This publication of Memories is the realization of Jacobs’s goal in 1924 to publish her newly completed manuscript in both Dutch and English. After the Dutch edition appeared, she enlisted the aid of Jane Addams and others in an unsuccessful attempt to find a U.S. publisher. The project went into eclipse until Harriet Feinberg, without at first knowing of these failed efforts, sought its publication. Thanks to her and others’ efforts, a wide audience of late twentieth-century readers interested in women’s history can become acquainted with Jacobs. This remarkable woman, who tells her life story in an accessible, direct style, allows us to share in her many struggles, while giving insight into her feminist politics and her strong personality. The fine editing includes many explanatory notes, as well as a historical afterword by Harriet Pass Freidenreich and a literary afterword by Harriet Feinberg. They have succeeded in providing a rich historical context that allows any interested reader to place the history of Jacobs’ individual life within the larger social and political picture.

Memories is very much a “public” history of a feminist pioneer who achieved her professional ambition to become a physician and then devoted herself to improving women’s lives in a number of areas. Jacobs highlighted her varied reform endeavors within the book through a topical arrangement. These were not disparate efforts, however, but were connected by her guiding vision of a society founded upon gender, social, and political equality, and free of militarism, nationalism, and war. Thus the reader understands her advocacy of peace as well as of equality in education, improving women’s health, women’s control over their bodies, and women’s voting and citizenship rights as threads woven together in her activist life. One might view her as the Dutch version of Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Margaret Sanger all rolled into one.

As with many women pioneers, Jacobs had crucial support, initially from her family, which laid the foundation for overcoming educational barriers, and later from organized women. From the time she was six she determined to become a physician and, raised in a large, middle-class Jewish family where she and her ten siblings were encouraged to become educated and achieve, her dream seemed possible, even realistic. Her father, a physician who enthusiastically upheld liberal democratic politics, clearly favored his bright, tomboyish daughter who shared his interest in medicine and politics. Jacobs recounted her despair and frustration when, as an adolescent, she encountered an educational system closed to women. Through her own ingenious persistence and the support of her father and his physician colleagues, she became the first woman admitted to a Dutch university, where she received medical training and graduated at the young age of twenty-five.

It was during her time as an intern that her “feminist and democratic beliefs first began to take root” (22). The harsh lives of her patients, particularly the women, concerned her. A neglected young woman, dying of syphilis in a hospital bed under a sign reading “meretrix” (woman of the streets), particularly affected Jacobs, who took special care of her despite warnings to leave her alone. After starting medical practice in Amsterdam, Jacobs began her long career as a “health” reformer by opening a free clinic for poor women and providing women with birth control in the interests of “planned motherhood.” In spite of strong opposition from the medical establishment, she dispensed pessaries (similar to a diaphragm) to women, not only to improve their health and the quality of their lives but for humanitarian reasons. She also waged a campaign for twenty years to improve working conditions for salesgirls, who suffered gynecological problems as a result of standing for hours on end. Her interest in public health inspired her support for ending prostitution, especially the official regulation of it. Defying conventions of polite society, Jacobs wrote articles and gave lectures that supported sex education for young people, decried the sexual double standard, and exposed the risks of venereal disease to the general society.

While Jacobs worked hard to improve women’s health and reproductive lives, she came to believe that lasting reforms for women rested upon their gaining political power through the vote and participation in the political process. After Dutch authorities rejected her solo attempt to cast a ballot in 1883, she devoted herself to winning the vote for women. Jacobs joined and then led the Dutch suffrage movement, and by 1904 she had become prominent within the international suffrage movement. Although her single-handed efforts to defy and end conventions that prevented women from moving about freely in Amsterdam, skating on the canals and going to the theater alone quickly led to change, Jacobs learned that women’s suffrage would require sustained organization throughout the country, especially in the face of a press that ignored suffrage work. In exchanges with Bertha Von Suttner, a prominent peace advocate who criticized Jacobs for wasting her time on suffrage, Jacobs insisted that women had to gain political power first before contributing to peace. Given the liberal political circles in which she moved and her strong background in antimilitarism, Jacobs found that she could show the connections between women’s political empowerment and peace reform. Thus when the Great War began, she was prepared to lead a protest against the war with women suffragists, pacifists, and social reformers who believed that the war would undermine all they had worked for.

While Aletta Jacobs enjoyed the appellation of “pioneer” in other areas of reform, she insisted that she was not a pioneer pacifist. Nevertheless, from the perspective of subsequent generations, she secured a place in peace history when she called and organized an international antiwar congress of women at The Hague in 1915. Dutch, British, and German feminists came together to plan the congress after the International Woman Suffrage Alliance refused sponsorship. In this interesting chapter we get an insider’s view of the Hague congress and resulting women’s peace delegation, in which Jacobs figured prominently. The delegation traveled to all the belligerent and neutral nations with a plan for continuous mediation, a step toward starting the talking and stopping the guns. Jacobs even made a separate journey to the United States to meet with President Wilson to lobby for American leadership in neutral mediation. Jacobs and her friend Rosa Manus kept the international committee afloat during the war years, and were present in Zurich in 1919 when the group decided to become a permanent organization, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. This peace historian wishes that Jacobs would have revealed more details about the workings of the Hague congress, the peace delegation, and her impression of the leading personalities, but it appears that Jacobs sought balanced and short accounts of all her pioneering efforts. Her memoirs contain little “gossip” about her friends and colleagues in the international reform movements.

While Jacobs focused upon women’s health, suffrage, and peace activism, she also revealed that feminist politics shaped her personal life. She and Carel Victor Gerritsen became fast friends and lovers during the 1880s, eventually marrying after they decided to have a child. Marriage would, of course, quell any chance that their unsanctified relationship would hurt Gerritsen’s political aspirations. Yet, in her quest for autonomy, Jacobs sought to actualize her feminist politics in her personal life. Her partnership with Gerritsen was a joyful, loving one that allowed Jacobs the time and space she needed to pursue her own medical practice and reform endeavors. Much like Mary Wollstonecraft, Jacobs insisted upon living arrangements that would not permit domesticity or marriage to subvert career or activism. The couple built a house that had “her” and “his” sleeping and work quarters as well as common living and dining rooms.

In dealing with other areas of personal life, Jacobs provided only glimpses or omitted some things entirely. For instance, Jacobs gave cursory attention to the death of her only child, who lived for just a day. I also wished to learn more of her female friendships, which we know from her letters were actually quite important to her. She did devote a chapter to her extensive travels with Carrie Chapman Catt in 1911, and here we get some impressions of the warm and supportive friendship shared by these two very strong-willed suffrage leaders. She does not mention raising her nephew from the age of ten, a significant experience in her life, perhaps because they were estranged at times. Readers might also wonder why Jacobs never discusses her Jewish background or her Jewish identity or lack thereof.

Memories thus exhibits a number of limitations common to autobiographies. What Aletta Jacobs does choose to emphasize, however, makes a fascinating story. Memories will have lasting value not only because Jacobs was a pioneer for peace, social justice, and feminist causes, but also because she revealed the interconnections among her reform struggles, the local, national, and international aspects of those struggles, and the challenges posed in balancing personal and public life.