I Wish I'd Been There: Resisting a Sacred Symbol

By Julia Kasdorf

One Sunday morning during the 1930s, two young church members walked into Maple Grove Amish Mennonite Church in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, with nothing on their heads. The night before, they had hatched the daring plan together and vowed not to lose their nerve, although they expected discipline.

When asked why she did it, one of them told me, "I didn't want to be plain. I never was a plain Mennonite, and I am not now." She wished to be nameless for an interview I conducted while researching the life and work of J.W. Yoder (1872-1956), but she explained her position. In 1928 about to graduate from Belleville High School, she was told to wear either a net cap or black bonnet to the baccalaureate ceremony. At first, she couldn't decide whether to stay home or to comply with the church rule. As a child, she had often heard her mother and J.W. Yoder denounce the head covering as "unbiblical" during Sunday dinners. Amish-born Yoder-a long-time member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and briefly a professor at both Elkhart Institute and the progressive, "old Goshen"-regarded the head covering as an un-Christ-like "subordination veil" and saw no reason to retain a relic from Semitic antiquity. In the end, the girl resentfully wore a borrowed bonnet to march with her classmates in mortarboards.

Years later, she clipped a Gospel Herald article denouncing the covering on biblical grounds, and pasted it inside her Bible. Around that time-the late 1960s or early 1970s-she and three others were the first to quit wearing coverings at Maple Grove. But I wish I'd been there the first time she tried, because I admired the way she placed her body in line with her beliefs, following the strong tradition of our Anabaptist mothers. Also in their spirit, she did not make that impossible stance of resistance alone, and eventually she did see the rules change.

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Julia Kasdorf is author of two collections of poetry, Sleeping Preacher and Eve's Striptease, and a forthcoming collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing From a Mennonite Life. She teaches English at Messiah College and worships at St. Stephen's Cathedral Church (Episcopal) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, January 2000