Women (She) Talking (Said)

Two Films, Two Stories, One Fight

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Today is International Women’s Day, and I am celebrating it with period cramps, tea, exhaustion eye bags, sweatpants, and fury. I stayed up too late last night watching Women Talking. I had to. What could be a more appropriate way to usher in a holiday dedicated to women than to watch a group of us do what we do best: band together to think our way around a system designed to keep us subservient? It did not disappoint, but it was emotionally roiling to say the least.

I read the book by the same title, written by Miriam Toews, several years ago. I was browsing a bookshop, waiting for the writers’ group that met upstairs to commence, when I found it on the “new fiction” shelf. I needed a birthday present for my best friend, and it looked intriguing, so I bought it. Then, read it before giving it to her, just to be sure that is was as interesting as it looked (not the same copy, I got one from the library. Not that anyone but me cares about this distinction.). The story is set in a closed Mennonite community in Bolivia, and based, tragically, on actual events. In 2010, the women and girls of the community discovered that a group of their men, including elders, had been using cow tranquilizer to knock them out and rape them during the night. These attacks had been going on for years, with the women waking to find themselves bruised and bloody with no memory of anything having occurred. They were told by the community elders that they were being attacked by ghosts or demons, or simply that it was all the result of the “wild female imagination.” Never mind the pregnancies that resulted, or the four-year-old girl who nearly died from infection after she was attacked, or the woman in her sixties with her teeth knocked out. It was all imagination, or spiritual attacks. They were doing it to themselves.

Until they caught one of the bastards, and he, coward as all such bullies are, named the others. The men were arrested and taken to the closest city (for their protection, not the women’s. Try telling a woman for years that she’s imaging being raped, let her find out the truth, and see what happens next). The rest of the men, except for the school teacher who was considered odd by the rest of them, left for the city to post bail for the offenders. They would be gone for two days. The women were left with an ultimatum: they had until the men returned to forgive their attackers, thereby retaining their places in heaven and the community…or leave, and sentence their eternal souls to hell. The women decided that they would choose a different ultimatum. They could do nothing, stay and fight, or leave their homes for an unknown world. The women had never seen a map in their lives. They had no knowledge of anything outside their own homes and fields. None of them could read or write. The stakes could hardly have been higher. The book and movie centers around a group of these women, two families who have been selected to meet and discuss their options in the hayloft of a barn. It had already been decided that staying and doing nothing was unthinkable. But to stay and fight, or leave?