Children of the Hutterites 
The goal of child rearing is voluntary submission of the will to the community 
by Gertrude Enders Huntington 
“All of us have by nature a tendency 
toward evil and to have pleasure in 
sin. . . . Children, however, know nei- 
ther good nor evil.” 
Account of Our Religion, 
Doctrine and Faith Given by 
Peter Rideman, 1565 
In 1963, when I embarked on a 
series of field studies in a Hutterite 
colony in Canada, I did not realize 
how very different the child-rearing 
practices of this communal Christian 
sect would be from those taken for 
granted in the New England college 
community in which we had been liv- 
ing. Otherwise, my husband and I 
might not have been so sanguine about 
taking our three children to an iso- 
lated, German-speaking community in 
which they would be immersed in a 
socialization process so thorough that 
it has maintained the Hutterite culture 
through some 450 years of persecution 
and protection, hardship and afflu- 
ence. 
My mother, a child psychologist and 
elementary-school teacher, came with 
us to the colony. The children had 
had little preparation other than time 
spent on Amish farms — and the fam- 
ily-centered culture of the Amish 
proved to be no preparation for the 
communal childhood they were about 
to experience. The Hutterite culture 
is rigidly age graded; not even as a 
child had I so often been asked, “How 
old are you?” Our three-generational 
family had a member in every age 
category except adolescence, but our 
fifth-grade daughter, because of her 
wider experience, was admitted to the 
edge of the adolescent’s private world. 
As the oldest person in the colony, 
my mother was called grandmother 
by everyone. She was identified with 
the three grandparent couples. My 
husband and I were in the middle 
generation. Each of our children was 
in a different category: Abigail, nine, 
was a “German school” child; Daniel, 
who had his fifth birthday in the col- 
ony, was a kindergarten child; and 
Caleb, two, was a house child. Thus 
it was natural for us to participate 
in the various socially defined age 
grades and to experience personally 
the socialization process. 
We were assigned a two-room house 
about forty feet from the nearest fam- 
ily (with whom we shared an outhouse) 
and about sixty feet from the nearest 
“long house,” consisting of apartments 
for four families. The center of the 
colony had the feeling of a medieval 
village. It was bounded on one end 
by the communal kitchen, which 
housed the dining room, bakehouse, 
washhouse and bathhouse, and at the 
other end and slightly to one side was 
the public-school building, which was 
also used for German school and the 
daily church services. All buildings 
related to home and family were 
painted white with blue trim; those 
that served an economic function were 
usually painted red. All living build- 
ings were built true to the compass, 
running due north and south or due 
east and west; the floor plan of the 
living houses has changed little since 
the sixteenth century. 
The uniformity of the color and ar- 
chitecture, the physical proximity of 
the buildings, the grassy commons, the 
flowers around the houses, and the 
neat walks proclaim visually the or- 
derly existence of the inhabitants. 
Time is measured out as discretely 
as space, and there is a proper activity 
for each moment of the day, each 
day of the week, each season of the 
year, and each stage of one’s life. An 
individual’s dress establishes sex, age, 
activity, and obedience to the rules 
of the colony. When it became evident 
that we were not simply visitors but 
participants, we were urged to take 
off our “ugly” clothes and put on Hut- 
terite attire. The dress signified our 
willingness to accept our age- and sex- 
determined position in the colony and 
to abide by the rules. We became 
a part, first, of the visual environment, 
then of the behavioral environment, 
next the emotional environment, and 
finally, we almost became a part of 
the intellectual environment, usually 
•fet ' • V* V * vV.x» : /.• 
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