IAV's international orientation came from Rosa Manus, the institute's co-founder and first president. Rosa Manus had been actively involved in the international women's movement since 1908, and was vice-president of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAWSEC) since 1926 (among other prominent positions she occupied in the international women's and peace movements).23 Since 1910, Rosa Manus had an increasingly close relationship with the American feminist Carrie Chapman Catt, the founding president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance IWSA, which developed into the IAWSEC) From a letter Rosa Manus wrote in 1930 to Clara Hyde, Carrie Chapman Catt's secretary, we know that Manus had initially envisaged the IAV as the place to safely store the movement papers and books of Aletta Jacobs.24 But apparently the idea for the library and archive as a "truly international" center had developed further since 1930, and Manus used her extensive network, built up during thirty years of inter national activism, to involve leading figures of the International Alliance of Women and the International Council of Women in the project. The British Margery Corbett Ashby, the Belgian Baroness M. Pol Boël, the French Cécile Brunschvicg, Carrie Chapman Catt, and the Brazilian Dr. Bertha Lutz,25 among others, became IAV board members and/or sent materials to the institute.26 The serious commitment to building an international collection is also underlined by the literally hundreds of letters that Manus and some of her IAV colleagues wrote to individual feminists and women's organizations in dozens of countries, asking them to send material (in whatever form) to the IAV in Amsterdam, one of which, by librarian Ferf, we quoted above.27 While these efforts probably were unprecedented in the history of women's archiving and library building, especially in their international dimension, they also inevitably reflected the limits of the international women's movement at that time, which to a large extent was confined to Western countries and their colonies. As far as we know, the IAV women did not reflect on the implications of this situation, in particular, the global power/knowledge relations underpinning the establishment of such an archive in Western Europe, in the capital of a colonial power. They seemed to find it self-evident that "the women of the world" would be willing and able to send their books, journals, and archives to Amsterdam. However, just imagine for a moment how amazed Western women would have been if they had been asked to send their materials to Peking or another city in Asia; or how different a 'truly international' archive for the women's movement would have looked had it been founded and organized by women who did not consider Europe or 'the West' as the center of the world. The limits of the IAV's 'internationalism' and the institute's 156 basic North-West European perspective28 can also be seen in the choice of languages for its international publications and correspondence: English, French, and German - but no other world languages such as Spanish, Arabic, or Chinese.29 In addition to the international orientation - no matter how limited in practice - the wish to collect materials that would advance 'scientific research' about women also shaped early IAV archival policies. This dimension of the IAV's mission particularly mattered to co-founder Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot, the first woman to receive a doctorate in economics in the Netherlands. Posthumus-van der Goot belonged to a group of younger, often academically trained feminists, who became active at a time when the Dutch government proposed and implemented ever more reactionary measures regarding women's paid labor. These policies already started in the 1920s, but increased in pace and scope in the 1930s, with the economic crisis as justification.30 Realizing how little they knew of the history of the women's movement in general, and of women's struggles for the right to paid employment in particular, these younger feminists felt the need for historical and contemporary materials that would enhance their understanding of women's earlier struggles for equal rights, and help them to refute government statements about the harmful effects of married women's paid employment. With no institutionalized women's studies existing as yet that could challenge these attacks on women's rights on the basis of solid research, economist Posthumus-van der Goot herself tried to do just that for the Netherlands. She published an article in the second IAV Yearbook in which she demonstrated that paid employment was not harmful to married women or their families. On the contrary, her research showed that the families of gainfully employed women in the textile city of Enschede whom she had studied were doing better on many social and economic indicators than the families of women without such income. Posthumus-van der Goot strongly emphasized that, in contrast to the Dutch government's policies, her findings and statements were based on objective, scientific research.31 In order to actively document the history of the women's movement and to collect data that could be used for scholarly research, the IAV in 1937 also organized a survey among 'Veterans of the Women's Movement,' asking them to provide biographical information and to write about their own involvement in the movement. The 76 files - of which more than twenty date from 1947, when Posthumus-van der Goot tried on a smaller scale to collect material about the earlier women's movement - provide an intimate, and sometimes unexpected, perspective on the world of those who had been at the heart of the First Feminist Wave and were still alive when the material was collected.32 157 ARCHIEFVORMER EN PARTICULIER ARCHIEF 23 Myriam Everard, 'Manus, Rosa', in: Els Kloek (ed.), 1001 vrouwen uit de Nederlandse geschiedenis (Nijmegen 2013); Myriam Everard, ManusRosa, in: Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland. URL: http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/DVN/lemmata/data/Manus [09/10/2012] 24 In this letter of May 20, 1930, Manus wrote: "Dr. Jacobs' books have come to me now, and I am organising a real feministic library which I hope, will prove useful to the feminists." Aletta Institute, archive Rosa Manus, inv. no. 91. 25 The Brazilian feminist Bertha Lutz became a member of the International Advisory Council of the IAV in 1938. She was one of the few women delegates at the founding conference of the UN held in 1945 in San Francisco, and also participated in the 1975 UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass., International Women's Tribune Centre Records, 1970- 2000, MS 373, Box 3). 26 Jaarboek Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging II (Leiden 1938) 194, 207-212. 27 Aletta Institute, archive IAV, inv. no. 17-24, IAV correspondence 1935-1940. FRANCISCA DE HAAN AND ANNETTE MEVIS THE MAKING OF THE COLLECTION INTERNATIONAAL ARCHIEF VOOR DE VROUWENBEWEGING (iAV) 28 Rather than speaking of a 'European' perspective, we would like to emphasize the economic, political and cultural hierarchies within Europe as well. The women in charge of the IAV and running the major international women's organizations mainly came from or identified with the richer countries in North and Western Europe. 29 De Haan, 'A "Truly International" Archive'. 30 The Dutch government's policies were, of course, not exceptional. Governments across Europe tried to limit, or at the very least discredit, married women's participation in the labor force during this period (Francisca deHaan, Gender and the Politics of Office Work, The Netherlands 1860-1940 (Amsterdam 1998); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950. A Political History (Stanford 2000); Indre Karciauskaite, 'For Women's Rights, Church, and Fatherland. The Lithuanian Catholic Women's Organisation, 1908-1940' Aspasia 1 (2007) 128-152. 31 W.H. Posthumus-van der Goot, 'Onderzoek naar den arbeid der gehuwde vrouw in Nederland', in: Jaarboek Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging II (Leiden 1938) 135-180. 32 Francisca de Haan, 'Schatten uit het archief: veteranen van de eerste golf' LOVER 30:3 (2003) 56-57.

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2012 | | pagina 80