Kraybill notes that Amish homemakers actually have more control over their daily affairs than do women in full-time clerical and nonprofessional jobs. This relative autonomy does not mean that Amish women are exempt from “job pressures,” though. As an excerpt from a New Order woman’s diary shows (see fig. 4.1), much of their time is spent acquiring and preparing food and coordinating meals for family members. Amish women also devote a huge amount of effort to what Micaela di Leonardo refers to as “kinwork,” or the “maintenance and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties” for their large extended families.52 Such work includes making visits and telephone calls; writing letters; making or obtaining presents and cards; observation of various life-cycle rituals, such as births and birthdays, marriages, and deaths; organizing holiday gatherings; and the mental work of coordinating all these activities and making decisions about whether to intensify or neglect particular ties. One Old Order woman showed us a poem she had composed on a poster board for her brother’s birthday; more than fifteen different kinds of candy bars were taped onto the board, their names humorously incorporated into the poem. Reflecting on the ways Amish women expertly manage food and kin relationships, a New Order bishop praised Amish women as the “true keepers of our culture.”
In contrast to the mainstream emphasis on romantic and often publicly flaunted love, the ideal Amish relationship between husband and wife is a quiet and sober, but loving, partnership characterized by respect and mutuality. Rather than espousing the “feminized definition [of love that] dominates both contemporary scholarship and public opinion,” with its emphasis on feelings, the Amish view of love approximates the colonial-period model of love with its integration of expressive and instrumental components in roles and individuals.53 While many of our respondents volunteered that neither the Amish nor their marital relationships were perfect, none of the women indicated dissatisfaction with their marriages. Nor did they interpret “submission” in a negative manner. Virtually all of these women felt that their own marital relationships were “close” or “very close” to the ideal relationship.
July 31
I did the laundry, wrote an obituary poem as a favor for a friend who wants to send it into the Budget [in] memory of her deceased grandmother. Made supper, mashed potatoes, and bologna gravy for son Paul and ate with them. Dad did not go with me as he went to the youths’ Bible Study in eve. Paul’s busy, will have church at their place. I did some “fixin” with needle and thread while there.
August 3
We canned 18 quarts peaches. Peter’s next door did 90 quarts. The whole family helped. Johns [husband of] our youngest daughter, did 100 quarts! They had 6 helpers. I did weekly cleaning (quick way), rested and got suitcases ready to travel with son Charles and family to their home in North Carolina. First we plan to attend a school meeting, approximately 600 people, where Charles is to have a topic. He is also a minister. A driver of North Carolina, another friend from there and this friend’s friend of Rhode Island, will sleep at our house while we’re gone.
September 19
Another busy day! Bridget, next door, picked a large wheelbarrow load of sweet corn. We all helped each other and cleaned, blanched and cut it off, ready for the freezers. It is a lot of work, but it is much more tasty than any corn ever is at restaurants etc.! In the eve, we picked some grapes from our arbor and made grape juice to can tomorrow.
December 6
Got up early and helped each other make gelatine custard pudding to take along to visit our widowed sister, Mrs. Deborah Yoder, another relative couple went too, and she brought a delicious casserole. In P.M. we visited a poor young widow, 26 years old, and her 2 lil’ boys. After that we went to a Bulk Food Store to order cheese and ham for our church lunch, which we’ll need for Sunday in a week. In eve, we baby-sat grandson “Timmy” (1 year old) while Charles’s and many others were to Holmes Siding’s banquet support at Walnut Creek Inn.
Fig. 4.1. This excerpt from the daily diary of a New Order Amish woman in Holmes County reveals how central the management of food and the maintenance of good family relations are in the lives of Amish women. Names in the diary entries have been changed to maintain anonymity. Courtesy of Charles Hurst.
Voices of Resistance?
Not all the women we interviewed were uniformly positive about the daily realities of their position in the family. When asked what they thought made the difference in whether or not Amish women were viewed as equal in honor to men, many women predictably replied that it depended on the extent to which women themselves projected the appropriate personality and performed their prescribed roles. But another dominant reason given for the differential respect accorded women, especially by their children, concerned the behavior of the husband: “I would say probably the main thing that makes the difference is the way the husband treats her,” noted one New Order woman. “If the husband treats his wife with a high respect, the children will also.” Commented another, “Some of the men feel, you know, ‘What I say is it.’” An Old Order woman was even more blunt: “Oh, it definitely depends on the husband. Some men just have this idea … you know, they interpret the Bible wrong. I think they do. It says the husband should be the head of the household, and they think he should be the lord of the household. And they have no respect for their women, to tell you the truth. And that gets passed down from generation to generation. Whereas in another household the husband might treat his wife like a queen, and that gets passed down too.” According to one Old Order woman, “If the husband says, ‘Hey, I’m the boss around here, and we’ll do what I say,’ you usually end up with a browbeaten wife.”
Amish women have strategies they can use to negotiate, maneuver, and interpret their “subordinate” position so that they gain leverage and power in everyday relationships. Their extensive knowledge of household affairs and of their children’s emotional needs gives them a powerful voice in many decisions. Wives also often become astute observers of their husbands’ moods and trigger points and learn how to frame an idea in a way that gets the best possible reception. When angry, a woman may also use the “silent treatment,” a technique that carries an especially strong message in Amish society.54 Reflecting on a difficult decision he had made that angered his wife and daughters, an Old Order bishop confessed, “The worst part of it is dealing with their silence.” An Amish midwife noted that from the outside the Amish family looks patriarchal, but from the inside “It doesn’t feel that way, it feels more maternal. Many of the controls are in the hands of wives and mothers but not in a controlling way.”
Outright resistance by wives is rare. However, one Amish woman sent us a poem that conveys her perspective regarding her role as a domestic worker. The poem describes a woman who one day becomes tired of washing the dishes as she has done for years:
Round and round in an endless reel
Getting to nowhere ever more
But then she revives and upon reflection finds joy in her work:
Somehow, slowly, she seemed to see
the humble things as they really were
Each in its own reality
A part of home and a part of her.
In replacing her resentment and self-pity with the realization of her own egocentric insensitivity and debt of gratitude to others, this woman is following a time-tested Amish recipe for personal therapy that stresses changing one’s attitude rather than the circumstances.
To be sure, there is a handful of cases in which Amish wives suffer serious physical and emotional abuse at the hands of their husbands. The Amish are appalled by domestic violence, and the idea of a husband striking his wife runs contrary to Amish teaching and upbringing. When such abuse occurs, the church community usually gets involved right away; however, the Amish may have difficulty addressing the problems because their distance from the world limits the willingness of victims and perpetrators alike to request services from the larger community. We heard of a case in the Geauga Settlement in which an Amish woman became so fe
d up with the ineffectiveness of the church leaders’ intervention strategies (typically, confession or short periods of excommunication for the perpetrator) in stemming her husband’s abuse that she went to the police herself and got a restraining order. According to insiders, cases of sexual abuse are more likely to involve an uncle, a brother or some other male relative rather than the husband, and they tend to occur in larger families from the more conservative affiliations.
Recognizing the difficulties in treating the cycle of physical or sexual abuse that can afflict certain families, the Amish in the Holmes County Settlement have formed Hoffnung Heim (literally, Home of Hope), a shelter for those who need psychiatric help or counseling. One board member commented, “At Home of Hope, we see authoritarian husbands, and it’s hard for wives to submit to that. We see way too many cases where the husband is the boss, and it just goes from one generation to the next.” Noted an Old Order businessman, explaining why the Amish prefer to try to resolve issues of abuse among themselves: “We don’t want people to see our underbelly.”
Diversity in Women’s Roles
In spite of the general agreement among the Amish on the roles that are appropriate for women, there are structural conditions under which the position of Amish women varies in the Holmes County Settlement. The shift out of family farming to employment in a small business, factory, or construction crew, for example, has direct implications for gender roles and family life because it pushes the family in the direction of separating public and private spheres and embracing the traditional English model of gender roles—the man as breadwinner and the woman as domestic worker.55 This situation in which Amish husbands work away from home, leaving their wives home alone to carry out the tasks of parenting and housework, can generate stress. One Old Order Amish man reflected on the new pattern of “working out”: “With the husbands gone all day, the wives go crazy now, all day with lots of kids—her shopping day is an escape.” An informant who conducted focus groups with Amish women pointed out: “If you were home all day without another adult there with eight children, that was different than when your husband was there on the farm with you.” The Amish belief in separate gender roles only intensifies the association of women with domesticity in the face of the “lunchpail threat.”
Conversely, when men and women work productively together and share tasks, gender inequality is minimized. Such is the case on farms, where women can move toward an androgynous position.56 While there are gender distinctions in farm work, owning and working on a farm require sharing of tasks, and each person necessarily crosses into the other’s prescribed areas. Moreover, involvement in this partnership on the farm is carried out with men and women in close proximity to each other, which also encourages greater equality between the sexes.57 Still, the gender breakdown of tasks on a farm varies a lot across families. “Some women are very much involved in the farm work. They help in the field; others don’t. And it just depends on their capabilities, their interest, the family load, all kinds of things. Even how they decide or agree to divide the work.”
While it is common for single Amish women to be employed as teachers in private schools, as housekeepers, as restaurant workers, and as bookkeepers and receptionists at local Amish businesses, some married women work out of necessity, especially if the husband is disabled, or because the woman is childless. A woman may also be “the driving force” behind a business in or near the home, such as a fabric, natural foods, or crafts store. With the high rate of tourism in the Holmes County Settlement, some Amish women are providing home-cooked meals to outside groups brought in by tour guides. This means outsiders come not only into the shop, but into the more intimate setting of the home as well. In addition, certain home-based businesses, such as greenhouses or bakeries, allow Amish wives to play a more central economic role and form a “partnership” with their husbands.58 The role of an Amish wife in the postfarming era thus depends heavily on the specific form of economic livelihood that she and her husband have embraced.
The Holmes County Settlement lags behind the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, settlement, where fully 20 percent of the Amish businesses are managed by women.59 Although the Lancaster Settlement has often been a trendsetter among the Amish, most of those with whom we had conversations did not “see that happening” in the Holmes County community. It appears “highly unlikely that the position of women within Amish society will be transformed” in Holmes County.60 At the same time, a few women do believe that there is more pressure to work outside the home than in the past, especially as farming has become less common as a full-time livelihood. The Amish have been extremely creative and flexible in adapting to the economic pressures they have confronted.
In addition to economic factors, religious differences among the Amish influence gender inequality. Church regulations on the kinds of work women may engage in vary, with Swartzentruber churches being the most limiting. One Amish employer said, “Even working in my office here, you would never have … a Swartzentruber girl working here at a full-time job as an Old Order girl might.” Since most Swartzentrubers live on farms, however, the scope of women’s daily work is actually quite broad—from managing the household and kin network to helping out on the farm and perhaps even a side business. In contrast, when men in the more progressive affiliations begin working away from home, the domestic role may become more differentiated from the public one, and more narrowly defined. Johnson-Weiner explains this counterintuitive finding in terms of the more evangelical nature of the more “liberal” churches. If the church is to demonstrate to potential converts its faithfulness to biblical strictures about women’s place, then it must emphasize and enforce the divinely ordained hierarchy of (1) God, (2) Christ, (3) men, (4) women. While all Amish churches require male authority in strictly religious settings, the more liberal churches enforce these requirements in secular settings as well.
Indeed, three-quarters of our female interviewees who believed men’s roles were viewed as more important than women’s roles in Amish society belonged to the relatively liberal New Order Amish. “In general, I would probably say that men’s roles are considered more important in Amish society,” commented one of these women. “To the men, anyway [laughs heartily].” By contrast, most of the Old Order Amish said unequivocally that they thought both male and female roles were equally respected in the Amish community. As Johnson-Weiner points out, there is no clear separation between the home and the church for the more conservative Amish, since religious services are held in the home and the families in the community are viewed as constituting the body of Christ on earth. Within that body of Christ, “there is no male or female … A woman’s equality as a Christian overrules her subordination to men in the earthly hierarchy.”61 Johnson-Weiner concludes that while in the formal hierarchy of the church Amish men have authority over women, in the informal real world of everyday activities women share power with men.
Being Single or Widowed
Although marriage and parenting are the norm for the Amish, a small percentage of individuals remain single or face the early and unexpected death of a spouse. Among the Amish, single women outnumber single men, in part because a higher percentage of young men than women choose not to be baptized, creating a “marriage squeeze.”62 These “single sisters,” as they are sometimes called, occupy a liminal position in Amish society. On the one hand, they sometimes feel they are unconsciously excluded from the nuclear-family orientation that drives Amish church and school life, or that they are censored for their strong views. “I have seen nothing in men that would improve my life,” commented one thirty-year old New Order woman. Another single Old Order woman agreed: “Amish women are content because they deny their feelings. They wear a lot of masks.” She continued, “I went to one ‘preparatory service’ for communion and had to bite my tongue when the bishop said women were supposed to be quiet in church.”
On the other hand, single Amish people often find that the Ordnung is flexibly interpreted so as to accom
modate working outside the home or other “fence-crowding” behaviors. “I’m probably the only Amish girl in the settlement that’s got carpet,” quipped an elderly single woman. “But don’t tell the bishop I told you that.” This woman participates in an annual reunion for “single sisters” that spans numerous settlements and is sponsored by a group called the Association of Unmarried Amish Women. An Andy Weaver man who had remained single into his thirties also described doing things, such as visiting a coffee shop in Wooster in the evenings, that would be very unusual for a married Amish man.
Divorce is stigmatized for the Amish, but widowhood and remarriage are much less so. Here again, however, a gender imbalance is seen. In the Holmes County Settlement, 5.3 percent of women are widows as compared to 0.4 percent of the men who are widowers.63 One church district, for example, has eleven widows among thirty-plus families. The reasons for this somewhat skewed state of affairs are not hard to find. Like their non-Amish counterparts, Amish men die earlier, on average, than Amish women, and they are more likely to remarry. According to Gayle Livecchia, there are two kinds of remarriage, “companion marriage” and “family formation marriage.”64 The former typically involves an older widower marrying for companionship a woman (or “old girl”) who is roughly his age, either a widow or a woman who has remained single; remarriages between Amish in their seventies or even eighties are not unusual. In “family formation marriages,” a widower marries a younger woman, who will have children. One man in the settlement had twenty-two children by four wives; he kept remarrying after each new spouse died. In Levecchia’s study, 72 percent of women who married a widower had never been married before, because men were reluctant to get involved in blended families and deal with someone else’s children. In both types of remarriage, however, courtship is very private. It is sometimes done through the mail—the couple might not even see each other during their courtship—placing the Amish at the cutting edge of “mail dating.”
An Amish Paradox Page 16
