Do Nothing · Stay and Fight · Leave

Do Nothing / Stay and Fight / Leave names the three choices placed before the women of Molotschna Colony after years of attacks and an ultimatum from the colony’s authorities. The ballot turns a crisis shaped by violence, restricted knowledge, and threatened expulsion into a decision the women must make together. Its apparent simplicity conceals a sharp question: whether safety and dignity can be secured by remaining under the existing order, or whether they require leaving it behind.

A choice imposed by the crisis

Since 2005, girls and women in Molotschna Colony had been attacked at night and awakened without understanding what had happened. Many people in the colony attributed the attacks to ghosts or Satan, as punishment for sin. The explanation changed when eight assailants were identified as men from the colony, including close male relatives of victims. The revelation exposed the danger within the community rather than outside it, and made the women’s treatment by its authorities part of the crisis itself.

The men were taken to the city and imprisoned after an earlier attempt to confine them locally was judged unsafe. Most of the remaining men went to seek bail so that the accused could return to Molotschna while awaiting trial. Peters and the elders then made forgiveness a condition of the women’s continued place in the colony: if the women did not forgive the accused, they would have to leave for an outside world they knew little about. They had only two days to organize a response. The ballot’s options were therefore not abstract positions. Each carried consequences for safety, belonging, and the women’s ability to decide what should happen to them.

Three options, pictured and contested

The women voted the previous day, but the ballot had no written descriptions. Because they could not read, each option was accompanied by an illustration made by Neitje Friesen. Stay and Fight appeared as two people engaged in a knife duel; the image was considered too violent, though its meaning was understood. Leave was represented by the rear of a horse, an image that also raised the possibility of watching others depart. The ballot made the alternatives visible without resolving what either would demand in practice.

The result was a deadlock between Stay and Fight and Leave. The Friesen women predominantly favored remaining and resisting; the Loewen women leaned toward departure. The positions were not fixed, and convictions shifted on both sides. Some women had voted to do nothing and leave matters in the Lord’s hands, but they were not attending the later debate. Salome Friesen argued that Do Nothing was not genuinely available as a course of action, while accepting that allowing women to vote for it could itself be empowering. Mejal Loewen pushed back against Salome’s authority to define which options counted as real. Their disagreement shows that the ballot was also a dispute over who could name the choices and speak for the group.

With little time, the women collectively authorized the Friesen and Loewen families to weigh the options, set aside Do Nothing, and decide which course to take and how to carry it out. The debate became a practical process of listing advantages and disadvantages, rather than a vote detached from the circumstances of the women’s lives. When the group began considering Stay and Fight, Ona Friesen proposed that its heading be written down, followed by a section for its pros. The women spoke over one another, requiring August Epp to ask them to take turns so he could understand and record their contributions. The written list made disagreement legible, but it also depended on a man able to translate and write what the women said.

The ballot as a dispute over power and knowledge

The options expose the limits of the colony’s promise of belonging. Salome Friesen argues that women are treated not as members but as commodities: men and boys are permitted to direct women’s lives, decide their fate in questions of excommunication, interpret scripture, lead worship, and punish them. Her account connects the ballot to a broader structure in which women are expected to obey while being denied authority over the rules that govern them. The choice to leave thus concerns more than physical movement; it challenges the claim that the women’s place in the colony is theirs to lose only by failing to forgive.

Ona Friesen makes the conflict over forgiveness a conflict over knowledge. If the bishop and elders say the women do not need counselling because they were unconscious during the attacks, she asks what they can be required or able to forgive when they cannot understand what happened. She extends the question to the women’s ignorance of the outside world: not knowing that they are imprisoned cannot itself prove that they are free. Her argument refuses to treat enforced unknowing as consent or as evidence that no harm has occurred.

The same struggle appears in the discussion of the Bible. Salome identifies male interpretation, passed down to women, as more than a gap in their knowledge. Ona points out that women’s inability to read or write leaves them at a disadvantage in any negotiation about scripture’s meaning. The ballot, illustrated because its voters cannot read, therefore operates inside the very inequality it asks them to confront. The women can reason together and challenge authority, but access to the written record and to accepted interpretations remains unequal.

From decision to departure

As the debate develops, Salome Friesen gives the Leave option an uncompromising answer: she can identify no disadvantage to leaving. She is holding Miep, and the meeting’s account imagines mother and child crossing fields, a dry riverbed, and the border without turning back. That image turns a ballot mark into a prospective journey, but the women’s departure is not treated as a simple escape from uncertainty. They have little knowledge of the world beyond the colony and must make the choice under pressure, with the danger of being stopped or reported still present.

The deliberation ends in a concrete collective decision. Agata Friesen asks whether the women agree to leave after dark, so that they will not be seen passing Chortiza Colony and Hiakjeke Colony. The women nod. The choice has moved from the ballot’s three symbols to a time and a way of traveling together. When August Epp reports that he has obtained the cooperative safe, dynamite, and a world map, he also describes packing onions, soap, and pieces of wood for traction or kindling. The map is wrapped around cheese in brown paper; the safe and supplies are hidden in Greta Loewen’s buggy. The preparations give material form to the decision: departure requires provisions, concealment, transport, and shared coordination, not conviction alone.

That coordination is tested when the women discuss the Koop brothers. Agata reasons that they may be waiting to tell the men once the women move, or to prevent the departure themselves. A reported fire to the north could be an attempt to drive the women south, toward the city and the men; the group rejects that proposed direction and plans instead to head north, away from them. In this way, Leave ceases to mean merely choosing the horse on Neitje Friesen’s ballot. It becomes a collective refusal to let others dictate the women’s route, their account of what happened, or the conditions under which they may remain together.