- Person
- Aletta Jacobs
- Lived
- 1854–1929
- Field
- Medicine, women’s rights
- From
- Dutch
The story
By 1914 Aletta Jacobs, the Netherlands’ first woman doctor, had given up medicine to lead the Dutch campaign for women’s votes. She had built friendships with suffrage leaders across Europe and America through the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. When war broke out in August 1914, she decided to use that network to try to stop the killing.
The Netherlands was neutral, so Jacobs, working with Mia Boissevain and Rosa Manus, called an International Congress of Women in The Hague and invited the American reformer Jane Addams to chair it. Governments were hostile and wartime travel was dangerous. Even so, more than a thousand women from neutral countries and from nations at war with each other met from April 28, 1915.
The congress passed resolutions calling for an end to the war through continuous mediation by neutral nations, and setting out principles for a lasting peace. Afterwards two small delegations of women, Jacobs in one of them, travelled through a Europe at war to put these proposals to heads of state and foreign ministers. Several said they would accept or not obstruct a neutral mediating body if others agreed and if the United States took the lead. In September 1915 Jacobs crossed the Atlantic to try to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to do so. He refused.
The effort did not end the war, but it created something lasting. In 1919 Jacobs and other women from the Hague congress founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and she became vice-president of both the international body and its Dutch section. Jane Addams, its first president, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, as did another of its leaders, Emily Greene Balch, in 1946. The league still campaigns for disarmament, human rights and the peaceful settlement of conflicts, and it holds consultative status at the United Nations.
Why it matters
The women’s peace organisation born at Jacobs’s congress still works internationally for disarmament and the peaceful resolution of conflict.
About Aletta Jacobs
First woman to study at a Dutch university and the Netherlands’ first woman doctor, who gave poor women free care, opened a pioneering birth control clinic and led the fight for women’s votes.
More about Aletta Jacobs
Sources
- Aletta Henriette Jacobs Jewish Women’s Archive
- Aletta Jacobs Wikipedia
- Aletta Jacobs EBSCO Research Starters
- Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.