Amish people believe that church membership entails accountability to and for each other, including financial assistance to fellow members facing high medical bills or property loss. Leaders discourage commercial insurance plans that would undercut this religious duty within the community. Numerous mutual aid programs ensure aid in the face of fire or storm damage or high health care costs. Fire and storm aid plans, the earliest type of Amish associations, emerged in the late nineteenth century (1872 in Ontario and 1885 in Pennsylvania).32
Mutual aid associations vary in their scope and organization, and they may encompass a few districts, an entire settlement, or an interstate affiliation. Some of these programs require an annual premium, while others—especially in the more traditional groups—collect funds only in response to specific needs. (“Assessment by need after the fire,” explained one member.) If the burden is too heavy for a single district, adjoining Gmays help each other. Manual labor for cleanup and rebuilding is freely given by members whenever disaster strikes. Remarkably, common to all these aid programs is their ability to address major needs without bureaucratic red tape, paid employees, underwriters, offices, computers, threat of lawsuits, or profits. Unlike commercial insurance, the transaction and administrative costs of Amish “insurance” are virtually nil. Volunteer assessors and aid plan directors operate from their kitchen desks during evening hours and can rely on the cooperation and ready payment from members without fear of litigation.
Caught between the rising costs of hospitalization and their reluctance to accept commercial or government-provided health insurance (Medicare or Ontario Health), Amish communities have devised various ways to assist families with major medical expenses. Some settlements have informal community-based “insurance” plans, while conservative communities rely on more traditional forms of support. Medical costs are covered in three basic ways: (1) spontaneous collections and benefit meals or auctions, (2) organized Amish hospital aid, (3) and negotiated discounts with hospitals. We describe these in chapter 18.
In the 1960s, some Amish businessmen began purchasing commercial liability insurance to protect themselves from outside lawsuits. Amish churches have had a long-standing opposition to any worldly insurance programs because they undermine mutual aid and use the force of law. To provide liability protection without using commercial insurance, some settlements established liability aid and product liability programs. Participation is voluntary, and members of the plan make a small annual contribution that fluctuates with the level of need.33
A handful of informal revolving loan funds, akin to old-style community savings and loan agencies, provide loans to qualifying families. Some Amish people put money into the fund at a miniscule rate of interest so that other church members can apply for low-interest mortgages for home or farm. The directors of the different funds in various settlements hold an annual meeting. Most of the funds shy away from providing loans to commercial Amish businesses, which usually acquire bank loans if they need capital. The policies of these financial assistance programs vary by state because of different state regulations.
Schools, Government, and Civic Aid
Although individual schools are operated by a board of fathers who act as trustees, most settlements have a school or “book” committee that offers advice on textbooks, prepares guidelines for operating the schools, and serves as a liaison with state departments of education. The school committees may also sponsor periodic local or regional training workshops for teachers. In chapter 14 we trace the development of Amish schools.
In 1967, during the Vietnam War’s military draft, Amish leaders from several states formed the National Amish Steering Committee to act as a broker between the Amish and Selective Service officers managing conscription and conscientious objection. After the draft ended, the Steering Committee continued to act as a liaison with the federal government and eventually spawned and coordinated state-level steering committees to serve as go-betweens with local and state officials. The national and state steering committees function as self-perpetuating bodies outside the formal structure of the church (see chapter 19). Because the National Amish Steering Committee must interact with the epitome of bureaucracy in the United States—the apparatus of the federal government—it has assumed the most complex structure of any Amish organization apart from businesses. Yet even the Steering Committee operates from a private home office with volunteer labor.
In response to accidents on homesteads, farms, shops, and public roads, certain Amish communities formed safety committees in the 1990s to encourage safety training and compliance with government safety standards. These committees maintain a close relationship with local, state, and federal officials and hold training meetings, workshops, and field days to educate Amish people about hazards and safety precautions. A number of Amish disaster aid organizations recruit Amish volunteers to assist in cleanup and rebuilding projects outside the Amish community following tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods. We elaborate on these efforts in chapter 19.
Health
A variety of Amish networks and organizations focus on physical and mental health issues. For example, People Helpers formed in 1995 to assist the caregivers of those with mental illness. Eventually it expanded and now holds educational meetings about mental illness and makes referrals to professional caregivers. Similarly, an organization called Family Helpers plans activities and workshops to promote healthy marriages.
Several groups of Amish people in different states have developed homespun residential treatment centers for people with depression and related issues, including sexual abuse and addiction. In addition, several professional medical centers have developed close partnerships with Amish groups for the treatment of mental illness and clinical care of children with unique hereditary illnesses (see chapter 18).
A plethora of support groups focus on special health interests. Since 1963, individuals with various disabilities have met at the Annual Handicapped Gathering. Eventually, specialized reunions spun off from this gathering to extend emotional support and provide information and resources to individuals and families dealing with cerebral palsy, polio, blindness, multiple sclerosis, and deafness. A similar gathering, the Sudden Death Reunion, is held annually for families who have recently lost a loved one through an accident or other unexpected means.
Special Interest Networks
Some Amish communities have small, informal historical libraries located in a home or as part of a bookstore. Other libraries have their own building and volunteers. The Heritage Historical Library in Aylmer, Ontario, has a vast collection of Amish materials. Amish historians gather for a two-day meeting every other year in a different settlement.
Like the Single Boys’ reunion mentioned in this chapter’s opening, the National Single Girls’ Gathering meets for two days each year. Other special interest groups have emerged around hobbies such as birding and have occasional local, regional, or national meetings. Horse Progress Days, which showcases new horse-drawn equipment as well as other new technology for shop and home, rotates from state to state each year and attracts upwards of 10,000 attendees.
As more Amish people entered nonfarm occupations in the last quarter of the twentieth century, special occupational groups emerged, and many of them hold periodic reunions. These Amish versions of trade conventions are favorite times to meet old friends and share expertise and knowledge about tools, products, and markets. Accountants, auctioneers, harness makers, machine shop operators, produce farmers, shed builders, income tax preparers, and quilters are some of the occupational groups that hold such gatherings. Although participants in all these special interest gatherings come from multiple affiliations, few people from the most traditional groups attend.
What Holds Them Together?
Our survey of districts, leadership, settlements, associations, and emerging organizations reveals an informal, small, and compact social architecture that embodies the spirit of Gelassenheit. Grounded in the ecclesial authority of individ
ual congregations, the social networks spanning the Amish world create bonds of fellowship that transcend geography and affiliation. These associations arose spontaneously without centralized or national direction in order to address needs beyond the capacity of local communities.
Thousands of people gather for Horse Progress Days, an event that rotates from state to state each year. Amish manufacturers and English workhorse enthusiasts demonstrate the latest horse-drawn equipment. Daniel Rodriguez
The architecture of Amish life remains largely untouched by the bureaucratic mentality that permeates much of the corporate world. The Amish aversion to bureaucracy stands as a stalwart example of their rejection of the structural realities of modernity. Amish beliefs about separation from the world and their predilection for locally based, small-scale, decentralized social units—church, schools, businesses—arrest, or at least retard, the growth of bureaucratic structures.
Without the organizational fixtures of solid modernity, how do Amish people sustain and understand their identity? Asked what holds Amish people across America together, one northern Indiana bishop thought for some time and then ventured, “We have the Eighteen Articles [the 1632 Dordrecht Confession], and the horse and buggy, and beyond that we interpret it in the church.” In the absence of modern organizational glue, Amish identity hinges on the interplay of shared religious markers and symbolic separators. The religious markers, especially the Dordrecht Confession and its teaching on shunning, are anchored in the past, while the symbolic separators, such as the horse and carriage, create new meanings in contemporary society. To accept car culture, Amish people assert, would push them beyond the Amish pale. On the other hand, simply buying a buggy does not make anyone Amish. The symbolic separators, they believe, must coincide with membership in a church that collectively embraces a particular past and gives those symbolic separators their spiritual potency.
The absence of modern structural identity also means, as the bishop suggested, that identity in the Amish world will be contested. It will not fall within the neat lines of an organizational flow chart or a uniform set of bylaws but will be interpreted and applied differently in nearly two thousand local church districts. Traditional forms of unity, in essence, work against modern modes of uniformity.
And yet, as we shall see, the forces of modernity do play a role in the formulation of Amish identity, creating and affirming boundaries for the Amish via commercial images and public policy. Each time a marketing label features a buggy silhouette with the words “Amish made” or government officials formulate a legal exemption for “the Amish,” outsiders are rarifying and reaffirming an identity with which insiders must live. Modernity, in other words, is always close at hand.
In fact, although most Amish people spend little time in sociologist Max Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy—absent as they are from the corporate world, higher education, the military, and government welfare programs—they increasingly find themselves standing in bureaucracy’s doorway. For example, Amish employees of sizable English-owned industries as well as Amish entrepreneurs who own larger firms face aspects of modern organizational life on a regular basis. A variety of regulatory agencies dealing with zoning, environmental resources, labor, and safety issues now touch not only businesses but also homeowners who may, for example, want to add a grandparents’ apartment to their home. As an Amish deli shop owner put it, “The state health department’s Ordnung is much more burdensome than my church’s.”
While their ideology rejects bigness, more and more Amish people, especially those operating businesses, are increasingly exposed to the logic and rationality of bureaucratic life, and that exposure may affect how they think about their church and community. What we can say with some certainty, however, is that modernity has held little sway over Amish family and gender roles. In the next chapter we explore the family, the basic social unit that ranks second only to the church in its prominence in Amish society.
CHAPTER 11
GENDER AND FAMILY
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Gathering in the cellar of a home to make sausage after butchering a pig, Katie and Susie picked cooked meat off of the bones. Susie’s husband, Pete, joined them, and next to each was a little pile of salt. “We like to eat a little too,” confided Katie, dipping a small piece of pork in the salt. Her husband, Andy, had wrapped his hair and beard in a Kopduche, or head scarf, causing great hilarity and teasing about the new “woman in the group.” The women criticized Andy for some of the spices he was adding and his mixing techniques, so his daughter fried some of the sausage he had mixed so that everyone could test it. Katie and Susie pronounced it flat and sent Andy back to try a new blend.
* * *
Casting Roles
In the Amish world, gender is constructed in the context of community, legitimated by religion and tradition, and reinforced in daily interaction. One’s role is defined by one’s place in the family and the church-community, and one’s identity is ensconced in relationships with others and shaped by the obligations these relationships entail. When an Amish child enters the world, his or her life is in many ways already mapped out. The label “another dishwasher” or “a little woodchopper” may greet the arrival of a new baby, and little girls learn to be Amish in ways different from little boys. As they sit on the boys’ or girls’ side of the kitchen table every day, small children begin to learn about gender and the ways it forms their place in their community.
The term patriarchal—in its anthropological and sociological sense—is an apt description of gender relations in Amish society: the male is the head of the family, and men occupy all visible leadership roles. Amish writer Joseph Stoll argues that “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.”1 Yet as we see in the opening vignette, that label does not capture the fullness and nuance of gender roles. For Amish people, subordination means neither inequality nor lack of importance. Outsiders’ assumptions about rigid patriarchal frameworks obscure the many ways in which Amish women’s agency is respected, affirmed, and operative. Gender relations in Amish life reflect a “soft” patriarchy, whose sinews stiffen and relax in different situations.2
The family is the primary social unit in Amish society. When Amish people report the size of their Gmay, they note the number of households, not the number of individuals. The Amish view of biblical roles—“The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3)—means that, to them, male is dominant over female, older over younger, and parent over child.
The family is the church in microcosm, reflecting and reinforcing the social architecture of the church. The father serves as the head of the family just as the ministers lead the congregation. The mother is to support the father in every way she can. Together they raise their children in the church, a task that, according to one Amish publication, “must be more important … than our work or our leisure.”3
Anthropologist Gertrude Enders Huntington observes that Amish people pass through six distinct stages of socialization: infancy, early childhood, school age, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.4 Examining each stage with an eye toward how gender is constructed illuminates family life and the various scaffolds that support it.
Infancy
Because the Amish do not proselytize, the growth of their communities depends on having an abundance of children. Given the importance of the family, it is not surprising that babies are welcomed. Children are expected and cherished, and those with physical or mental disabilities are considered special gifts from heaven. In some communities, infertile couples adopt children or provide foster care for non-Amish children through social service agencies.5
Where babies are born varies widely across settlements.6 In some communities most children are born in hospitals, while in other settlements birth centers have become common (see chapter 18), and in still others, births take place in the home. Availab
le options, family preference, and tradition all influence birthing practices. Local custom determines who will help with childbirth. In ultraconservative communities, a woman in labor is likely to be attended by her mother and mother-in-law at home, although she may go to a hospital in an emergency. In other settlements, obstetricians or certified nurse midwives deliver the babies, while yet other groups turn to unlicensed Amish and English midwives. (The non-Amish midwives typically have a medical doctor on call to provide backup services if needed.) Midwives may deliver the babies at the mother’s home or provide a “delivery room” in their own home or at a birth center. Some mothers deliver their first child in a hospital but then use a birth center or home delivery for the others. When births occur at home, the fathers often assist.
Midwives, Amish and non-Amish, work as neighbors helping neighbors, and they often have a special relationship with those they help. “Grandma Sue,” an Amish midwife who practiced in different settlements and delivered well over two hundred Amish babies, laughed at one child’s remark that “Sue always seems to find out about our baby before we children do.” Some parents told their inquisitive children that Grandma Sue brought the baby, leading one child to wonder, “How many babies does Sue have that she doesn’t want?” New mothers-to-be learn the lore of maternity through word of mouth, midwives, and the wisdom of older women rather than through birthing classes, books, or online sources.
Infants are welcomed as new members of the community and are seldom left alone. Until they are older or another child comes along, they sleep in the same room as their parents and typically take their naps in the main living area or in the kitchen. They are brought to the table at mealtimes and to church services on Sunday. People of all ages delight in infants, and even their youngest siblings hold them, play with them, and attempt to cheer them when they cry. The Amish view a new child as a gift from God, blameless and vulnerable, and see caring for their offspring as the parents’ God-given duty.
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