Rosa Manus
Rosa Manus, a leader of several feminist and pacifist organizations in the Netherlands, 1928. Photograph by Jacob Merkelbach. Source: Beeldebank Stadsarchief Amsterdam, via Wikimedia Commons.
From early on, Rosa Manus wished to escape her traditional bourgeois upbringing in Amsterdam, attending meetings of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, where she met influential suffragettes Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs. In 1915 helped to organize the International Women’s Conference against War. Manus would remain committed to the causes these organizations represented—women’s suffrage and pacifism—for the rest of her life, serving in leadership positions of various organizations and founding others. Increasingly angered by the reluctance of the Dutch women’s movement to recognize antisemitism in Europe, Manus distanced herself from the movement in the 1930s. In 1940 she was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück, then sent to Bernburg, where she was gassed in 1943.
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Early Life and Feminist Activism
Rosa Manus came from a prosperous bourgeois Jewish family. Her father, Philip Manus, was a tobacco merchant and her mother, Soete Vita Israel, was a homemaker born in the Netherlands. Rosa was the second of their seven children. From an early age, she longed for independence, education, and paid employment—aspirations that had no place in the environment in which she grew up. Even her desire to become a nurse was not supported. Instead, she took up philanthropy and sat upon various charitable committees.
In 1908, during the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), Manus met and formed friendships with Aletta Jacobs and Carrie Chapman Catt. From then on, she became increasingly well known as a feminist, partly through organizing the 1913 exhibition “De Vrouw 1813–1913,” which portrayed the life of Dutch women. The following year, she and Jacobs attended the conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in London. In 1915, as an extension of this event, Manus helped set up the International Women’s Conference against War, organized by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
Women’s Suffrage and Pacifism
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Growing Marginalization
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Deportation and Death
Rosa Manus had no illusions. Her friends and family were already being affected by Nazism, and she expected the situation of Jews to get worse. Through the National Women’s Committee for Refugees, she was active in helping the stream of German refugees and set up a center for refugee women. Her growing unease was justified, as was her assumption that she would be picked up soon after an invasion of the Netherlands. Already suspect as a pacifist and because of her international contacts, she was arrested in 1940. As a Jew, she could expect no special treatment and, after a short spell in prison, she was deported to Ravensbrück, and from there she met her final destiny.
Everard, Myriam. “Rosa Manus: The Genealogy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist.” In Rosa Manus (1881-1942): the international life and legacy of a Dutch feminist, edited by Myriam Everard and Francisca de Haan. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016.
Leydesdorff, Selma. “Dutch Jewish Women. Integration and Modernity.” In Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom, edited by Judith Frishman and Hetty Berg, 183-194. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007.
The papers of Rosa Manus are held by Atria, Institute on Gender Equality and Women's History in Amsterdam. With other archives, they were discovered in Moscow and were recuperated in 2003.
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