Myriam Everard
Myriam Everard holds a PhD in history with a study on same sex relations between women in the latter half of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic (Leiden 1994) and has since worked as an independent scholar of the history of women and the public sphere in the Netherlands, with a focus on the revolutionary period at the end of the eighteenth and the women’s movement at the end of the nineteenth century.
She has published books and articles on Dutch lesbian history, women and patriot political culture in the Dutch Republic (1780-1800), and first wave feminism in the Netherlands (1870-1920), with a special focus on radical, secular feminists like Wilhelmina Drucker (1847-1925), Annette Versluys-Poelman (1853-1914) and Titia van der Tuuk (1854-1939).
Recently she finished a collective research project on Dutch feminist and peace activist Rosa Manus, resulting in Rosa Manus (1881-1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist, co-edited with Francisca de Haan (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017).
With Ulla Jansz she now is working on a book on Jewish women in Dutch first wave feminism.
Profile picture: Ingrid Hoogland (KNAW), 2020
She has published books and articles on Dutch lesbian history, women and patriot political culture in the Dutch Republic (1780-1800), and first wave feminism in the Netherlands (1870-1920), with a special focus on radical, secular feminists like Wilhelmina Drucker (1847-1925), Annette Versluys-Poelman (1853-1914) and Titia van der Tuuk (1854-1939).
Recently she finished a collective research project on Dutch feminist and peace activist Rosa Manus, resulting in Rosa Manus (1881-1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist, co-edited with Francisca de Haan (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017).
With Ulla Jansz she now is working on a book on Jewish women in Dutch first wave feminism.
Profile picture: Ingrid Hoogland (KNAW), 2020
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May some scholar, book lover or antiquarian locate a copy of the lost Dutch translation!
in English/French/German by Myriam Everard
in Dutch (selection) by Myriam Everard
In 2021 an English translation was published in Eileen Hunt Botting, Portraits of Wollstonecraft Vol 1 (London etc.: Bloomsbury Academic) – see elsewhere on this page.
Research into Manus’s time in Ravensbrück (October 1941–March 1942), combined with newly surfaced letters from Ravensbrück, points out that none of these stories holds true. Instead, Rosa Manus, together with most other Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück, was murdered by gas in March 1942 in a mental asylum in Bernburg (Germany).
A more detailed account of Manus’ fate will appear in Rosa Manus (1881–1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist, ed. Myriam Everarad and Francisca de Haan (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017).
As a feminist she was active in the women's suffrage movement and in the struggle for one moral standard for both sexes, campaigning against the state regulation of prostitution.
In later years she grew into a Tolstoyan inspired social anarchist and sexual purist, and as such developed a clearly feminist stance, especially with regard to the concept of sexual difference, which she claimed to be historically and socially constructed (and thus acquired and subject to change) instead of naturally and innate (and thus deterministic and invariable).
Furthermore, Titia van der Tuuk was one of the four feminists who signed the 1912 plea for equal rights for homosexuals before the law (see "Vier Feministinnen und das Niederländische Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäre Komitee").
First, in working outwards from a non-traditional archival source, we are able to demonstrate the importance of the present-day interest in things and bodies as objects for historical research. Second, the public realm of speaking and publishing as a (feminist) writer, and the private realm of healthy living and fysical exercise, are usually analysed as belonging to the separate domains of the public and the private, or the instrumental and the expressive, a distinction we assert to be inadequate for analysing the body-politics so central to gender issues. Third, following Van der Tuuk’s outspoken involvement in what are often called ‘social purity feminism’ and ‘life reform movements’ (Lebensreform), sometimes condescendingly dubbed ‘lesser religions’, helps us to view these movements in a different light. All of them have often been portrayed as anti-modern and vaguely suspect ideologies, that in their more virulent forms were close to, or even a part of, national-socialist ideas about the superiority of ‘natural purity’ over the immoral life of ‘the big city’. But precisely because Van der Tuuk did not seal off the private and the personal from the public and the political, her kind of life reform remained a radical and ‘materialist’ feminist egalitarianism. What mattered to Van der Tuuk was never the opposition between nature and culture, or body and society, or modern and anti-modern, but precisely its opposite: the question which body in which society would best enable human beings with all sorts of bodies to realise their individual potential, without being held back by sexual difference.
May some scholar, book lover or antiquarian locate a copy of the lost Dutch translation!
In 2021 an English translation was published in Eileen Hunt Botting, Portraits of Wollstonecraft Vol 1 (London etc.: Bloomsbury Academic) – see elsewhere on this page.
Research into Manus’s time in Ravensbrück (October 1941–March 1942), combined with newly surfaced letters from Ravensbrück, points out that none of these stories holds true. Instead, Rosa Manus, together with most other Jewish prisoners of Ravensbrück, was murdered by gas in March 1942 in a mental asylum in Bernburg (Germany).
A more detailed account of Manus’ fate will appear in Rosa Manus (1881–1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist, ed. Myriam Everarad and Francisca de Haan (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017).
As a feminist she was active in the women's suffrage movement and in the struggle for one moral standard for both sexes, campaigning against the state regulation of prostitution.
In later years she grew into a Tolstoyan inspired social anarchist and sexual purist, and as such developed a clearly feminist stance, especially with regard to the concept of sexual difference, which she claimed to be historically and socially constructed (and thus acquired and subject to change) instead of naturally and innate (and thus deterministic and invariable).
Furthermore, Titia van der Tuuk was one of the four feminists who signed the 1912 plea for equal rights for homosexuals before the law (see "Vier Feministinnen und das Niederländische Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäre Komitee").
First, in working outwards from a non-traditional archival source, we are able to demonstrate the importance of the present-day interest in things and bodies as objects for historical research. Second, the public realm of speaking and publishing as a (feminist) writer, and the private realm of healthy living and fysical exercise, are usually analysed as belonging to the separate domains of the public and the private, or the instrumental and the expressive, a distinction we assert to be inadequate for analysing the body-politics so central to gender issues. Third, following Van der Tuuk’s outspoken involvement in what are often called ‘social purity feminism’ and ‘life reform movements’ (Lebensreform), sometimes condescendingly dubbed ‘lesser religions’, helps us to view these movements in a different light. All of them have often been portrayed as anti-modern and vaguely suspect ideologies, that in their more virulent forms were close to, or even a part of, national-socialist ideas about the superiority of ‘natural purity’ over the immoral life of ‘the big city’. But precisely because Van der Tuuk did not seal off the private and the personal from the public and the political, her kind of life reform remained a radical and ‘materialist’ feminist egalitarianism. What mattered to Van der Tuuk was never the opposition between nature and culture, or body and society, or modern and anti-modern, but precisely its opposite: the question which body in which society would best enable human beings with all sorts of bodies to realise their individual potential, without being held back by sexual difference.