Agata Friesen

Agata Friesen is the eldest of the Friesen women, though she was born a Loewen, and the mother of Ona Friesen and Salome Friesen. In the women’s hayloft meeting, she becomes one of the clearest interpreters of what their faith demands amid the crisis in Molotschna. Her conclusion is that leaving is not a retreat from religious duty: it is the course that best protects their children, their commitment to peace, and the possibility of forgiveness freely given.

Identity and Place in the Meeting

Agata’s authority rests on age, kinship, faith, and practical care rather than on formal office. She is a mother and grandmother among the women making a decision that will divide families and determine where their children can live. The meeting itself is held in a hayloft, away from the crowd of children in the women’s kitchens. Its improvised furniture and shared work give Agata’s arguments a communal setting: this is not a private pronouncement, but a decision the women must make together.

At the opening of the gathering, Agata proposes that the women wash one another’s feet. Each washes the feet of the person seated to her right, an act that takes time and represents service to one another. Agata connects the gesture to Jesus washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. The ritual establishes a model of authority based on service and mutual obligation, a contrast to the male leadership that has left the women facing the consequences of the assaults and a choice between forgiveness and exile.

Agata is also shown as warm and readily amused. When Greta compares the women’s predicament to horses that run from danger, Agata laughs and agrees that women are not animals. Greta counters that they have been preyed upon like animals and may need to respond by running. Their exchange exposes a central disagreement: whether leaving can be understood as a human choice consistent with the women’s values, rather than as a merely instinctive flight.

Family, Vulnerability, and Care

The crisis is personal for Agata as well as communal. Her granddaughter Miep, named after Agata, is among the children who have been attacked. When the meeting turns to the specific circumstances of Miep’s experience, Agata becomes very still and mouths a prayer or possibly a verse from Psalms. The contrast with her usual laughter shows how the subject affects her without making her response a speech: in this moment, silence and prayer register the weight of a grandmother’s concern.

Salome’s attempt to attack the men held by the colony with a scythe followed her discovery that Miep had been attacked repeatedly. The incident helped prompt Peters and the elders to call the police and take the accused men to the city, ostensibly to protect them from further harm. The remaining men then went to post bail, hoping the accused could return before trial. Under the arrangement described by Peters, the women would be expected to forgive them; refusal would mean leaving the colony. Agata’s family has therefore been drawn into a decision shaped by both the harm done to a child and the community’s control over what happens next.

Ona’s circumstances further reveal the unequal burdens the women carry. Pregnant after an assault, she faces the elders’ judgment that her condition has made her incapable of reason, while her unborn child is expected to be placed with another family. Agata’s arguments later make the protection of women and children central to the decision to leave. She does not treat the women as interchangeable: the choice bears differently on mothers, children, and those whose standing in the colony has already been diminished.

Pacifism as a Reason to Leave

Agata’s decisive argument begins from religious commitment, not from its rejection. She says she has considered the qualities described in Philippians—what is good, just, pure, and excellent—and has arrived at pacifism. In her reasoning, any violence is unjustifiable. If the women remain in Molotschna, they knowingly place themselves in a situation where violence may be done to them or committed by them. Staying could turn the colony into a battlefield and make the women participants in a conflict that contradicts Mennonite faith.

She develops this point by distinguishing genuine forgiveness from forgiveness imposed as the price of belonging. The women are being told that they must forgive the accused men when they return; otherwise, they will have to leave for an outside world they do not know. Agata argues that forgiveness offered under that pressure would not be genuine. By leaving, the women can avoid a confrontation that risks violence and seek to uphold pacifism, love, and forgiveness without making their faith an instrument of compulsion.

Her account of duty also shifts the emphasis from obedience to protection. Agata identifies the women’s duty as care for the creatures God has made, including themselves and their children, and as bearing witness to their faith. Leaving, she argues, can teach the children that peace, love, and forgiveness matter more than the expectations of their fathers. The choice is thus both an immediate response to danger and an act of religious instruction: the women’s conduct will show the next generation what their professed values require.

Authority, Interpretation, and Collective Judgment

Agata’s position takes shape within a community where women cannot independently read the Bible. Salome points out that the women do not know exactly what scripture says and have been told by their husbands that it requires wives to submit. She challenges the assumption that male interpretations should settle what the women are permitted to do. Agata’s own reasoning likewise treats faith as something the women must consider and enact, rather than simply receive as an order from men.

When Ona calls the plan to influence their sons revolutionary, Agata resists presenting it as a break with their identity. She describes the decision as maternal: the women are their sons’ mothers, and have reached a collective judgment about what is best for them according to their faith and their understanding of love and peace. She connects instinct with intellect and souls, insisting that maternal care and considered ethical judgment can work together. Her argument makes collective decision-making an expression of responsibility, not a departure from it.

This approach also informs her response to the children who may not join the departure. Agata says boys who refuse to leave can remain in the care of the Do Nothing women and their fathers. When Cornelius cannot come because his mother belongs to that group, Agata reassures Autje and Neitje that he might yet change his mind and join them elsewhere. Her reassurance acknowledges the pain of separation without claiming that the women can decide for every family.

Decision and Narrative Significance

Agata helps bring the debate to its practical conclusion. After Mejal and Earnest Thiessen return to Earnest’s house, Agata watches them from the window; the narrator reads the moment as a possible final goodbye to Earnest. She then turns to the women and asks whether they agree to leave that night after dark, so they will not be seen passing Chortiza Colony and Hiakjeke Colony. The women nod. The departure is no longer only a theological proposition: it has a time and a measure of secrecy.

Agata’s role is not to erase uncertainty but to give the women a religious language in which action becomes possible. She holds together foot-washing and departure, maternal attachment and collective judgment, forgiveness and refusal of coercion. Her reasoning recasts leaving as a disciplined practice of nonviolence: the women seek to protect themselves and their children while refusing to make either violence or forced forgiveness the price of remaining in Molotschna.