Women’s History Behind the Dykes: Reflections on the Situation in the Netherlands (original) (raw)
12. Becoming a Woman in the Dutch Republic
The Youth of Early Modern Women
In the Dutch Republic, female youths could turn to advice literature for help. These conduct books focused on young women's behaviour towards the other sex. A close reading of two widely distributed works reveals continuity: both Jacob Cats in the seventeenth century and Adriaan Loosjes in the eighteenth try to instil a specific habitus in the reader rather than instruct her on what (not) to do. Yet the analysis also highlights change. Cats admonishes attractive but vulnerable female readers to exercise restraint in their dealings with men, while the Enlightenment philosophe Loosjes instead emphasizes young women's freedom, urging his readers to live up to an ideal notion of femininity. Not the guidelines themselves, but the authors' perceptions of the young woman changed.
Women in Twentieth Century Britain, 2001
This survey offers an outline of women's and gender history , the key terms they deployed, and controversies that redirected the course of study in these fields. Focusing on the relationship between history, women's history, and politics, during the dynamic periods from 1900 and the Second World War, and from the 1970s to the 2000s, this critical survey draws on the notion of the 'supplement' to describe the research and writing that '"include women" in 'any of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historians' view of the past'. This term, as linguists and historians have noted, is equivocal, denoting an addition of material to the body of knowledge about the past that is relative to that body and perhaps marginal to it, but may also serve to challenge and relativize the very thing that we define as history. The notion of the supplement may serve as a general framework to help locate women's and gender history, as fields of study and a set of practices, in relation to modern history and to politics. What was the significance of the recovery of women as a subject of history? How did women's history relate to developments in the wider discipline? Has research and writing about women had the potential of making a difference to British history? These questions have been raised in debates, However, the interpretations have tended towards a linear description of the development of the field, according to which women's history developed from a herstory, to "social gender", to a feminist post-structuralist history . The article criticizes narratives of 'progress' or 'regress' , exploring instead the tensions between these trends with their potential of the 'supplement'.
Women: Female Roles in Art and Society of the Netherlands
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 2024
Long overdue in the history of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, this volume foregrounds women as creators, patrons, buyers, and agents of change in the arts of the Low Countries. Venturing beyond the participation of ‘exceptional’ individuals, chapters investigate how women produced paintings, sculptures, scientific illustrations, and tapestries as well as their role in architectural patronage and personalized art collections. Teasing out a variety of socio-economic, legal, institutional, and art-theoretical dimensions of female agency, the volume highlights the role of visual culture in women’s lived experience and self-representation, asking to what extent women challenged, subverted, or confirmed societal norms in the Netherlands.
Long overdue in the history of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, this volume foregrounds women as creators, patrons, buyers, and agents of change in the arts of the Low Countries. Venturing beyond the participation of ‘exceptional’ individuals, chapters investigate how women produced paintings, sculptures, scientific illustrations, and tapestries as well as their role in architectural patronage and personalized art collections. Teasing out a variety of socio-economic, legal, institutional, and art-theoretical dimensions of female agency, the volume highlights the role of visual culture in women’s lived experience and self-representation, asking to what extent women challenged, subverted, or confirmed societal norms in the Netherlands.
2000
How did women determine their attitude towards the transforming nation-state at the end of the 19th century? What stylistic strategies did they use and what were the consequences for the political power relations between the sexes? These questions form the guiding principle for the book "A Fatherland for Women". In this richly illustrated - partly English - collection, the National Exhibition of Women's Labor in 1898 is the starting point. The first part discusses the history of the (inter)national industrial exhibitions and makes clear how important contacts between women from different countries were in the design of women's exhibitions. Despite national differences, certain similarities between these manifestations are striking. The articles in the other three parts deal with themes that received a lot of attention at the Hague Women’s Exhibition: social care and labor; colonial relationships; secondary and higher education. A special photo section shows replicas of the postcards produced during the 1898 Exhibition, showing the exhibition building, the display of objects, working-class at work during the exhibition, the colonial display of a Javanese village and a photo of the Surinamese woman Lousie Yda.
Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate
Gender & History vol. 1 No. 1, 1989
It is argued that gender relations are equally as important as all other human relations, and that gender relations contribute to and affect all other human relations. Conversely, all other human relations contribute to and affect gender relations. Also published in: The Feminist History Reader, ed. Sue Morgan, Routledge: London and NY 2006, pp. 104-116, and translated, among others, in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek.
The Dutch history canon: a never-ending debate
Huub) Kurstjens, test developer for history and politics at CITO (Institute for Test Development), Arnhem (The Netherlands) 1 The well-known Dutch historian Pieter Geyl (1887-1966) argued at one time that history was 'a never-ending debate'. The same thing can be said about the ongoing reform in Dutch history education. Traditionally a university degree guaranteed the expertise of history teachers and henceforth the level of history teaching. Half a century ago there was hardly any disagreement about the historical curriculum, if at all. Professional historians took an 'implicit canon' for granted: they largely agreed upon the contents of the curriculum with variations for each sociopolitical segment of the population. 2 Which developments in society and in history education called for an 'explicit canon'? The fragmentation of history education In present-day Dutch history education, the concept of history has become fragmented: the facts have lost their coherence and the main lines have disappeared from view. This is due to rapid social changes, far-reaching globalization, revised notions of history as well as pressures from various emancipatory movements. The political-institutional history of recent decades, presented chronologically from a traditional Eurocentric perspective, masculine and chauvinistic by nature, was no longer satisfactory. Among other things, socioeconomic history and the history of changes in mentality were thought to deserve more space. Curricula changed at a rapid pace and exam topics became evermore exotic. Moreover, history education was increasingly used by interest groups and defined by current events. Thus, more attention was demanded for women's history, environmental history, the history of the Third World as well as the history of the integration of Europe (which, by the way, was not very successful judging from the Dutch rejection of the European Constitution). Themes were presented in such depth that students knew a great deal of subjects like the burning of witches in the Middle-Ages in Europe, but very little of contemporary general developments, backgrounds and events. Upon completing their secondary education students showed an embarrassing lack of awareness of historical periods and of the capability of situating events and developments in their historical context. They no longer knew the difference between Charlemagne and Charles V, what they stood for, what their backgrounds were, in which period they lived, or even which of them preceded the other. At the same time as thematic history teaching was introduced, more attention was demanded for the teaching of historical skills. Mere knowledge would not do; it was to serve a purpose. Historical knowledge combined with historical skills was to be socially relevant and meaningful and also preferably useful in other subjects. Another consideration was that in our secularised and individualised country with its heterogeneous population and with its traditional religious and socio-political barriers removed, the sense of a shared identity was increasingly at risk of disappearing. A common historical frame of reference might help solve the identity crisis from which the nation suffered. In other words, it was time for the teaching of a survey of historical facts. PAGE 10 1 With thanks to Stefan Boom and Willem Kurstjens for their comments concerning content and style and with thanks to Jan Mets for the translation into English. 2 Until the late twentieth century the Dutch population was characterized by the segmentation into a number of strictly separated religious (catholic and protestant) as well as political (socialistic and liberal) groups. Each of these segments had its own organizations, press, schools, radio and television channels, labour unions etc.
Women, gender, and the fight for gender equality in Europe
Routledge eBooks, 2022
Concepts like gender, sexuality, and family relations are closely connected to constructions of identities and meaning. This approach was not common either in traditional women's history or in history education before the last three decades. The introduction of the concept historical consciousness in history didactic theory has created new prerequisites for relating gender history to history education. Historical consciousness is an ability that each human being is gifted with, and it is fundamental for interpreting historical experiences for the purpose of orientating in time and life . An aspect of this is that history is formed both by scientific history and individuals' sense-making questions to the past. Historical consciousness is not easy to operationalize in an actual teaching situation. Nonetheless, the concept is highly present when teachers select historical content and methods. From an existential perspective, which history content is the most urgent one for the students? Which history knowledge is essential for students as citizens? What interests them? Those questions generate different answers in different social, economic, and not least historical-cultural contexts. Regardless which choice is made as a teacher or a student, it always means a kind of deselection. In a historical perspective, this has usually meant excluding women, children, indigenes, and poor people, in other words, people with a lack of power. This chapter focuses on gender history in the aforementioned aspects and with an intersectional approach. This text offers starting points that could be useful for teachers working with gender history. The first is to avoid using the term 'women's history.' It can result in women and their roles as historical agents being seen as an addendum rather than an integral and natural part of all the studied change processes. It can, of course, be appropriate to look in detail at women as agents .
Women's History in Many Places: reflections on plurality, diversity and polyversality
Women's History Review
This piece addresses the key questions posed by Chen Yan and Karen Offen in their joint position paper on the current state of women's history and its place at the cutting edge of historical practice. Having made the case that women's and gender history has had a significant and multi-level impact (empirical, conceptual, methodological and theoretical) on that practice, my article observes that acknowledgement of this is still very limited among those not centrally involved in the field. It notes the tensions between the aspiration both to identify and pursue women's and gender history as discrete fields of scholarly endeavour and the aspiration for women and gender to be treated as topics/categories which should be constitutive of all historical inquiry. It goes on to consider the relationship of women's history to gender history, to post-colonial and crosscultural scholarship, and to recent work in spatial histories. It argues that in the first case the two approaches are mutually reinforcing, and that in the other two cases women's and gender history has been at the leading edge of these developing fields and is uniquely positioned to make innovative contributions there. The capacity of women's and gender history to continue as a leading edge area of historical practice will be grounded in its ongoing commitment to reflexivity about problems and limitations in the field, and to sustaining its key insights into the links between the personal and the structural, the global and the local, and the material and the cultural. My contribution to the discussion opened up by Karen Offen and Chen Yan draws on my own experience as a historian of women, genders, feminisms and sexualities with particular interests in the Middle East, especially Iran, since c.1750, and in histories of empire since c.1700. It also draws on my involvement with comparative history, with interdisciplinary women's studies, and with the study of the concepts, methods and theories that sustain historical practice, which has taken me beyond the chronological and geographical confines of my other work. My experience is shaped by my membership of a generation who developed as historians in the UK through the 'history from below' revival of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, the 'cultural turn' of the 1980s and 1990s, and the more recent postcolonial turn.
Feminization Thesis: A Survey of International Historiography and a Probing of Belgian Grounds
Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique, 2008
Tine Van Osselaer (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) Thomas Buerman (Universiteit Gent) 'Feminisation' thesis: a survey of international historiography and a probing of Belgian grounds.* * This article was written within the context of In search of the good Catholic m/f. Feminization and masculinity in Belgian Catholicism (c1750-1950), a research project supported by the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders).We would like to thank the members of the scientific committee of our research project, Jan Art, Jan De Maeyer, Patrick Pasture, Leen Van Molle and Vincent Viaene for their suggestions and the proofreading of the several editions of this text.
Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis / Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 1999
Aux Pays-Bas, Wilhelmina Drucker (1847-1925) est considérée comme une des féministes les plus importantes de son temps. Néanmoins, ses rapports avec le féminisme belge sont largement ignorés et, dans l'historiographie belge, sa vie et son œuvre restent presqu'inconnus. En plus d'une esquisse détaillée de la vie de Drucker et de sa pensée féministe-socialiste, cet article présente également une analyse des recherches nouvelles sur les années 1890, l'époque du Congrès de Bruxelles de la Seconde Internationale, tout en soulignant l'importance des rapports entre Drucker et Marie Popelin, Emilie Claeys et Louis Frank. Ainsi l'article montre que, sans doute, Drucker a joué un rôle décisif dans la création des premiers mouvements féministes belges. En conclusion, l'attention est attirée vers quelques pistes de recherches prometteuses relatives aux rapports néerlando-belges ainsi qu'aux interdépendances historiques du libéralisme, socialisme et féminisme à la fin du XIXe siècle.