The Gerritsen collection
The Gerritsen Collection: Women’s History Online is a digital collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals about women and women’s movements with full text searching.
A gateway
The Gerritsen Collection provides access to more than 200 periodicals and more than 4,000 books in a number of languages, from the 16th century to 1945. Dutch materials make up a substantial portion of this international collection. The collection includes a considerable amount of material in English, German and French.Gerritsen: husband of ...
Carel Victor Gerritsen (1850-1905) was a prominent freethinker at the end of the 19th century, who served as an alderman in Amsterdam and as a member of the Dutch Parliament. He was also the husband of Aletta Jacobs, who is known for being the first Dutch woman to complete a university education.An extensive collection about women
From a very young age, Gerritsen was interested in the women’s movement and, even before he met Jacobs, collected everything he could find about women – both feminist and anti-feminist literature. In later years, Aletta Jacobs, with her extensive network of contacts, both in the Netherlands and abroad, also contributed to the collection.An intrepid collection
In 1903, the collection was sold to a public library in the United States and, in 1954, it was sold again to a university library in Kansas. In the years that followed, the collection was expanded and, in 2008, Aletta purchased the collection, together with the University of Groningen.Requesting access
The Gerritsen Collection can be accessed directly online with a plus membership, which includes a personal access code for online documents on the Aletta website.More about accessing the collection