Mothering Mennonite

By Buller Rachel Epp

Mothering Mennonite marks the first scholarly attempt to incorporate religious groundings in interpretations of motherhood. The essays included here broaden our understanding of maternal identity as something not only constructed within the family and by society at large, but also influenced significantly by historical traditions and contemporary belief systems of religious communities. A multidisciplinary compilation of essays, this volume joins narrative and scholarly voices to address both the roles of mothering in Mennonite contexts and the ways in which Mennonite mothering intersects with and is shaped by the world at large. Contributors address cultural constructions of motherhood within ethnoreligious Mennonite communities, examining mother-daughter relationships and intergenerational influences, analyzing visual and literary representations of Mennonite mothers, challenging cultural constructions and expectations of motherhood, and tracing the effects of specific religious and cultural contexts on mothering in North and South America.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927335864

Book preview

Mennonite

Mothering Mennonite

edited by

RACHEL EPP BULLER AND KERRY FAST

DEMETER PRESS, BRADFORD, ONTARIO

Copyright © 2013 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture Demeter by Maria-Luise Bodirsky

<www.keramik-atelier.bodirsky.de>

My Grandmother’s Strong Name and Telegram, 1943 appeared previously in The Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing 4.4 (July/August 2012). Used with permission.

Front cover artwork:

Tina Fast, detail of crazy quilt, c.1970, polyester fabric and cotton strand, hand stitched. Rachel Epp Buller, Agnes in Brief, 2011, mixed media print.

eBook development: WildElement.ca

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mothering Mennonite / edited by Rachel Epp Buller

and Kerry Fast.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-927335-12-3 (pbk.)

1. Mothers—Religious life. 2. Mennonite women. 3. Motherhood—

Religious aspects—Mennonites. 4. Women—Identity. 5. Mother and

child—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Buller, Rachel Epp, 1974-, editor of

compilation II. Fast, Kerry, 1964-, editor of compilation

BX8128.W64M67 2013 305.48’6897 C2013-902601-0

Demeter Press

140 Holland Street West

P. O. Box 13022

Bradford, ON L3Z 2Y5

Tel: [phone]

[e-mail]

www.demeterpress.org

For our mothers:

Dianne Waltner Epp,

for her influential and inspiring model

of Mennonite mothering

Tina Fast,

for mothering with a generous spirit,

a practical mind, and a love-filled heart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Mothering Mennonite and Mennonite Mothering

Kerry Fast and Rachel Epp Buller

I. PICTURING MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Picturing My Mother: The Looking Glass Revisited

Magdalene Redekop

The Elusive Dancing Mother:

Reflections on Hossack’s Mennonites Don’t Dance

Edna Froese

Milk

Kirsten Eve Beachy

Eking out a Discursive Space: Ideas for Life

Mary Ann Loewen

II. MOTHERING ACROSS GENERATIONS

A Selection from An Inheritance of Words, Unspoken

Connie T. Braun

Mimicking Maternal Gestures: Women’s Memories,

Narratives, and Intergenerational Identities

Susie Fisher Stoesz

Who’s Cooking the Borscht?

A Perspective on Social Identity

William Loewen, Gladys Loewen, Sharon Loewen Shepherd,

and DJ Pauls

Home Schooling

Wendy A. Crocker

III. CHALLENGING MENNONITE MOTHERHOOD

Single Sisters and Occupations:

Singlehood in a Conservative Mennonite Community

Tomomi Naka

Creative (M)othering:

An Invitation from a Childless Artist

Becca J. R. Lachman

(In)fertile Encounters: An Autoethnography

Christine E. Crouse-Dick

IV. MOTHERING IN AND AROUND CULTURE(S)

Tirelessly Working to Dispense Her Own Wisdom:

Mennonite Mothers and Scientific Motherhood

Tracey Leigh Dowdeswell

An Evangelical Reorientation:

The Contribution of Beachy Amish-Mennonite Mothers

Cory Anderson

Mothering, More with Less

Melanie Springer Mock

I Always Played Restaurant:

Mennonite Childhood Play as

Anticipation/Antithesis of Motherhood

Doreen Helen Klassen

From Persecution to Hope:

Mennonite Mothering in a Context of Violence

Jennifer Chappell Deckert

Contributor Notes

Acknowledgements

Envisioning and bringing to fruition this collection of writings has been a labour of love that could not have happened without the support of our families and the participation of many colleagues. From the beginning, Dr. Andrea O’Reilly, founder of Demeter Press, understood the importance of this topic and gave us her unwavering backing. Each of our contributors brought with them scholarly and literary perspectives that made for spirited and engaging exchanges in the editing process. We thank them for their patience and their diligence. For their detailed, thoughtful, and insightful feedback, and for their supportive endorsements of the project, we thank the book’s three peer reviewers. To others who read drafts and provided input, and to those who listened to partially formed ideas and acted as helpful sounding boards, we thank you. And to our readers, whether you are a mother or a Mennonite, one, both, or neither, we welcome you to our conversation.

Introduction

Mothering Mennonite and Mennonite Mothering

KERRY FAST AND RACHEL EPP BULLER

MENNONITE. MOTHER.

Mennonite and mother twist and turn together in multiple ways: mothering Mennonite, Mennonite mothering, Mennonite mothers, mothers Mennonite, Mennoniting mother(s), mothers Mennoniting. They are verb, noun, adjective, adverb. Mothering Mennonite attests to the variety and scope of ways in which Mennonite and mother combine. Cookbooks and milk parlours, memories of the maternal and childhood play are just a few of the many sites where Mennonite and mother intertwine in this collection of multi-disciplinary essays, creative writing and poetry. Yet Mothering Mennonite does more than expand our knowledge of the variety of ways in which Mennonites mother and the variety of contexts in which they do so. It situates Mennonite and mother in the nexus of mothers as transmitters of culture and religion and mothers as re-creators—even creators—of religion and culture. As such, it takes seriously the dilemma ethnic groups face of maintaining distinctness (that for Mennonites is weighted with religious and social meaning) and assimilating. But it does so with the understanding that culture and religion are not static; distinctness and assimilation are not binary opposites for Mennonites. Mennonites do not leave behind, and have not left behind distinctness in exchange for assimilation, but establish their identity in tandem with both. Nor can distinctness be adhered solely to things past—even by Mennonite groups for whom tradition and visible distinction are paramount to their identity—but must be continually redefined in opposition to surrounding culture if it is to be maintained. Mennonite cultures evolve in specific contexts and in articulation with the cultures in which they are located, and given the Mennonite penchant for distinctness, also in opposition to their surroundings. This is a dilemma of identity and as the contributors to this volume so aptly demonstrate, it is in that dilemma that Mennonite mothering takes shape.

MENNONITE MOTHERS IN HISTORY

Mothering Mennonite is by no means the first foray into an effort to understand what it means to interlace Mennonite and mother. Scholars—mostly historians—and literary artists have created a rich context in which to understand Mennonite mothering. They have teased out multiple meanings of Mennonite and mother intertwined.

In 1987 historian Marlene Epp published an essay entitled, Women in Canadian Mennonite History: Uncovering the ‘Underside.’ By this time there had been enough scholarship on Mennonite women that Epp could craft an essay on the direction that scholarship on Mennonite women could take. Her conclusion, from the vantage point of two and a half decades is self-evident: women’s history has been woefully ignored by Mennonite scholars. Epp provides enough research of her own about Mennonite women in Canada to substantiate more than adequately that [t]here is indeed an underside to Mennonite history. What lies there is a wealth of wisdom and talent, vision and courage, humour and pain. It is experience that Mennonites need to explore if they hope to approach an understanding of their past and a sense of self (104). Mothers in Mennonite history do not figure in Epp’s essay but nevertheless, it is an important grounding work for Mothering Mennonite as it highlights the importance of women in the quest for Mennonite identity. In the context uncovered by Epp, it no longer made sense not to examine women’s lives and ask how women contributed to shaping Mennonite life, culture and religion.

Epp was not alone in making this call. In the same year, Magdalene Redekop’s autobiographical essay, Through the Mennonite Looking Glass was published. In it she expresses her anger at the silence in which Mennonite women have been kept. Unlike Epp, Redekop’s call to fill the spaces of silence regarding Mennonite women turns on the trope of Mennonite mother. Do not ignore my tears and those of my Mennonite sisters as we begin to weep into our typewriters, lamenting the lost voices of our absent mothers. Do not be alarmed at the excess (245). Through her passion, Redekop leaves little doubt as to how vital Mennonite women, and mothers in particular, are to Mennonite life and identity. (See Redekop’s essay in this volume in which she discusses Through the Mennonite Looking Glass.)

One of the primary ways in which scholars have heeded Epp’s and Redekop’s call to pay more attention to Mennonite women is by turning their attention to Mennonite families. They have turned the spotlight onto the domestic side of Mennonite life, and this has meant that Mennonite mothers and their roles within their families and communities have received attention, albeit not necessarily in a systematic fashion. That family should be the category of inquiry for scholars of Mennonite history and culture is not surprising. It is within the family that the category of mother is most obviously defined. And as Epp writes, family has been central to the ethnic and social identity of Mennonites.

The Mennonite family, either nuclear or extended, was a central institution for organizing community life and transmitting beliefs. A family functioned as an economic unit, a migration unit, and was the building block for village and settlement formation.… [S]ociologists have generally agreed that the family has been a near-sacred institution for Mennonites.… Family life represented, historically, the context within which Mennonite women were defined by their communities and churches but also strongly influenced their own perceptions of themselves as individuals with particular roles and status. (61)¹

Given the centrality of family for the development and maintenance of Mennonite culture and religion, it is evident that Mennonite mothers bore a good deal of the responsibility as purveyors of Mennonite cultural and religious identity. Where and how then have historians situated Mennonite mothers in their examination of Mennonite families?

Linda Huebert Hecht, in her essay on Anabaptist families in sixteenth-century Tirol, provides an important methodological point from which to begin. A woman is not a mother to the exclusion of other facets of her life. A woman’s identity as mother is always intersecting with other cultural and historical factors in which the woman is situated. [T]he choices Anabaptist women made in these different categories of believer, martyr, missionary, lay leader, and individual participant articulate with their social roles in the family and household, according to Hecht (240).

Rachel Waltner Goossen examines the maternal tension between identity and wider cultural factors in her study of gender and conscientious objection in the United States during World War II. (She devotes one chapter in her study to the family life of women whose husbands were conscientious objectors [COs].) The strain of mothering for the wives of COs was brought on by the clash between the Mennonite value of pacifism and a society hostile towards COs. In this environment, women forged family life, sometimes in conflict with Mennonite teaching. So for example, birth control use became more widespread among these women because having children complicated their already restricted options for making a living in a discriminatory environment. The clash of values took on a very different form for those who had children. As their children faced taunting by their peers because of their fathers’ choices, their mothering was given shape at the very heart of the clash of values.

Lucille Marr, in her study of mid-twentieth-century Ontario Mennonite women whose husbands were leaders in the Conference of Historic Peace Churches (CHPC) during and after World War II, does not shed light on mothering in the public sphere as Goossen and Hecht do, but turns her attention to mothers in the domestic realm. The heightened public activity of their husbands brought on by the war, resulted in these women turning their attention to the domestic sphere and there many [wives] found their power in motherhood and in creating a sacred space for their families, (272) Marr concludes. For the women of Marr’s study, mothering in a context where Mennonite values publically clashed with the dominant values of society resulted in them exerting their influence in the private domestic realm to strengthen family and identity.

In his studies of both the Kleine Gemeinde who migrated from Russia to North America (Family, Church, and Market) and of 1870s immigrants from Russia to the new world (Hidden Worlds), Royden Loewen broadens the influence of Mennonite women by turning his attention to Mennonite communities. His commitment to social history affords a focus on the dynamic and evolving everyday work that lay behind the institutional or confessional side of Mennonite society (Hidden Worlds 4), and he takes seriously the important roles women played in the dynamic and creative dimensions of everyday worlds (Hidden Worlds 5) in Mennonite communities. According to Loewen, Mennonite women, and by extension mothers, were an integral part of the cultural formation that took place in Mennonite communities in the dynamics of migration and cultural change.

The historian who has paid the most attention to understanding Mennonite mothers is Marlene Epp. In her book, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War, Epp makes explicit the importance of family as the category in which to understand Mennonite women’s lives, and addresses the conflicting versions of family in which mothers found themselves as war refugees. The topic of family fragmentation and reconfiguration is one of the major themes she covers in the book (10). Her thorough examination of the experience of these women as they attempted to recreate their fragmented families is invaluable in our understanding of Mennonite mothers. But she also examines the wider Mennonite cultural and religious milieu in which these women found themselves, one in which their families were deemed deviant as single-parent families in which fathers/husbands had disappeared. These women were required to mother, not in the context of tensions between Mennonite values and the values of the dominant culture as Waltner Goossen’s women did, but in the tension of conflicting Mennonite values.²

It would be twenty years after the publication of her essay, Women in Canadian Mennonite History that Epp deliberately named the category of mother in historical scholarship for the first time. One of the chapters in her comprehensive book, Mennonite Women in Canada: A History is entitled Wives, Mothers, and ‘Others’: Women within Families. Epp has not lost sight of the importance of situating Mennonite women in a family context, but she does specifically recognize that women as mothers are integral members of those families. It should not be underestimated how significant Epp’s contribution is to our understanding of Mennonite women and how this lays the groundwork for a more concentrated examination of Mennonite mothers and mothering. Nine out of the seventeen contributions contained in Mothering Mennonite make reference to Epp’s work.

The attention that scholars have given the family in Mennonite communities is indicative of how central family is in understanding Mennonite life. Focusing on the family has meant that mothers are not treated as isolated beings, but that they and their roles are intricately interwoven with other members of the family and the Mennonite communities by which those families are shaped. This is essential to ensure that mother does not become the quintessential Mennonite woman’s experience; it is but one of many, albeit one that many Mennonite women have. Mothering Mennonite is indebted to this historiography most specifically because the scholarship outlined above demonstrates that Mennonite women have always been mothers in situational contexts. Who they are, what they do, and their role in the family are determined in part by the expectations and ideals of Mennonite communities and by Mennonite theology and doctrine, but also by the historical particularities in which mothers are located. This has meant that Mennonite mothering has, in Mennonite history, been a dynamic process of transmitting and determining cultural, religious and ethnic identity.

MOTHERS IN MENNONITE LITERARY ARTS

Literary artists have also explored the complexity of Mennonite mothers in culture and family and like historians, have made explicitly clear that mothers are integral to Mennonite life in complex ways. They have, even more than historians, left little doubt that Mennonite mothers are not easily categorized, nor is their role in the dissemination and production of Mennonite ethnicity and culture a smooth and easy path.

We could begin, perhaps, with Peter G. Epp’s, Eine Mutter, written in 1932.³ The book is an account of the Mennonite story in Russia as recounted by Agatha, a Mennonite mother. Through her own matriarchal experience, she recalls the breadth of Mennonite life in Russia; she alone is able to contain the scope of Mennonite life that generations have lived in Russia. In a parallel fashion, Rudy Wiebe’s mother in his autobiographical work, Of This Earth, holds the family story. She releases it, with all its grief and loss, its endurance, its vitality, when the time is right as she opens the story with the words, nu es et Tiet (now it is time). Without his mother there would be no story and his own ability to tell that story would be silenced.⁴

In a different sort of way, poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf elucidates the pivotal role Mennonite mothers play as their daughters write poetry. Her focus is on the creative writing process itself and the vital—and at times tortured—relationship between Mennonite mothers and their poet daughters. In her essay ‘We Weren’t Always Plain’: Poetry by Women of Mennonite Backgrounds, she writes that mothers are not only the subject of poetry, but are also caught up in the flesh and blood relationships with their daughter poets that awkwardly and painfully contain the poets, their poetry and their mothers. As Kasdorf acknowledges, mothers and poet daughters are positioned very differently in the wider Mennonite community and mothers are implicated in their daughters’ art. Poets usually write from the periphery of Mennonite communities, but their mothers do not have the luxury of standing aloof. Our mothers remain at the doorways, forced to clean up—employing womanly arts of mediation and conversation to restore the relational damage done by their author daughters (321) through their poetry. These mothers may not contain the story, as do Wiebe’s and Epp’s, but they do assist in the telling of the story, even if the stories their daughters tell in their poetry threaten the very communities of which they are part.⁵

Other literary artists expose the fragility of motherhood within the tensions of patriarchal family life. Anna Marie Johnson reaches far back to the Anabaptist origins of Mennonites in her short story, On Fire illustrating how the long the tentacles of early Anabaptist martyrdom keep Mennonite mothers in the grip of historical ideals.⁶ Her main character, Juliana, becomes the sacrificial mother, noting that [m]otherhood is its own kind of quiet martyrdom (77).

Notable of course are Di Brandt’s works, questions i asked my mother and Mother, Not Mother.⁷ questions i asked my mother in particular exposes the role mothers play in patriarchal Mennonite families. The mother is the mediator between angry daughter and angry father, but she is also absent in the burning desire of the daughter to be loved.⁸ And then there is the mother in Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness who is tragically present in her absence. As Edna Froese, in her essay in this volume on Darcie Friesen Hossack’s collection of short stories, Mennonites Don’t Dance, repeatedly reminds us, Mennonite mothers are entirely intertwined with the messiness of Mennonite family life.⁹

This collection takes seriously what historians and literary artists have so painstakingly uncovered, that Mennonite women are mothers at the nexus of the personal, patriarchal communities, historical particularities, and the cultural and religious identity of Mennonites, and that they are at the heart of perpetuating and determining Mennonite identity.

Mennonite literary artists and scholars have made it unequivocally apparent that Mennonite mothering is a fertile and necessary area to explore. What this survey of scholarship and literary artists also reveals is that Mennonite and mother are words that have been imbued with multiple meanings and that their meanings are not natural nor can they be assumed. The complexity, the variation, the remembrance, the forgetting, the history, the present bring together Mennonite and mother in multiple ways. From very different approaches, the contributions in this collection address the tension that is implicit when Mennonite and mother are intertwined. Because Mennonite culture and religion have been defined by a sense of distinctness, or separateness from society, Mennonite mothers stand in the gap between assimilation and preservation. Some of the writers speak specifically to this tension, discussing mothers who strove to forge professional identities independent of family and culture, or mothers in whose memory culture is posthumously conveyed. Several of the contributors speak eloquently and powerfully to the tensions and creative force that Mennonite history has created between Mennonite and mother. To be the bearer of history can make impossible demands on mothers, and yet position them as the vehicle through which culture and religion is transmitted to the next generation. In deeply personal accounts, some contributors write about the ability of mothers to transmit culture and religion that challenge the received norms of Mennonite motherhood. By exploring divergent models of what it means to mother as a Mennonite, some of the authors raise the sometimes difficult and often unacknowledged experiences of singlehood and childlessness, whether through infertility, or by choice. Other pieces in the volume address the tension that exists in the face of outright assimilation. Some mothers are able to adapt and convey culture and religion in new ways in the process of assimilation, while others are left more fragmented. A few contributors investigate seriously the role of children, either as future mothers or in tension with their own mothers.

FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP

In Feminist Studies, where maternal scholarship is increasingly prominent, nothing speaks directly to mothering in the specific cultural and religious context of Mennonites. Our multi-disciplinary compilation joins narrative and scholarly voices to address both the roles of mothering in Mennonite milieus and the ways in which Mennonite mothering intersects with and is shaped by the world at large.

One of the most striking features about the contributions to this volume is that, regardless of thematic focus or perspective, nearly all of them include some narrative voice and analysis of personal experience, often woven into a scholarly argument. This is entirely consistent with the field of Mothering Studies in general, where many scholars approach their topic of choice through a personal lens. Grounded in the second-wave feminist axiom that "the personal is political," which legitimized activism at home as well as internationally, early writers in what has since become a growing field of Maternal Studies, developed their theories and arguments based specifically on their lived experiences as women and mothers. Adrienne Rich’s pivotal text, Of Woman Born, has become a touchstone, even decades later, for women (including some contributors to this book) who resonate with her discussions of motherhood, encompassing taboo subjects such as maternal ambivalence and maternal rage, and her willingness to give voice to the lack of power afforded mothers in patriarchal cultures.

An important legacy left by Rich’s work deals with the distinction between motherhood and mothering, two separate meanings of maternity: motherhood refers to a patriarchal, oppressive institution while mothering reflects female-defined and potentially empowering experiences. Andrea O’Reilly and contemporary colleagues have embraced Rich’s work and that of other feminist theorists of her era to form the field of Mothering Studies or Maternal Studies.¹⁰ O’Reilly suggests that feminist mothering not only entails the negation of patriarchal motherhood but also "seeks to dismantle motherhood for mothers themselves, so that they may achieve empowerment in mothering" (803). While the contributors to Mothering Mennonite do not explicitly engage this terminology, their embrace of mothering is understood. The authors variously connect with the feminist writings not only of Adrienne Rich but also of Hélène Cixous, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others. Even without such specific referents, however, many of the authors included here seek not only to deconstruct the patriarchal and hegemonic constructions of motherhood, but also to seriously engage the important role of religion for Mennonite communities and families. Whether in the pieces that address old order Mennonite communities, or in the ones that are situated in contemporary, assimilated Mennonite settings, the authors make clear that the cultural definitions of motherhood are closely intertwined with religious principles and historical understandings of gendered divisions in the church and at home.

It is precisely this focus on religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage that marks our volume’s most significant contribution to the existing scholarship of Mothering Studies. In a field that is still relatively new, we have yet to hear about the maternal experiences of any number of ethnic or religious groups. Just as second-wave feminism in the West was critiqued as a largely white women’s movement that assumed that women’s experiences were universal, so now the scholarly conversation is again being broadened by maternal scholars.¹¹ Demeter Press leads the way, with recent and in-process publications that address Latina/Chicana mothering, motherhood in South Asia, mothers in prison, queer maternity, Black motherhoods, and other models outside of the white Western hegemonic discourse.¹² In Mothering Mennonite, we highlight the experiences of women who identify with and are shaped by particular ethnic and religious contexts and whose lives often do not parallel those of middle-class Western women. The authors of this volume address widely ranging definitions of Mennonite across North, Central and South America, from closed and separatist groups to fully integrated communities.

As the first book to incorporate religious groundings in interpretations of motherhood, the writings in Mothering Mennonite broaden our understanding of maternal identity as something not only constructed within the family and by secular society at large, but also influenced significantly by historical traditions and contemporary belief systems of religious and ethno-religious communities.¹³ Our volume as a whole functions as a bridge of sorts between two fields, addressing lacunae in both Mennonite and Mothering Studies and establishing connections between them.

ESSAYS AND MORE

The first section in Mothering Mennonite, Picturing Mothers and Daughters, offers literary images of Mennonite mothers and daughters, their relationships and their negotiations in the transmission and reception of both maternal and cultural identities. Each of the four contributors writes from the perspective of the daughter—remembering, honouring, questioning, and imagining what might have been or may yet be. Magdalene Redekop revisits and reflects upon the grounding and the reception of her well-known essay, Through the Mennonite Looking Glass, written twenty-five years ago. Beginning with a wedding photograph of her parents, Redekop draws on theories of representation to mine the image for meaning, and in the process touches on experiences of adoptive mothering and step-mothering. Her retrospective reflections on her earlier essay punctuate the discussion and speak to Mennonite women’s anonymity and lack of agency in historical photographic documentation. Similarly, Edna Froese writes of the erasure and loss of Mennonite women’s identities in and around motherhood. In a lyrically crafted essay, Froese reviews stories from Darcie Friesen Hossack’s Mennonites Don’t Dance and excerpts of poetry by Di Brandt, and offers personal reflections on her mother’s life. Borrowing Brandt’s dichotomy of mother, not mother, Froese examines the constructions, limitations, and losses inherent in the perceived ideal of the Mennonite mother in Hossack’s stories and in her own life.

In a creative essay that weaves together past and present, Kirsten Eve Beachy colorfully describes a morning spent with her dairy farmer mother-in-law. Beachy intersperses reflections on her own mother with the practical concerns of milkers, manure, and recalcitrant bovine. Mother and mother-in-law each pass along a specific construction of Mennonite maternal identity, whether or not Beachy chooses to accept it. While neither figure represents a model that fits her current reality, Beachy honestly engages with the possibilities of motherhood offered to her as she seeks to chart her own path. Mary Ann Loewen offers an analysis of her mother’s struggle to find an intellectual voice of her own amid cultural constraints and prescribed gender roles. Studying her mother’s life through her writing, Loewen discovers a subversive undercurrent in her mother’s columns written for a church publication. Writing for the column allowed her mother to develop an identity separate from her husband, just as in recent years, Loewen’s writings about her mother have enabled her to carve out her own, parallel discursive space.

The second section, Mothering across Generations, gathers writings that address how intergenerational influence gives shape to and disseminates practices of Mennonite mothering. Connie Braun’s short piece provides grounding for her literary poems that follow. Understanding her poems as An Inheritance of Words, Unspoken, Braun sees her poetic work as bearing witness to the history of her family, post-World War II Mennonite refugees from Poland and Ukraine. Braun’s poems excavate themes of family, tradition, spirituality, identity, marriage, and mothering as an implicit inheritance, transmitted and engendered by generations of Mennonite mothers, and explore the tension of her role as an acculturated Canadian daughter, wife, and mother. Susie Fisher Stoesz explores the enduring role of storytelling across generations of Mennonite mothers who serve as purveyors of Mennonite religion and ethnicity. Combining narrative storytelling gleaned from interviews with analysis that emphasizes the importance of women’s storytelling as oral history, Stoesz focuses on the conceptions of motherhood across generations of a single family. She suggests that despite differing socio-cultural contexts, there remains an important connection between motherhood, the sharing of family memories, and the maintenance of Mennonite religion and culture in these women’s daily lives and identities. An essay written collectively by four siblings of the Loewen family similarly combines stories from generations of women in their family with broader analysis of maternal identity. The Loewen siblings use the lens of social identity theory to examine the ways in which their Mennonite Brethren mother and grandmothers constructed identities of motherhood by complying with or resisting particular social expectations. Looking back on a century of transgenerational mothering, the Loewens offer narrative examples from each of the three women to demonstrate their lifelong negotiations of identity. To conclude the section, Wendy Crocker explores the ways in which Old Colony Mennonite daughters, and their eventual career choices, are positioned between the teachings of their mothers and the teachings of formal education. Crocker writes from the position of an outsider, a school administrator who works with Old Colony children and mothers in the public school system. Combining interview narratives with sociological analysis, Crocker demonstrates that the learned values and gendered roles of the home and Old Colony community environments, when combined with educational opportunities, allowed her interview subjects to negotiate paths between their communities and in and around motherhood.

The third grouping, Challenging Mennonite Motherhood, offers essays that address departures from the cultural constructions, assumptions, and expectations of Mennonites and motherhood. Tomomi Naka examines the occupational paths of unmarried Mennonite women and illuminates their negotiation of religious and cultural expectations regarding motherhood and domesticity. In the conservative Mennonite community, woman-as-mother is an expected identity. Naka’s essay, grounded in ethnographic research conducted in a conservative Mennonite congregation in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, explores how single women grapple with religious ideals of marriage and motherhood and attempt to become contributing community members as unmarried women. Naka highlights the ways in which some unmarried women in these Mennonite congregations challenge their culture’s emphasis on motherhood and, in so doing, demand to be seen as full members of the community. At the same time, even while these unmarried women forge identities as not-mothers, their professional choices betray an adherence to received cultural ideals of motherhood as demonstrated by female care work. Becca J. R. Lachman examines what it means to be married but deliberately childless within a Mennonite community. Lachman draws on her experiences as a writer and musician to envision creativity as a form of birthing and calls on Mennonite women to nurture and mentor each other through these creative processes within a community of faith. While Lachman’s decision to remain childless challenges the church’s expectation of motherhood, Christine Crouse-Dick explores how infertility complicates her understanding of Mennonite identity. Discussing the importance of community in Mennonite identity, she analyzes the limitations of that community in her journey with infertility and highlights the church’s silence on the topic. Her autoethnographic approach offers chaotic personal narratives without the promise of resolution, yet she imparts painful stories and poses challenging questions in the hope of inviting conversation and understanding in her Mennonite communities.

The final section of essays, Mothering in and around Culture(s), explores how experiences and expectations of Mennonite motherhood are shaped by specific religious and cultural contexts. Tracey Leigh Dowdeswell examines the collision of scientific motherhood with practices of childbirth and infant care among Canadian Mennonite women in the first half of the twentieth century. Dowdeswell argues that the medical paradigm of scientific motherhood, which promoted hospital births instead of home births with midwives, and artificial infant formula instead of breastfeeding, disenfranchised Canadian Mennonite women as mothers and ultimately removed them from their pre-industrial role as bearers of legitimate knowledge about mothering and caregiving within the Mennonite community. Cory Anderson examines more insular cultural factors as he reviews a selection of books published by and for Beachy Amish-Mennonite women, one of several groups to separate from Old Order Amish. Looking at books by three different authors, Anderson traces the changing influence and importance of evangelicalism on mothering across different generations of Beachy Amish-Mennonite women. As part of his examination, Anderson asserts that within the dense communities of the plain people, women occupy aggregate, inseparable roles of married woman-wife-mother. The books written by and for these women, therefore, do not compartmentalize mothers as a separate social unit. Continuing the literary thread, Melanie Springer Mock investigates the cultural implications for motherhood and simple living bound up in Doris Janzen Longacre’s More-with-Less Cookbook, a staple resource for many North American Mennonite mothers. Based on a series of interviews, Mock’s essay examines the significance of Longacre’s 1976 cookbook for Mennonite women raising children in the first decade after its publication. She argues that the book—part cookbook and part how-to treatise on living simply—allowed women to maintain traditional roles as Mennonite mothers while also breaking from those roles, defining for themselves a new mothering approach based on careful simplicity and a global worldview.

Traces of this global worldview are found throughout the volume in various references, but appear most frequently in this final section of essays. Doreen Helen Klassen’s essay draws on her months of research examining childhood play among Low German-speaking communities in northern Mexico and Belize. Klassen focuses on imaginative and pretend play, arguing that even within these religiously and culturally conservative Old Colony Mennonite communities with strictly gendered divisions of labour, pretend play among children may either mimic or defy future adult roles. Dispelling stereotypes of somber attitudes within insular communities, Klassen interviews dozens of women who demonstrated that their imaginative play prepared them well for their eventual roles as adults and mothers, still able to play.

In recent decades, Mennonites have become associated with a global worldview, not only through the volunteer emergency response work of Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS), the relief and development work of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), and the missionary work of numerous Mennonite denominations but also due to the significant rise of Mennonite congregations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. To conclude the volume, Jennifer Chappell Deckert examines the care work of the Teusaquillo Mennonite Church in Bogotá, Colombia in assisting victims of political violence and displacement. Based upon her conversations with displaced mothers as a volunteer with MCC, Chappell Deckert frames the work of the church as that of mothering and reconciliation, creating a safe space for victims and committed to a path of peace and justice. Significantly, her exploration moves into the realm of metaphor as the church conducts the work of mothering: at Teusaquillo Mennonite Church, cultural values are embraced in a cross-cultural setting, transmitted to victims of displacement, and passed along from mother to mother.

NEW POSSIBILITIES

The essays compiled here cover a diversity of fields, from Sociology, Anthropology, and International