Retirement might mean that husband and wife slow down, but nonetheless both continue many of the chores that occupied them when they were raising children. They generally remain financially independent, funded in their golden years by income from the sale of their farm or business, proceeds from an auction of extra furniture and no-longer-needed machinery, personal savings, and their part-time labor. Remaining physically, socially, and emotionally close to their children and grandchildren, they lead independent lives, and their wisdom is valued.
With very few exceptions, the Amish make no use of retirement centers or nursing homes. If a parent needs long-term assistance with the activities of daily living, adult children take turns providing it. In some cases an infirm parent who needs continuous care rotates from home to home, spending several weeks in each one. Otherwise, adult children may take turns providing care in the Dawdyhaus.
The Extended Family
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the extended family in Amish society. Mary, a typical thirty-five-year-old married woman, is ensconced in a thick family network of some 250 people that includes grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, siblings and their spouses, first cousins and their spouses, and a similar clutch of relatives on her husband’s side. The majority live within fifteen miles of Mary’s home, and some live within just a mile. Some are members of her church district. Her extended family provides care, support, and wisdom for all stages of life—from pregnancy to how to dress the deceased for burial. They offer recipes, childcare, and homespun remedies for common ailments. This pool of knowledge is a reservoir of cultural capital, an oral how-to manual for fixing problems from marital discord to depression.
When men and women marry, they retain ties to their extended families as well as to other members of their community. Same-sex siblings play a particularly important role, especially for women. Only daughters surpass sisters in importance, and women draw on the emotional and practical support of their female relatives in a variety of ways.
A woman is usually helped after she gives birth by her mother. If there are no older girls in the home, an unmarried sister or a niece may move in to help care for the newborn and assume household chores for a while. Only if no relative is available will a neighbor be called on to supply an unmarried daughter to help out. Sisters and married daughters provide labor and support when a family readies the house for church services. This task, which fills two or more weeks preceding the gathering, involves cleaning everything and even laying new shelf paper or repainting rooms. At weddings, aunts and married sisters of the bride are often invited to share the honor of cooking, and unmarried sisters wait on tables.
Singles
Single men and women rarely live alone but are instead integrated into the extended family network. Singles are treated with respect and participate in the life of the church-community, but because the bulk of activities are family oriented, a single person can sometimes feel “like an oddball,” in the words of one single woman.27 Because getting married and having children is such an esteemed goal in Amish society, singles sometimes feel marginalized. On the other hand, one single woman declared, “I don’t feel second class.” Some singles pursue careers such as teaching, craft making, or running small businesses, earning the admiration of others in the community.
Individuals rarely choose to remain single or childless. In one settlement, only 7 percent of those thirty to seventy-five years of age had never married.28 Marriage is the ritualized step into Amish adulthood, leaving singles in a liminal space for a number of years until they realize that marriage will likely elude them. The ambivalence of their status is rehearsed at the start of every church service as they continue to walk into the service and sit with the unmarried “boys” or “girls.” Eventually, usually in their thirties, they begin to sit with the married men or women.
A gathering of single Amish women, which rotates from community to community across the United States, is held every year. In some settlements, singles organize evening and weekend social events. A higher female birthrate, a higher rate of male defection from the church, and the restriction that marriage be between fellow church members results in more single Amish women than men. Single adult women often live with and care for their aging parents. They may also develop especially close relationships with their sisters, nieces, and nephews.
Sexuality
The Amish strongly oppose extramarital and premarital sex. Their reliance on Scripture, the importance of the family, and the welfare of their communities both inform and preserve the Amish view that sexual expression belongs within marriage. “We’re still very Victorian in this sphere,” noted one man. Although Amish sexual standards may be more concrete and specific than those of some cultures, the Amish do not claim exemption from lust or sexual desire. “We all have temptations until we die,” a seventy-six-year-old grandfather said. “When I see women half-dressed on the street, they look tempting, and my mind goes to the ditch.” Yet oft-heard calls for holy living and moral purity reinforce Amish sexual mores, as do sanctions against those who transgress them.
Sexual Transgressions
Premarital sex occurs with greater frequency in some communities than in others, and undoubtedly some courting couples who engage in sex use natural or artificial birth control to avoid pregnancy. Transgressors are expected to confess to the church regardless of whether pregnancy results. As one woman put it, “If you commit adultery or fornication, you go tell the ministers. That’s how they find out. Usually people are so ashamed that they request their membership be put aside [in a temporary excommunication].”
Men and women hold equal responsibility to confess fornication, but the expectation for confession varies in different groups. In some groups, after a public confession and a short period of excommunication, the wayward couple is completely forgiven and restored into full fellowship. After noting how rigorously some other communities punish premarital sex offenders, one woman added, “In our church, they’re in the Bann just over one church Sunday. If a girl gets pregnant, we say, ‘That’s too bad,’ and then we move on.” In other Gmays, the excommunication might last as long as six weeks.
In most churches, couples who conceive before marriage are disgraced in several ways. In addition to a public confession before the Gmay and an excommunication of two to six weeks, wedding festivities may be shortened, fewer guests invited, and the ceremony held on a different day of the week than customary or ahead of the regular wedding season to accommodate the impending birth. These public changes shame the couple and their parents and help to discourage premarital intercourse.
If both partners are baptized Amish members, they almost always marry and try to have the wedding before the baby arrives. Amish people unequivocally consider abortion to be a sin. If the father is not Amish, the pregnant woman might leave and marry the father outside the church, or she might remain in the community and raise the child as a single parent, or she might even arrange for an Amish couple to adopt the child. Church members tend to be more forgiving of the premarital pregnancy of an Amish couple than that of an Amish woman and a non-Amish man.
Sexual Orientation
The Amish consider homosexual activity a sin.29 Because they are not exposed to much television or other mass media, some Amish people are not familiar with the terms gay and lesbian or public discourse on the topic, although others learn about same-sex issues when they read local newspapers.
No systematic research has measured the prevalence of homosexuality among the Amish. Some Amish people privately express same-sex inclinations, but they tend to keep their desires under cover. Those with homosexual inclinations who are married may feel dissatisfied and unhappy, but they nevertheless continue in their marriage, yielding their personal yearnings to the expectations of their church. In short, a de facto “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seems to prevail. “The Silent Struggle,” an anonymous essay on homosexuality that appeared in the Amish publication Family Life, never ment
ions the word homosexuality. The essayist notes, “Many [people] have been this way since childhood; no one knows why. And our plain society keeps these people hidden, pretending there is no problem, offering no help.” The writer goes on to advise, “Do not enter marriage just to be socially acceptable; you will hardly be happy and it would be unfair to your partner.” He or she summarizes by saying that “there is hope” that people can change via God’s power, yet also suggests that not everyone will or can change sexual orientation, and that it is God’s will that such people accept remaining single.30
Homosexual practice that becomes known must be confessed publicly in church. Most of the confessions are made by men, perhaps because women may be able to carry on affairs more discreetly than men.31 Some who claim a homosexual identity seek out others in the community with a similar inclination or look for counselors to help them claim a heterosexual identity. Some individuals leave the Amish community because they realize it is impossible to live as an openly gay or lesbian person in Amish society, but such cases are relatively rare.
Abuse and Violence
Sexual Abuse
No systematic or evidence-based studies have documented the extent of sexual abuse in Amish families. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence and legal charges against some individuals indicate that Amish society, like other societies, experiences sexual abuse. In some cases, ex-Amish people point to sexual abuse as one reason for leaving the community.
Sexual violations occur both inside the nuclear family and within the extended family or neighborhood. Typical cases involve teenage boys or adult men abusing young women who are not baptized or married. The size of extended families and the high density of Amish communities provide a large pool of potential victims for perpetrators. Compared to those in small-family societies, male Amish predators have easy access to many possible victims—sisters, nieces, granddaughters, and neighbors.
A clinician notes, “The majority of Amish offenders with whom I have counseled are hapless individuals who experience inappropriate sexual desires and act on victims of convenience. A few are truly predatory and need to be treated as such, but the majority are conscience-ridden and struggling with what they are doing, experiencing a compulsive desire they realize is wrong, and even revolted by their own behavior.”32
The Amish church forbids sexual abuse and considers it a sin. When a case of sexual abuse becomes public knowledge inside the community, the offender typically makes a public confession and then is placed in the Bann for several weeks. This shaming ritual is rarely adequate to terminate compulsive abuse; offenders with a serious psychological disorder and addiction may continue abusing victims until halted by other interventions.
Amish people prefer to deal with abusers inside their own church-based system of discipline rather than report them to outside authorities. However, their religious practices of forgiveness and pardon coupled with social shaming do not always provide the necessary therapy for sex addicts or adequate protection for victims. Despite their aversion to informing civil authorities, some members have reported cases of abuse to outside authorities and cooperated with law enforcement officials. Some Amish offenders have served extensive prison sentences, and others have undergone treatment in Amish-operated mental health centers.33
Several cultural factors make it challenging to report sexual abuse to outside authorities, and some victims and Amish people who know of the abuse do not know how to report it. Sex education is not included in the school curriculum, and some youth do not understand inappropriate sexual advances or know what to do if violations occur. Because Amish people have less exposure to and interaction with social service agencies, counseling, and health care professionals, outside experts are less likely to learn of or detect abuse in Amish clients.
Abuse is typically reported to church leaders, who are always male. Because the church, family, and community are knit together and the authority structure is patriarchal, male leaders may not be sensitive to the needs of female victims. Men may minimize the acts of a male perpetrator or blame female victims for the violations. Moreover, female victims may face intimidation and scorn within their family and community if the abuse they report leads to imprisonment of the perpetrator. Furthermore, church leaders, with their limited knowledge of addictions and treatment therapies, do not always realize that church discipline is inadequate to address serious psychological disorders, which need much more than “a prayer and some help from above,” as one Amish man put it.
Numerous outside professionals have worked in tandem with Amish people to address the problem of abuse and to provide treatment. Despite the complications of reporting and responding to abuse, some Amish people have actively sought to raise awareness of it and to support victims and their families. In Ohio, an outside social services agency prepared a booklet about sexual abuse entitled Strong Families, Safe Children, which was widely distributed in Amish communities by church leaders.34 Two other booklets, Healing from Sexual Sin and Walk in the Light, were written by Amish people. Healing offers help for those who struggle with sexual issues, and Walk contains an explicit discussion of the psychological damage related to sexual abuse, suggests ways to prevent it, and gives advice on what to do when it occurs. One woman who experienced sexual abuse wrote a book about her story that was sold within and beyond the Amish community.35 An Amish periodical, Family Life, has published numerous articles on abuse in an effort to inform families and assist victims.36
Domestic Violence
Although the Amish religion emphasizes peaceful and nonviolent living, anecdotal evidence, reports of counselors, and concerns of church leaders point to the presence of some domestic violence in Amish communities. The same issues that impede reporting sexual abuse to outside authorities also obstruct reporting domestic violence.
Some leaders have demonstrated concern about violence in their communities. Family Life, for example, published an article on the topic in the mid-1990s.37 In one settlement, a group of Amish women calling themselves the Sewing Circle collected stories of domestic violence and printed them in a booklet to raise awareness of the problem. Their purpose was “to encourage Plain People who are victims of domestic violence to know that there is hope and healing for their pain. … We reached out from our own abuse and found people who responded; and in their response was hope. In turn … we are offering the same hope that was offered to us.”38
The incidence of violence and abuse in Amish communities likely varies across affiliations. In one study, which included interviews with 288 randomly selected Amish women of childbearing age, only two participants (less than 1 percent) reported that “a spouse or boyfriend had pushed, grabbed, shoved, or slapped them” in the past twelve months. None of the Amish women reported that they had been kicked, beaten, threatened with a gun, or forced to have sex in the previous year. In comparison, 7 percent of non-Amish women of similar age in the same study had suffered violence at the hands of a spouse or boyfriend.39 A police officer who has investigated numerous cases of sexual abuse in one Amish settlement says she was “never called to investigate any cases of domestic violence,” although, of course, some cases may never have been reported.
Changing Society, Changing Roles
Stereotypical Amish family life unfolds on a small, family-owned farm. As partners, the husband and wife perform distinct tasks but recognize each other’s contributions to the well-being of the family. Eating three meals a day together, with their sons and daughters seated on separate sides of the table in order of age, the parents know that the labor of all is critical to the well-being and economic productivity of their household.
This pattern, considered ideal by many Amish people, remains stable in many communities. In others, however, it has vanished as men and some women have begun leaving home before sunrise for work at a factory, construction site, or market stand. As communities change, so do family and gender relations. The economic value of children and the social worth of the mother who births and cares for t
hem reflect somewhat their contribution to the family economy.40 For example, Amish wives whose husbands work as day laborers “make a smaller contribution to the subsistence and to the economic survival of their family, which may affect both their self-esteem and status in the community.”41 In addition, children have less economic merit in the families of factory and construction-crew workers than they do in farm families and families with home-based shops, who need their labor.42
Perhaps most importantly, when men work away from home, the traditional family structure is disrupted. Wives lose the support of their husbands during the day and must care for children alone. One grandmother grumbled that her son-in-law did not eat breakfast or lunch with the family because he worked in carpentry for a non-Amish employer, leaving his wife alone with six children, the oldest of whom was a first-grader.
As Amish communities adopt different patterns of work, their family routines change in ways that mirror the transformation of American society from 1850 to 1950. Industrialization and the rise of wage labor had a major impact on gender and family relations as men and unmarried children left the family home or farm for outside employment. As a result, the woman as housewife and homemaker played a subordinate role in the economic well-being of family and community.
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