History piques curiosity about the overlooked
Mennonite Women in Canada: A History
Marlene Epp
University of Manitoba Press, 2008
378 PAGES
The Mennonite Historical Society of Canada may want to consider enlarging the handsome box that contains their three-volume Mennonites in Canada, so that Marlene Epp’s new book on Canadian Mennonite women can be slid inside, too.
It’s not that women didn’t participate in the events recorded in those narratives (two by Frank H. Epp, covering 1786 to 1940, one by T.D. Regehr, 1939 to 1970). As in many mainstream histories, however, they were assumed present, as an undifferentiated mass and often essentially invisible.
By bringing her “feminist curiosity” to the lives of Canadian Mennonite women, Marlene Epp, professor at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ont., and author of Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War, thus further “completes” the historical project of Mennonites in Canada. And it’s a pleasing bit of trivia, or irony if you like, that she is Frank H. Epp’s daughter.
Epp faces a formidable challenge in documenting the female reality of a diverse population of Canadian Mennonites, now found in close to 50 subgroups. She doesn’t attempt a parallel version of the chronological narratives already mentioned, nor a compilation of “women worthies” for the record. Rather, Epp clusters the experiences of women into five triads of roles or “arenas of activity,” which she analyzes, up to 1979, as they were both “prescribed and lived.”
She looks at women in immigration and settlement as “pioneers, refugees, and transnationals;” in the family as “wives, mothers, and ‘others’;” in the church as “preachers, prophets, and missionaries;” in wider society as “nonconformists, nonresistors, and citizens;” and in relation to the material world as “quilters, canners, and writers.”
Epp finds that “women were constantly acting in ways that unsettled a clear delineation of their roles” and shifted “with some ease” when circumstances such as migration, widowhood, war, and other crises required. Religion could be “oppressive or empowering,” though it was more likely “both simultaneously and also somewhere in between.” Exigency was the main condition that gave women voice before ideological shifts in culture in the 1970s “unsettled the gender inequality in Mennonite church life.”
This brief review cannot begin to mention the many stories, ideas, sources, and aspects of the female Mennonite’s life Epp gathers into this text. Her work is necessarily an overview, but is rich in detail and highly interesting, likely to provoke further curiosity, and probably arguments as well. It also begs any number of further studies.
For example, Mennonites have a long history of theological fragmentation. What was the role of women in the renewals or schisms of Canadian churches? Epp refers to Delbert Plett’s work to suggest “woman-centred domestic spirituality” may have suffered a decline when outside theological trends entered the community. Theological change is also a kind of migration, however, in which women participate in various ways and their experience (and influence upon others) in retaining the old or opening themselves to the new requires wider investigation.
Oddly, the book as a whole felt a little bleak to me – oddly, I say, because many individual parts of it aren’t so at all, and besides, Mennonite women “carved out spaces for themselves within the structures that constrained them, but also at times successfully subverted and resisted those structures.”
Perhaps it’s because carving out, subverting, and resisting seem a grim piece of work that doesn’t quite fit the strong women who shaped me – my grandmother, mother, and aunts. Perhaps it’s because in this study the constraining structures loom large. If histories also cast vision, we may need a stronger dose of “women worthies” after all, in even thicker description of their humanness and vitality, for our ongoing challenges around roles and relations.
Epp hopes both men and women will read and discuss this book, and in doing so, understand and enlarge their curiosity about Mennonite women of the past. I warmly second her wish. This is a significant addition to the Mennonite history shelf, and deserves attention, in or out of the box.
—Dora Dueck
