The Day a Hutterite Woman Retires (She Is Only 45)

On a colony like mine, a woman retires at forty-five. I am forty-six, and this morning I was in the kitchen before six. I'm Eva Wurz, head cook on a Lehrerleut Hutterite colony in southern Alberta. In this video: what "retired" really means on a colony (it is not stopping), the bell a woman stops answering at forty-five, the three age grades every woman here climbs, the jobs the "grandmothers" quietly hold, the little school where our two-and-a-half-year-olds are handed to them, and the one job that has no retirement age at all. Mine. INSIDE - The garden bell, and who stays sitting down - What a woman gives up at 45, and what she keeps doing - Why 45: on the kitchen rota since the age of 14 - 45 for Lehrerleut women, 50 for Dariusleut - The three age grades, and why the older women envy the girls - Who holds the babies - The Klanaschul, the little school - The head cook's job, and the colony in Montana where it sat empty for nearly seven years Tell me in the comments: at what age did you, or your mother, stop working, and what did she do with the first free morning? SOURCES Patricia Looney, Hutterite Women and Work, MA thesis, University of Victoria (1986). Fieldwork from 1985 at one Lehrerleut and one Dariusleut colony in southern Alberta: retirement ages, age grades, the garden bell, kitchen rotation, grandmothers' work, kindergarten, the head cook https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstreams/122e733d-8c1f-4a98-a5ed-96368a78b271/download The Roundup, "Cooking for a Colony" (2012): Prairie Elk Colony, Montana, retiring from the kitchen at 50, and the head cook's post https://www.roundupweb.com/story/2012/12/12/golden-roundup/cooking-for-a-colony/1814.html hutterites.org, "Early Years": the Klanaschul and Gmanschoft https://hutterites.org/day-to-day/education/early-years John W. Bennett, Hutterian Brethren (1967), quoted in Looney (1986) Practice differs from colony to colony and between the Leut. About the narrator: Eva Wurz is a composite character. Her voice and image are AI-generated. The facts in this video come from the sources above.