Anabaptist Modest Dress
Differing Interpretations
From Within
From Without
Anabaptist women explain modest dress and head coverings as choices of individual faith and demonstration of their acceptance of community standards and values. Dress styles are reminders of being separate from the outside, but they are also reminders of belonging inside their communities. Women may feel a sense of power and connection through participating in religious community traditions. While they acknowledge the gender hierarchies modest dress represents, they place more emphasis on their feeling of personal connection to community and God.
In scholarly interpretations, modest dress is discussed as a form of control exerted over women's bodies, especially since its practice has often been enforced and critiqued by men. Interviewed women do repeatedly mention that a community reason for modest dress is to help protect men from wanting to sin. However, they prefer to emphasize individual faith while academic discussion places more emphasis on gender hierarchies that emerge within communities that practice modest dress. More responsibility for upholding group standards of virtue tends to fall to women than men.
Getty Images, Juan Monino
Graybill and Arthur 1999; Jones 2010; Michelman 2003; Mong and Clifton 2021; Reynolds 2000
Reflection: Popular Perceptions
Plain Anabaptist groups and their dress traditions are often nostalgically viewed by outsiders as quaint or charming. How and why might these opinions have developed? And how and why might those perceptions be different than the way outsiders sometimes perceive Muslim women's religious modest dress?
