To build up an archival collection that represents the diversity in the women's
movement, the archivist not only needs to know the movement (of which the
institute is a part), but also to establish and develop contacts with those persons
and organizations whose archives it would be especially important to acquire. Even
though a significant amount of time is spent on this part of the work, the archivist
is still sometimes pleasantly surprised by the offer of an interesting archive of a
woman or organization whose name was not on the wish list. An example is
Jacqueline Wttewaall van Stoetwegen 1900-1984), who worked for the Young
Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in the Netherlands and for the World
YWCA in Geneva from 193 5 onwards, ending her career in 1960 as secretary to
Elizabeth Palmer, president of the World YWCA. Another example is the archive
of the Vrouwenaktiegroep Spuugzat, which started in April 1992 "out of anger at,
and to protest against, increasingly misogynist and sexist advertising."54
Conversely, building up a representative archival collection on an always limited
budget also means that the archivist occasionally has to refuse materials that are
offered: for example, a woman's life-long collection of holiday scrapbooks, a
collection of cuttings the institute already has in its possession, or the archive of a
local women's organization (that is, if the municipal archive in question is willing
to store it)The policy is to acquire and preserve the archives of national women's
organizations; local women's organizations or local branches of national
organizations are therefore referred to municipal archives.
Following similar guidelines, the Dutch National Archives in The Hague in 1994
handed over to the IIAV several archives of national women's organizations in
their possession, among them the archive of the Nederlandsche Bond voor
Vrouwenkiesrecht, donated to the National Archives in 1920, well before the
establishment of the IAV.55 In order to make visible 'women's archives' held in
other archival institutes in the Netherlands, the IIAV in 1990 started to register
these women's archives in a database, called Database Women's Archives (DAVA).
However, because of the expanded possibilities to find archives through the Internet,
this service has been discontinued.
The process of establishing and professionalizing the archival department
culminated in 1991 in the publication of the Overzicht van de archieven in het IIAV,
which contains an extensive introduction on the history of the IAV/IIAV and
descriptions of 188 archives - clearly a milestone for the archival department and
hence the IIAV as a whole.
The combination of the flowering of interest in women's history on the one hand,
and the existence of a well-functioning archival department at the IIAV on the other,
in the first half of the 1990s resulted in the publication of a number of books
(all PhD theses), based partly or entirely on archival material housed in the IIAV.56
However, after this initial period of bloom, women's history has not been
successfully institutionalized at Dutch universities. No positions were opened for
women's historians, and the number of PhDs in women's history has significantly
decreased since the second half of the 1990s.
Steady Growth and Unexpected Treasures
Most of the archives in the collection were acquired during the 1990s and the first
decade of the 21st century, as Table 1 above showed. The main reason, obviously, is
that the IIAV has had an archival department since 1988, and an active acquisition
policy since 1989. In addition, in the 1990s a number of Second Wave women's
organizations and groups ended their activities and handed over their archives to
the IIAV. Examples include Tegen Haar Wil, founded in 1983 to offer help to sexually
abused women and girls, and Kenau, a center where women learned physical and
mental self-defense through various martial arts. Thirdly, historians have played an
important role in this process of growth by informing the IIAV about archival
material that they discovered while conducting research or by persuading
organizations or individuals to deposit their documents at the institute. Surely one
of the most interesting examples is that of the archive of Johanna W.A. Naber,
self-taught historian and the third co-founder of the IAV in 193 5. Her extremely
important archive (2.3 meters) only came to the institute in 1994, after historian
Maria Grever, who wrote her PhD on Naber, persuaded Naber's relatives to have it
housed at the IIAV.57
Yet, of all the interesting acquisitions of the last decades, few materials were more
unexpected or received with more profound happiness than the IAV materials that
had been stolen by the Nazis in 1940. This material was discovered, as if by a miracle,
by a Dutch journalist in what was called a 'secret archive' in Moscow in 1992. It
turned out that the Soviet Army had found the material hidden in Sudeten Germany
and had relocated it to Moscow, where it was stored in a huge building together with
many other stolen archival treasures from all over Western Europe. After the initial
discovery, it took another eleven years and many efforts by the Dutch Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and the Dutch Embassy in Moscow before the IAV materials were
finally returned to Amsterdam - demonstrating once again the political and
valuable nature of women's archives58
The material that was returned to the IIAV consists of about five running meters
of archival material, pictures and documentation, all collected by the IAV
- especially Rosa Manus - between 1935 en 1940. It includes personal documents
of women's movement leaders such as Aletta Jacobs, Rosa Manus and Betsy Bakker-
Nort; documents of organizations such as Arbeid Adelt, established in 1871 and the
oldest national women's organization in the Netherlands, and the Nederlandsche
Vereeniging van Werkende Vrouwen; hundreds of pictures of international
congresses, demonstrations, marches, and individual women; and a whole
documentation system then in use at the IAV. However, most of the stolen books
(about 4,000) and periodicals (150 different journals) have still not been
retrieved.
ARCHIEFVORMER EN PARTICULIER ARCHIEF
54 Aletta Institute, archive Spuugzat.
55 In 1894 the Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht was established; the Bond was an offshoot established in
1907.
56 Jolande Withuis, Opoffering en heroïek. De mentale wereld van een communistische vrouwenorganisatie in
naoorlogs Nederland1946-1976 (Meppel 1990); Francisca de Haan, Sekse op kantoor. Over vrouwelijkheid,
mannelijkheid en machtNederland 1860-1940 (Hilversum 1992); Marianne Braun, De prijs van de liefde.
De eerste feministische golf het huwelijksrecht en de vaderlandse geschiedenis (Amsterdam 1992);
164
FRANCISCA DE HAAN AND ANNETTE MEVIS THE MAKING OF THE COLLECTION INTERNATIONAAL ARCHIEF
VOOR DE VROUWENBEWEGING (lAV)
Corrie van Eijl, Het werkzame verschil. Vrouwen in de slag om arbeid1898-1940 (Hilversum 1994);
Mineke Bosch, Het geslacht van de wetenschap. Vrouwen en hoger onderwijs in Nederland, 1878-1948
(Amsterdam 1994); Mieke Aerts, De politiek van de katholieke vrouwenemancipatie. Van Marga Klompé tot
Jacqueline Hillen (Amsterdam 1994); and Grever, Strijd.
57 In her will of June 3,1937, Johanna Naber had donated her archive and books to the IAV, but she changed her
will on July 23, 1940 because the IAV had been closed by the Germans (Grever, Strijd, 34, 37).
58 Van de Loo, Moet terug; De Haan, A "Truly International" Archive'.
165
