The Riddle of Amish Culture

by Donald B. Kraybill

  A young man purchasing his first buggy can select carpet in several colors and textures. He also has a choice of a dozen colors of upholstery in two textures of crushed velvet. Other colors and textures can be ordered by catalogue. A standard carriage will cost nearly $4,000, with another $1,000 in accessories such as clock, speedometer, four-wheel brakes, thermopane windows, and extra lights. A new carriage will last from ten years to a lifetime, depending on its use and care.19

  The Amish, in essence, have refused to concede the traditional form and color of the carriage but have accepted modern technology under the surface. Some changes were induced by legal regulations, while others sneaked in by default beneath the stalwart symbols of tradition. In this way the buggy is a metaphor of the larger process of social change in Amish society.

  Thus, dialect, dress, horse, and carriage are symbols of integration and separation. They require daily rituals of Gelassenheit—of surrender to communal values. Unlike ceremonial symbols reserved for historical festivities, these concrete expressions of ethnicity shape everyday behavior in practical ways. They link members together in a common history and a common mission against worldliness. As means of defense, they draw the boundary lines between church and world. As badges of ethnicity, they announce Amish identity to insider and outsider alike. In many ways they are sacred symbols, which the Amish have guarded with care. Their public visibility conveniently masks a multitude of changes on the backstage of Amish life.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Social Architecture of Amish Society

  Bigness ruins everything.

  —Amish carpenter

  SOCIAL BUILDING BLOCKS

  Human interaction is shaped not only by cultural beliefs and symbols but also by patterns of social behavior. Societies, like buildings, have distinctive architectural styles. Like blocks of Legos, social relations can be arranged in many different ways. In some societies males dominate, in others females do, and in still others neither does. The organizational pattern of each society creates a distinctive social architecture.

  Growing up in an Amish family with eighty first cousins nearby is quite different from living in a nuclear family with two cousins living a thousand miles apart. Child-rearing practices in Amish families, where both parents often work at home, differ radically from dual-career families whose children play in daycare. A society’s architectural design shapes human behavior in profound ways. What features distinguish the social architecture of Amish society? What is the organizational shape of Gelassenheit?

  Demographic factors—birth rates, mobility, marital status, and family size—are the building blocks of a society’s social structure. Table 4.1 compares the demographic differences between the Amish and non-Amish population in Lancaster County. The Amish are more likely than their neighbors to marry, live in large households, terminate school early, and engage in farming. A striking feature of Amish society is the large proportion (52 percent) of people under eighteen years of age. With only 6 percent of its members over sixty-five, Amish life tilts toward child rearing. Schools, rather than retirement villages, dominate the social landscape.

  TABLE 4.1

  Demographic Characteristics of Lancaster County Amish and Non-Amish Populations (in percentages)

  The individualization of modern society, reflected in spiraling percentages of single people and single-parent homes, is largely absent from Amish society. Whatever the Amish do, they do together. Only 5 percent of Amish households are single-person units, compared to 20 percent for the county. Moreover, virtually all of the single-person households adjoin other Amish homes. Several households are often on the same property. Many double households include a small adjacent Grossdaadi house for the grandparents. Five people live in the average Amish household—nearly double the county rate of 2.8 per household. The majority of Amish reside in a household with a half dozen other people or at least live adjacent to one. Moreover, additional members of the extended family live just across the road or beyond the next field.

  AGE AND GENDER ROLES

  Age and gender roles are essential building blocks in Amish society. The Amish identify four stages of childhood: babies, little children, scholars, and young people.1 The term little children is used for children from the time they begin walking until they enter school. Children between the ages of six and fifteen are often called scholars. Young people from mid-teens to marriage explore their independence by joining informal youth groups called “gangs” that crisscross the settlement.

  Social power increases with age. In a rural society where children follow the occupations of parents, the elderly provide valuable advice. Younger generations turn to them for wisdom in treating an earache, making pie dough, training a horse, predicting a frost, or designing a quilt. In a slowly changing society, the seasoned judgment of elders is esteemed, unlike fast-paced societies where children teach new technologies to their parents. The power of age also molds the life of the church, where the words of an older minister count more than those of a younger one. The chairman of the ordained leaders in the settlement is traditionally an older bishop with the longest tenure in that office. Wisdom accumulated by experience, rather than by professional or technical competence, is the root of power in Amish society.

  Although power increases with age, gender distinctions produce inequality. In the realm of church, work, and community, the male voice carries greater influence. Age and gender create a patriarchy that gives older men the greatest clout and younger females the least. One mother said, “How people see women hasn’t changed that much. We’re still seen as second class. Of course, we really emphasize family life. And when you think about how much the children of divorce suffer—that’s all such a mess. We emphasize family life. That’s what is important to us, to have good family relations. But I don’t think women are becoming more free in our community. That’s how it seems to me.”

  Amish families are organized around traditional gender roles. Although in Amish marriages, like others, various power equations emerge depending on the personalities of the partners, the husband is seen as the spiritual head of the home. He is responsible for its religious welfare and usually has the final word on matters related to the church and the outside world. Among farm families, husbands organize the farming operation and supervise the work of children in barns and fields. Many husbands assist their wives with gardening, lawn care, and child care, but others do little. Husbands rarely help with household work—washing, cooking, canning, sewing, mending, cleaning. The visible authority of the husband varies by household, but Amish society is primarily patriarchal and vests final authority for moral and social life in the male role.

  THE ROLE OF WOMEN

  The church teaches that, in the divine order of things, wives are expected to submit to their husband’s authority. This theme is emphasized in the wedding vows.2 A fifty-year-old woman noted, “I think maybe our wedding sermons today are easier on the woman’s role in the home. I know a lot of women have felt put down in the wedding sermon. I know some of the preachers try harder these days to say kinder things about the woman’s role in the home.”

  Entrusted with the responsibility of raising a large family, many Amish women are very efficient managers. Married women rarely have full-time jobs outside the home. In addition to providing child care, the wife normally oversees the garden, preserves food, cooks, cleans, washes, sews, and supervises yard work. An Amish woman’s garden and flowers are her kingdom.3 Many women mow their lawns with push mowers, without engines. Moreover, those who live on a farm often assist with barn chores—feeding calves, milking cows, and gathering eggs—as well as harvesting crops and vegetables. Others do clerical work or bookkeeping in their husband’s shop. The work is hard and the hours long, but there is quiet satisfaction in nourishing thriving families, tending productive gardens, baking pies, sewing colorful quilts, and watching dozens of grandchildren find their place in the Amish world. One woman, who had baked fifty-six pies in preparation for the lun
ch following church at her home said, “It’s no big deal because the children always help.”

  Mingled with the work are many pleasant moments of reprieve—a quilting party, a “frolic,” a sale, a wedding, and, of course, perpetual visiting. In addition to the endless chores, one woman said, “we sing, laugh, smile, and go through mid-life crises. We are real. Some of us even believe in women’s rights, anyhow if we know what they are.”

  Women vote in church business meetings and nominate men for ministerial duties. They do not, however, participate in the community’s formal power structure. They cannot be ordained, nor do they serve as members of special committees. Virtually all Amish schoolteachers are single women, but they too are on the fringe of the formal leadership structure.4

  One of the remarkable changes in gender relations is the growing number of women who own and operate businesses. About 15 percent of the hundreds of Amish businesses are operated by women. In some cases husbands work for their wives who are the owners. Gender influences shape business involvements. Women tend to operate food, craft, and quilt industries but not metal, woodworking, or construction firms. An attorney who works with both Old Order Mennonites and Amish noted that Amish women are much more involved in real estate transactions and much more likely to speak up at a real estate settlement.5

  Without the prod of market forces, labor-saving devices have come more slowly in the kitchen than in the barn. The ban on electricity has, of course, eliminated many appliances from Amish homes. Even with ample help from children, it is a challenge to manage a household of eight or more people without electric mixers, blenders, dishwashers, microwave ovens, and clothes dryers. Increasingly, washing machines and sewing machines are powered by air pressure as are mixers, beaters, and blenders. The kitchens and bathrooms in newer Amish homes have a modern appearance, with lovely state-of-the-art cabinetry. Contemporary-looking gas stoves and refrigerators have eliminated old wood cookstoves and iceboxes, although kerosene space heaters are still widely used. Permanent-press fabrics, disposable diapers, cake mixes, and cleaning detergents have lightened household work in many ways. Nevertheless, some Amish women think the acceptance of labor-saving devices has favored the men. One young woman described the tilted balance of power this way:

  The joke among us women is that the men make the rules so that’s why more modern things are permitted in the barn than in the house. The women have no say in the rules. Actually, I think the main reason is the men make the living and we don’t make a living in the house. So you have to go along with what they need out there. You know, if the public health laws call for it, you have to have it. In the house you don’t. Even my Dad says that he thinks the Amish women get the brunt of it all around. They have so many children and are expected to help out with the milking. Some help for two hours with the milking from beginning to end and they have five little children. That’s all right if a man helps them in the house and puts the children to bed, but a lot of them don’t. I don’t think it’s fair that we have the push mowers to mow the lawns with. It is hard work on some of these lawns. We keep saying that if the men would mow the lawns there would be engines on them, and I am sure there would be. Years ago they used to mow the hay fields with an old horse mower, but now they have engines on the field mowers so it goes easier for the horses, but they don’t care about the women.

  Using horses to pull a modern hay baler, a family works together to harvest a new crop of hay.

  Another woman declared that the church accepted gasoline-powered weed trimmers “because the men needed to trim their fence posts, which left the women feeling, at last, we may need to fight for our rights!” These statements show the growing sensitivity of some women to gender roles. Amish women are not liberated by modern standards, but many find fulfillment in durable, defined roles within their extended families. They know who they are and what is expected of them. One husband said: “A wife is not a servant; she is queen and the husband is the king.”

  Marriage in Amish society accents not romance but the importance of a loving, durable partnership. Many Amish couples experience a partnership in their marriage that was typical of preindustrial, rural life before the rise of factory work. One woman described the joy of a good partnership as she drove the horses pulling the hay baler while her husband stacked the bales on a wagon in the face of an impending storm: “The machinery all worked, and the green hay smelled so good, and the horses felt brisk, and we were in a hurry. It’s a wonderful feeling at a time like that. We two, the four horses, and the baler all working harmoniously together, with the wind grabbing at our clothes and manes, as if to say, it’s helping us along.”6

  Several Amish women offered the following recipe on “How to Preserve a Husband” from the back of a cookbook they had printed for distribution.

  First use care and find one not too young, but one that is tender and a healthy growth. Make your selection carefully and let it be final. Otherwise, they will not keep. Like wine, they improve with age. Do not pickle or put in hot water. This will make them sour.

  Prepare as follows:

  Sweeten with smiles according to the variety. The sour, bitter kind are improved by a pinch of salt of common sense. Spice with patience. Wrap well in a mantle of charity. Preserve over a good fire of steady devotion. Serve with peaches and cream. The poorest varieties may be improved by this process and will keep for years in any climate.7

  As largely self-employed people, Amish women, ironically, have greater control over their work and daily affairs than do many other women who hold full-time clerical and nonprofessional jobs. Unfettered by the pressure to succeed in a career, Amish women devote their energies to family living. While their work is hard, it is their work, and it brings as much satisfaction as a professional career, if not more. Amish women view professional women working away from home and children as a distortion of God’s created order that can only lead to divorce, unruly children, and family disruption. Their role models are other Amish women who have managed their families well. Happiness, after all, depends on one’s values and social point of reference. All things considered, within their context Amish women express high levels of social and personal satisfaction. Indeed, women in modern society, often burdened by conflicting role expectations and professional pressures to excel, may experience greater anxiety over their roles than many Amish women.

  FAMILY TIES

  When Amish leaders tally up the size of their churches, they count families, not individuals.8 The family, the keystone of Amish society, is large in both size and influence. Most Amish youth marry between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, on a Tuesday or Thursday in November, as the harvest season comes to a close. Marriage is highly esteemed, and raising a family is the professional career of Amish adults. Nine out of ten adults are married.

  Marriage vows are rarely broken. An Amish woman explained, “I don’t think us Amish should allow divorce. I think you need to work things out. That’s how we’re taught. We’re taught over and over, when you decide to marry, you will spend the rest of your life with this person. You need to work it out.” There are, of course, some de facto divorces, and in rare cases couples may live apart, but divorce is taboo. People who initiate divorce are automatically excommunicated. If a husband divorces his wife and leaves the community, she can remain within the church but cannot remarry until he dies.

  Many Amish babies are born at home and welcomed by siblings.

  Believing that large families are a blessing from God, couples yield to the laws of nature and produce sizeable families.9 Although the church informally frowns on birth control, some couples do use artificial and natural means to regulate the arrival of newborns in one way or another. Despite such attempts, Amish culture continues to value large families. One young mother, after giving birth to four children, said with a measure of satisfaction, “Well, I’m half done now.” Including parents and children, the average family has 8.5 members, compared to the county norm of 3.3. By age forty-five, th
e typical Amish woman has given birth to 7.1 children, whereas her neighbors average 2.8. Death and disease reduce the number, yielding families that average 6.5 children. Slightly over 10 percent of Amish families have ten or more children. By the turn of the twenty-first century, about 1,100 new babies were arriving in the Lancaster settlement every year.

  While Amish children are numerous, the cost of their upbringing is relatively low. There are no swimming pool memberships, tennis lessons, stereos, computer games, summer camps, sports cars, college tuition, or designer clothes to buy. Children assume daily chores by five or six years of age, and their responsibilities in the barn and house grow rapidly. They are seen not as economic burdens but as blessings from the Lord and as new members who will contribute their share to the family economy. Even with the growth of businesses, the labor provided by children is an economic asset to the community.

  The power of the family extends beyond sheer numbers. The family’s scope and influence dwarfs that of the modern nuclear family. Amish life is spent in the context of the family. In contemporary families social functions from birth to death, from eating to leisure, often leave the home. In contrast, Amish activities are anchored at home. Children are usually born there. They play at home and walk to school. By age fourteen, children work full-time in the home, shop, or farm. They are taught by their extended family, not by television, babysitters, popular magazines, or daycare teachers. Young couples are married at home. Church services rotate from home to home. Most meals are eaten at home. Adults work at home or nearby. Plentiful recreational activities, such as swimming, sledding, skating, softball, volleyball, and corner ball, centered near home, have no admission fees.