Modest Dress

I recently attended a family funeral in central Wisconsin. Both Amish and “English” (the word used by Amish to refer to non-Amish) members of the community attended. We could easily identify who was who – Amish men in beards, hats, dark suits with suspenders; and Amish women in dark long dresses, with long sleeves and caps covering their hair. We also saw Amish women working at their farms and walking to church services. They were cloaked with their heads covered and their hair pinned up. No other conclusion could be drawn than that these women were dressed “modestly.” The Amish men were also dressing modestly. As a practice they retain the dress code of the time of their founding.

I was reminded of how we can identify ourselves today – Orthodox Jewish men with their black suits, hats, beards; and Muslim women with their hijab or head scarves. Dressing as a kind of identity is old as in this example from Iran: “Fadwa El Guindi, in her book on the history of hijab, locates the origin of the Persian custom in ancient Mesopotamia, where respectable women veiled, and servants and prostitutes were forbidden to do so.” [2]

When I was growing up, Roman Catholic Nuns who taught at nearby Catholic schools, or nursed at the city’s Catholic hospital, wore “modest clothing.” Their habits were long and black; their hair was covered. We could see only their hands and their faces – the rest of them was clothing. What was “religious uniform” to me back then was really Christian women dressing modestly, according to their beliefs.[3]

Like the Nuns, the Amish women and men I met or saw in Wisconsin also trace their heritage to the Roman church, but the Amish come from the Mennonite Anabaptist tradition.

“The Amish are a Christian religious group who originated in Switzerland around 1525. They were known as Swiss Anabaptists . . . The Swiss Anabaptists were persecuted because of their refusal to follow the Swiss Church requirements on baptism. In 1690, some Anabaptists broke away from the Swiss Anabaptist Church, which are now the Mennonite. The group that broke away was lead by Jacob Amman. The Amish migrated to North America in the 1700s because William Penn was promoting religious tolerance.”[4]

Although Christian, the Amish look, live, and dress very differently from most of the rest of us Christians. They appear more different from us than do some our Muslim and Jewish sisters and brothers.

Dressing modestly has changed over time, not for the Amish, but certainly for most of the rest of us. Cole Porter[5] wrote, “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking but now, God knows, anything goes.” Nuns seen now in the USA often do not wear the black habits common in my youth. Many modern Mennonite women no longer wear the dark, long-sleeved and long-skirted clothing of earlier generations.

Similarly, Muslim women dress according to local norms as they try to meet the Qur’an’s requirements for modest dress. “It goes by many names -- hijab, niqab, abaaya, burqa, chador. It can be anything from a simple scarf draped around the face and neck to a shawl...”[6] For example, for Persians, hijab becomes chador, a full-length semi-circle of fabric open down the front, which is thrown over the head and held closed in front. Traditionally, light colors and prints have been used, but now in Iran, black is a favored color.

It’s not just culture or religious authority either. Some women are just choosing to dress more conservatively.

"It's not only Muslim women who are making attempts to be modest when they go out . . . There's also a contingency of Christian women and Jewish women and others who just don't feel that they need to show their bodies. Other women are striving to be modest as well." [7]

---

[1] This is one of a series of occasional columns in which the author, raised in the Christian tradition, searches for common ground and common history among the teachings, beliefs and practices of adherents of the Abrahamic faiths -- Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

[2] El-Guindi, Fadwa, Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance, Berg, 1999. Cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chador

[3] For example, see 1 Corinthians 11:5

[4] http://ezinearticles.com/index.php?The-Amish---A-Step-Back-in-Time&id=1127006

[5] from his song, “Anything Goes” for the show of the same name, first produced on Broadway in 1934

[6] http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20011028muslimwomennat3p3.asp

[7] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0427_060424_muslim_sports_2.html