The women’s manifesto

The women’s manifesto is the shared ethical and political platform that emerges from the women’s meetings in Molotschna Colony. Its three aims—protecting children, remaining steadfast in faith, and thinking—turn a crisis into a collective statement of what the women believe they are entitled to pursue. The manifesto matters not as a finished document but as a change in who may name the problem, interpret religious duty, and decide what the community’s future should be.

Crisis and the need for a common frame

The meetings begin in response to years of assaults on women and girls in Molotschna Colony. The attacks had been attributed by many in the colony to ghosts or Satan and understood as punishment for sin; the later discovery that eight men from the colony were responsible transformed that explanation into a crisis of authority as well as safety. Many of the accused men were close relatives of women they had harmed. The women must consider their response while the remaining men have gone to the city to post bail, hoping the accused can return to the colony while awaiting trial.

The women face a choice presented as both urgent and consequential. Peters says that if the women do not forgive the men, they will have to leave for an outside world they know nothing about; they have only two days to organize their response. The ballot offers three alternatives: Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, or Leave. The manifesto develops within this constrained choice, but it also changes its terms. Instead of treating forgiveness or departure as decisions for male leaders to define, the women ask what they themselves owe their children, their faith, and their own capacity to understand.

Three aims become a manifesto

Mariche gives the emerging platform its clearest form. She says the women want their children to be safe, want to remain steadfast in their faith, and want to think. Her statement comes as she is crying softly and struggling to speak, but its structure is plain: safety, faith, and thought are presented together as shared claims, not competing privileges. The other women respond with approval. Agata praises the statement, Greta raises her arms, and the older women celebrate; Salome and Mejal smile.

Ona recognizes the significance of what has been said and calls it the beginning of a new era and their manifesto. The word marks a change in scale: a discussion among women has become a declaration of common principles. Yet the platform is not portrayed as a polished text or a completed political program. It is worked out through conversation, disagreement, clarification, and the participants’ effort to say what they mean. Agata later asks whether they can agree that their purposes are to protect their children, keep their faith, and think, while setting aside the question of whether they would die for their cause. The manifesto’s strength lies in this deliberate focus on immediate obligations rather than heroic or abstract claims.

Leaving as an expression of faith

The women’s decision to leave is argued from within their religious commitments, not simply as a rejection of them. Agata reasons that staying would place the women in direct proximity to further violence and might draw them into violence themselves. In her account, remaining would risk turning Molotschna Colony into a battlefield and would betray the Mennonite commitment to pacifism. She invokes the instruction in Philippians to consider what is good, just, pure, and excellent, and concludes that pacifism is the answer.

Ona extends this reasoning to the demand for forgiveness. If the elders and Peters have decided that women do not need counseling because they were unconscious during the assaults, she asks what the women are expected or able to forgive when they cannot fully understand what happened to them. She connects that contradiction to the colony’s isolation: not knowing the outside world does not make the women free, any more than not recognizing imprisonment would make imprisonment freedom. Her argument challenges the assumption that ignorance can make a coercive arrangement harmless or spiritually acceptable.

Agata presents departure as a way to protect the women and their children while bearing witness to faith. If they stay, she argues, any forgiveness offered under those conditions may be coerced rather than genuine. Leaving, by contrast, could better sustain pacifism, love, and forgiveness, and teach the children to pursue those values even when their fathers expect otherwise. The manifesto therefore makes departure more than a change of location: it is framed as a religious and ethical choice about how to live without reproducing the violence the women reject.

Challenging authority over scripture and knowledge

The manifesto also contests the distribution of interpretive power in Molotschna Colony. Salome describes a social order in which women are expected to serve, remain silent, and accept decisions made by men, including decisions affecting their status and religious lives. Her account links everyday submission to institutional authority: men lead worship, interpret scripture, and exercise power over women’s futures. The women’s claim that they want to think directly opposes a system in which their thoughts and choices are treated as matters for others to determine.

Salome points out that women cannot independently verify the biblical arguments used to require their obedience because they are unable to read the Bible. She argues that their perceived duty to submit rests on what husbands have told them scripture commands. The issue, she insists, is not merely that there are gaps in what the women know; it is that male interpretations are handed down to them as authoritative. Ona agrees that their inability to read or write places them at a disadvantage whenever the meaning of the Bible is negotiated. In this light, thinking is not an ornamental part of the manifesto. It means gaining some independence from interpretations that the women have not been allowed to examine for themselves.

This challenge does not lead the women to discard faith. Instead, they distinguish faith from the authority claimed in its name. Agata insists that their duty is to protect the creatures God has made, including themselves and their children, and to bear witness to their beliefs. She also connects the women’s decision to their responsibilities as mothers and as people with souls. Her argument allows maternal care, intellect, and religious conviction to support one another rather than treating women’s obedience to men as the only proof of faithfulness.

From shared principles to an uncertain plan

The manifesto’s claims are joined to decisions about what the women will do. Agata says they have spent the previous two days interpreting their journey as consistent with God’s will, their faith, and their responsibilities as mothers and human beings. Greta acknowledges that they do not know everything that will happen, but says they have made their plan. Their resolve is therefore not based on certainty about the destination or outcome. It rests on their decision to act together despite uncertainty.

The practical preparations make clear that the plan requires more than agreement in principle. August Epp reports that he has obtained the Co-op Safe, Dynamite, and a World Map; he also mentions a sextant, though he is unsure whether it will be useful. These supplies belong to the practical effort surrounding the women’s decision, rather than to the manifesto’s three stated aims. The difference matters: the platform names what the women are trying to protect and uphold, while preparation addresses the material difficulty of carrying out their choice.

The women also have to assess the risk of being intercepted or misdirected. Agata reasons that the Koop brothers may be waiting to report the women’s departure or prevent it, and that a false claim of fire to the north could be intended to push them toward the men in the city. The group rejects that account and decides to head north, away from the men. This final movement from shared language to coordinated judgment shows the manifesto at work: its principles help the women define their purpose, while their discussions and preparations turn that purpose into collective action. Their destination remains uncertain, but their right to think and decide together has become part of the plan itself.