Mennonite Women in Canada: A History (review)

The photograph on the cover of Epp's history of Canadian Mennonite women evolves as readers delve further into her book. Before reading Epp's meticulously researched account, viewers of the image will most likely note the uniformity of thirteen women, all clothed in conservative early twentieth-century attire, plain full-length dresses, or simple white blouses and long skirts. After finishing Epp's study, readers will possess a whole new set of interpretive lenses through which to view the image. The photograph changes from one large group of women to a portrait of three subgroups: Five women wear hats with elaborate floral decorations; five wear hats with few or no embellishments; and three of the women rather audaciously allowed themselves to be photographed with their hair uncovered. Epp's investigation informs readers, especially those who are not Mennonite but also many Mennonite male readers, about the significances of such wardrobe subtleties and helps them realize that a history of the women of this much-traveled and constantly evolving sect cannot have a "monolithic theme" (ix).

Mennonite women might at first glance appear similar not only in their attire but in their demeanor and attitude because they have been viewed through Mennonite histories written by men. The women have been indistinctly perceived as if "through a low-lying fog," to use the words of a Katie Funk Wiebe, another Mennonite historian whose work Epp expands upon. Indeed, such a fog in her own family led to Epp's research, being prompted to begin it when her father turned to her for help "because he didn't know where to find any information on such an unlikely topic." Even though he had been living among them all his life, "Frank H. Epp, . . . a well-known historian . . . amongst Canadian Mennonites," knew little about the women of his church (xiii).

The information that Epp gathered to enlighten her father reveals no simple image, and the complexity arises out of a number of factors that serve as the focal points of Epp's five chapters. Chapter 1, "Pioneers, Refugees, and Transnationals," describes Mennonite women's migration to Canada from various places on the globe. Chapter 2, "Wives, Mothers, and 'Others,'" reveals various exigencies that forced many women to ignore expectations that they "marry for life [and] bear and raise children" (60). Chapter 3, "Preachers, Prophets, and Missionaries," explains how women who were "prohibited . . . from preaching" and instructed to remain silent "in [church] business meetings" preached unofficially and honed their administrative talents in women's groups that lay outside the official church hierarchy (122). Chapter 4, "Nonconformists, Nonresistors, and Citizens," exposes how men's conforming to the fashion of the outer society provoked more stringent dress requirements for Mennonite women and how changes in gender roles in non-Mennonite society during both world wars, as well as the Mennonite policy of pacificism, led many women away from the traditional life of hearth and home. Chapter 5, "Quilters, Canners, and Writers," examines how many women's "zealous desire for self-expression was channelled into forms of creativity . . . that were allowed for Mennonite women within a church . . . that often circumscribed female behaviour" (226).

Various waves of migration explain the diversity of Mennonite women in Canada. Arriving sometimes with husbands, sometimes without, women came from "Switzerland and southern Germany" in the "late eighteenth through to the mid-nineteenth" centuries and "from Russia beginning in the 1870s" (29). Later waves of migrants left Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (42), and many fled to Canada from the Soviet Union in the turmoil of World War II and the decade following it (56). Although these sources contributed the largest numbers, the "arrival of refugees . . . from . . . Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and from the African continent" also made "the characteristics of Mennonite women more multi-faceted in the late twentieth century" (56). Of course, many of the women arrived, sometimes reluctantly, accompanied by spouses who had initiated the move, but others arrived without husbands...