Lily Craven@TheAttagirls
When a professor - a man, of course - defended regulated prostitution as necessary for men's health, Woman of the Day Aletta Jacobs swiftly retorted, “If that is really your opinion, you are morally obliged to make your daughters available for this purpose.”
Who knew that we would still be having this argument in 2026? Certainly not Aletta, born OTD in 1854 in The Netherlands, the first woman officially to attend a Dutch university and the first woman in her country to receive a doctorate in medicine.
She was born into a liberal Jewish family and wanted to become a doctor, like her father, but women were denied secondary education in many areas, and entirely excluded from universities. After primary school, she rejected the limited "finishing school" option for girls - it was “idiotic”, she said - and she had to lobby the authorities persistently just to become one of the first Dutch women to attend high school.
Persistent lobbying became the underlying theme of her life. None of the opportunities so readily available to men ever opened to Aletta unless she fought for them. She even had to petition the Dutch Prime Minister directly to be admitted to the University of Goningen in 1871 for provisional admission for one year, and thereafter to allow her to sit exams and graduate. In 1878, she earned her medical degree, and the following year, her doctorate, the first woman in the Netherlands to do so.
Aletta spent some time observing women doctors in London and met Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first female doctor in England, and her sister, Millicent Garrett Fawcett. They shared similar views on women’s suffrage and the education of women.
Fully-qualified Dr Jacobs could not treat male patients - it was improper, indecent or unchaste for a woman to be in close proximity to male patients - and when she tried to take part in hospital clinical rounds, they would often refuse treatment or examination if she was present.
At this point, I would have expected NHS Fife’s collective head to be exploding, but then I remembered. They too are only concerned about the comfort and feelings of men.
Inevitably, Aletta established a practice in Amsterdam providing free care to poor women and children, and came up against a host of social problems that affected them most: widespread poverty, unhealthy working conditions such as long shifts without breaks for shop girls, repeated pregnancies harming the health of women, high infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases among patients and especially among prostituted women.
"During this time I saw with my own eyes the catastrophic results that frequent pregnancies can have for a woman."
In 1882, she opened the world’s first birth control clinic and introduced the pessary (diaphragm) to the condemnation of her male medical colleagues, religious leaders, and others who called it disgusting and immoral because they thought it would lead to rampant adultery and invite divine punishment.
"If contraceptives were available – could a childless world be the result? Would they promote adultery?…I found comfort only by realising that a baby is most women’s greatest wish, which they would give up only for very serious reasons."
By 1883, Aletta was actively challenging the denial of the vote to women. She tried to register to vote. After all, existing electoral law did not explicitly exclude women: it granted voting rights to "citizens" who paid a certain amount of taxes, and she was an independent, taxpaying woman who ticked all the boxes.
After a bit of head-scratching, the mayor and city council of Amsterdam admitted that even though, strictly speaking, the law didn’t actually *exclude* women, mumble mumble, something something…she should ask the Amsterdam District Court. The District Court decreed that she was not a citizen, even though she met the criteria, so she appealed to the Supreme Court.
Shades of Canada’s Famous Five “persons” case here.
Of course you are not a citizen, said the Supreme Court, and anyway, taxes for married women are paid by their husbands, blithely overlooking the fact that Aletta was a single woman. The government obligingly amended the constitution in 1887 to explicitly limit voting rights to "male" citizens, thus closing the loophole.
Aletta responded by starting her lifelong campaign for women's suffrage, heading the Dutch Association for Women's Suffrage from 1894, and co-founding the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. She had ties with the USA’s Carrie Chapman Catt and devoted herself to women’s rights and pacifism on a full-time basis from her retirement from practice in 1903 until her death in 1929.
Dutch women were granted the vote in 1919.
"I feel happy that I have seen the three great objects of my life come to fulfillment during my life…They were: the opening for women of all opportunities to study and to bring it into practice; to make Motherhood a question of desire, no more a duty; and the political equality for women."
"Fighting for what is right makes life worth living."
