Ona Friesen—Agata Friesen

Ona Friesen and Agata Friesen are mother and daughter who reason together in the women’s meetings about how to answer violence without abandoning their faith. Their relationship becomes especially consequential when Ona’s argument for distance and forgiveness is taken up by Agata and made into a case for leaving. The exchange is not a simple transfer of authority from mother to daughter: Ona supplies an ethical insight, and Agata develops it into a collective decision about protecting children and living by Mennonite commitments.

Identity and Family Context

The meetings place the relationship within a community where women have little access to formal power and are unable to read the Bible for themselves. Their debate therefore concerns more than a family choice. It unfolds among women trying to interpret their faith and decide how to act when the colony’s usual authorities and expectations cannot provide safety. Ona and Agata participate in that deliberation as individuals, but their mother-daughter bond gives the question of children’s safety a particular family resonance.

Ona’s circumstances are sharply constrained. She is pregnant after the assaults in Molotschna, and the elders have judged her Narfa to leave her incapable of reasoning. The colony has also considered giving her unborn child to another family to raise. These facts form part of the world in which Agata and Ona discuss what the women owe to themselves, their children, and their faith. The record does not present Agata speaking directly about Ona’s pregnancy or the proposed placement of the child, so their debate should not be mistaken for a recorded private exchange about those matters. Instead, the personal vulnerability surrounding Ona makes the wider argument about protection and women’s judgment especially consequential.

A Shared Argument About Leaving

Agata’s case against staying begins with pacifism. In her view, remaining in Molotschna would risk placing the women in a direct encounter with further violence, whether they became its targets or answered it themselves. That prospect would make the colony a battleground and compromise the faith’s central commitment to nonviolence. Mejal accepts the force of this reasoning, and Agata’s religious argument helps make departure intelligible not as a rejection of Mennonite faith but as a way to practice it.

Ona approaches the decision through forgiveness and the condition of the soul. She argues that forgiveness is meaningless if it is not heartfelt, and that the women must seek it within themselves rather than comply with what Peters or anyone else expects. She connects peace of soul with the presence of God within a person, and argues that understanding the men’s actions can make compassion possible. Her position does not require the women to remain near the men: forgiveness, pity, and love can be considered from a distance, even if the men never ask for forgiveness or continue to deny responsibility.

Agata recognizes the force of this distinction. She reframes Ona’s emphasis on distance as a reason the women must leave, describing departure as a way to gain perspective while remaining rational, loving, and obedient to their faith. In this exchange, Agata does not silence or correct her daughter’s insight. She gives it a collective form: leaving can create the distance necessary for forgiveness without exposing the women to a situation in which their response might become coerced or retaliatory.

Maternal Duty and Religious Authority

Agata extends the argument from the women’s own safety to the children they are responsible for protecting. She says their duty is to safeguard God’s creatures, including themselves and their children, and to bear witness to pacifism, love, and forgiveness. Staying would risk war with their attackers and could make any forgiveness forced rather than genuine. Leaving, by contrast, would allow the women to teach their children those values through their actions, even when the children’s fathers expect something different.

That appeal to maternal responsibility is not presented as separate from thought or faith. Later, when Ona calls the women’s intention to influence their sons revolutionary, Agata describes it as instinct joined with intellect and soul: mothers deciding together what is best for their children according to their understanding of love, peace, and the path to heaven. She asks why such a decision should be called revolutionary when it follows the women’s own account of their religious obligations. Her response gives maternal care intellectual and spiritual standing in a community where women’s reasoning is often discounted.

The discussion also questions who has the authority to interpret scripture. Salome points out that the women cannot read the Bible and that their belief that wives must submit to husbands rests on what husbands have told them the Bible commands. This matters to Ona and Agata’s shared deliberation because the women are not simply choosing between obedience and disobedience. They are examining how male authority has shaped what counts as religious obedience, then judging their options against the faith’s stated commitments to peace and care.

Relationship and Significance

The strongest evidence of their relationship is a pattern of intellectual recognition: Ona advances the possibility that distance can make genuine forgiveness attainable, and Agata develops that reasoning into a duty to leave. The daughter’s contribution is not merely personal testimony, nor is the mother’s response only reassurance. Together, their exchange helps make departure both an ethical alternative to retaliation and a means of teaching the next generation.

Their bond also illuminates the difference between maternal authority and patriarchal authority. Agata does not claim that a mother’s instinct alone settles the decision; she joins it to collective deliberation, religious principle, and the women’s own reasoning. Ona, in turn, is treated as a thinker whose account can alter the direction of the discussion. The relationship thus stands within the larger struggle over who may interpret faith and decide what protects children: the women’s deliberating community or the men who have traditionally defined obedience for them.