, 185, 207, 223, 229, 232, 238, 239, 244, 253n63, 270n55, 278nn1–2, 279n3; Amish diversity and, 53, 127, 173, 175, 186–87, 188, 216, 228–29, 235–37, 239, 240, 242, 243; education and, 184, 193, 234; labor and, 27, 52, 100, 158, 161, 163, 168, 170, 174, 178, 179, 184, 185, 206–7, 223; language and, 191; literature

Index  301 and, 195, 196, 198; mission and, 15, 126, 216; technology and, 27, 176–77. See also separation from the world worldliness, xii, 191, 230, 232, 235, 239, 253n63, 278n1 worldly (outside the church), 8, 13, 15, 21, 23, 28, 34, 39, 49, 58, 97, 199, 200, 210, 233, 237, 239, 240, 245, 249n12, 261n10, 263n61, 280n19; Amish-Mennonite schism, 16, 17; as non-Amish, 174, 184, 185, 191, 197; as temporal versus eternal, 14, 128, 151, 152, 238, 239 Wyntjes, Sherrin, 7, 11 yield/yieldedness/yielding, 36, 97, 99, 120, 136, 140, 187, 199, 200, 203, 225, 229, 232, 235, 273n71. See also Gelassenheit; giving up; submission Yoder, A., 215 Yoder, Crist (“Little”), 70–75

Yoder, Joseph W., vii, 70, 261n10 Yoder, Lena, 5 Yoder, Rosanna McGonegal, vii, 70–75, 261n10 Young Companion (magazine), xv, 197, 199, 201, 203, 214, 221, 227, 267n7, 275n23, 275n29 young folk (youngie), xii, 50, 52–56, 87, 132, 199, 203, 234, 237; adult- and peer-­ centered communities, 53–54, 240; adulthood and, 57, 66; dating, 61–65, 275n29; frolics and, 118–20; gender and, 53, 54; joining church, 57–61, 259n67; sex and, 88–92, 263n51; singles and, 67, 134, 136–38, 270n60; weddings and, 70–86 Zimmerman, Don H., 31 Zimmerman, Joy, 219 Zwingli, Ulrich, 7, 8