Sue Bender, whose bestselling book Plain and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish (1989), became "one of the go-to texts of an anti-materialist movement of the 1990s known as voluntary simplicity," died on August 3, the New York Times reported, adding that her death was not widely reported at the time. She was 91.
In the 1980s, Bender's hectic life included working as a family therapist and a ceramist, along with being a wife and mother of two sons. In an art gallery, she "came across traditional Amish dolls without faces, and in their stripped-down, personality-effacing forms she felt a powerful challenge to her way of life," the Times wrote.
She decided she would try to live among the Amish, and eventually found two farm families, in Iowa and Ohio, who agreed to let her live and work with them over the course of two summers. Bender "wrestled with the tension between being a woman who hated housework and defined herself by her artwork and professional achievements, and her desire to internalize the Amish sense of identity that came from community, godliness, and manual labor," the Times noted.
"Every step was done with care," she wrote. "The women moved through the day unhurried. There was no rushing to finish so they could get on to the 'important things.' For them it was all important."
Writing Plain and Simple took Bender five years. Despite tepid initial reviews, the book eventually found its audience, hitting the New York Times paperback bestseller list in 1992. She wrote two follow-ups: Everyday Sacred (1995), a journal of lessons from various teachers, and Stretching Lessons (2001), about spiritual growth.
Although Bender had hoped that living among the Amish would change her, she found it was not easy to integrate their values into her life in California. Her time with them did, however, have an effect on her art. The Times observed that her early ceramics "were nonfunctional; she made what she called 'precious objects' intended to be shown in a gallery or displayed in a home.... But after she returned from Amish country, where women made handsome quilts and dolls but did not consider themselves artists," she brought what she had learned from the Amish into her life.
"Now, for the first time," she wrote, "I began to make practical ceramics that our family could use every day," like dishes, bowls, and plates.