Women in the Special Collections (part 3): Aletta Jacobs

Important women from the history of the University of Groningen of course also need to feature in this series. The first of these is Aletta Jacobs (1854 - 1929), one of the Netherlands’ most prominent feminists. She is still very relevant; this is for instance evident from the new Aletta de Musical. Jacobs was the first female student in the Netherlands who was officially registered, could take her exams and completed her education.

She set up her own GP practice on the Herengracht in Amsterdam. She believed it was important that women could make their own choices. She introduced the diaphragm, a barrier method of birth control that a woman could use herself. She also wanted to teach women how their body works, so they could understand better what happened in their bodies. To achieve this, she wrote a book called De Vrouw : Haar Bouw en haar Inwendige Organen (‘The Woman: Her Build and her Internal Organs’).