Aletta Jacobs, 'De Vrouw, haar bouw en inwendige organen'

Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929) was, together with Wilhelmina Drucker, a driving force behind the first feminist wave. She was co-founder of an association for obtaining the right to vote for women. In the 19th century, women were not allowed to vote. This was laid down in the constitution of 1848, although not in so many words. In order to be allowed to vote, you had to pay a certain amount of tax and be a citizen. According to the law, women were ‘incapacitated’ and therefore did not have the right to be a citizen. In 1883, Aletta Jacobs did try to vote by registering herself on the electoral roll. She was refused and the law was amended: in 1887, the constitution explicitly stated that women did not have the right to vote. After many years of struggle, women finally got the right to vote and be elected in 1919, and in 1922, it was the first time that women were allowed to vote in the Netherlands.

Studying and working

Aletta was seventeen when she wrote a letter to Prime Minister Thorbecke requesting permission to go to university to study medicine. In response, Thorbecke wrote a letter to her father in which Aletta was granted permission. She went to study and became the first female doctor in the Netherlands. 

In 1879, she established her practice on the Herengracht in Amsterdam. In the nearby Jordaan, she held free consultations twice a week. At that time, the Jordaan was still a very poor neighborhood and she had to deal with working-class women who became pregnant year after year. Illegal abortions were common, as was infant mortality in families that were both large and poor. The constant pregnancies had a devastating effect on the body. Aletta introduced the pessary, a contraceptive that could be used by women.

The Woman, her Build and Internal Organs

In 1899, the publication De Vrouw, haar bouw en inwendige organen (The Woman, her Build and Internal Organs) was published. The content was revolutionary. For the first time, there was a book that explained in clear language how the woman's body was constructed. The structure of the book was traditional in itself. First, the skin was discussed:

The skin (cutis), with which the entire human body is covered, is softer and finer in women than in men. […]

Then came the skeleton, the muscles, the circulation, the nervous system, the digestive organs, the respiratory organs, the urinary organs and finally the sexual organs: 

The sexual organs (organa genitalia) enable us to give life to new beings. This ability to multiply ourselves is something we share with plants and animals. What distinguishes us from plants and animals, however, is that the rational human being does not need to reproduce, passively like the plant, or subject to an uncontrollable impulse like the animal, but that he can do this under the rule of reason.

Businesslike and clear

The book is written in a businesslike, direct style. Only the spelling reminds the reader that the text is more than a century old. Until the publication of this book, women - and men - had little idea of ​​how the body functioned. In books about folk medicine you could still read that you could conceive a boy on your left side or at full moon and that a woman, once pregnant, should not eat sweet things because the child would then have a sweet tooth. The pleasures of sex were kept secret. In Aletta, on the other hand, it was briefly but powerfully stated that 
 

[…] the clitoris […] is located between the two folds of the small lips, which unite in front of and behind this organ. It is a small, blunt, vascular and nerve-rich protrusion, without an opening. The feeling of lust is mainly located in this organ. 

Throughout the text are black and white images of the skeleton and organs, including the ‘genitals of a 14-year-old girl’. The pictures do not deviate from what you would expect in such a book. At the back of the book we find something special: a body of a woman printed in color that you can open completely. It starts with the skin, then the muscles, followed by images of the circulatory system, the nervous system, the skeleton and the contents of the chest and abdomen. Nowadays we associate such pop-ups with children's books, but originally this technique was used to illustrate scientific theories in books for adults on subjects such as astronomy and anatomy.