In cold weather, most Amish women will wear a heavy, often quilted, black bonnet over their covering to protect and warm their heads. Like the women, Amish men wear their hair in simple, unassuming styles, most often a bowl cut. Men belonging to more conservative orders would most likely never trim their beard.
What do the different Amish bonnets mean?
Black bonnets are worn by Amish women who are not yet married. Today, you’ll see Amish women wearing both white and black bonnets to symbolize their relationship. In short, white bonnets mean a woman is married and black means she is single.
Why don’t the Amish tie their bonnets?
The Amish belief system is Christian based and, as such, their head coverings stem from I Corinthians 11, which dictates that men should have their heads uncovered for prayer, but women should cover their heads at all times even when she is not praying.
How can you tell the difference between Amish and Mennonites?
Amish women wear solid-color dresses, whereas Mennonite women wear flowered prints or plaid fabric. Amish people live in close-knit communities and don’t become part of the other population, whereas Mennonite lives as a part of the population not as separate communities.
Do Mennonites wear black bonnets?
Yes, the Mennonites are accepting of outside customs, such as celebrating the birth of a child with a thoughtful gift. Does the color of the bonnets of Mennonite women mean anything? Yes, white bonnets are worn by married women and black bonnets are worn by unmarried women.
Do the Amish pull their children’s teeth?
We have provided many permanent tooth extractions and dentures for teen patients. An Amish girl told us “My mom and my sisters had a denture when they were teenagers. Many Amish lost their teeth when they were young.”
What are Amish bonnets called?
The white or black head covering Amish females wear is known as a kapp or prayer covering. This is different from the larger black bonnet women may wear over the kapp.
Do Mennonites only drive black cars?
His family’s church, more properly known as the Weaverland Conference Mennonite Church, permits its members to own cars, but only if they are painted black.
Why do Mennonites wear black bonnets?
A bonnet. White bonnets are for the married, while black are for the unmarried. Unmarried women are not common in the Amish community (Old Order).
What religions wear bonnets?
In addition, types of headgear called bonnets are worn by women as an outer Christian headcovering in some denominations such as the Amish, Mennonite and Brethren churches among the Anabaptist branch of Christianity, and with Conservative Quakers, mainly in the Americas.
Why do Amish women wear black and white bonnets?
All women wear bonnets/prayer caps, except for the Nebraska Amish, who never wear bonnets. Young girls, prior to age 9, may wear colored bonnets, but older girls and women wear black bonnets and married women can wear white ones. There are several reasons why the bonnet is a part of their everyday clothing. ii A reflection of faith
Why do Mennonite women wear a black bonnet?
Conservative Amish and Mennonite women wear an outer bonnet (usually black) in obedience to the Biblical commands given in 1 Tim. 2:9-15, 1 Peter 3:1-6, and Titus 2:3-5 that a Christian woman should be discreet, chaste, modest, sober-minded, in subjection, meek and quiet, and shamefaced.
What do Amish people wear on their heads?
An Amish bonnet or head covering is called kapp (or prayer cover). It is worn and topped with a black Amish bonnet used by women in Amish communities during certain occasions. The material and how these head coverings are worn vary in men and women in the community. The different kapps worn by the Amish people signifies many things.
Are there any Mennonites in the Amish church?
In general, yes. While people may disagree on an individual level, the Amish and Mennonite groups generally coexist peacefully and will work together to support the needs of their local communities. For example, Amish and Mennonite volunteers work together on Anabaptist charitable projects such as the Mennonite Disaster Service.
Saloma Miller Furlong left the Amish at age 20 expecting “there would be hell to pay — forever.”
She wasn’t dramatizing the unrelenting disapproval from family and community members. She was citing the Amish religious teaching that condemns those who leave the faith to eternal damnation.
But by that time the young woman had already experienced something of hell on earth.
In a new memoir, “Bonnet Strings: An Amish Woman’s Ties to Two Worlds,” Furlong focuses on the most eventful years of her young-adult life:
Between 1977 and 1982, she fled Geauga County, Ohio, for Vermont, was bullied into returning, then two years afterward left for good. She later married the man she fell in love with on her first foray into “the world.”
As a companion book to the American Experience documentary “The Amish: Shunned,” “Bonnet Strings” was released by Herald Press early this month when the program aired on PBS-TV.
Furlong told parts of her story in that film and an earlier one in the series, as well as in a 2010 memoir of her childhood, “Why I Left the Amish.”
Memoir writing tough
“Memoir writing is such a tough business,” Furlong reflected in a telephone interview last week from her home in Massachusetts. “It’s so hard to know your own motives.”
She learned that the hard way, after her sisters stopped talking to her following publication of her first book. (All four sisters left the Amish after she did; her two brothers remain.)
Furlong blames only herself for her failure to fit into the culture of her birth. Curious, independent-minded, outspoken and worst of all dick-keppich (stubborn, in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect), she says she takes responsibility for leaving.
She accepted baptism as a teenager, mainly due to pressure. At the time, she writes, “I lacked the courage to leave and I lacked the conviction to join. So I took the middle road: I joined the church without conviction.”
“Ultimately, I still did have a choice. I could have stayed, moved to another Amish settlement, or left,” she says now.
That wasn’t true during her childhood, and perhaps that’s why her first book had a harsher tone than this one does, she adds.
The reader, however, may conclude that the actions, and inactions, of others are what drove Furlong out.
There was the mentally ill, violent father; the older brother who sexually abused her when she was 11 years old; and the mother who failed to protect her and added abuse of her own.
The church community looked down on the dysfunctional family, expecting members to solve problems by praying, submitting, confessing, forgiving and forgetting — until the next crisis arose, as it inevitably did. Furlong herself alerted county social workers to the situation, to no avail.
By the time she left home the first time, Furlong was plagued by suicidal thoughts and an eating disorder.
Yet on her return, the community tried to accommodate her by allowing her to live apart from her family.
Squelching her desire for an education beyond the eighth grade, she accepted a position teaching in an Amish school. She recalls it as a frustrating experience set in a crowded classroom with an undermining co-teacher and an unhealthy reliance on the “school strap.”
If the book challenges the reader’s image of Amish society as a haven from care and an oasis of Christian kindness, “We really can’t expect anything of the Amish that we don’t expect of the larger society,” Furlong gently reminds her interviewer.
A happy ending
Furlong’s story proceeds to the happy ending exalted in literature from “As You Like It” to “Bridget Jones Diary”: a wedding.
The author escaped into the loving arms of a good-looking young man (yes, there are pictures). She confides that even her Amish mother seem to tacitly approved of him.
Before he married her more than 30 years ago, David Furlong learned Saloma Miller’s “shameful” secrets, accepted who she was, and waited until she was ready to embrace both her new life and him — all after suffering her vehement rejection.
At one point he considered converting from Roman Catholic to Amish for her sake, something she discouraged.
David Furlong contributes three chapters to the book, one at the end of each of its three sections. He gives his perspective on events his wife has described — her initial flight, return and final leave-taking in his yellow Datsun pickup truck.
Eventually, he would help her fulfill her desire for a family (two sons) and an education (Smith College, Class of 2007).
As Mennonite memoirist Shirley Hershey Showalter, author “Blush,” says in a blurb for Furlong’s book: “This story includes all the elements of a good romance — attraction, danger, secrets, beautiful scenery, obstacles, culture classes, and old-fashioned chivalry.”
Saloma Miller Furlong will talk more about her life story Feb. 25 when Milanof-Schock Library sponsors her and Shirley Hershey Showalter presenting “Coverings: Amish and Mennonite Stories.” The program will be held at 7 p.m. in the Mount Joy Mennonite Church, 320 Musser Road, Mount Joy. Afterward, the authors will sign their books, which can be purchased there or brought in.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; tickets, $5, will be sold at the door. Register by calling the library at 653-1510.