Reviews
Strangers at Home makes a major contribution to our understanding of Anabaptist history and the ongoing construction of Anabaptist identity. Moreover, in investigating the role of religion and ethnicity in framing the choices available to individuals and communities, the essays in Strangers at Home consider the historical construction of gender in Anabaptist cultures in the larger context of women's history and, in so doing, question assumptions about the field of women's history itself.
Amish and Mennonite women occupy a unique niche in rural America, and the intricate, complex essays in Strangers at Home demonstrates a maturity in their study.... The essays are uniformly sophisticated, interesting, and worthwhile.
This work is significant both for its breadth... and for offering glimpses into the varieties of Mennonite and Amish life.
A unique and significant contribution not only to the body of scholarship on Anabaptist women, but to the study of women's experiences in ethnoreligious groups in general.
These essays add to the diversification of the historiography of women, raising in fresh ways questions of ethnicity, religion, and individual-community relationships. Their publication is a milestone in Anabaptist scholarship.
This collection of essays is an extraordinary contribution to the scholarly study of Anabaptist women.
All who follow the invitation of the young woman features on the dust jacket to explore the experiences of the women who share the predicament finding themselves Strangers at Home, will be greatly enriched.
This collection represents a fresh and much needed approach to Anabaptist studies.
These path-breaking essays make a stellar contribution to the scholarship of gender roles in contemporary Anabaptist communities.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders
Part I: Practice Makes Gender
Chapter 1. Insights and Blindspots: Writing History from Inside and Outside
Chapter 2. Who Are You? The Identity of the
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Insiders and Outsiders
Part I: Practice Makes Gender
Chapter 1. Insights and Blindspots: Writing History from Inside and Outside
Chapter 2. Who Are You? The Identity of the Outsider Within
Chapter 3. "To Remind Us of Who We Are": Multiple Meanings of Conservative Women's Dress
Chapter 4. River Brethren Breadmaking Ritual
Chapter 5. The Chosen Women: The Amish and the New Deal
Part II: Creating Gendered Communities
Chapter 6. Meeting around the Distaff : Anabaptist Women in Augsburg
Chapter 7. "Weak Families" in the Green Hell of Paraguay
Chapter 8. "The Parents Shall Not Go Unpunished": Preservationist Patriarchy and Community
Chapter 9. Mennonite Missionary Martha Moser Voth in the Hopi Pueblos, 1893-1910
Chapter 10. Schism: Where Women's Outside Work and Insider Dress Collided -
Part III: (Re) creating Gendered Traditions
Chapter 11. Speaking up and Taking Risks: Anabaptist Family and Household Roles in Sixteenth-Century Tirol
Chapter 12. Household, Coffee Klatsch, and Office: The Evolving Worlds of Mid-Twentieth-Century Mennonite Women
Chapter 13. Voices Within and Voices Without: Quaker Women's Autobiography
Chapter 14. "We Weren't Always Plain": Poetry by Women of Mennonite Backgrounds
Chapter 15. "She May Be Amish Now, but She Won't Be Amish Long": Anabaptist Women and Antimodernism
Works Cited
Contributors
Index