Some Conclusions

Abstract

In her memoirs published in 1924, Aletta Jacobs described how, in 1870, when she was fifteen years old, she was seized with horror at the idea of having to dedicate her entire life to housework. She fantasised eagerly that she would flee home and, dressed as a boy, sign on to a ship, and sail to America, to become a coachman there.¹ But in 1870, it would have been most unusual to put this idea into practice. Little remained in nineteenth-century Holland of what had been a flourishing tradition of female cross-dressing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In other European countries this tradition vanished as wel1.² For women like Aletta Jacobs, who was the daughter of a country surgeon, other pathways gradually opened up. She was the first woman to be given the right to study at a Dutch university, and became Holland’s first female doctor and most celebrated feminist.