Jellison, Katherine

English

The University of Akron

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies Volume 8 Issue 2 Gender-Focused Research in Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies Article 2 2020 Content Overview for This Special Issue Katherine Jellison Follow this and additional works at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/amishstudies Please take a moment to share how this work helps you through this survey. Your feedback will be important as we plan further development of our repository. Recommended Citation Jellison, Katherine. 2020. "Content Overview for This Special Issue." Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 8(2):107-08. This Editor's Comments is brought to you for free and open access by IdeaExchange@UAkron, the institutional repository of The University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies by an authorized administrator of IdeaExchange@UAkron. For more information, please contact mjon@uakron.edu, uapress@uakron.edu. Content Overview for This Special IssueKAthErinE JEllisonProfessorHistory DepartmentOhio UniversityAthens, OHAddress correspondence to: Katherine Jellison; 429 Bentley Annex, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701; jellison@ohio.eduRecommended citation: Jellison, Katherine. 2020. “Content Overview for This Special Issue.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 8(2):107-08.Publication type: Editor’s comments (may be freely distributed). JAPAS is published by the Amish & Plain Anabaptist Studies Association (http://amishstudies.org) and the University of Akron.With this gender-focused issue of the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies, we bring attention to an approach to Amish and Anabaptist studies too often neglected. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines gender as the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviors and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relation-ships with each other. As a social construct, gen-der varies from society to society and can change over time.1 In their combined contributions, authors of ar-ticles included in this special issue investigate all aspects of gender as the WHO defines it, with particular attention to what might be termed exter-nal and internal comparisons. Externally, how do Amish/plain Anabaptist understandings of gender differ from those of mainstream “English” soci-ety? Internally, how have concepts and practices of gender changed over time within the Anabaptist community?Guest co-editor Natalie Jolly launches this special issue with an examination of where schol-arship on Amish and plain Anabaptist women has been and where it is going. With a specific focus on research about Amish women, Jolly examines scholarly trends of the past four and a half decades and suggests promising new paths of inquiry going 1 Definition retrieved 5 November 2020 (https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1).forward. As she notes, the articles in this special issue of JAPAS make important contributions to emerging developments in Anabaptist gender studies.In their article, “Working Together: Women and Men on the Amish Family Farm in 1930s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” Katherine Jellison and Steven D. Reschly examine the im-portance of Old Order Amish women’s labor to their community’s economic survival during the Great Depression. In a time of economic crisis, Amish women and men effectively employed—with some modifications—the gendered work roles and system of mutuality that their ancestors had transplanted from Europe to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. Utilizing quantitative and qualitative data from New Deal government studies as well as oral history and newspaper evi-dence, Jellison and Reschly explore how women’s labor—both alongside men and on their own—en-abled Amish farm families to weather the depres-sion more successfully than the nation’s other agricultural households. Rebecca Janzen likewise focuses on the twen-tieth century’s interwar period in “Old Colony Mennonite Women’s Lives in Mexico from the 1920s to the 1940s.” Using multilingual sources, Janzen examines the lives of Mennonite women whose families relocated from the Canadian prai-ries to Mexico in the 1920s. Centering her attention on two women in particular, Janzen demonstrates how unique but often neglected sources—in this case, passenger lists and foreign resident cards—108 Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies,Volume 8, Issue 2, Autumn 2020 can yield information about ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances.In “Claiming a Piece of Tradition: Community Discourse in Russian Mennonite Community Cookbooks,” Amy Harris-Aber explores issues of cultural identity among the descendants of Russian Mennonite immigrants in south-central Kansas. Russian Mennonites settled this region of the state in the 1870s and 1880s, and the cookbooks that their female descendants produced between 1960 and 2010 reflect changes in an ethno-religious community moving away from its agrarian roots. Through the uniquely female medium of the com-munity cookbook, Harris-Aber finds the voices of those simultaneously honoring their immigrant past while embracing greater engagement with the outside world of the present.Natalie Jolly assesses the existing literature on Amish women in “Hemmed In? Considering the Complexities of Amish Womanhood.” Jolly notes that while scholarship once characterized women as mere supporting players in Amish culture, more recent work demonstrates the centrality and com-plexity of women’s experience in Amish life. Jolly also highlights the significance of excommuni-cated Amish women’s memoirs in elucidating the intricacies of Amish womanhood.As Jolly notes, “Amish masculinity is as fasci-nating as its counterpart,” and Robert Strikwerda proves the accuracy of that statement in “Masculinity among the Amish: Characteristics, Hegemony, and Soft Patriarchy.” Combing through literature on Amish manhood, Strikwerda observes key juxtapositions between Amish mas-culinity and notions of manliness in mainstream society. His analysis considers the implications of these comparisons and interrogates the concept of soft patriarchy to suggest new ways of thinking about how the Amish perform masculinity.Finally, this special JAPAS issue closes with consideration of a recent and significant contri-bution to Anabaptist gender studies, anthropolo-gist Karen Johnson-Weiner’s The Lives of Amish Women (2020). In this book symposium, Amish author Gracia Miller, conservative Mennonite writer Sheila Petre, and cultural anthropologist Vlatka Škender provide an intriguing, multifacet-ed analysis of Johnson-Weiner’s new publication.Taken as a whole, this special issue demon-strates the importance of bringing considerations of gender to the study of Amish and Plain life. As the scholarship represented here illustrates, doing so can provide a deeper level of complexity and nuance to the field of Amish and plain Anabaptist studies. 

Content Overview for This Special Issue

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Content Overview for This Special Issue

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