Mennonite Dress Code for Women: What They Wear, Which Groups Keep It, and Why

Most Mennonite women today dress like their neighbours. A dress code survives in the conservative, Old Order and Holdeman churches, where women wear long dresses, a prayer covering over uncut hair, and no jewellery or make-up. Women in the Old Colony churches of Latin America wear dark dresses and kerchiefs, and Russian-German congregations in Germany keep head coverings.

The Mennonites’ own Third Way website, which speaks from the tradition of Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada, puts the change simply: “Women used to wear coverings or prayer veils on their heads all the time and clothing was very simple. However, today only the most conservative Mennonites do this; most Mennonites would look like anyone else you would meet on the street.” In a way the story has come round. The first Anabaptists dressed so like everyone else that the authorities could not pick them out of a crowd. The plain clothes came later, and how a woman should dress before God is a question each of these churches still answers from the same Bible.

Which Mennonites still keep a dress code?

Only a minority, and they differ among themselves. The Mennonites and their Anabaptist cousins form about sixty separate organized groups, dressed in everything from ordinary modern clothes to bonnets. In the main Mennonite Church in North America, plain clothing “declined rapidly” after the 1950s, as the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO), the movement’s own reference work, describes it. In the eastern United States most of its congregations dropped their dress rules in the 1960s and 1970s. Churches that wanted to keep them left and formed new conservative bodies, such as the Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonite Church.

Across the world, plain dress is rarer still. Mennonite World Conference, in figures published in 2026, counts 2.03 million baptized believers in the Mennonite and related churches, and “about two-thirds of the baptized believers are African, Asian or Latin American.” Most of them dress as people in their own countries do. When the Mennonite church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo marked its hundredth year in 2012, its Mille Voix choir sang in shirts and long dresses sewn from bright pink cloth printed with white doves.

Within each group the details change from one congregation to the next, and the rules are often unwritten. In the most conservative groups, GAMEO says, “most of the clothing regulations have never been written out or specified. The power of custom suffices.”

What is a Mennonite cape dress?

A long dress with an extra layer of cloth, the cape, over the bodice. In GAMEO’s words: “The cape on women’s dresses covers the front and back of the bodice. The older style comes to a point in the back. This item is derived from the three-cornered kerchief.” The sleeves are long, the dress is long, and the cut is plain. Some groups have required homemade rather than store-bought clothes.

The Amish wear a dress of the same family, with a cape and an apron, in solid colours only. Old Order Mennonite dresses are “typically made of printed fabric.” Reformed Mennonite women dress in grey, with a three-cornered cape, an apron and a large grey bonnet.

Is a Mennonite bonnet the same as a prayer covering?

No. The prayer covering is a small, light cap of fine fabric, usually white, pinned over long hair that is put up; Pennsylvania Mennonites long called it simply the cap or the covering. It was once almost always tied with strings, and by the 1950s the strings were kept mainly in the most conservative churches. By then women in the eastern churches were taught to wear the covering all day. Elsewhere they wore it for worship and prayer, and sometimes at the table.

The bonnet is for going out, and it is larger than the covering. Mennonite women in the eastern United States wore one once called a Quaker bonnet, because the Pennsylvania Quakers took up the style around 1800. Among the Amish, bonnets and shawls are the approved garments for going out. The Amish call the covering the kapp, and their bonnet, larger and usually black, goes over the kapp, usually outdoors. Conservative Mennonite groups differ on the bonnet, but every one of them requires the covering.

The names change from group to group. Holdeman Mennonite women, the Third Way glossary says, pin their uncut hair under a small black fitted bonnet and cover their heads with black rectangular scarves for church. In the Mennonite groups that came from Russia, the covering was a kerchief or head shawl, usually black, rather than a cap.

Why do Mennonite women cover their heads and keep their hair long?

Because of what Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. “But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven,” he says, and a few verses later, “But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering” (1 Corinthians 11:5, 15). Mennonites who keep the covering take the passage as a standing instruction for every Christian woman. Women in these churches do not cut their hair; they often part it in the middle and pin it up under the covering. In one Old Colony family in Bolivia, the mother and her daughters wash and braid one another’s hair every Saturday night.

For most of Mennonite history the covering needed little defence. Nearly all Christian women in Europe and North America covered their heads in church, and Mennonites wrote very little about it; the 1632 Dordrecht Confession, which some conservative churches still use, does not mention it. Only when other Protestant women stopped wearing coverings did Mennonite leaders begin to write more. In 1921 the Mennonite Church (MC), one of the main North American Mennonite bodies, named the covering an ordinance in its Christian Fundamentals, teaching “that Christian women praying or prophesying should have their heads covered,” and that church’s confession of 1963 kept the teaching.

Since then most members of the Mennonite Church (MC) have read the passage another way. GAMEO’s 1989 account describes the shift: the passage came to be “viewed as teaching a principle, but having been a cultural accommodation to the Corinthian church, and not a binding practice for all times.” Conservative churches hold firmly to the older reading. A booklet from Rod and Staff, a conservative publisher in Kentucky, argues that once the covering goes, every other mark of separation from the world will follow. Both sides open the same eleventh chapter of First Corinthians. What divides them is whether its instruction was for Corinth or for every church, the same question that divides other churches over the Christian head covering.

What Bible verses do Mennonites give for plain dress?

Two passages on adornment come first. Paul asks “that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works” (1 Timothy 2:9-10). Peter looks past the clothes to the woman wearing them: “Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price” (1 Peter 3:3-4). From these come the rules against jewellery, wedding rings included, and against make-up.

The second ground is nonconformity: “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). A dress that ignores fashion is a way of not being conformed that anyone can see. The third is the line between men’s and women’s clothing, which is why conservative women wear dresses and skirts rather than trousers: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment” (Deuteronomy 22:5).

Yet the first Anabaptists of the 1520s had no uniform at all. They wore the ordinary clothes of the common people, only plainer, and in the Netherlands accounts from 1550 to 1572 tell of believers the authorities could not pick out of a crowd. Rules came a generation later. A discipline adopted at Strasbourg in 1568 already speaks of “our regulation concerning apparel” and rules: “Tailors and seamstresses shall hold to the plain and simple style and shall make nothing at all for pride’s sake.” The distinctive garb came later still, as the stricter groups kept the plain styles of one century while the world’s fashions moved on. Some groups then forbade bright or light colours and required black or grey. The world moved; they stood still, and standing still made them stand out.

What do Mennonite women wear in Germany and the Netherlands?

In the old Mennonite churches of the Netherlands and Germany, ordinary clothes. Dutch Mennonites, the Doopsgezinden, gave up their dress rules long ago; one congregation, Balk in Friesland, kept some until the middle of the nineteenth century. The last European Mennonite women to wear a prayer covering, a black lace kerchief, belonged to the Badischer Verband in southern Germany, and the custom faded there in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Today the Doopsgezinden ordain women, and the first woman minister in the Netherlands was one of theirs. When European Mennonites met in Switzerland in 2012, many came in jeans and T-shirts.

Germany also has a second Mennonite world, far more conservative. Since the 1970s, Mennonites and related Anabaptists from the former Soviet Union have settled there in large numbers and founded hundreds of congregations. Ben Goossen, reporting for Mennonite World Review in 2014, estimated that Germany’s Anabaptist population had grown from a few thousand members to as many as 100,000. In a congregation near Heidelberg he found men and women seated on opposite sides of the sanctuary. He also noted that liberal Germans call both the head coverings of conservative Mennonite women and Muslim women’s headscarves signs of oppression. Most of these churches belong to no national Mennonite conference, and they disagree among themselves on matters of conduct and church discipline.

What do Mennonite women wear in Mexico, Belize, Bolivia and Paraguay?

The Mennonite colonies of Latin America were founded by Low German–speaking Mennonites from Canada. In the 1920s about 8,000 of them left Manitoba and Saskatchewan for Mexico and Paraguay, and their descendants later spread to Belize, Bolivia, Argentina and other parts of the continent. The historian Royden Loewen, in Village Among Nations (2013), counts this transnational community at about 250,000 people.

In the Old Colony church a woman’s clothes tell you whether she is a member and whether she is married. In northern Mexico, where the researcher Doreen Klassen interviewed Mennonite women in 1994, dark clothing marked a member of the Old Colony church and married women wore kerchiefs; in earlier decades, lighter clothing and white kerchiefs had marked a woman as single. On the colonies of Bolivia, women pay a skilled neighbour to embroider the kerchiefs they wear to church and when they go out, and daughters can date an old photograph of their mother by the narrow pleats on her dress. Writing in the 1950s about the same family of churches in Manitoba, GAMEO noted that the black kerchief women wore to worship was a tradition the average member would not tie to any Bible teaching on the covering.

Pink cloth printed with doves in the Congo, an embroidered kerchief in Bolivia, jeans in Switzerland: the clothes could hardly differ more. The adorning Peter asks for is the same in every one of these churches, “the hidden man of the heart”.

Related reading

• How Do Amish and Mennonite Clothing Choices Reflect Their Faith?
• Amish vs Mennonite: Same Anabaptist Roots, Different Ways of Living
• 13 Bible Verses About Modesty
• Is Cutting Your Hair a Sin? For Most Christians, No
• How to Identify if an Amish or Mennonite Woman is Married
• Bedtime Attire: A Look into What Mennonites and Amish Wear to Bed