Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, the Lord God said. Let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps. God named the man, and the man named the animals, and then God gave man a bride. The anonymous authors of Genesis said that Adam named her, too. Eve, man’s rib, the first wife, the mother of all living. Called woman because she was taken out of man. Not an animal, but not the first human, either, Eve is defined by her function. She is a helpmate to man. She is second. God ordains it.



Wives should submit to their husbands, Paul wrote to the first Christians. It was a life sentence, but he was not the first man to pass it. Let the women learn in silence, he said, or they will disrupt the church. What the women thought of Paul, about his pronouncements or their own place in the world, the Scriptures do not say. Perhaps they were haunted by the first judgment. Eve acts of her own volition only once, and it is to disobey God and bring man down with her into dust. Is this what happens when women talk?

In her new novel, Women Talking, Miriam Toews disputes Genesis and Paul. In the fictional Molotschna Colony, a group of Mennonite women have gathered in secret to discuss a sin. Horrors have visited them at night. A group of men in the colony drugged them with a veterinarian’s anesthetic for years, and raped them and their children while they slept. The act is discovered when one woman forces herself to stay awake. The colony’s bishop, Peters, hopes to hide all this from the secular world. But a woman named Salome Friesen forces his hand, when she attacks the rapists with a scythe; they have abused her three-year-old daughter, and she wants justice, or at least retribution. The rapists live, and Peters hands them over to local authorities in part for their own protection. The women, he decides, must choose to forgive, or they will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews Bloomsbury, 240 pp., $24.00

The religious dictates of Molotschna give men all the power. But no doctrine can make the women stupid. When the men leave to post bail, the dissenting women meet in a barn to discuss the options the bishop did not give them. Toews did not write a play, but Women Talking often reads like one; the women fight with one another, and rage at men and God, and debate matters of religion and identity. They keep a record of their turmoil through an amanuensis, August Epp, who is the novel’s narrator. A former prisoner, he returned to the colony years after its bishop excommunicated his parents. The women tolerate him because the other men believe he is effeminate, and because he is the community’s schoolteacher. He can read and write, and the women cannot, so one of their number, Ona, has asked him to take minutes for their meetings. It is August’s job to listen to the women talk.

They have two days to decide upon one of three options. They may do nothing. They may leave. Or they may stay and fight. Toews’s cast has already discarded the first option; the only thing more intolerable than what has already happened to them is for them to do nothing in response. But their other options represent significant departures from their Mennonite identities, at least as those identities have been defined by the men who run the colony. If they fight in a physical sense, they violate a core tenet of their faith: Mennonites are pacifists. If they fight for justice, and demand some measure of control over their lives, they reject another colony teaching: Women are supposed to be submissive to men. And if the women leave the colony altogether, they will leave everything they know behind them. They only speak Plautdietsch, the language of the Mennonite colonies. They do not have a map of the surrounding area. Trips to nearby towns are usually undertaken by the men, which deprives women of useful worldly experience. Though there are other Mennonite colonies nearby, they will not protect Molotschna’s women from its men.