The novel begins with three illustrations (clouds over a field, a Mennonite woman and man facing off in a knife fight, and a horse’s behind see Figure 1) that correspond to the women’s three possibilities: “1. Therefore, whether the women’s illiteracy in the novel is factually accurate or not is immaterial because its function is to symbolize the gender-based oppression both they and their real-life counterparts endure. Similarly, Women Talking itself acts as a witness for the real-life women who were attacked. The women recognize the importance of witnessing to their experience they recognize that their voices are valuable even though the men teach them otherwise. Although the women will be unable to read the minutes, they want them taken so they can be “an artifact for others to discover” (51). The colony’s men hate him, which is why the women trust him not to tell the men about their conversation. He has also served prison time for stealing a horse that a cop was mistreating at a protest (143). Toews takes some poetic license here as, according to the Mennonite Encyclopedia, Bolivian Old Colony Mennonites educate girls through “the age of 12.”August is an outcast because he is single, because he is bad at farming, and because his parents were shunned when he was a child so he has just recently been allowed to return to the colony.

The minutes are being taken by a man, August Epp, because the colony does not teach its women to read or write. The novel consists of the minutes from the women’s deliberations broken up into five chronological chapters which span the two days of the meeting.

The decision must be made quickly so that if they choose to go they can do so while the men are in “the city” trying to get the rapists released on bail (5). The book takes place in June 2009 as women from two families who have been chosen as representatives for all of the colony’s women discuss whether or not they should all leave the colony as a response to the violence against them. 3 (2019): 428-31.Īs its prefatory “Note on the Novel” states, Miriam Toews’s Women Talking is inspired by the rapes that occurred “Between 20” in a Bolivian Mennonite colony and then resumed in 2013 even though the original perpetrators were imprisoned. Reprinted from Mennonite Quarterly Review 93, no.

Women talking the novel