Dr aletta jacobs biography
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After some effort she was permitted to attend classes at Groningen University for a period of one year, she started on April 20, 1871. Even life insurance companies tried to deny coverage to wives of fertile age.
From 1871, women were fined and imprisoned (§ 218) for abortions, but simultaneously had to go without safe and reliable means of contraception.
Pessary’s victory
After years of trial and error, Mensinga succeeded in developing his so-called pessarium occlusivum, consisting of a rubber cap bearing a flexible lip to seal the mouth of the uterus.
Moral and economic arguments were frequently used against it: Even considering family planning was suspected as an invitation for abortion. The congress established an International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) with the American suffragist Jane Addams as president. Furthermore, when recommending a certain product, physicians were afraid of being held responsible for any failure.
It was only Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs who started to relieve her patients’ problems during her training at an Amsterdam hospital: "During this time I saw with my own eyes the catastrophric results that frequent pregnancies can have for a woman.
She served as the president of the Dutch Women’s Suffrage Association for sixteen years until the passage of women’s suffrage in 1919.
Aletta Jacobs wanted to become a medical doctor since she was young and refused to be deterred when local schools and universities rejected her application based on her gender. In 1990, the University of Groningen began granting the Aletta-Jacobs-Award.
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Her experiences in her medical practice, motivated her to become more active for women’s rights, advocating not only for better working conditions for working-class women and women’s right to safe birth control, but also demanding equal right in family and marriage and economy, society and politics.After being refused to register to vote despite fulfilling the Dutch voters law as a taxpayer, Jacobs brought her case to her region’s Court of Appeal. She continued working for the feminist cause until her death in Baarn, the Netherlands, on the 10 of August 1929 at age 75 years.
Aletta Jacobs’ life highlights the value of simple determination.
During the day her mother taught her housework, while in the evenings she learned French and German. She maintained her clinic until 1904, when she celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of her doctorate in medicine on March 8, after which she retired from her practice.
Born in February 1854 to a large Jewish middle-class family in the small village of Sappemeer in rural Netherlands, Aletta Jacobs is not only remembered as an ardent feminist, suffragette and pacifist, but also an advocate for women’s birth control rights and sexual health.
One result of these classes was that she decided to hold a free clinic two mornings a week for destitute women and children, a practice she continued for fourteen years. In long discussions they convinced me that sexual abstinence as their sole remedy cannot avoid pregnancies. Society ladies fond of using Jacobs’ methods said ugly things about her at their tea parties and sewing circles.
Later in life, Jacobs mostly engaged in activism to introduce women’s right to vote.
She lobbied for the rights of young female workers after noticing the toll extreme hours took on their bodies, calling for a reduced workday and improved working conditions. In line with her own observations, he had seen women’s physical and mental ruin due to never-ending child-bearing.
In 1904 she became in addition the first leader of the International Women Suffrage Alliance (IAW), founded in the same year in Berlin.
Alette Jacob was also an ardent internationalist and pacifist. This antifeminist political act further increased the growth of a suffrage movement in the Netherlands. So, she opened another clinic dedicated to issues of birth control, which was free of charge and dedicated to the poor.
Her birth control clinic was harshly critiqued by the public and Jacobs herself was harangued by fellow physicians who were ignorant to its benefits and viewed her public information about issues of birth control as “disgusting.” Jacobs, however, not only continued to treat these women’s medical needs but also began to advocate on their behalf.
She continued to travel the world and publish writings on topics like contraception and her international women’s issues. She returned to Amsterdam to attend the conference on the advancement of medical science on September 8-15. She tried to keep the international bonds of women going, after the First World War started in August 1914.