Norm of Male Authority and Female Submission

The norm of male authority and female submission in the Molotschna Colony is a system of power sustained through family roles, religious interpretation, community discipline, and restrictions on women’s knowledge. It is not presented simply as a single command: its force lies in the linked practices that let men direct women’s lives, explain scripture on their behalf, and determine the consequences of dissent. The women’s meetings make those practices visible, then test whether faith requires obedience to them or can support a different order.

Authority in Family and Community

The colony’s hierarchy reaches into ordinary family life as well as formal leadership. Salome Friesen describes women as expected to serve silently and obey, while men and even fourteen-year-old boys may issue orders and help determine women’s fates. Boys are also expected to interpret the Bible, lead worship, and participate in decisions about excommunication and burial. Salome’s account makes submission more than a private marital expectation: it is a social arrangement that gives males authority across domestic, religious, and communal settings. The narrator explains that the word patriarchy is an interpretive translation of Salome’s less familiar curse, rather than the word Salome herself used.

The threat of violence within marriage gives that arrangement immediate consequences. When Ona Friesen asks Mariche Loewen whether she truly wants to stay without fighting, she points to Mariche’s difficulty standing up to Klaas Loewen’s aggression, protecting her children, or getting out of danger. Mariche rejects Ona’s authority to judge her as a wife and mother. Their confrontation shows how the norm can constrain women’s choices while also making those choices painful to discuss among women: resistance is not an abstract principle when family safety and personal judgment are at stake.

Control of Religious Knowledge

Restricted literacy helps preserve male authority over religious meaning. Salome argues that women cannot independently verify what the Bible says because they cannot read it, and that their sense of an obligation to submit to husbands rests on what husbands have told them the Bible commands. She tests that dependence with a deliberately stark hypothetical: if a husband claimed scripture authorized him to strike his wife or punish a child, would she accept his account? The point is not that such a claim has been established as doctrine, but that women are placed at a disadvantage when they cannot consult the text for themselves.

Salome identifies the problem more precisely as the male interpretation of the Bible being handed down to women. Ona agrees that inability to read or write weakens women’s position in any disagreement about interpretation. Their exchange treats literacy as a source of authority, not merely a practical skill: access to words determines who can examine a religious claim, contest it, and speak as an interpreter rather than a recipient. The women’s argument therefore challenges not only particular male decisions but also the process by which those decisions acquire religious legitimacy.

Authority During the Assault Crisis

The attacks expose the consequences of a system in which women have little control over their safety or over the official account of their experience. For years, girls and women were made unconscious at night with an animal anesthetic, and many in the colony understood the assaults as supernatural punishment. The discovery that eight men from Molotschna were responsible replaced that explanation with evidence of human perpetrators, many connected to their victims as relatives. Leisl Neustadter stayed awake until she caught Gerhard Schellenberg entering her bedroom with a jug of the spray; she and her adult daughter restrained him, and he identified the other seven men.

The response also reveals competing forms of authority. Molotschna is self-policed. After Salome attacks one accused man with a scythe and another is killed by angry male relatives, Peters and the elders call the police to arrest the accused men, ostensibly for their own protection. The men are taken to the city, while other men from the colony go there to post bail so the accused may return pending trial. Community leadership thus determines discipline and initially manages the crisis, but police and the courts enter the process as another source of authority. The women, meanwhile, face a religiously framed ultimatum: forgive the men when they return or leave the colony. Peters gives them only two days to organize their response. The demand makes submission operate through both spiritual consequence and threatened exclusion.

Ona questions the logic of requiring forgiveness when women were unconscious during the attacks and were denied counseling on that basis. She asks what they can be obliged to forgive if they were unable to understand what happened. Her reasoning draws attention to a contradiction: women are told they lack knowledge of the assault, yet are expected to make a decisive moral response to it. Ona also argues that the conditions making the attacks possible were created and ordained by men, including the elders and Peters. The women’s inquiry shifts responsibility from isolated offenders alone toward the governing circumstances that permitted the violence and shaped its interpretation.

Faith as a Ground for Resistance

The women do not frame their challenge as a simple rejection of religion. Agata Friesen argues that pacifism is central to Mennonite faith and that remaining in Molotschna could place the women on a path toward further violence, whether committed by them or against them. Mariche Loewen counters that staying and fighting might eventually secure peace for their children and preserve the colony’s separation from the outside world. Agata answers that no tenet requires the women to remain apart from the world alongside men who provoke violent thoughts and actions.

Ona and Agata further argue that leaving may better uphold pacifism, love, forgiveness, and care for children. In Agata’s account, forgiveness offered under pressure would not be genuine; departure would allow the women to teach their children those values without subordinating them to their fathers’ expectations. This argument turns religious duty away from automatic submission to male authority and toward a moral judgment the women make together. It also makes the decision to leave a claim about how faith should be practiced, not merely where the women should live.

Collective Alternatives and Significance

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. She also imagines a religion developed from the old one but focused on love. These proposals answer the existing hierarchy point by point. Shared decisions challenge male control; literacy gives girls access to knowledge; and a wider view of the world contests the isolation through which the colony’s rules are maintained.

The women also consider how their choices affect their sons. Agata describes their decision to guide the boys in accordance with their faith and their understanding of love and peace as both maternal and intellectual. She rejects the idea that exercising this responsibility is necessarily revolutionary: the women are their children’s mothers, and their instincts, reasoning, and faith converge in deciding what is best for them. In this way, maternal authority becomes an alternative basis for action, rather than a demand that women reproduce the fathers’ expectations.

The norm matters because it shapes more than who gives orders. It governs whose account is trusted, who can interpret scripture, who decides how harm will be answered, and which people may remain within the community. As the women debate these questions, they expose authority as something maintained by institutions and habits but also open to challenge. Their proposed departure and collective governance make visible a possibility the prevailing order denies: women acting as interpreters of faith, makers of decisions, and responsible participants in the future of their children.