We want the world

We want the world is the expression that gives the women’s proposed departure from Molotschna Colony its widest meaning: they seek not only distance from danger but the possibility of protecting their children, keeping their faith, and thinking for themselves. In the closing reflection, August Epp turns the phrase into a question about whether a life outside the world can be fully lived at all.

A choice under pressure

The expression takes shape against an urgent ultimatum. The remaining men have gone to the city to post bail for the imprisoned attackers, hoping the men can return to Molotschna while awaiting trial. Peters says the women will then have the opportunity to forgive them; if they refuse, they will have to leave for an outside world they know nothing about. They have only two days to organize a response. In that setting, leaving is at once a choice the women must make and a consequence imposed on them if they do not forgive.

The women distinguish among doing nothing, staying to resist, and leaving. When the costs of departure are weighed, Salome says there are no cons of leaving. The starkness of that answer does not erase the uncertainty of going: the women face an unfamiliar outside, but remaining would keep them within a community where their safety and freedom are in question.

Faith, thought, and the meaning of departure

Leaving is argued as a religious decision, not simply a rejection of religion. Agata says that remaining would place the women in the path of violence and risk turning Molotschna into a battlefield. For her, that would betray the Mennonite commitment to pacifism. She later argues that leaving better enables them to practice pacifism, love, and forgiveness without making forgiveness coerced, and to teach these values to their children rather than merely submit to their fathers’ expectations.

Salome challenges the authority used to prescribe that submission. The women cannot read the Bible, she points out, and their belief that wives must submit to husbands rests on what their husbands have told them the Bible requires. Her argument links the wish to think with the practical limits placed on women’s access to religious knowledge: the decision to leave also opens a question about who has the authority to interpret faith.

Agata describes the decision to protect the children as both collective and religious. She says the women have decided together what is best for them, and presents maternal instinct, intellect, and soul as working in concert. Her defense gives the expression a communal dimension: the world they want is not an abstract freedom detached from care, but one in which the women can act on their responsibility for their children.

The people carried into the decision

The women’s circumstances are not identical. Ona Friesen is pregnant and keeps an empty feed pail beside her because of nausea. Some women hurriedly tried to arrange her marriage to Julius Penner after learning she was expecting, but Ona refused, saying he deserved better and that marriage to a woman who was not a virgin would taint him with sin. The elders regard her Narfa as making her incapable of reason. Her situation shows how the debate over departure intersects with stigma, pregnancy, and the community’s judgments about women’s capacity to decide.

The plan also requires the women to consider boys who may accompany them. August Epp answers Ona’s question about thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys by acknowledging that they can cause harm, while insisting that they are children who can be taught. His comparison of them to yearlings holds danger and immaturity together rather than treating the boys as simply innocent or irredeemable. The question complicates the meaning of protection: the women must consider both the risk boys may pose and the possibility of educating them differently.

Their support for one another is likewise practical as well as emotional. Mejal Loewen and Salome Friesen spend much time at odds, yet Mejal crosses the plywood partition to embrace Salome when the crisis overwhelms them. Their gesture gives visible form to a solidarity that persists despite disagreement. Conversely, Cornelius will not join the departure: his mother belongs to the Do Nothing group, and he has no choice but to stay with her. The collective decision therefore does not carry everyone with it.

Making a world possible

The women’s proposed departure becomes concrete in the preparations. They agree to leave after dark, so they will not be seen when passing the Chortiza Colony and Hiakjeke Colony. August Epp has wrapped a map around a large block of cheese and covered it with ordinary brown paper. The Co-op Safe is ready beneath the back seat of Greta Loewen’s buggy, alongside onions, soap, and pieces of wood to provide traction if the wheels become mired or to serve as kindling. A route, food, practical supplies, and concealment turn the expression from aspiration into planned movement.

The preparations do not promise an easy or fully known destination. Instead, they show what the women can carry with them: provisions for travel, obligations to children, and commitments they understand as matters of faith. The world they seek is approached through such limited, specific means rather than through certainty about what awaits them.

August Epp’s closing question

At the end, August Epp reflects on the women’s meeting minutes as a document that may be used for kindling and warmth, while the women who made them give him life. He gathers their aims into a sequence: protecting children, thinking, keeping faith, and wanting the world. The movement from practical care to a question about existence enlarges the expression beyond the immediate plan to leave.

August Epp asks himself what good life can be if it is not lived in the world, and what teaching can mean if it does not lead toward the world. The question does not report the outcome of the departure; it leaves the desired destination unresolved. Instead, it makes access to the wider world the condition at stake: not a repudiation of faith or responsibility, but the possibility of living and teaching them beyond the boundaries that have confined the women.