International Archives for the Women's Movement
The International Archives for the Women's Movement was founded in 1935 by three Dutch feminists, Rosa Manus, Johanna Naber and Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot.
On 3 December 1935, the International Archives for the Women's Movement (Dutch: Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (IAV)) was founded with Manus as president and Posthumus-van der Goot as the secretary.
[5] Within a year, the official opening of the IAV was held and by 1937 they had established a multi-lingual Yearbook to confirm the international nature of collecting and studying documents about women.
By June, German officials had inspected IAV twice and on 12 July 1940 the Security Police confiscated forty boxes of materials, as well as the furnishings and fixtures.
[9] In 1947, Dirk Graswinckel, a member of the committee to recover and repatriate Nazi plunder, returned a few boxes, representing about 1/10th of IAV's pre-war holdings.
[12] Though some minor works were published in the 1950s and 1960s by IAV, and they moved several times, little effort was made to reach those beyond Posthumus-van der Goot's circle.
[17] In 1992, a report which appeared in NRC Handelsblad, a major Dutch newspaper, written by historian Marc Jansen, noted that some of IAV's materials had been located in Russia.
[15] In the spirit of Perestroika and Glasnost policy reforms, historian Mineke Bosch and a colleague, Myriam Everard, went to Moscow in 1994 to try to discover what records were held in the Osobyi Archive.
Bosch discovered a leather bound volume of newspaper clippings, photographs and translations which had been prepared by Hungarian women for a visit by Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs, following the 1906 Copenhagen Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.
They found a large portion of Manus' documents but also noted that the collection did not represent the entirety of the stolen artifacts,[24] as most of the 150 periodicals and all of the 4,500 books of the pre-war IAV were absent.
[25] When the delays caused concern that the IAV archives might not be returned quickly, the International Institute for Social History microfilmed 14 reels of 33,663 individual images, making the documents accessible once again.
[1] Though officials continued to press for the return of the documents bureaucracy delayed any action until an announced 2001 visit by Queen Beatrix to Russia.
[24] In December 2015, nine books, including Beroepsarbeid der gehuwde vrouw (Occupational work of the married woman, 1921) by Betsy Bakker-Nort were returned from the Berlin Central and Regional Library, bearing the stamp of IAV or Rosa Manus.
