Are You Smarter than a Book Cover?

“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world,” said anthropologist, writer, and speaker Margaret Mead. Her quote resounds in my soul; guess that's why I blog about Amish - and those who leave - giving accurate information.

One screaming inaccuracy I see on fiction book covers is the well-groomed, attractive, side-glancing or provocative looking Amish gal with a wispy tuft of hair dangling from her white kapp.

Why wrong you ask?

Well, the kapp does make it easier to see the air-brushed youthful image. However, in reality Amish females are prohibited from the vain and worldly practice of plucking their eyebrows and using make-up to cover acne, and every hair must be in place. Their culture teaches females to be subservient and passive.

I’ve met strong, out-spoken, opinionated ex-Amish gals. They have their own ideas and often tell it like it is without using a mouth-filter. I've been emotionally bruised by those ex-Amish females. Mosie (our ex-Amish "son") and Harvey (our ex-Amish son-in-love) have told me stories of women who run the family. But to always paint covers with angelic, blemish-free and subtly suggestive faces is misleading to readers.

The kapp is symbolic of submissiveness. The kapp is what a female wears to cover her tidy hair every day. There are rules to how the hair is pulled back and secured.

These rules vary among the different Amish orders. But - for the most part - this is typical . . .

Whenever she leaves the house, she wears the bonnet to cover her kapp, just like the man must wear a hat when he’s outside his home. It'd be rare to find an Amish gal at the barn-raising without her bonnet.

When we were visiting our son-in-law’s Amish parents I witnessed the strict adherence to this practice. We were sitting in the living – or front – room of their dawdy house (I’ll explain that in a future post). My husband Paul asked if he could see the barn. Harvey’s father, the stout Amish bishop with long white beard, rose from his chair to accommodate my husband’s request, pulled his black hat from the peg on the wall and placed it over his long hair. Just to go out to the barn – his own property – he wore his hat.

Now, Mosie told me there’s a color tradition among his Swartzentruber Order. Unmarried gals wore a black kapp while married women wore white. In some settlements the young girls wear black to church, and for everyday at-home use it’s the white kapp. And that’s only while they’re young. Once they reach adolescence they wear a white kapp (under the bonnet) to attend a funeral or the singings in the evening. In other Orders the black kapp symbolized unmarried girls or those who weren’t yet Church members.

Scratching your head in confusion yet?

Well, here’s more. Among stricter Orders, there's a third head covering called the ivva-kopp or ivverbonnet. Those are similar to the bonnets but, are heavier & warmer, quilted over layers of thick paper from flour bags, and fit more snugly to the head. Some ex-Amish tell me they grew up in settlements where they never saw an ivva-kopp.

Women wear their black – or dark colored – bonnet as tradition, to protect the kapp, and also to protect themselves from wind and winter’s cold.

In some settlements the bonnet rules are more lenient; in the hot summer, inside a black buggy, the bonnet may stay on the back shelf of the buggy. I can only image how hot it’d be wearing those things. Some settlements mandate bonnet use year round while others hardly wear the bonnet in the summer, except on Sundays to attend church. In an Iowa settlement they wear colored bonnets.

Hey, if you’re confused then welcome to the complexities of the Amish system.

I’d like to see those publishers’ cover designers be more creative and accurate; stop with the redundant, misleading picture. Make a realistic cover where the young gal has a uni-brow, teen ache, every hair is in place, her downcast eyes show compliance, or the heavy black bonnet hides her face. Oh wait, that wouldn’t sell books. Well, at least you can be smarter than a book cover.  ~Brenda

(c)Copyright 2013, Brenda Nixon.