Google Doodle salutes Jewish Dutch women’s rights pioneer
Aletta Jacobs was the first female medical doctor in the Netherlands and a force for women’s rights and suffrage
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
An extraordinary, pioneering Jewish woman, Aletta Jacobs was honored Thursday in a Google doodle, a whimsical graphic that sometime appears above the search bar on the search engine’s otherwise spare home page.
February 9 would have been the 163rd birthday of Jacobs, who was born in the Netherlands in 1854 and grew up to blaze a trail in women’s rights and achievements.
“Today, on what would’ve been Jacobs’ 163rd birthday, we celebrate all that she did to pave the way for those who came after her,” wrote Google, which processes more than 3.5 billion searches a day.
The daughter of a doctor, she yearned to enter the medical profession at a time when women in her village were not even allowed to attend high school.
She studied independently, passed the assistant chemist exam in 1870, petitioned the University of Groningen for permission to attend classes on medicine in 1871 and became the first female in the Netherlands to study medicine and to obtain a medical degree, which she did in 1879.
As a doctor she fought her colleagues to make contraceptives more widely available and set up the first birth control clinic in the world. According to Wikipedia, she helped the inventor of the contraceptive diaphragm to improve the device significantly.
She opened her practice doors twice a week to poor women and also worked to improve the conditions of salesgirls.
In 1903, she left her medical practice to campaign for the right of women to vote, which was finally granted in 1919.
In that year, she co-founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Aletta Jacobs died in the Netherlands in August 1929.
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