New review of Marlene Epp's "Mennonite Women in Canada"

A new review of Marlene Epp’s Mennonite Women in Canada has been posted to the Alex Freund’s German Canadian Studies blog.

Rather than a radical manifesto against Mennonite women’s oppression, Epp’s history is the careful yet effective documentation of Mennonite women’s resistance and submission to as well as creative engagement with complex and often subtle forms of silencing, marginalization, stunting and shunning, abuse and violence. Much of this oppression has been the result of the “Mennonite ethos” that values notions of subservience (being “the quiet in the land”), passive acceptance of pain (Gelassenheit, yielding to God’s will), serving others (“discipleship,” following Jesus’s example of bearing the cross), rejecting the material world, and the hegemony of the community (Gemeinschaft).

Read more on the German Canadian Studies blog.