“The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone likely finds herself in places no one has ever been before…”Albert Einstein.

“Well behaved women seldom make history” — Laurel Thatcher  Ulrich.

“There are some things you learn best in calm and some in a storm.” – Willa Cather.

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Living on my beautiful farm in America in the troubled year of 2021, approaching my 74th birthday, I’ve witnessed and absorbed a lot of history, almost a century’s worth.

Here on a hot summer day in a small upstate New York village in 2021, it looks more and more as if the men of the earth are coming closer and closer to destroying it, either by greed,  violence, ignorance, or their oldest trick,  simple hatred and domination.

I don’t know if it’s too late or not; I hope not. If you want something, said Margaret Thatcher, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.

There is something to that.

In this context, I’ve been fascinated by the Amish Woman, whose ship has recently docked just up the street. And who I am getting to know.

They are beyond interesting. They are trapped in between different visions of being a woman,  somewhere between the vision of Willa Cather and the anger and feminism of Gloria Steinem.

It always upsets some women when a man of any age writes about women, but I’ve never been good at being told what I can write—nuts to them. Imagine telling women they shouldn’t ever write about men.

And if any of us are to get through to the next century (I’m afraid I won’t be one of them), we had better all start talking to each other and quickly.

To me, Amish Women are the women in the middle of the great struggle of women for equality and the increasingly desperate efforts of men to stop them.

It is very easy to judge them as pawns and prisoners. I object to that.

I write about what I think and feel, not what other people tell me to think and feel or what polls and statistics tell me that I feel.

I also need to say something else.

I would not like to live or ever choose to live in the Amish world.  Neither would any of the women I love – my wife, my daughter, my friends.

Nothing I write is meant to be an endorsement (or condemnation) of them or a condemnation of us.

I was raised as an American.

I like to argue and ponder and I want to understand the world around me, not live in a cloistered community creating my own reality.

I don’t wish to be a patriarch, I am waiting for women to rule the world and save us.

But the Amish women have challenged me to think about our assumptions about what happiness really is and our own arrogance and righteousness about condemning people who choose to live differently.

From the first, that is the issue that has drawn me to writing about this subject and what fulfillment really means. There are no simple conclusions, no easy answers.

There are all kinds of ways to be a content and fulfilled human being, nobody in our intolerant society has the patent on that.

The Amish Woman inspires me to think about that.

If you’re looking for that, go someplace else, you will be disappointed.

As I get to see and know more Amish women, I’ll share what I feel and think.

I know that’s not the fashion – we are supposed to pretend to have all the answers –  but what can I say? It’s just who I am. I’ll never be asked on Cable TV, and I hope that goes in my eulogy.

Many women believe that Amish Woman symbolizes everything wrong with the way women have been and are being treated in our world.

Others might wish they could find the security and stability that many Amish women have, which helps keep them in the faith. It’s not easy to be a woman, either way.

I’ve always known that. I grew up seeing a strong woman destroyed by an oblivious man. And I hear about it all the time from the women I know.

A young Amish woman told me just this week that she is in no hurry to get married, contrary to public opinion. “We don’t believe in divorce,” she said, “We don’t do it. So we take our time and make sure we know our husband well and are making the right decision about marriage…”

I can’t know or pretend to know what Amish women are really thinking. As I said, I can only go by my instincts, my own skepticism, and common sense.

Many women believe Amish women are either brainwashed or coerced into remaining into the church or powerful and essential figures in the lives of their families and community. They can’t imagine they join the church willingly.

They believe that they are either being help prisoners in yet another brutal patriarchal system or strong and idealistic people who choose a life of family and faith and commit themselves to obey men’s decisions.

They believe that they are breeding machines so that the patriarchy that is the Amish Church can survive and prosper.  It’s almost inconceivable to many people that they might be happy.

And honestly, it’s not really or entirely knowable.

They are caught between the extreme black-and-white ways we are taught to think: they are either among the most secure and well-treated women or the subject of wanton physical and sexual abuse.

They do not seem brainwashed people to me, they have too much to say, and too many diverse thoughts.

Willa Cather spoke my mind when she wrote that there are really only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

This is the true reality of history. Nothing is new, and so many things never change. Women are yearning to be free; men don’t want them to be free.

I think the Amish women I know are surprisingly strong and independent, even outspoken.

But they are also the calm women that Willa Cather speaks of and the women that Einstein speaks of when he talks of women who will follow the crowd and not leave it.

When I say strong, I mean they remind me of My Antonia and the prairie women Cather writes so beautifully about. I think of them when I read Cather’s quote about her life: “I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.”

The Amish women work hard and uncomplainingly, six days a week, every week.

Vacations are unknown to them; they will never see the Florida Keys or the Caribbean. They will never spend an afternoon binging on Netflix. or pausing for a drink. They dig up rocks, plow fields all day, sell and cook cookies and donuts and pies all morning.

They clean, cook, do massive amounts of laundry, work the plows, till the soil, water the crops, often by hand, with buckets of water from wells.

From May to October, they walk barefoot, but no matter what they do, they all dress in the same bonnets and dresses.

The idea is that no one should stand out, but even the Amish bishops cannot forbid individual personality and spirit from showing itself.

It is actually quite easy to tell these women apart. They are all very different from one another, and yes, they have plenty of attitude. The human spirit has always been stronger than the humans.

You cannot be docile or weak and survive in that life.

The Amish women have more freedom than I expected.

They are encouraged to speak their minds and read; at the age of 21, they are free to leave and work anywhere they wish (except inside cities.) If they do stay and work at home, they must be paid for it.

They are free to choose their own husbands and take their time about it. They are free, along with their husbands, to move if they wish, and go anywhere there is an Amish community.

In the Old Amish farm families, they were pressured to have many children help work their farms without hiring outside labor.

As fewer and fewer Amish families are farmers, this is beginning to change.

The Amish are having fewer children and live on fewer farms. Lots of Amish women and men now work outside of their communities.

About fifteen percent of Amish women leave their communities when they are teenagers.

From birth, they are taught to obey their parents and the church.

This may be considered brainwashing, but the Amish women I talk to say they have chosen their lives freely and fully and are happier than any of the “English” women they know and safer.

They raise some interesting questions for me about what happiness and freedom are.

The American women I know are not, as a rule, generally happier than the Amish women I know.  Few of them seem as fulfilled. They struggle to find good jobs and get paid fairly for them.

Yet I doubt many of them would be happy in that life. We are just different people, raised in a different way.

American women suffer from unequal pay and opportunities, sexual and verbal harassment, abuse, and assault. Every woman I know has experienced one or the other.  Violent crimes from rape to verbal, sexual, and physical assault are epidemic.

Are American women happy? I don’t really know.

I wonder if we as a people really have the right to tell anybody else how to live. I don’t know how we can be leaders in a world where we can’t bring ourselves to understand or face our country.

The world for Amish women is quite different. Abuse and assault occur, but they are unusual. Splitting up is not an option. So marry we

English women complain about their husbands. They ask too much of them, make more money than they do, leave child care to their wives,  expect more control than they are entitled to, rarely do their share of work.

Are Amish women and their lives really all that different from many American women and their lives? They are very different. But are they happy? It isn’t for me to say, nor do I really know most days what happiness is.

Some of the happiest days of my life have been the hardest, that’s how I learn and grow.

But I confess I do not understand people who think they are so happy and wonderful that they know what everybody should do, and are so quick to condemn people who are different.

It seems obvious that women have harder lives than men, are less entitled, and report being poorly, even viciously and aggressively treated.

The testimony of the MeToo women and movement is a staggering indictment of the morals and decency of many of the supposedly best educated, most creative, and powerful  “English” men in the world.

I’m a  dying breed, a history lover, and it seems that Amish women live in much in the same way that American prairie and farm women lived until the prairies were settled.

Those Willa Cather women were considered heroic, not brain-washed.

Those women also hauled water, help plant crops, had numerous children, worked day and night, from dawn to dusk. They also lived closed and isolated lives.

As American began to change in the early 20th century – technology, corporate work, the decline of family farms, TV, and state colleges –  the Amish church decided to break away from the rest of the developing country and resist change, to say the same.

The “English” woman and the Amish women had less and less in common.

I can’t say if the Amish women are better of than their English counterparts, but I am surprised by how content and fulfilled they are.

Am I fit to judge them for the way they live? That’s easy. No, I’m not.

I see there is great respect between the Amish husbands and wives I have met. I have never heard or seen one raise their voices to each other or disrespect one another.

The Amish woman has a clear territory that they govern, the men their own domains.

“I don’t like it when the English women talk about me as if I were a breeding cow or goat,” said one.”I love my life; I love my family; I love my God. I’m not ashamed of it. I stayed with the church knowingly; no one forced me. I wouldn’t trade any one of my eight children for life in a big corporation in a big city.”

She was, she said, treated well, as is the practice of the Amish church. ‘No one ever coerced or pressured me.  This is the life I wanted to live.” That, she said, is what being Amish is about. Being plain, being kind, being gentle to others.

Several Amish women have said they find much English freedom, especially that of women, to be chaotic and frightening.

“I am not a zombie,” she said. ”

Some of us need structure and direction in our lives.

“I have a lot of responsibility in my life,” she said, “raising children is difficult and demanding. I work as hard as anyone, and the difference is that I get to love my work deeply and every day. I will never regret these children.”

Within the church, as within the family, write Donald B. Kraybil, Karen Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, men, and women occupy separate domains that often overlap.

They have enormous influence in the shaping of Amish religious law and life in their communities.

Marilyn Lehman, who grew up Amish in La Grange County, Indiana, argues that when women prepare the home and food for the fellowship meal after  church, they transform the space “from ordinary to ceremonial.”

Amish writer Louise Stolzfus says the women in Amish culture are very free to speak their minds.

Barbara Miller certainly does. They do not openly challenge their husbands.

Amish theology is clear about the equality of faith.

The Amish notion of their church is as the body of Christ in which male and female are spiritual equals and requires and honors both, even though they participate in different ways.

Almost every day, Moise and Barbara take a carriage ride together, out in the country to places I have never seen. Sometimes, they go for hours.

Without Barbara and her daughters, the Miller Farm would collapse overnight. Barbara is much more than a breeding machine.

Without her, there would be no food, no clean clothes, no labor for the farm, no watering of crops, plowed soil, no partner in a church of spiritual equals, no one to organize and host religious gatherings, no one to smooth injured feelings or resentments.

Writing of My Antonia in her classic work, Willa Cather suggested several ways to be a strong and fulfilled woman; they don’t have to do what the men do.

Said Antonia: “The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly to us from afar off but upon our perceptions being made finer so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what there is about us always.”

Yet there is the spirit of light and love about these women, and I feel it in their presence. They have taken the trouble to know me, something very few people in my life have done.

They have embraced and accepted me, something that is also rare in my experience.

The other day, I was overjoyed to have my special boot taken off my injured foot after weeks of discomfort and work.

I was surprised that no one I know in my travels noticed it was gone, but then, no one had noticed it was there in the first place.

When I went up to the Miller farm to drop something off, I got out of the area, and every one of the young women I saw or ran into smiled and said, “I see your boot is gone, Jon. Congratulations.”

A small thing, I am sure, unless one considers the meaning of humanity, a flickering candle in our daily news.

When kindness and empathy have left people, we become afraid of them even for a few moments, as if their reason had left them.

When it has left a place where we have always hoped to find it, it’s like an automobile crash; we leave security behind and evolve into something malevelont and bottomless.

These Amish women I’m writing about have kept their empathy and kindness.