The Lives of Amish Women

320 Pages·2020·8.88 MB·English

by  Karen M. Johnson-Weiner

The Lives of Amish Women
Young Center Books in AnABAptist And pietist studies
Steven M. Nolt, Series Editor
The Lives of Amish Women
KAREN M. JOHNSON-WEINER
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
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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.
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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.
Contents
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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prefACe
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 men-
tor, 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 ethnogra-
phies . . . [and] recognized that women were largely missing . . . that the
interests . . . pursued were largely contemporary American (and male) inter-
ests, 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 chil-
dren. This leads some observers to see them as examples of appropriate fe-
male 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 se-
rene.” The Amish way, Bender reports, is “full of connections” whereas her
“English” (non-Amish) life is “equally full of disconnections.”2 In his in-
troduction 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 op-
pressed, 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 in-
side 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 busi-
ness 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 soci-
ety.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 general-
ized 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, home-
canned 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 treat-
ing 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 bor-
ders 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-a-
year communion, eight grades of formal schooling, horse-and-buggy trans-
portation, 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 busi-
ness 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 child-
less 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-