The Gerritsen Collection
The Gerritsen Collection of Women's History, 1543-1945, is possibly the greatest single source for the study of international women's history and the feminist movement. The Gerritsen Collection was begun in the late 19th century by Dr. Aletta H. Jacobs (1854-1929), the first woman university student and woman doctor in the Netherlands. Dr. Jacobs was also the founder of the first birth control clinic in the world (1878), a leader in the Dutch and international women's suffrage movement for 50 years, and an ardent pacifist as well. She and her husband Carl V. Gerritsen, an alderman of Amsterdam and a member of the Dutch Parliament, moved easily on an international stage and had the resources to collect material close to their political and social interests. During the 25 years of her medical practice in Amsterdam, where she specialized in treating women and children, Dr. Jacobs built up a collection of approximately 2,000 volumes, with many French, German, Italian, and older English works. At the time of Mr. Gerritsen's death and Dr. Jacob's retirement from medicine in 1903, the collection was sold to the John Crerar Library in Chicago. The Crerar Library made significant additions of many new titles, particularly those dealing with the American women's movement and titles published in the Midwest between 1880 and 1920.
Collection coverage:
The Gerritsen Collection online delivers two million page images exactly as they appeared in the original printed works. Users can trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others. In many cases, it also provides easy access to primary sources otherwise available only in a few rare book rooms.
Since Dr. Jacobs was an active suffragist, the collection is particularly rich in materials dealing with women's rights. In addition, topics included are the nature and role of women, the historical and legal status of women, prostitution, the education of girls and women, biography and autobiography, and secondary materials on women writers, marriage and the family, employment of women, women and religion, and women's voluntary associations. To a lesser extent topics such as divorce, women in politics, women's reformatories, and women as composers, musicians, and artists are represented. Titles are in English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Czechoslovakian, and Arabic. Titles from the 19th and 20th centuries are well represented with a lesser representation of titles from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.