Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs.
In the late 1800s, Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the revolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women’s rights.
By the time their successors finished their work in 1945, the Gerritsen Collection was the greatest single source for the study of women’s history in the world, with materials spanning four centuries and 15 languages.
Image of Aletta Jacobs, Chicago Daily News, September 29, 1915. Archive of The Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons
The Gerritsen curators gathered more than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. The anti-feminist case is presented as well as the pro-feminist; many other titles present a purely objective record of the condition of women at a given time.
Victorian residents with a State Library card can access the Gerritsen collection of Aletta H. Jacobs online. This incredible archive delivers two million pages of images exactly as they appeared in the original printed works. Don’t have a card? Sign up here.
