The Amish

by Steven M. Nolt

  In addition to kinship and neighborhood, there was yet another connection that linked this group. A number of the young adults were teachers in Amish schools. They had attended teacher meetings together, exchanged lesson plans, and shared schoolroom joys and frustrations. On this evening, church, family, school, and community overlapped, as they do so often in the high context culture of Amish life. These institutions reinforce one another and work together to pass on the faith to the next generation, and family and school play the most prominent roles in this regard.

  Amish at Home

  The home is a key space in Amish society. It is not only a center of family life, but also—as we’ve seen—the location of church services and weddings. Funerals also take place in the home of the deceased. For members of more traditional affiliations, such as the Swartzentruber Amish or Andy Weaver Amish, a great deal of canning and food preservation takes place with the aim of making the home as self-sufficient as possible. For those in relatively more progressive affiliations, where store-bought staples are common, the home is still at the center of production for households that are farming or operating a family business. Amish parents laugh at the overly idyllic image, served up by tourist brochures, of Amish homes as quiet, serene places—“With six children ten and under!” one mother remarked. But there is a sense in which Amish homes, due to their rural settings and their more limited technology, are free of what is, in other settings, assumed to be normal background noise.

  Furniture is generally spartan by the standards of mainstream America, although some households in larger and more liberal settlements have comfortable recliners, beautiful kitchen cabinetry, and lovely grandfather clocks. But even here there is no wall-to-wall carpeting. More conservative households simply have rough wood or linoleum flooring throughout, while those at the other end of the spectrum may have more expensive hardwood flooring and area rugs of various kinds. In line with the values of humility, there is no portrait photography on display. Most Amish families do not have family photos, while those from more progressive affiliations might have photos—even albums, in some cases—but do not display them.

  A kitchen in a moderately progressive Amish community features attractive cabinetry and gas-powered appliances. Kitchens in more conservative affiliations have wood stoves, iceboxes, and no indoor plumbing. Credit: Don Burke

  The language of the home is a German dialect commonly known as “Pennsylvania Dutch,” or Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch. The dialect is not confined to Pennsylvania, and Amish people across the country speak Pennsylvania Dutch, although there is some variation in vocabulary and pronunciation from region to region. Unless an outsider is present, conversation is virtually always carried out in Pennsylvania Dutch. Amish people read and write in English, so letters or notes left on a kitchen table are in English even as the verbal conversation throughout the day is in the dialect. In that sense, the Amish home is bilingual: German dialect for spoken communication and English for written. In addition, a select number of religious texts—Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, the Ausbund hymnal, a prayer book—are read in standard High German, but almost no one speaks High German conversationally.2

  Growing Up Amish

  Amish communities are full of children. Married women on average have about seven children, which means that the typical Amish person has six siblings, twenty-four aunts and uncles, and eighty-four first cousins. The Amish view infants as innocent and vulnerable, and delight in and even dote on babies. At the same time, parents believe that one of their primary tasks is to instill a sense of discipline in their children. Young children are given responsibility for chores around home and taught to obey both mother and father. Although gender roles are clear to children, chores are not rigidly defined by sex. Boys may be asked to help take care of the baby and girls might be enlisted in the barn, for example. Chores change with the seasons and also vary from one affiliation to another. For example, during the winter, Swartzentruber Amish need to cut and store ice in straw-insulated ice houses for use in the summer. (Most other Amish have natural gas–powered refrigerators.) Amish children grow up around animals, and caring for pets is a responsibility that usually begins at a young age. Even families that do not live on a farm have a driving horse, which older children help feed and water.

  When children begin first grade they enter a new stage in life. School-age boys and girls are called “scholars.” There is no gender segregation in Amish schools or school curricula, and boys and girls often share in the same games and activities at recess. After completing eighth grade, teens work at home and begin to take on more distinct gender roles that point to adulthood. A boy may begin working full time in a woodworking shop or apprenticing as a welder, while his sister may spend much of her day canning food, sewing, or working in an aunt’s quilt shop. Typically, until Amish youth are twenty-one they turn over their wages to their parents—who, in turn, provide for their needs and promise to give them financial help of various sorts when they marry and start a household of their own.

  Gender Dynamics

  Amish families are patriarchal in the sense that the Amish believe that the Bible teaches that the man is the head of the home and bears final responsibility for making major decisions that affect the household. In public settings, on a shopping trip to town, for example, this sense of patriarchal propriety might be expressed by a husband speaking for the family or doing most of the talking. At home, however, or with close friends, husbands and wives both speak freely and joke or banter, and although many household jobs are identified with one gender or another, most tasks are, at some point, undertaken jointly or by the other spouse if time and need demand. Some scholars have described such systems as “soft patriarchy,” a set of gender norms that relaxes and flexes depending on the situation.

  Amish publications often use the language of “marriage partners” to describe their ideal of complementary marriage. Women’s work is valued as a contribution to a stable and thriving home. Married women with young children almost never accept employment away from home, but some women begin small retail stores or other small businesses from their homes. These firms typically grow out of the traditional women’s realm of work—selling food, fabric, crafts, or greenhouse plants—but the sophistication of the businesses, and the fact that some of them end up employing their husbands, point to the economic and entrepreneurial room to maneuver that Amish women have. Lawyers and accountants who work with Amish clients report that it is uncommon for an Amish man to make major decisions about a farm or a family business without the close consultation of his wife.

  The changing world of Amish work, which we explore in the next chapter, has unsettled family life in some ways. When most households were farming, patterns of intergenerational and men’s and women’s work were more fluid, running together depending on the season or the weather. As more men have taken jobs off the farm, family life runs the risk of becoming divided. Home alone with young children, wives of day-laboring men have found themselves inhabiting a narrowing domestic sphere, while their husbands may share fewer household chores and be less involved with child-rearing than before.

  Men and women work together preparing soft pretzels and other food for a benefit auction. Gender roles are traditional yet flexible depending upon the particular needs of a situation. Credit: Daniel Rodriguez

  Outsiders with close contacts in the Amish world attest to vast numbers of happy marriages but know that difficult and dysfunctional relationships also exist. Church leaders are not oblivious to these situations, but the response of the church is shaped by competing cultural values. The Amish consider all violence and abuse to be sin, but they are also predisposed to encourage submission and patience. Bishops and ministers in some communities have launched homespun marriage seminars, sometimes under the rubric of “Family Helpers,” in which they seek to smooth patriarchy’s sharp edges, while upholding traditional understandings of the home. A question posed at such a gathering in Ohio in 2007 suggests th
e pain one woman felt. “I am very discouraged,” the anonymous writer began. “When we go away, like to church, instead of helping with the little ones, my husband will scold me for not being ready. Often times by the time I get in the buggy I’d rather cry than go anywhere.” The bishop’s public answer, in turn, illustrates his effort to invoke the values of Gelassenheit and apply them to the husband, chiding him for thinking only of himself and putting his desires ahead of his family’s needs: “The husband you describe here is not giving himself for you as Christ gave himself for the church. Your husband might be doing what he saw his father do unaware of how much this hurts you. He is thinking of himself more than he is thinking of you and he is not being a Godly leader.… The husband needs to help with the children and a Godly husband will.”3

  The Amish church forbids divorce, and a spouse who files for divorce, for any reason, risks excommunication. In cases of spousal abuse, ministers might suggest separation, but they may be slower to offer such counsel than would advisers in mainstream society. If husband or wife leaves the church and the other spouse does not, the person remaining Amish is expected not to remarry, holding open the possibility that the errant party could repent and return. If an Amish person is widowed, he or she will typically remarry quickly, especially if there are young children in the home. Across the board Amish people believe that children are best reared in a home with two parents.

  Not all Amish fit easily into the standard Amish family structure. Those who never elect baptism and leave the faith are disproportionately men, which means that single women comprise a small but noticeable segment of many communities. Some single women embrace their status. They might develop businesses or travel with a degree of freedom that would be unlikely for a married woman, or form especially close relationships with their nieces and nephews. For others, singleness is marginalizing. They may feel obligated to devote themselves to caring for aging parents. Such care is valued and honored in Amish society, but it can also be a lonely place in a community that assumes marriage and children.

  At the End of Life

  It is rare for an elderly Amish person to be placed in a nursing home. Only if ongoing medical care is unusually technical will a person move into a professional care setting. Most often, members of the older generation move into a Dawdyhaus (grandfather’s house) next to their children and grandchildren. They continue to be part of a multi-generational household, do odd jobs around the farm or family business, and perhaps assist with child care.

  When death occurs, the wider community moves into action, taking over family chores, digging the grave, and attending to other details to allow the immediate family time and space to grieve. Licensed funeral directors play a small role, completing death certificates and performing basic embalming but not applying cosmetic enhancements or selling expensive caskets. Bodies are quickly returned to the deceased’s home where family members of the same sex dress the body and place it in a simple coffin, made by an Amish carpenter. In the three days preceding the funeral, hundreds of people may come to view the body and extend sympathy to family members.

  Church members bring benches to the home of the deceased and arrange them for the funeral service, which may draw three to six hundred people. Sometimes two or three services are conducted simultaneously in neighboring homes if there are more mourners than can crowd into one house. Funeral services do not focus on eulogizing the dead, but on expressing gratitude to God for life and recognizing that everyone’s time on earth will, at some point, come to an end. “Mom used to say funerals are not just to bury the dead, but to remind us we must all face death,” one middle-aged man remembered his mother telling him as a child.4

  Following the service, the family proceeds to an Amish cemetery for the burial where the values of humility and equality are symbolized by the headstones. Regardless of one’s status, age, or gender, they are all the same small size and engraved only with the individual’s name, age, and birth and death dates. For months thereafter, a widow or widower can expect visitors every Sunday afternoon and evening, sharing memories and words of encouragement.

  Small headstones with simple inscriptions express values of Gelassenheit even in death. Credit: Don Burke

  Commitment to the aged is the corollary of Amish concern for maintaining spiritual fidelity with the past. “Perhaps one of the greatest spiritual teachings” he received from his parents and grandparents, reflected one Pennsylvania farmer in 2009, was how those generations “cared for their elderly parents.” His grandparents had “provided living quarters for both [great-grandmothers] in their house and faithfully cared for them till they died … age 93 and 102.” And then “we saw Dad’s care for [our] grandparents” as they “cleaned grandparents’ houses twice a year, cared for their gardens, did some of their sewing, got the estates ready for auction, repaired their broken furniture, and whatever, and read the Bible to them on Sundays.”5 These activities were critical pieces of the writer’s spiritual formation, formation that was centered in the everyday activities of the home. Indeed, the routines and rituals of the home are critically important resources for bringing up children in the Amish way. In recent decades, parents have also had Amish schools to aid them in their efforts.

  Who Shall Educate Our Children?

  Until the mid-twentieth century virtually all Amish children attended public schools with non-Amish peers, under the instruction of non-Amish teachers. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, only a small portion of Amish children were enrolled in public schools (and these were clustered in a handful of settlements). The rise of Amish schools has been one of the most significant developments in the group’s history.

  Disaffection with public schools stemmed from three factors, all of which took on new significance as the 1900s wore on. First was the consolidation of rural one-room schools into larger and often town-based facilities. Amish parents preferred small-scale schools, within walking distance, that employed teachers who lived in the local community and knew the parents. Consolidated schools undercut these arrangements. Second, curricula were changing with the addition of science, health, and civics classes that sometimes included—or at least offered the opportunity to include—teaching of evolution, sex education, and patriotism, all of which met with Amish disapproval. Finally, state attendance laws began to override the informal patterns whereby farm kids, and especially boys, could end their schooling with eighth grade and continue their practical education through work experience at home through apprenticeship. As these developments accelerated, an Amish minister asked, “How can we parents expect our children to grow up untainted by the world if we voluntarily send them into a worldly environment, where they associate with worldly companions, and are taught by men and women not of our faith six hours a day, five days a week, for the greater part of the year?”6

  Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s school authorities and Amish parents skirmished over schooling. Outcomes varied depending on the state or the degree to which either or both sides were willing to negotiate. In some places, fathers paid hefty fines and even sat in jail rather than send their children to high school. In other places, Amish parents bought abandoned one-room public schools and reopened them as private Amish schools. Sometimes public education officials approved these Amish schools and in other cases they moved to shut them down. Several conflicts ended up in court, notably one brought by officials in Green County, Wisconsin, that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1972 the high court ruled unanimously in Wisconsin v. Yoder that states must allow Amish children to end their formal education with eighth grade. Thereafter, most of the remaining conflicts were quickly resolved.

  In the years that followed, the number of Amish schools shot up dramatically and an ever-increasing percentage of Amish children were enrolled in them. Today there are more than two thousand Amish schools enrolling students in grades one to eight. A handful of students (depending on the settlement) may complete a General Educational Development (G.E.D
.) program after finishing eighth grade.

  Most Amish schools are one- or two-room buildings with multiple grades in a single room. Older students are expected to help younger scholars and model good behavior. Since teaching happens in a common classroom, pupils in the lower grades absorb some of the lessons being taught to the older students across the room, which quietly prepares these youngsters for the future. Meanwhile, lessons directed to younger students review and reinforce learning for those in the upper grades who overhear the teacher’s work with those in the lower grades.

  Teachers work with students across grade levels in a one-room Amish school. Credit: Dottie Kauffmann / Mennonite Historical Library

  The vast majority of Amish teachers are young Amish women who are themselves graduates of an eighth grade Amish school. Younger teachers learn from more experienced ones, and many attend regularly scheduled Amish teacher training workshops. Although Amish schools are a relatively new phenomenon, they have quickly become a unifying force and an Amish identity marker. Statewide gatherings of Amish school teachers and the writing of Amish school curricula, for example, have brought Amish people from various settlements and affiliations together in ways they had not connected before. Amish generally discourage homeschooling and in some settlements expressly forbid it. Homeschooling strikes Amish parents as an expression of go-it-alone independence, in contrast to their values of cooperation and fitting in with the larger group. Said one leader, “Children need the companionship of neighbors and friends to help develop” so they will “know how to get along with each other in later life.”7