1935: Establishing the IAV

In 1935, Rosa Manus (1881-1943), Johanna Naber (1859-1941), and Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot (1897-1989) established the International Archive for the Women’s Movement as an archive and library to collect and preserve women’s heritage and to encourage scholarly research about women’s position in society. At the same time that the IAV was being founded, Willemijn Posthumus’s husband, Nicolaas W. Posthumus, founded the International Institute for Social History (IISH). Until 1981, both institutes were virtually always located in the same building.

The end of the First Wave of the Women’s Movement

In 1935, the First Wave of the Women’s Movement was over, and many of the women who had been active in the women’s movement around 1900 were elderly or had died. The three founders of the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV) believed that it was important to preserve women’s cultural heritage and the history of the women’s movement. In addition, young feminists in the 1930s needed well-documented historical knowledge and data. The Dutch government had been attempting since the 1920s to prevent women from participating in the paid workforce, and feminists needed information to be able to defend themselves against these types of actions.

Aletta Jacobs

The first major donation to the IAV was the archive of Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929), the first female physician in the Netherlands and a famous advocate of women’s suffrage. Jacobs’s archive, which contained books and letters, was in the possession of Rosa Manus, and Manus donated to the just-founded IAV.

Second World War: the stolen archives

At the beginning of World War Two, the IAV was housed in two rooms in the building occupied by the International Institute for Social History on Amsterdam’s Herengracht. In July 1940, these two rooms were plundered by the Germans. After the war, just ten percent of the collection was recovered. When the archive was reopened in 1947, its shelves were virtually empty. It would be many years before the long journey made by the IAV’s archives came to light. In 1992, the stolen archives were discovered in Moscow, and in 2003, after a long period of negotiations, they finally returned home to Amsterdam.

The Second Feminist Wave

In the 1970s, the IAV experienced a period of enormous growth during the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. In 1975, during International Women’s Year, the IAV received a substantial grant from the Dutch government and was able to hire more paid staff. In the years of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement, the IAV acquired a wealth of material. Aletta’s extensive collection of posters dates from this period.

Merging and moving house

By the end of the 1970s, the IAV was outgrowing its space. Staff members sat amidst piles of books and papers, and the bookcases were bulging. In 1981, the IAV moved into a building on Amsterdam’s Keizersgracht, to share space with the Information and Documentation Center for the Women’s Movement (IDC) – which collected principally contemporary materials – and LOVER , ‘journal of feminism, culture and science’. The IDC, LOVER and the IAV merged in 1998 and became the International Information Centre and Archive for the Women’s Movement (IIAV).

The 1990s: the dawning of the digital age

Up until the beginning of the 1990s, people still looked for information, books and archival documents in the card catalogue or on microfiche. The advent of the computer age simplified this process. The late 1980s and the early years of the 1990s was a period of professionalization and movement toward digitizing the organization and the collection. In 1992, the digitization of the catalogue was complete. From that moment onward, users could find the books or the information they were seeking using computers in the library’s reading room. To further facilitate information searches, a women’s thesaurus was compiled. This is a list of search terms that allows a user to search the collection by subject. In September 1996, the IIAV’s first website was online. Today, much of the collection can be viewed online.

1995: Greater awareness of black, migrant and refugee women

Midway through the 1990s, the IIAV formally decided to give priority attention to making information about black, migrant and refugee women available. This decision was driven by the goal of ensuring that the IIAV’s collections would reflect the diversity of the women’s movement.
Read more about black, migrant and refugee women

1998: Expanding international contacts

The Know How Conference of Women’s Information Services took place at the IIAV in August 1998. Three hundred information specialists from 83 different countries took part and shared their knowledge and expertise about how to make information about women more accessible. This conference was the first of many important international projects.
Know How Community

The IIAV since 2000

The new millennium got off to a good start. In 2000, the IIAV received the Joke Smit Prize, the award that is given out every two years by the Dutch government in recognition of a fundamental contribution to improving the position of women in society. State Secretary of Education, Culture and Science Rick van der Ploeg commended the IIAV for recognizing early on the importance of implementing developments from the IT field.

2002: IIAV University Chair Gender & Ethnicity

The IIAV took the initiative to create a university chair in 2002. The goal of this chair was to conduct research into the roles of gender and ethnicity and to analyze social and cultural barriers to achieving diversity. Dr. Gloria Wekker was appointed to the chair. There are currently four professors and several affiliated researchers associated with the IIAV.
More about scholarship and Aletta

2003: The stolen archives are returned from Moscow

A portion of the IAV’s archives that had been lost during the Second World War were discovered in Moscow in 1992. After a period of ten years of negotiations, the IIAV finally got the stolen archives back.

2005: Jubilee with the IISH

The IIAV celebrated its 70th birthday together with the IISH in 2005. The IISH had been founded in 1935, along with the IIAV’s forerunner, the IAV. They organized a joint anniversary conference – Traveling Heritages – that dealt with the newest developments in the field of cultural heritage preservation.
Traveling Heritages

2009: Name change and a new website

The nearly 75-year-old IIAV received a thorough makeover in 2009. The IIAV has been rebranded with a new name, a new house style, and a new website with improved search and order functions. From now on, the former IIAV will be known as Aletta, Institute for women’s history.

The future

In the jubilee year of 2005, the IIAV and the IISH made plans to cohabitate once again. Both institutes, which shared the same building from the time that they were founded in 1935 until the 1980s, agreed that they would again share space, beginning around 2011. Unfortunately, due to the recession, these plans could not be carried out.

Following an extensive search process, Aletta has found a beautiful new location in downtown Amsterdam. In September of 2011 the entire collection and all employees will move to the ‘De Vijzel’ building located at Vijzelstraat 20.

Researching history

Professor Francisca de Haan, PhD, has researched the history of the IIAV and wrote an article ‘A “Truly International” Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV, now IIAV)’. This article was published in the Journal of Women’s History 16 (2004) no. 4 and is now available online. (© Journal of Women’s History)
Read the article (pdf)