For 300 Years, Hutterite Girls Couldn’t Choose Their Husband

For about three hundred years, a Hutterite girl did not choose her husband. On certain Sundays the elders brought the young people into one room, boys on one side, girls on the other, and a girl was offered two or three young men and expected to take one. The wedding followed almost at once. Then, in Russia in the 1840s, a girl ran away. My name is Eva Wurz. I am the head cook on a Hutterite colony of 150 people in southern Alberta, and my daughter is nineteen. This is the story of why she will choose her own husband. IN THIS VIDEO - 1540: why our confession of faith said young people must not choose for themselves - 1578 and 1612: what visitors saw in the matching room, in their own words - The six-month rule for anyone who refused - "Marital sister": what a Hutterite husband once called his wife - Fair to the elders: Isaac, Rebekah, and the fight against "self-will" - The girl who ran to Johann Cornies, and the year the brotherhood let it go - 1874: "Go and harness our horse to the wagon. We are going to visit Sohn." - How a Hutterite marriage is made today, and what has not changed Tell me in the comments: who chose your grandmother's husband? And if you could know one thing about the girl who ran, her name, her face, who she married in the end, which would it be? SOURCES Robert Friedmann, "Marriage, Hutterite Practices," Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1957): https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Marriage%2C_Hutterite_Practices "Hutterite Families – Marriage" (citing Hostetler 1974, Peter 1971, Kephart 1976, Ingoldsby 2001): https://family.jrank.org/pages/836/Hutterite-Families-Marriage.html Dora Maendel, "A Hutterian Proposal," Preservings No. 42 (2021): https://www.plettfoundation.org/preservings/archive/42/a-hutterian-proposal/ hutterites.org – Courtship: https://hutterites.org/our-beliefs/courtship/ 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. Accounts differ on when the old practice ended (around 1830 or around 1845). Both are given in the video.