International Archives for the Women's Movement ( nl, Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (IAV)) was founded in Amsterdam in 1935, as a repository to collect and preserve the cultural heritage of women and make the documents of the movement available for study. The entire
collection was stolen by the Nazis in 1940 and only small portions were recovered after the war. In 1988, the part of the archival collection which had not been
looted by the Nazis became the foundational collection of the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women's Movement. A substantial portion of the archive was discovered in Moscow in 1992 and returned to Amsterdam in 2003. In 2013, the institution which houses the collection was renamed as the
Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women's History
Atria, institute on gender equality and women's history is a public library and research institute in Amsterdam dedicated to research and policy advice on gender equality and to the documentation and archival of women's history. Its previous names ...
History
![RosaManus](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/RosaManus.jpg)
The International Archives for the Women's Movement was founded in 1935 by three Dutch feminists,
Rosa Manus,
Johanna Naber and
Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot
Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot (2 May 1897 – 16 January 1989) was a Dutch economist, feminist and radio broadcaster. As the first woman to attain a doctorate in economics in the Netherlands, her work focused on the impact of working women ...
. Manus was a conference organizer for the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance
The International Alliance of Women (IAW; french: Alliance Internationale des Femmes, AIF) is an international non-governmental organization that works to promote women's rights and gender equality. It was historically the main international org ...
(IWSA), a secretary of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is a non-profit non-governmental organization working "to bring together women of different political views and philosophical and religious backgrounds determined to study and make kno ...
(WILPF) and was involved with many of the leading feminists of her day, including
Aletta Jacobs
Aletta Henriëtte Jacobs (; 9 February 1854 – 10 August 1929) was a Dutch physician and women's suffrage activist. As the first woman officially to attend a Dutch university, she became one of the first female physicians in the Netherlands. I ...
and
Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt (; January 9, 1859 Fowler, p. 3 – March 9, 1947) was an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920. Catt ...
. When Jacobs died in 1929, her books and papers were bequeathed to Manus. Naber was one of the founders of the IWSA and a historian dedicated to writing about the history of the women's movement, including writing biographies of prominent women. As a member of the
National Dutch Women's Council nl, Nationale Vrouwenraad van Nederland (NVN), Naber had begun to collect publications on feminism and create an archive for the NVN and by 1921, had urged creation of a resource for other women to study. Posthumus-van der Goot was an economist and after she attended a 1934 conference arranged by the Dutch Association for Women's Interests and Equal Citizenship (DAWIEC) to study government policies on paid employment for women, she realized that there was inadequate information on the history of women working.
The three women's different skill-sets and ages, which constituted three-generations of the Dutch women's movement, combined to persuade the founders of the newly established
International Institute of Social History
The International Institute of Social History (IISH/IISG) is one of the largest archives of labor and social history in the world. Located in Amsterdam, its one million volumes and 2,300 archival collections include the papers of major figu ...
(IISH) (which included Posthumus-van der Goot's husband) to give them two rooms in their building at
Keizersgracht
The Keizersgracht (; "Emperor's canal") is a canal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It is the second of the three main Amsterdam canals that together form the Grachtengordel, or canal belt, and lies between the inner Herengracht and outer Prinsengr ...
264 for their project. On 3 December 1935, the International Archives for the Women's Movement ( nl, Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (IAV)) was founded with Manus as president and Posthumus-van der Goot as the secretary. Within a year, the official opening of the IAV was held and by 1937 they had established a multi-lingual Yearbook to confirm the international nature of collecting and studying documents about women. The international advisory board, included such members as
Margery Corbett Ashby
Dame Margery Irene Corbett Ashby, ( Corbett; 19 April 1882 – 15 May 1981) was a British suffragist, Liberal politician, feminist and internationalist.
Background
She was born at Danehill, East Sussex, the daughter of Charles Corbett, a bar ...
, British feminist and IWSA president from 1926-1946;
Cécile Brunschvicg
Cécile Brunschvicg (), born Cécile Kahn (19 July 1877 in Enghien-les-Bains – 5 October 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine), was a French feminist politician. From the 1920s until her death she was regarded as "the ''grande dame'' of the feminist mov ...
, French feminist,
International Council of Women
The International Council of Women (ICW) is a women's rights organization working across national boundaries for the common cause of advocating human rights for women. In March and April 1888, women leaders came together in Washington, D.C., wit ...
(ICW) member and IWSA delegate;
Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt (; January 9, 1859 Fowler, p. 3 – March 9, 1947) was an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920. Catt ...
, American founder of the IWSA;
Dorothy Heneker, Canadian feminist, lawyer and Secretary of the Women's International Organizations' Peace and Disarmament Committee;
Bertha Lutz, Brazilian feminist and IWSA board member;
Baroness Marthe Boël, Belgian feminist and president of ICW between 1936 and 1947; and
Elsie Zimmern, British feminist and ICW general secretary from 1925.
The women corresponded with women's groups in English, French and German, encouraging them to forward articles, books, brochures, periodicals and the like for inclusion in the archive. They also had reciprocity agreements with other women's facilities, like the
Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand
The Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand is a specialized public library run by the Paris municipal library system.
History
Created from a massive collection started in 1897 by journalist and activist Marguerite Durand. It was initially located at th ...
in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
and
The Fawcett Library of
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
. By the end of the 1930s, the archive contained approximately 4500 books and brochures, as well as a collection of around 150 periodicals from twenty countries. Most of these journals were contemporary publications, though there was a complete collection of the ''Tribunes des femmes'' from 1833. Several
first edition books were part of the archive, including ''A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest'' (1694) by
Mary Astell
Mary Astell (12 November 1666 – 11 May 1731) was an English protofeminist writer, philosopher, and rhetorician. Her advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women has earned her the title "the first English feminist."Batchelor, Jenni ...
and ''
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
''A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects'' (1792), written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), is one of the earliest works of feminist philosop ...
'' (1792) by
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (, ; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationsh ...
. There were original documents by
Jane Austen and a manuscript copy of
Cécile de Jong van Beek en Donk's novel, ''Hilda van Suylenburg'' (1897).
Nazi intervention
![WillemijnPosthumusvanderGoot](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/WillemijnPosthumusvanderGoot.jpg)
At the outbreak of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
the situation in Europe curtailed the sharing of items from the archive. The uncertainty also propelled Manus to merge her private library and documents into the IAV holdings for safety. This proved to be a costly miscalculation, as when the
Nazis invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, the archive became a target. By June, German officials had inspected IAV twice and on 12 July 1940 the
Security Police
Security police officers are employed by or for a governmental agency or corporations to provide security service security services to those properties.
Security police protect facilities, properties, personnel, users, visitors and enforce cer ...
confiscated forty boxes of materials, as well as the furnishings and fixtures. The only item which was not taken was the safe, which contained money, other valuables and some of Jacob's papers. The reasons the documents were taken has been obscured. The Germans claimed that the Berlin women's movement wanted them, which the German women later denied, though
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink
Gertrud Emma Scholtz-Klink, ''née'' Treusch, later known as Maria Stuckebrock (9 February 1902 – 24 March 1999), was a Nazi Party member and leader of the National Socialist Women's League (''NS-Frauenschaft'') in Nazi Germany.
Nazi activities
...
, head of the
National Socialist Women's League
The National Socialist Women's League (german: Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, abbreviated ''NS-Frauenschaft'') was the women's wing of the Nazi Party. It was founded in October 1931 as a fusion of several nationalist and Nazi women's assoc ...
did admit to having received around 500 books from IAV in 1942.
Francisca de Haan a professor of
gender studies
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field ...
at
Budapest
Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...
's
Central European University
Central European University (CEU) is a private research university accredited in Austria, Hungary, and the United States, with campuses in Vienna and Budapest. The university is known for its highly intensive programs in the social science ...
, believes that the actual reason the archives were taken had more to do with the facts that Manus, the president was
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
, both an international feminist and
pacifist, and suspected of
Communist leanings because of her left-leaning views and activities; Manus would later be executed at
Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1943.
The confiscated records were initially sent to Berlin, and then later were moved to
Sudetenland for security reasons. At the end of the war, the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
took the documents from
German-occupied Czechoslovakia and in 1945-46, stored them in the
KGB
The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
's (russian: Особый архив), meaning special archive, which was housed in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...
. In 1947, Posthumus-van der Goot, the only one of the founders who survived the war, became president of the IAV and reopened the archive. She immediately began making inquiries as to what had happened to their stolen collection, following the lead that women's groups in Berlin had wanted them. , a German philosopher living in
Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...
wrote her that it was unlikely that any German women, except possibly Scholtz-Klink had any interest in obtaining the materials. In 1947, Dirk Graswinckel, a member of the committee to recover and repatriate
Nazi plunder
Nazi plunder (german: Raubkunst) was the stealing of art and other items which occurred as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Nazi Party in Germany. The looting of Polish and Jewish property was a k ...
, returned a few boxes, representing about 1/10th of IAV's pre-war holdings. Then in 1966, a librarian from
Hradec Králové
Hradec Králové (; german: Königgrätz) is a city of the Czech Republic. It has about 91,000 inhabitants. It is the capital of the Hradec Králové Region. The historic centre of Hradec Králové is well preserved and is protected by law as an ...
,
Czechoslovakia
, rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי,
, common_name = Czechoslovakia
, life_span = 1918–19391945–1992
, p1 = Austria-Hungary
, image_p1 ...
found four books stamped by the IAV and returned them. In the 1960s, the organization filed for reparations under the
Wiedergutmachung
The German word ''Wiedergutmachung'' after World War II refers to the reparations that the German government agreed to pay in 1953 to the direct survivors of the Holocaust, and to those who were made to work at forced labour camps or who othe ...
program and assumed its remaining holdings were lost.
Second-wave feminism rejuvenation
The period of actively acquiring materials ceased effectively in 1939 and through the 1970s no efforts were made to expand the collection beyond what had been retrieved, unless an individual or organization donated materials. Though some minor works were published in the 1950s and 1960s by IAV, and they moved several times, little effort was made to reach those beyond Posthumus-van der Goot's circle. In the 1970s during the
Second-wave of feminism institutions and organizations began to flourish again. Women's history groups at several Dutch universities began seeking out records on women and re-discovered IAV. Growing interest in preserving women's records and specifically evaluating the history of ordinary women, led to the decision to begin acquiring documents again in the early 1980s, with the specific focus of obtaining journals, letters and diaries from working class women, instead of just women's movement elites. The Dutch government began to subsidize the collection efforts, causing the archive to exponentially expand.
Wanting better access to the materials, the first professional
inventory was completed in 1980 and the following year, having outgrown their space, IAV moved to Keizersgracht 10 in Amsterdam, sharing offices with three other women's organizations: the Documentation Centre for the Women's Movement ( nl, Informatie en Documentatie Centrum (IDC)), the journal ''Lover'', and the Foundation of Women in the Visual Arts ( nl, Stichting Vrouwen in de Beeldende Kunst (SVBK)). In 1988, the IAV, IDC and ''Lover'' organizations were merged to form the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women's Movement ( nl, Internationaal Informatiecentrum en Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (IIAV)) with the IAV archival collection underpinning the new institution's holdings.
Subsequent recoveries
In 1992, a report which appeared in ''
NRC Handelsblad'', a major Dutch newspaper, written by historian Marc Jansen, noted that some of IAV's materials had been located in Russia. He reported that the Russians were willing to return more than thirty collections, including those of the IAV. Almost immediately the state archivists of both countries met in Moscow and signed an agreement to return the twenty-five boxes of IAV's documents found in Russia, but there were delays because the
Russian Parliament
The Federal Assembly ( rus, Федера́льное Собра́ние, r=Federalnoye Sobraniye, p=fʲɪdʲɪˈralʲnəjə sɐˈbranʲɪjə) is the national legislature of the Russian Federation, according to the Constitution of the Russian F ...
refused to ratify the agreement. In 1993, Heleen Massee of the photograph division of IIAV was allowed to go to Moscow and take notes on the content of six boxes.
In the spirit of
Perestroika and
Glasnost policy reforms, historian
Mineke Bosch and a colleague, Myriam Everard, went to Moscow in 1994 to try to discover what records were held in the Osobyi Archive. Bosch discovered a leather bound volume of newspaper clippings, photographs and translations which had been prepared by Hungarian women for a visit by Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs, following the
1906 Copenhagen Conference of the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance
The International Alliance of Women (IAW; french: Alliance Internationale des Femmes, AIF) is an international non-governmental organization that works to promote women's rights and gender equality. It was historically the main international org ...
. The Hungarians had invited Catt to visit in October, and advised her to bring a German-speaking companion, who was not German to assist her. To commemorate the visit,
Rosika Schwimmer
Rosika Schwimmer ( hu, Schwimmer Rózsa; 11 September 1877 – 3 August 1948) was a Hungarian-born pacifist, feminist, world federalist, and women's suffragist. A co-founder of the Campaign for World Government with Lola Maverick Lloyd, her ...
had helped them bind the volume marked with the inscription "1906 October 12–14". Upon finding the booklet, Bosch brought it to Everard and they approached the director and asked if they could return it to Amsterdam. Though sympathetic, the director denied their request, claiming that all items had to be counted before they could be returned.
Bosch and Everard spent four days in Moscow and inventoried 203 dossiers containing 28,051 documents, discovering hundreds of pictures dated to the 1890s. They found a large portion of Manus' documents but also noted that the collection did not represent the entirety of the stolen artifacts, as most of the 150 periodicals and all of the 4,500 books of the pre-war IAV were absent. When the delays caused concern that the IAV archives might not be returned quickly, the International Institute for Social History microfilmed 14 reels of 33,663 individual images, making the documents accessible once again. Though officials continued to press for the return of the documents bureaucracy delayed any action until an announced 2001 visit by
Queen Beatrix
Beatrix (Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard, ; born 31 January 1938) is a member of the Dutch royal house who reigned as Queen of the Netherlands from 1980 until her abdication in 2013.
Beatrix is the eldest daughter of Queen Juliana and her husban ...
to Russia. Finally in January 2002, twenty-two boxes of materials were returned to the Netherlands. Nine boxes, including some of the IAV records were retained because they had not been properly processed. In March 2003, the final nine boxes were sent, and rejoined the archival collection in May.
In December 2015, nine books, including ''Beroepsarbeid der gehuwde vrouw'' (Occupational work of the married woman, 1921) by
Betsy Bakker-Nort
Bertha "Betsy" Bakker-Nort (8 May 187423 May 1946) was a Dutch lawyer and politician who served as a member of the House of Representatives for the Free-thinking Democratic League (VDB) from 1922 to 1942.
Born in Groningen, she became involv ...
were returned from the
Berlin Central and Regional Library
The Berlin Central and Regional Library (german: Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin) or ZLB is the official library of the City and State of Berlin, Germany. It was established as a Foundation by two State laws, initially in 1995 and amended in ...
, bearing the stamp of IAV or Rosa Manus.
References
Citations
Bibliography
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{{coord missing, Netherlands
1935 establishments in the Netherlands
Archives in the Netherlands
Feminism in the Netherlands
Preservation (library and archival science)
Looting
Art and cultural repatriation after World War II
Organizations established in 1935