Rosa Manus
Rosa Manus | |
---|---|
Rosette Susanna Manus | |
Born | |
Died | 1942 |
Known for | Sufferagist Women's rights advocate Pacifist |
Rosette Susanna "Rosa" Manus (Dutch pronunciation:
Early years
Rosette Susanna Manus was born in 1881 in
Women's Suffrage and Pacifism Work
Suffrage
Manus became involved with the international
Following the 1908 Fourth Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Amsterdam, Manus became a board member of the Dutch Association for Women's Suffrage (Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht, VVK).[10] In the VVK, Manus worked closely alongside Mia Boissevain on the Propaganda Committee. Together they organized a 1913 exhibition, "De Vrouw 1813–1913," (The Woman) on the lives of Dutch women[18] and successfully argued for women's full citizenship in the Netherlands.[19]
In 1915, Manus played an integral role in organizing the International Congress of Women at The Hague, where she was appointed secretary of a new International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, later known as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Manus and Aletta Jacobs are often credited with the survival of WILPF through the First World War.[20]
Manus accompanied Carrie Chapman Catt, then-President of the IWSA, on a world tour in 1922-1923.[21] They toured Latin America (visiting Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Peru) where they met with many fellow female activists, including Bertha Lutz, and discussed issues of Latin American women's suffrage.[21][22]
Along with other IAW members, Manus attended the Week of Women Suffrage Campaign in Egypt to aide Egyptian women in their efforts to gain the vote in 1935.[23] She also attended the 13th Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1939.
Peace Movements
Manus participated in a number of peace movements throughout the 1930s.
Later, in 1936, Manus served as secretary for the Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix (RUP) and the World Peace Congress.[24] For her efforts, the Dutch Police put her under surveillance. Due to her work, Catholics and national socialists in the Netherlands launched a "hate-campaign" against her because she was a Jewish woman with significant political and social standing.[25][26]
Other Women's Organizations
In 1935, together with Johanna Naber and Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot, Manus established the International Archives for the Women's Movement (IAV), later known as the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women's Movement and currently known as Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women's History which is located in Amsterdam.[18][27][28] Manus's papers are currently located in these archives, however, they were only recovered in 1992 when they were found in Moscow.[2] When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, they took the papers from the IAV and moved them to an unknown location in Berlin.[29] How and when her papers were taken from Berlin to Moscow remains unknown but it appears that only a fraction of her documents survived.[30]
Manus also founded the Dutch Electrical Association for Women.[2]
Manus was made an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau by royal decree on August 22, 1936.[31]
International Feminist Connections
Rosa Manus felt part of the international women's movement as evidenced from pieces of writing to Mary Sheepshanks about the publication of the feminist journal Jus Suffragii.[32] Such connections were also evident in her writings to Carrie Chapman Catt, whom she described repeatedly as a mother-like figure.[32]
Catt and Manus toured Europe together and developed a close relationship.[33] Manus felt comfortable in her relationship with Catt, enough so that she exposed her friend to newly emerging sexual culture of European society. She took Catt to a Parisian show fraught with nudity in order to educate Catt on national differences of women's ideals on sexuality and exposing Catt's limited sexual awareness due to her Puritan upbringing.[34]
Judaism and Antisemitism
Women's organizations of the twentieth century often had both Antisemitic and anti-Muslim tendencies since they were predominantly run by Protestant women.[32] Manus was part of the first wave of Jewish women who started to refer to themselves as feminists.[35] Within these organizations, Manus often faced pressure to conform and not give other Jewish women positions because the organizations did not want to seem too Jewish.[2] Manus spoke of her support for Carrie Chapman Catt's aide to Jewish refugees through her letters, but she found she needed to distance herself from that activism because of her own Jewish identity.[36]
Manus's Jewishness brought her into conflict with other feminists, particularly those from Muslim countries. The issue of immigration of Jewish people to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s kept Muslim and Jewish women in the region from uniting over feminist causes. This was true for Manus and Egyptian feminist Huda Sha'rawi who clashed over the issue even though the IAW and WILPF held Britain responsible for clashing interests in Palestine.[21] Sha'rawi strongly advocated for the Palestinians stating they were experiencing violence under British colonial rule while Manus and other feminists focused on the persecution of Jews during World War II.[37] This caused further conflict between the two women. At an IWSA meeting in 1939, Manus came into conflict with Sha'rawi who was a representative from Egypt.[2] They had conflicting views about Palestine.[2]
As Nazi Germany rose to power in the 1930s, Manus grew aware of the threat to herself and her movement. While attending a play in London, England, Manus first encountered the plot of the Nazi regime to kill the Jewish people.[38] It was at this point that Manus donated her papers to the IAV.[38]
In 1933, after attending the Geneva Disarmament Conference, Manus helped found and became the president of the Dutch Neutraal Vrouwencomite' voor de Vluchtelingen (Neutral Women's Committee for Refugees).[24]
She was accused at various points of both communism and pacifism and was particularly targeted on top of these issues because she was Jewish and a woman.[2][38]
Death
The Gestapo arrested Manus between August 10 and August 14, 1941[2] and deported her to Germany. They arrested Manus due to her actions as a pacifist activist, however, they deported her because she was Jewish rather than because of her political actions.[39] First she was taken to Auschwitz and then was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp (a camp for political prisoners and Jews) by train in October 1941.[40][41] Manus was likely gassed at Bernburg in 1942, but there is conflicting information around her date of death.[18] Multiple sources suggest that she was murdered in the Nazi euthanasia mental hospital Bernburg.[42]
Manus is a less well-known figure because she left few personal texts behind and she did not write a memoir like other feminists of her era.[43] She did not feel as though she was a particularly important person.[44] She often refrained from taking positions of immediate leadership because of her Jewishness, but she accepted on occasion because she was the lone Jewish female representative who had the chance and felt it was important in certain circumstances to step up - she always claimed her actions were for her feminism rather than her Jewishness.[45]
See also
- List of peace activists
- Manus friend and biographer, Clara Meijers
References
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- ^ "Rosa Manus | Jewish Women's Archive". jwa.org. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
- ^ OCLC 41108563.
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- ^ JSTOR 3175646.
- ^ a b c "Who was Rosa Manus?". Atria Institute on gender equality and women's history. 18 April 2016. Archived from the original on 24 June 2016. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
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- ^ a b c Rupp, Leila (1996). "Challenging Imperialism in International Women's Organizations, 188-1945". NWSA Journal. 8: 14–15.
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- ^ Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton University Press, 1995. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvx4 . p 212.
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- ^ Grever, Maria. On the Origins of Dutch Women's Historiography: Three Portraits (1840-1970). Current Issues in Women's History. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. p 258.
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- ^ "Who was Rosa Manus?". Atria. 18 April 2016. Retrieved 25 August 2019.
- ^ ISSN 1937-5239.
- ISBN 0691016763.
- JSTOR 3178388.
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- ^ Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton University Press, 1995. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvx4 . p 234.
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External links
- Archief Rosa Manus Fonds[permanent dead link], Atria, kennisinstituut voor emancipatie en vrouwengeschiedenis, Amsterdam, Netherlands