Illiteracy Among Women in Molotschna

Illiteracy Among Women in Molotschna is not merely an absence of reading and writing; it shapes who can preserve the women’s decisions, interpret their faith, and speak with authority about their circumstances. During the women’s meetings, speech must pass through a literate male recorder, while the women themselves work to make collective deliberation and future access to knowledge possible.

Recording the Meetings

August Epp is appointed to record the meetings because the women cannot write the minutes themselves. At Ona Friesen’s request, he undertakes not simply to take notes but to create a document about the gatherings. The arrangement gives the women a written record, but also makes their testimony dependent on someone who can translate and write it. August explains that the women speak Plautdietsch, their only language, and that he must quickly translate their words into English in his mind before recording them. The language is unwritten, and the written account therefore passes through both a language shift and a male intermediary.

The women also have no easy way to consult the record once it is made. When they consider the available responses to the attacks, each option is accompanied by an illustration because the women cannot read. Neitje Friesen draws the illustrations; the option of doing nothing is represented by an empty horizon. The images make the choices available for discussion without written descriptions, but they also show how literacy determines the form in which information can circulate among the group.

Limits on Knowledge and Authority

The barriers extend beyond the meeting’s paperwork. Agata Friesen points out that if the women leave Molotschna, they cannot read or write, do not speak the country’s language, and have domestic skills that may not be useful elsewhere. She also notes that they have no world map. These limitations make departure a practical as well as political question: the women must decide how they could live and support themselves in a world they have had little opportunity to learn about.

Literacy also bears on the authority to interpret scripture. Salome Friesen identifies the men’s interpretation of the Bible as something handed down to women, and Ona states that their inability to read or write puts them at a disadvantage in any negotiation over biblical meaning. Their exclusion is thus not simply from books, but from a means of checking, contesting, or forming interpretations independently. Salome’s broader argument is that women are treated as servants and commodities rather than as full members of the colony; restricted access to written knowledge is one part of that unequal order.

The women’s embodied knowledge is set against official explanations. For years, women and girls in Molotschna have been attacked at night after being rendered unconscious with an animal anesthetic. Many in the colony believed the assaults were the work of ghosts or Satan; the perpetrators were eventually identified as eight men from the colony, including close relatives of women. Because the women were unconscious during the attacks, the bishop and elders decide that they do not require counseling. Ona questions what the women can be expected to forgive if they are told they need no counseling because they were not conscious. Her challenge exposes a gap between the authorities’ claims and the women’s need to understand what has happened to them. Restricted access to literacy and interpretation compounds the difficulty of having their knowledge and questions recognized.

A Program for Learning

Against these limits, Ona proposes a different arrangement for the colony. Men and women would make decisions collectively; women would be allowed to think; girls would learn to read and write; and the schoolhouse would display a world map so that the community could understand its place in the world. She also proposes that the women create a new religion developed from the old one and centered on love. These are proposals, not changes already achieved, but they connect literacy to collective authority, education, and religious life rather than treating it as an isolated skill.

The meeting’s record becomes part of that aspiration. Ona gives August a large sheet of brown paper used for packaging cheese and meat and suggests that he write lists of the advantages and disadvantages of the women’s options on it. She knows the women cannot read what he writes, yet wants the sheet kept in the hayloft as an artifact for others to discover. The plan distinguishes between a document’s immediate use and its future audience: even unreadable to the women who commissioned it, the written list could preserve evidence that they debated their choices.

The Record and Its Unresolved Tension

The tension returns at the end of the account. As he is leaving, August runs back to the table, gathers his notebooks and minutes, and asks Salome to give them to Ona. Salome points out that Ona cannot read them. The gesture acknowledges the value August places on preserving the record, while Salome’s response insists on the continuing divide between written testimony and the women’s access to it.

That divide does not mean the women have no intellectual or political agency. They debate the options, identify the limits imposed on them, question the elders’ reasoning, and imagine education as part of a transformed community. But their words must be translated and written by another person, and their proposed changes remain unrealized within the meetings. Illiteracy therefore functions in the narrative both as a concrete obstacle and as a measure of whose knowledge can become durable, authoritative, and available to others.