My Visit To A Hutterite Colony {+ How Hutterites are NOT like the Amish}

why do feminists always think their way is the best/only way? I didnt see any bars or chains anywhere around there, except maybe on the chicken cages.. the women are free to leave, they CHOOSE not to.. i imagine they wonder how you can live being a slave to your boss/sexuality, being “forced” to exibit your body in skimpy clothes and torturous shoes, feeling compelled to leave your home, forsake your children/fertility, in the name of money/career/status. This is not a third world country where women truly have no rights and can be arrested or killed for doing something against their culture, its Canada and America, where help is a phone call away. Leave them be.

I would just like to chime in as a non-hutterite, non-LDS citizen of Southern Alberta who frequently shops at the Hutterite booth at the Crossroads Market. A close friend of mine also married into the culture although her husband is on the fringe of the colony owning a Tire and Lube business off the colony and by marrying outside the faith he was forced to move off the colony although they are still welcome to be with the family for celebrations and such.

When it comes to not having any internet, that is completely false. Their beliefs are based on communal living. When a person has, he gives. When a person truly needs, he takes. The definition of need is in its strictest form. If you will die without it, you take. When they have a surplus of goods, they use whatever means they need to to sell or give away those goods. In very few cases, that even involves the internet. They don’t use it for absolutely everything so they have no need of iPads, tablets, etc.

On the topic of children playing, the children spend a lot of time outdoors when they are young as their mothers are working the yards and going back and forth to the kitchens. They also spend time in the fields watching their fathers work. They develop an affinity for the outdoors. They are not deprived an electronic type of play, they are just encouraged to play in ways that keep their bodies strong and their social skills engaged. This is done from such young age that by the time they are teenagers, the absorbed, online, disengaged lifestyle of today’s youth is completely foreign to them. They CHOOSE to play offline as they are unfamiliar with online devices. Hand your grandmother a VR gaming system and see what she prefers playing with, a deck of cards or the gaming system? Just because the children only had a pool out for one day doesn’t mean they only played once. It just means they used a sprinkler every other day 🙂

When it comes to the expectation of the women, the Bible says, wives, submit to your husbands…[and] Husbands love your wives (I said I wasn’t Hutterite, not that I didn’t know scripture). A woman is naturally bonded to a child from birth. She has to be there to feed the child no matter what. Women TEND to have a more nurturing temperament as well and so instinctively want to do all of the things needed to care for their child like hold them and cuddle them and bathe them and clothe them. Not that men NEVER want to do this, but it comes more naturally to a woman. By the time a child is old enough to do something without their mother, the bond of nurturing is so strong that it is more natural to have the woman continue in that role. During these years, it only makes sense that the husband should be doing something to provide for , or LOVE his wife and family. This is when men find work. In the colony, they work the fields, build furniture, erect buildings and the like. Women who don’t naturally tend to child rearing have the entire colony to lean on. Men who aren’t naturally inclined to working in the fields or carpentry can lean towards administration or communication. It’s not like the communities are practicing an archaic, rigid, uncaring lifestyle that stops anyone from doing what they’re good at. On the contrary, it opens up the opportunity by allowing each other to use the skills they are strongest at.

Regarding the voice of the women and the opinion of the feminist, if you truly are a feminist, you would realize that just because a woman is not in the council chamber doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a voice. Refer back to the verse I gave before. For a husband to truly love his wife, he must act as her voice. Just like our MP and MLA must act as our voice in Assembly chambers, so the husband acts as their voice in the colony. A true feminist would know that a woman’s voice is only as strong as the woman behind it. Giving women the right to speak doesn’t mean they WILL speak. The suffragettes didn’t win their battle when they won the right to vote. They are still fighting their battle every time a woman chooses not to speak up for herself. If you do decide to visit one of the colonies, you will likely notice that when you talk to the women alone, they are some of the strongest women you will ever meet. Behind closed doors, they are well educated, articulate, opinionated, and easily express their thoughts. They keep their opinions to themselves in public so not to make a scene and have a respectful conversation with their husband in private about their opinion when appropriate allowing their husband to act on it. It is definitely different than what current culture would have us be comfortable with, but it is not so atrocious as Hollywood would have us believe.

Re: this not being a feminist culture-

Read “I Am Hutterite” by MaryAnn Kirby. And some other hutterite authors. I think it was in Kirby’s book that she mentioned many strong willed women. That the men would go to council, report home to their women what was discussed, the women would tell them where they went wrong or what still needed to be done, send them back to council again and again until the men had come to an agreement the women agreed with. (Which reminds me of what native women said when asked by whites, the native men went ahead when journeying because the women told them where to go and to go first so they could look out etc and report back to the women who were coming along at a comfortable pace with the kids etc. The whites saw it as the men were the leaders but the natives saw it as the women were the leaders and the men were the scouts, trail breakers, first line of defense, etc.)

Feminists (with the capital F) in mainstream US society are usually campaigning hard for social services for women and children (housing, daycare, etc). Hutterite women have all that. Hutterite women have such social support that they have one of the highest birthrates in the world. Meals, laundry, and childcare are all communal. No one pays rent or has a mortgage. No one has to commute or worry about bills. Can you imagine not having to cook or clean in your own house, and only have to do each one week out of the month as your day job, and go home and rest at night? Mainstream women are pushed to give their children to strangers to raise while they commute and work the same job day in and day out dealing with strangers. Hutterite women work daily with lifelong friends and relatives (women, not stranger men who might sexually harass them or rape them in a parking garage). Their children are nearby onsite and they can get to them at any time needed in the day. They do something different as their work every week, and it varies through the course of the year. They don’t have to commute and breathe tailpipe exhaust and have miles between them, their children, their home, their work, etc and hours of road time daily. Their clothing is comfortable jumper dresses that it doesn’t matter at all if you gain or lose
weight. Body image issues are rare. Divorce is very rare, a hutterite woman on colony doesn’t have to worry about divorce, no one would tolerate it. If her spouse decides he has to do that, he can leave, she will continue life on colony with her kids and never worry about finances, housing, etc. Marriage is taken seriously, involving a series of council meetings etc for months before the marriage can proceed. All the steps involved to get married maybe helps to make sure the couples are motivated enough and several in the families and colony leadership have to make sure they know the couple well enough to give their judgement that they are sane, sound, etc to proceed with marriage. New mothers have a team of women working round the clock to provide for her and her baby, for months. Other women coming into her house to clean, bring hot meals, help with baby care. Its a given, it’s structured, no mother has to wonder what her help will be (or worry about the size of her housing, rent/mortgage, bills, etc). By the time her child is 3 they go to communal childcare during the day. Hutterite houses/apts/duplexes don’t have kitchens and dining rooms because meals are taken at the dining hall. Women work on a rotation, cook week, garden week, cleaning week, etc. Adults RETIRE at 45 and after that time, younger people deliver hot meals to their home so they don’t even have to go to the dining hall, and a cleaning crew cleans their homes weekly including floor scrubbing etc. Hutterites are famous for their singing and often sing while they work. Singing is one of the activities shown to release oxytocin , the bonding hormone. On every colony there are Boss positions for different areas of industry. The Cook Boss, Garden Boss, and Sewing Boss are always women. For colonies of 100-250 people, to manage the many acres of gardens, food service, etc is to be a farm manager or restaurant manager. Sewing Boss buys fabric in quantity and handles planning and management of clothing making for all, from work clothes to wedding dresses (which are blue). Every woman in a Boss position has to do a lot of planning, calculating, purchasing, team management, teaching, etc. and of course no Boss works in a vacuum. Women start working in the rotation at 14 or 15, the same age they begin to eat at the adult women’s table. At some point, I think age 12, they become eligible to be a mother’s helper for newborns and learn from the team of women tending to the mother and child how to do it.

I’ve actually read some anthropology study about hutterite society, and anthropologists say that hutterite life is hardest on MEN, that women have security to live their life, children have security (there’s no stranger on a colony, everyone looks out for the kids), but men feel the lack of Independence and have to curb themselves at times to continue cooperating.

Over my years I have studied many organizations. From ones being Baptist to being raised in the LDS church, to one of my good friends. Frederick Smith of the RLDS movement. I have left lectured at Eastern Mennonite College, and have no many Mennonites and on the niche mostly in Pennsylvania. They all seem to be very good people, very similar to those I find in rural Utah, it only seems to be when they come in contact with society that there is conflict. One thing it has taught me is that my morality is not the same as theirs. It does truly break my heart to see the way they care for their animals, for it makes me ask how I just person can do so? But again this is my morality. I will have to study this group in the future, to fully understand their ideas and how it relates to Menno Simons and his theology. Thank you for bringing this story to us, it is extremely interesting to see how segments of our society that are hidden live.