The Molotschna Women's Vote on How to Respond to the Assaults was the women’s first collective attempt to choose a course after years of assaults and the threat that they would be forced either to forgive the accused men or leave their home. Its three-option ballot made the crisis legible as a choice among inaction, resistance, and departure; its deadlock did not settle the question, but set the terms for the debate that followed and ultimately led the women to plan a departure together.

Crisis and constrained choice

The vote took place under an imposed deadline. Since 2005, girls and women in Molotschna Colony had been assaulted at night after being rendered unconscious with an animal anesthetic. Many residents had understood the attacks as the work of ghosts or Satan. The perpetrators were eventually identified as eight men from the colony, some related to the women they had harmed. The revelation made the crisis not an outside threat but one embedded in the community’s own family and social ties.

Molotschna Colony was self-policed. After Salome Friesen attacked one accused man with a scythe and another was killed by male relatives of victims, Peters and the elders called in the police and had the accused taken to the city. The colony’s remaining men then went to post bail, hoping the prisoners could return while awaiting trial. According to the rule Peters announced, the women would then be expected to forgive the men, securing everyone’s place in heaven; women who refused would have to leave for an outside world they did not know. They had only two days to organize their response. The vote therefore addressed more than what to do about the assaults: it confronted the power of the colony’s male authorities to define forgiveness as the price of belonging.

Three choices, made visible

The ballot offered Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, and Leave. Because the women could not read, each option had an illustration. The image for Stay and Fight showed two colony members in a knife duel, a picture others judged too violent but whose meaning was clear. Leave was represented by the rear end of a horse. The illustrations made the choices accessible while also showing how little room the ballot allowed for a response outside its three stark alternatives.

The Do Nothing option had a constituency among women who preferred to leave matters in the hands of the Lord, but those women would not attend the subsequent meeting. Salome Friesen had argued that doing nothing was not truly an option, while allowing women to vote for it could still give them a measure of power. Mejal Loewen challenged Salome’s authority to decide which choices counted as real. Their disagreement exposed an important distinction: the vote offered participation, but the women were still contesting who had the right to frame the decision itself.

A deadlock becomes a process

The vote was deadlocked between Stay and Fight and Leave. The division largely followed family lines: the Friesen women tended to favor staying and fighting, while the Loewens preferred leaving. Yet the convictions in both groups were shifting. The result was not a mandate for either course, nor a final decision to depart. Instead, the women collectively authorized the two families to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the remaining alternatives, decide which was suitable, and choose how to carry it out. They set aside Do Nothing, which most dismissed as an unacceptable answer to the crisis.

The debate was recorded by August Epp, whom Ona Friesen had asked to document the meetings. The women’s illiteracy made his role necessary, but his account also makes clear that recording was not automatic or neutral: he translated their Plautdietsch speech into English and tried to keep pace as they spoke. The ballot’s illustrations and August’s written minutes were two different ways of making the women’s deliberation available—to those taking part and, through the record, to readers beyond the meeting.

From deliberation to departure

The subsequent discussion tested the alternatives rather than simply repeating the ballot. When Mejal asked for disadvantages of leaving to be written down, Salome Friesen answered that there were none. Her position captured the pressure behind the vote: departure meant entering an unfamiliar world, but staying meant returning to a community where the women’s safety and membership were conditional on decisions made by men. Salome’s categorical answer did not erase the practical uncertainty of leaving; it rejected the idea that the women owed the colony continued endurance.

As discussion continued, the women connected their choice to their treatment as servants and commodities, their exclusion from interpreting the Bible, and their inability to read or write in negotiations with male authority. These arguments changed the meaning of Leave. It was not simply movement away from danger, but a refusal to accept the terms on which the colony offered continued belonging. Once the group had settled on departure, Agata Friesen asked whether they should leave after dark, avoiding notice as they passed Chortiza and Hiakjeke colonies. The women agreed. August had procured the co-op safe, dynamite, a world map, a sextant, and practical supplies for the journey, which were packed into Greta Loewen’s buggy. When the women suspected that the Koop boys might be trying to steer them toward the city and the men, they decided to travel north instead.

The vote’s significance lies in both its unresolved result and its practical consequence. A split ballot forced the women to deliberate across the Friesen–Loewen divide rather than disguise disagreement as consensus. The process turned a threatened expulsion into a decision the women could claim as their own: not a choice made freely of danger or uncertainty, but a collective plan formed under pressure, with the women determining that leaving was preferable to submission on the colony’s terms.