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.