Anabaptist Modest Dress
Dress as Folklore
The Boundaries of Community
The clothing traditions of Anabaptist women are an example of folklore as an everyday lived experience. A group’s shared material culture, such as distinct clothing, helps to strengthen feelings of a shared group identity. As a type of customary lore, modest dress is learned generationally without necessarily being formally taught. The distinctive dress used by different communities becomes a border marker between the religiously based groups and outsiders. While modest dress makes borders between “us” and “them” visible, it also marks the community’s less tangible borders of identity by communicating and reinforcing members’ shared values of simplicity, modesty, and separatism.
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Bradley 2018; Hostetler 1964; Hume 2013;
Mong and Clifton 2021; Reynolds 2000;
Sims and Stephens 2011a
Getty Images, DebraLee Wiseberg, https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/group-of-young-amish-ladies-royalty-free-image/157725471?adppopup=true
Dress as Performance
Getty Images, Mark Wilson, https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/an-amish-women-escorts-young-children-to-school-near-the-news-photo/72082145?adppopup=true
Anabaptist dress as folklore shares many aspects of performance. Anabaptists participating in the daily ritual of wearing traditional clothing enact performance of a shared group role with outside communities as the audience. Within church communities, however, the gendered dress traditions are central to the performance of women’s roles in their families and among fellow church members. Women in particularly conservative churches may still try to express some individuality through dress, but in order to correctly perform roles such as wife or mother for the audience of church leadership and neighbors, dress must meet aesthetic standards that appropriately express shared community values.
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Bradley 2018; Graybill and Arthur 1999;
Mong and Clifton 2021; Reynolds 2000;
Sims and Stephens 2011b