{"id":4039,"date":"2015-09-18T13:32:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T17:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groups.etown.edu\/news\/?p=4039"},"modified":"2015-09-23T15:25:23","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T19:25:23","slug":"snowden-lecturer-discusses-research-of-amish-women-sept-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/2015\/09\/18\/snowden-lecturer-discusses-research-of-amish-women-sept-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowden Lecturer discusses research of Amish women Sept. 22"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dr<\/a>While researching Deitsch, the language spoken by the Amish, Karen Johnson-Weiner discovered a new research interest \u2013 the lives of Amish women. She isn\u2019t exploring how they are different from mainstream women nor how they are the same but simply how they are and who they are.<\/p>\n

\u201cI began my work with interest in their language,\u201d said Johnson-Weiner, the 2015 Snowden Fellow at Elizabethtown College\u2019s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. \u201cI interviewed teachers; most of their teachers are women. I went out to talk to the women in their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

By watching the women\u2019s interactions with their families and children, on the farms and in the communities, Johnson-Weiner became intrigued about \u201cwhen a baby girl comes into the world in an Amish family and grows up, how does she become the woman she is?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

We tend to think of Amish women a just \u2018Amish,\u2019 but what IS an Amish woman?\u201d<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Johnson-Weiner, will speak about her recent research, \u201cWriting About Amish Woman,\u201d at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22, at the College\u2019s Snowden Lecture.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was originally learning \u2018how do you maintain your language and your culture\u2019,\u201d she said about her initial research but, she said, she ended up intrigued by the women.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tend to think of Amish women as just \u2018Amish,\u2019 but what IS an Amish woman?\u201d But, just as the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect is not a standardized language, with multitudes of variations depending on locale and family make-up, so are the Amish women unique depending on where they live and what they do.<\/p>\n

\"514c2POY3-L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a>Johnson-Weiner said she wanted to be careful not to allow stereotypes of the Anabaptist group or her own preconceived ideas of the Amish community or Amish women to cloud her research. She wanted to know who the women felt they were. What did they look like in their own eyes?<\/p>\n

What she found is that, just as speaking Pennsylvania Dutch is simply part of their culture and their religion, so is being an Amish woman. \u201cYou can\u2019t divide them\u201d she said of the language, the people, the beliefs and how the women live their lives.<\/p>\n

It was surprising to the professor how little the Amish discuss their religion. \u201cThey don\u2019t go on and on about the Bible,\u201d she said. \u201cSimply, they say, \u2018It is our way\u2019.\u201d That\u2019s a phrase Johnson-Weiner, Distinguished Service Professor, Linguistic Anthropology, with State University of New York at Potsdam, heard over and over as she interviewed women and families.<\/p>\n

A definite similarity of Amish women is that they \u201clive their faith.\u201d Everything they do is faith-based, she said, though they don\u2019t discuss it or really think about it. But, said Johnson-Weiner, Amish women do question why things are the way they are from time to time, and their relationships are more partnerships than she had originally imagined.<\/p>\n

She also found quite a bit of diversity in the Amish community based on the women\u2019s locale and family make-up.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey might be a very conservative group, agrarian-based, with large families, lots of children,\u201d Johnson-Weiner said. \u201cOr, when husband the leaves the home to work in a factory, there are not as many children. The woman might purchase clothing rather than sew.”<\/p>\n

This different family dynamic and structure helps mold who the Amish women are from the start. On farms, babies are brought along from the very beginning for chores; there is a sharing of labor. If the parents both work outside the home, however, it effects the children and their views of mainstream society.\u201d As they grow up, the women might interact more with mainstream society, she said, changing their perspectives.<\/p>\n

Johnson-Weiner is the author of \u201cNew York Amish: Life in the Plain Communities of the Empire State\u201d and \u201cTrain Up a Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools.\u201d She also is coauthor (with Donald B. Kraybill and Steven M. Nolt) of \u201cThe Amish\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Snowden Lecture is free and takes place at the Young Center\u2019s Bucher Meetinghouse.<\/em> For more information, contact the Young Center at 717-361-1470 or youngctr@etown.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While researching Deitsch, the language spoken by the Amish, Karen Johnson-Weiner discovered a new research interest \u2013 the lives of Amish women. She isn\u2019t exploring how they are different from mainstream women nor how they are the same but simply how they are and who they are. \u201cI began my work with interest in their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":4040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[764],"tags":[494,1017,1016,466],"class_list":["post-4039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-and-academics","tag-amish","tag-karen-johnson-wiener","tag-snowden-lecture","tag-young-center","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4039"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4051,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039\/revisions\/4051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}