| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Strangers at Home: Amish and Mennonite Women in History. Ed. by Kimberly D. Schmidt, Diane Zimmerman Umble, and Steven D. Reschly. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv, 398 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6786-X.)

In 1995 the editors of Strangers at Home convened a multidisciplinary conference, "The Quiet in the Land? Women of Anabaptist Traditions in Historical Perspective," at Millersville (Pennsylvania) University. The first academic conference of its kind, the gathering's title drew on the quiet-in-the-land (Stille im Lande) label long used to describe sectarian Anabaptists and reinterpreted it to call attention to the silence and silencing of women in these ethnoreligious communities. In this volume "Anabaptist" designates not just adherents of the sixteenth-century Reformation movement but also its denominational heirs: Mennonites, Amish, River Brethren, and, by some extension, Quakers. While two of the book's fifteen essays focus on European subjects and one looks at Paraguay, the rest deal with nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States women.

The book is organized into three sections, the first of which includes essays charting the interaction of scholars, ethnoreligious communities, and gender. The opening essay by Hasia Diner explores insider/outsider dichotomies in an insightful reflection on the advantages and disadvantages of writing as a woman about Jewish communities she knew well and about Irish immigrants that initially she did not. Diane Zimmerman Umble follows this insider/outsider theme as she recounts her fieldwork among Amish and Old Order Mennonites. As a Mennonite herself, Umble was in some ways an insider, but as a member of a mainline branch of that church and as a professional woman she remained an outsider among Old Orders who question her credentials as wife and mother. Taken together, these two essays would make for lively and fruitful discussion in any history methods course.

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