Miriam Toews’ latest offering Women Talking is based on a true story of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia and the unspeakable violations the women of that community suffered at the hands of their own.

But rather than be about the details of the crimes, Toews chooses to focus on the women, their reactions, and the choices that they now have to make as they find out their attackers or “unwelcome visitors” as the elders prefer to call the rapists who are being bailed out of jail by the men of the colony and will soon be returning.

The women decide that they have three choices:

Do Nothing

Stay and Fight

Leave

The women gather in a hayloft to discuss their options and through these discussions the reader gets a glimpse of the pain, powerlessness and anger the women feel as they are caught between deciding what is more important– their own safety and that of their children or their religion as it is explained to them by men. Since women haven’t been taught to read, they have never read the Bible or been allowed to interpret the scriptures on their own, but they are starting to suspect that what they have been told may not jive with the true teachings of the Lord.

“She had everything she wanted; all she had to do now was convince herself that she wanted very little”

The antiquated lifestyle and speech of the Menonites makes this novel feel like it is from the distant past when in fact these crimes took place between 2005-2009 and the subject matter couldn’t be more timely. The women discuss their lives under a patriarchal rule and the reader can’t help but realize that while Toews is discussing an isolated colony in Bolivia she could easily be talking about women anywhere and that the three choices the women have in the novel are the same three choices that face millions of women everyday.

Toews does a wonderful job of demonstrating how infantilizing a patriarchy is to women. By overloading them with daily chores, refusing them a basic education and allowing the women no voice in lawmaking or decisions the women are little better than slaves. But does one realize that they are slaves or being abused if they have never known anything else? Not all the women are aware of their inferior status within the colony and this revelation of acceptance, of willing to live by the status quo sometimes makes reading this novel hard. I often felt like grabbing and screaming at these women to stop discussing and start packing. But I also realized that I was reading this book from a position completely different from these women, a position of the educated, a position of the independent, a position of power, in other words a position of more than three choices.

When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.