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Strangers At Home: Amish and Mennonite Women in History. Edited by Kimberly D. Schmidt, Diane Zimmerman Umble, and Steven D. Reschly. Center Books in Anabaptist Studies. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xiv + 398 pp. $39.95 cloth.
Strangers at Home was born out of the first academic conference on Anabaptist women in 1995 and reflects just how much ground needs to be covered in this up-to-now understudied field. The editors duly note that while Amish and Mennonite history has been the focus of a growing number of historical studies, women have been largely marginalized in these works. Aside from filiopietistic and hortatory writings on Anabaptist women that arose in the late 1970s, scholarly studies of Anabaptist women have been few and far between. Strangers at Home serves as a corrective to early Anabaptist histories as it seeks to move Amish and Mennonite women from the periphery of their histories to the center. The underlying premise of this collection is that like all women's history, Anabaptist women's history belongs at the center because women's lives and work in their community were and are at the center. The editors' aims, however, extend beyond a mere chronicling of Anabaptist women's history; the authors want to do more than fill historical gaps. What the collected essays set out to show is that Anabaptist women's history (1) "illuminates the relationship of individuals to the community and to broader society"; (2) "advances religion and ethnicity as topics within women's history"; (3) "raises critical questions about the assumptions implicit in mainstream scholarship"; and (4) "raises once again the issue of diversity in the historiography of women" (4-5). The aims of this volume, then, are ambitious. The authors attempt to contextualize Anabaptist women's history with larger themes in Anabaptist history, American religious history, and women's history more broadly. The editors want to advance a "multilayered...