The women come up with three possible actions: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. He gives the women two days to organize their response. Otherwise, men and women alike will be barred from Heaven, and the women (only the women) will be excommunicated and forced to leave the colony. Before he leaves, Peters issues an ultimatum: If the rapists ask for forgiveness, the women must give it to them. Following an attack on a perpetrator, Peters has the men taken to the city prison-but only for their own protection.Īs the novel opens, Bishop Peters and the colony’s men have left to retrieve the perpetrators from jail, leaving the women, children, and those who are elderly or have disabilities behind. The truth does not come out until one of the men is caught in the act and confesses.

When they report the abuse to the colony’s leader, Bishop Peters, he tells them that that they have been visited by ghosts or by Satan, who is punishing their sins, or that their reports are the result of “wild female imagination” (57). Over the past few years, nearly every girl and woman in the colony, from the very young to the very old, has had the experience of waking up drowsy, bloodied, and bruised. It opens shortly after eight men in the fictional Mennonite colony of Molotschna are jailed for drugging and raping female members of the community. Toews’s epistolary novel is written as meeting minutes taken by the colony’s schoolteacher, August Epps. This study guide refers to the 2020 Bloomsbury Publishing paperback edition.Ĭontent Warning: The source material features depictions of domestic and sexual violence, rape, and suicidal ideation. A critically acclaimed film adaptation of the novel was released in 2022, which was nominated for a number of film industry awards, winning an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. It was a New York Times Notable Book and appeared on a number of year-end best-book lists. Women Talking, Toews’s seventh novel, has garnered considerable acclaim: it was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Book Award and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Toews, who grew up in the Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba, is the author of several novels set in Mennonite communities, many of which criticize aspects of the faith.

Women talking the novel