Women Around the World Who ROCK

Is there a place on Earth where rockin’ women aren’t found? Nope. For decades, I’ve looked for amazing women wherever I traveled, whether it’s a teeny town or a world-renowned metropolis. My itinerary will take me to sites where women worked to make their community better or excelled at any number of things. I’ve found my woman-based meanderings a wonderful way to get to really know a place.

I’ve always wanted to share what I’ve learned—that’s why I’ve been a journalist all my life. And that’s why I started this website in 2022. My website includes much on the Hidden HerStories and MoreStories of the Texas town where I’ve lived for 33 years, but I’m gradually expanding to places I visit—which could include a location 10 miles away or 1,000 or 5,000 miles away.

I aim to make HerStory exploration easy and enticing. So I typically alert a traveler (armchair or IRL) to a HerStory site close to a top tourist destination that’s likely to be on their must-see list. Easy-squeezy to walk a few blocks from that top destination to see a few spots where women did something amazing. But I also include HerStory sites that take a visitor to enchanting but lesser-known neighborhoods. A reader will find a smorgasbord to choose what appeals on any given point in a trip.

AMSTERDAM

Herewith, an offering of awesome Amsterdam women I just visited! First, thumbs up to a city that salutes women and other overlooked groups more than most. Amsterdam’s public history monuments and outreach give visitors a more complete Amsterdam and Dutch history beyond the typical tributes to wealthy white men. And Amsterdam’s public history includes truthful looks at slavery and Nazi collaboration (as well as Amsterdammers’ resistance to those evils). Some outstanding agencies offer tours that spotlight a complete history, such as Badass Tours, which gives visitors looks at Amsterdam’s Asian, Black, Jewish, LGBTQ+ changemakers as well as the Women’s History Walk I took. The walk was a fab adjunct to the women I found in my research.

Let’s go look for ladies! And enjoy your meanders in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

ARRIVAL: AMSTERDAM CENTRAAL

Maybe you’ll be one of the many, many visitors who like me arrived by train and step out to Amsterdam Central Station’s red brick splendor. Many visitors begin Amsterdam exploring by heading down Damrak, the main avenue from the station that leads to the Palace. Join them, but make a few stops for the forgotten females.

COLONIZER FIGHTER

Walk just a few blocks down Damrak and stop at the huge brick building, Beurs Van Berlage, the former stock exchange. At the corner of the building at Damrak and Oudebrugsteeg, look at the statue set into the corner. Meet Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the “Butcher of Banda.”

Hold that thought and head left to the building’s next corner. See the woman’s head painted above the entrance? Look underneath that surface to see her naked body. This is the sobering first stop of the awesome Badass Tours’ Women’s History walk I took with our super guide Rissa. As she notes, the selling and exploitation of bodies of women, men, and children who lived in countries colonized by the Dutch powered mightily the wheels of commerce for Amsterdam and the Netherlands.

Colonial people were enslaved and often died because of the likes of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, governor of the Dutch East India Company. Enraged that the people of the Indonesian Banda or “Spice Islands” wouldn’t sell their nutmeg and mace at cut rates exclusively to the Dutch, Coen had nearly the whole population killed or enslaved. That was one horrible chapter in the colonizing atrocities over centuries: From the 1600s, the colonization work done by the East and West India companies and Dutch military included rape, torture, enslavement, and executions that continued to Indonesia’s independence struggle in the 1940s. The profiteering on work done by the subjugated people financed many of the beautiful Amsterdam mansions.

The woman that Badass Tours honors here is Cut Nyak Dhien. She led guerilla forces against Dutch colonizers in north Indonesia’s Sumatra. Over 25 years of resistance, she crafted strategies to inspire fighters and outsmart the Dutch. She was captured by the Dutch in 1905. She persuaded them not to kill her, but they exiled her. Joke’s on them: Her daughter Cut Gambang escaped and continued the resistance.

Cut Nyak Dhien is designated a National Hero in Indonesia, with her house made a museum and her face on a banknote and a stamp and on streets and more sites.

Join the tourists and head down Damrak a few more blocks to the Palace.

ROYAL PALACE

Queen Wilhelmina and her daughter line ruled the Netherlands for a century.

Whether you go inside to view Royal Palace opulence or give its somewhat drab exterior a glance from Dam Square, toast the Queens! Queen Wilhelmina was the first in a line of four Dutch bawss ladies who ruled for a century, starting with Wilhelmina’s 58-year rule starting in 1890. It’s complicated, but she’s credited for inspiring the Dutch during occupation (Churchill called her “the only real man among the governments-in-exile”; she also made some Nazi-friendly deals); she advocating for “Ethical Policy” that aimed to stop brutal treatment of colonized people and power share (plenty of bad shit still happened); and she pushed for women’s suffrage.

Wilhelmina’s daughter Queen Juliana was somewhat progressive on social issues during her reign from 1948 to 1980 and cultivated a “queen of the people” approach (No more royal curtsies! The kids go to public school!). Her daughter Queen Beatrix took the reins from 1980 to 2013. Things started badly when she married a former Hitler youth member, but she’s known for passing on more royal power to the Parliament; advocating for the European Union; and being a bit of a tree-hugger.

Catharina-Amalia: Next Netherlands lady in charge

The lad Willems took back over when Beatrix’s boy Willem-Alexander ascended in 2013 and continues to rule. The Dutch monarchy started with three Willems who ruled from 1815-1890.

But guess what? The royal family now only has daughters. So Queen rule will be back when their eldest daughter takes over. Then, all hail the new Dutch ruler: Catharina-Amalia Beatrix Carmen Victoria, Princess of Orange, Princess of the Netherlands, Princess of Orange-Nassau, the QUEEN.

DAM SQUARE: ALL HAIL MARRETJE!

Nice to have some lady royals, but while standing in front of the Palace in Dam Square, DO celebrate one particularly bodacious commoner woman who fought for justice outside this palace. She reminds us that the justice work of everyday women is far more inspirational than those of cossetted monarchs.

Marretje Arents sold fish and limes daily right here on the Square, supporting her four children while her soldier husband served in the East Indies. Marretje was among many Amsterdamsters angry at their high taxes which impoverished working people and funded wars of aggression and royal excess.

Marretje was a ringleader in the attacks on nearly 40 tax collectors in June, 1784, in the neighborhood around current Rembrandt plaza (formerly Botermarkt, the place to get butter and other dairy from farmers). Dressed in red, she urged others to join her in breaking into tax collector houses, looting and throwing their riches into the canals.

Marretje led women and men in the 1784 Pachtersoproer tax riots pictured here.

Marretje led the rioters to the chief tax officer. A chronicler reports that she said this to him: "Today we are in charge, and tomorrow we will come to you at the town hall. Then we will see what we will do with all of you, you land-grabbing gentlemen." She then turned and mooned the tax chief, saying that "Now you can clean my ass, because I will do that much for you.”

Happy ending for the people: Tax collections were postponed for six months. Bad news for Marretje: she was arrested a few days later at her market stall, and jailed in the basement cells of the City Hall, the original building that grew into the Palace. She was sentenced to death by hanging in the weighing house once here in Dam Square to weigh the many wares sold here. Defiant until the end, she shouted from the gallows: “I did it for the whole country, against the tyranny of the tenants, who tormented us citizens and forcibly took our money and good for the lease.”

SHOPPING FOR SUFFRAGE

From the Royal Palace, many tourists will file like lemmings onto Kalverstraat, a street littered with the same stores that . . . anyone can shop at in most US cities and big cities abroad. I know that YOU are not going to squander your time in one of the world’s most fascinating cities to get one more gander at the latest at Urban Outfitters. No, you will want to walk from Dam Square just a half-block down Kalverstraat to number 22, where women fomented suffrage rebellion.

Because you have GOT to meet Wilhelmina Drucker, known as “The Iron Will” in her drive to get rights for Dutch women. First, a little background. Wilhelmina came from challenging circumstances, born in 1887 as an illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and a banker who refused to recognize or care for her. Nevertheless, she persisted. She sewed for a living as her mother did, and took up socialism. Wilhelmina learned that her half-brother got an inheritance out of her rich dad, so she sued and got a settlement from him that gave her financial independence.

She started the Free Women's Association, which spawned an avalanche of activism. Some of the activism strategizing happened when Wilhelmina and other radical women met here at Kalverstraat 22, which used to be the Suisse Hotel. While the monied men of Amsterdam played billiards, feminists met in the adjacent café to launch Vrije Vrouwen Vereeniging, the Free Women's Association.

Wilhelmina rallied her sisters to get a feminist magazine going and start women’s trade unions. She lectured throughout Europe on women’s rights, particularly for suffrage and for unmarried women’s access to a livelihood that would support a family. She collaborated with leading feminist and suffragist Aletta Jacobs (you’ll meet Aletta below in my look at ladies of the cool Jordaan neighborhood) to work with the masses of women fighting for their rights. Thankfully, Wilhelmina was able to see suffrage enacted before she died in 1925.

“Iron Will” Wilhelmina also inspired generations to come! Her fierce determination got her the nickname of Dolle Mina—Dolle meaning “mad” or “crazy” and ‘Mina shortened from Wilhelmina. In the 1970s, Dutch feminists were inspired to dub their new activist group Dolle Mina.

Here’s just one of their activisms: They broke into a meeting of gynecologists in Utrecht, south of Amsterdam, to protest the lack of abortion rights. They wrote baas in eigen buik (boss over my own belly) on their stomachs. They also wrapped pink ribbons around urinals to promote public toilets for women; jostled and whistled at men so they could experience a bit of relentless sexual harassment women do; and stormed schools, bars, and other male-only bastions.

Dam Square: Dolle Mina demo for subsidized day care, 1971

Dolle Mina members demonstrated for more childcare support, bringing playpens and real babies to places such as Dam Square. AND Dolle Mina members gathered in 1970 at Wilhelmina’s statue to burn a corset to salute her work to free women from oppressive laws. You, too, can honor Wilhelmina at her statue, located not far from sculptures of another amazing woman. Look here soon for a jaunt to honor women in that area. And NO WE’RE NOT ANGRY that statues of women and streets named for women in many cities are located away from the city centers, denying them ease of viewing!!

AND Dolle Mina continues! Chapters are thriving throughout the Netherlands, continuing with actions such as the Claim the Night marches that happened this September 1 in 19 cities. Members speak out for legislation addressing violence against women and other issues and ally with groups addressing racism and repressive state actions. Plus, they still meet at Wilhelmina’s statue to renew their commitment to feminism!

Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History: Visit!

Thanks to the awesome Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women's History for details on Dolle Mina and so many more resources documenting women making change in the past and present! Visit them at Vijzelstraat 20, where you can browse books and publications, much of it in English. Atria is also in a cool neighborhood close to the city center, with plenty of other wonderful women of history sites to visit. Stay tuned.

RIJSKMUSEUM: ART EQUITY

Artlovers won’t miss a visit to this epic museum. What most don’t know is that some of the best “Dutch Masters” artists were women! But of course, their art and deserved fame have been under wraps for centuries.

Dutch “Master” Judith painted this, but her rival painted over her signature.

The Rijksmusuem got the memo in 2021 and, for the first time since it opened in 1885, featured a few of these amazing women artists in the museum’s prime spot, the Gallery of Honour. Since then, the museum offers visitors a more women-centric experience with a self-guided women’s tour on an app and continuing programs to keep art acquisition equitable. You don’t have to travel there: Search “women” at the Rijksmuseum website to see art and stories of women artmakers. Here’s a sampling.

Judith Leyster

Love Judith’s self-confident self-portrait! And her painting above shows why her fame was hidden for so long: “The Serenade” was signed by artist Frans Hal, a rival who liked to steal her students. Frans was thought to be the artist Golden Boy of the Golden Age of Dutch history, when colonial exploitation fueled a wave of wealth and art commissions. The Louvre discovered his signature to be false; the painting originally had Leyster’s distinctive monogram: her initials entwined with a five-pointed star.

Judith may have started painting because her father’s brewery business failed and she and her siblings had to go to work. Either way, her exemplary talents were noted and by age 24 she was the second woman allowed into the master painters guild. She painted most of her known work before she got married to another painter, Jan Miense Molenaer, and had five children. Over the years, many of her paintings were attributed to Frans or to her husband; in addition to sexism, signatures were changed on women’s work because paintings done by better-known males would sell for more. Now Judith’s work likely eclipses many male “masters” in value.

Gesina ter Borch

Gesina was born in 1631 into a family of artists of means, so she didn’t need to support herself as an artist. Unfortunately, she seldom signed her work. She created some paintings in collaboration with her half-brother, who then signed them and got sole credit. This portrait of their little brother Moses is the only known painting signed by Gesina. It was acquired for three million euros by the Rijksmuseum in 2023 from an unwitting antiques dealer.

Gesina enjoyed working in poetry and philosophy in her watercolor paintings, which she preserved in a diary-type notebook. Here’s The Triumph of the Art of Painting over Death.

Is Gesina foreshadowing her obscurity with the female artist’s gagged mouth?

Rachel Ruysch

Rachel Ruysch’s work gained quite a bit of fame in her lifetime—her paintings often sold for twice more than the paintings of Rembrandt! So we have sexism to thank for the fact that her import was buried until recently. Rachel’s mother came from a painter family and her father was a professor of anatomy and botany who taught at Amsterdam’s Hortus Botanicus (check out those gorgeous gardens!). Rachel was inspired by the delectable flora at the gardens. Her early paintings at age 15 were so good that she was allowed to go pro. Her specialty became beautiful portraits of flowers; she also liked to add in insects and reptiles of the forest floor.

*Vase of Flowers with an Ear of Corn*, 1742

Rachel married in 1693 and had 10 children; because her income funded childcare, she continued painting. Thumbs up to husband Juriaen Pool! He painted this family portrait. Rachel didn’t marry for status: Juriaen was younger and raised in an orphanage, where he learned painting. While he did work as a painter, he spent more time promoting her career.

Rachel’s renown spread to other countries, and she became a long-distance court painter for a German prince to deliver one highly paid painting a year. Plus she literally won the Dutch lottery, which nicely enhanced her financial security. She was the first woman to be a member of the fabled artists’ society Confrerie Pictura in The Hague. She only stopped painting when she died at 86.

Maria Sibylla Merian

And guess who taught Rachel Ruysch? This amazing woman, Maria Sibylla Merian, who painting hundreds of beautiful scientific illustrations and traveled far afield to learn and collect plant and insect specimens. Plus she made groundbreaking scientific discoveries. I wanted to imagine her doing her work, so I went to the street where she had lived (couldn’t find a house number in my research) close by the Rijksmuseum and conjured her.

This was a woman fascinated by insects, raising silkworms and caterpillars as a girl in Frankfurt, carefully observing and drawing their life cycles. She later published illustrated books about insect life cycles, disproving the widespread belief of the time that insect eggs were generated spontaneously in mud or water. A pioneer ecologist, she proved and illustrated the symbiotic relationship of insects to plant and flower species.

In 1691, she and her daughters Johanna and Dorothea moved to Amsterdam. She supported them by selling her illustrations of insects and flowers, and took in art students, including Rachel Ruysch. She sold paintings and got a small grant from the city to travel with Dorothea to Suriname, then a rough South American colony, to document insects, plants, and animals there. She learned of the medicinal uses of many of the plants from the indigenous people she was assigned as slaves. She also railed against the Dutch barons for using the labor of enslaved persons.

One of her study subjects was the peacock flower, later known as Pride of Barbados—a plant common to my area and backyard. She wrote: “'The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves . . . In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves.'

Maria discovered nearly a hundred new species, and some are named after her, such as the giant tarantula spider Avicularia merianae.

JORDAAN CHANGEMAKERS

Jordaan is super hipstah now, dotted with chic cafes and boutiques. But it started as the poor neighborhood for workers and immigrants, who serviced the rich closer to the city center. Houses were small and stuffed with big families; by 1900, some 80,000 squeezed into a neighborhood that now houses around 20,000. Poverty’s fallout was everywhere, and women were leaders in bettering health and housing. Let’s honor a few of them.

Aletta Jacobs

Aletta helped poor women and sex workers.

Envision Aletta Jacobs doing her challenging work here at Spuistraat 2. She came to Jordaan after struggling against rampant sexism to get a medical degree. She established a clinic here in 1880, providing free healthcare for poor women and children and sex workers. She saw the toll on women of having babies year after year, so she provided them with birth control such as the new diaphragm—which became known as “the Dutch cap.”

Aletta Jacobs is seen by many as the founder of feminism in the Netherlands. In 1879, she became the first licensed Dutch woman doctor. She sued for the right to vote, arguing that the law didn’t specifically prohibit women. The Supreme Court ruled against her. She devoted herself to improving women's working conditions and getting voting rights. In 1903, she gave up her doctor practice to lead the Women's Suffrage Association. She spoke worldwide for suffrage, including a global tour with American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt. In 1919, she finally got to see suffrage for all women.

Suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta talking suffrage in Shanghai, 1912.

This building that housed her clinic is herstoric as well. It was a bastion of workers’ rights organizations and arts groups that supported justice. The Werkteater put on theater productions here and in community settings such as prisons and hospitals and schools during the 1970s and ‘80s. They engaged the community in important issues such as aging and healthcare and arts-making.

The Dutch honor Aletta’s contributions in many ways: Her name is on streets and schools such as the Dr. Aletta Jacobs vocational school; there’s even a planetoid named after her! If you’re visiting the Rijksmuseum or Vondelpark, see her house with a bust of her on it at nearby Tesselschadestraat 15.

Potato Riot women

Enjoy a stroll down Prinsenstraat street, but stop by number 11 to picture life here in the early years of WWI, when food basics were being highly rationed. Women who needed to feed their families came together and decided to get food however they could. They broke into the grocery at Prinsenstraat 11 to take food, as well as other spots such as potato vendors.

Women’s committees numbering thousands in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities carried out actions ranging from petitioning government officials for more and cheaper food to looting coal barges in the lean years of 1916 and 1917. Actions ramped up in the summer; police fired on crowds, killing and injuring protestors. Factory workers joined in with a strike, and finally, the women got some food relief.

Noordermarkt Riotgrrrls

Women were also at the forefront of struggles a decade later, when unemployment rose to record highs as Hitler gained power in nearby Germany. Some 50,000 Amsterdammers were jobless, and women with paid and unpaid jobs were speaking out. On July 4, 1934, riots broke out in several neighborhoods, including Jordaan.

Women were at the barricades near this statue on Noordermarkt and elsewhere in Jordaan and other neighborhoods. Visit the statue, titled Unity the Strongest Chain on a Saturday and enjoy the enticing market at 400-year-old Noordermarkt square as well. The Noordermarkt, once called the Princenmarkt, was a rag and patch market where women would repair clothing. Stroll a few blocks to imagine the height of the riot on Tweede Goudsbloemdwarsstraat street.

Anne Frank

Your Jordaan meander may include a visit to the amazing Anne Frank House at Westermarkt 20. Do go, but look below in the Plantage neighborhood section for another way to bring home the scope of the death and imprisonment of some 107,000 Jewish people—children like Anne Frank, too—along with homesexuals, disabled people, Romas, and others. Find brave women who resisted.

Helena Mercier

Given the gentrification of Jordaan that long ago forced out the poor people and then hippies and ‘creatives’ in the 1970s, it’s gratifying when a bougie business incorporates the herstory of their building. So it is with the Hotel Mercier at Rozenstraat 12, named after Helena Mercier, who’s credited as the mother of social work in the Netherlands.

Helena: Fix poverty through access to basic needs.

If you pop in to tell the Hotel Mercier folks “thanks” for keeping Helena’s legacy alive with her name, look as you enter for the “Ons Huis” preserved above its entrance. Helena started the “Our House” community school for children and adults in 1892. She believed that Jordaan’s impoverished people needed basic needs met before they could rise, such as education, decent housing, and adequate nutrition. She started up community kitchens to provide nutritious hot meals at low cost. She got funding to improve some 130 houses in Jordaan, and her advocacy for a Housing Act passed in 1901.

Helena’s writing brought like-minded activists who also believed that the way out of poverty was through education and access to basic nutrition, healthcare, and housing. Marie Muller-Lulofs worked with Helena to create in 1904 the School of Social Work, still continuing at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science, where a building is named for her.

Marie also started agencies for home healthcare, after-school daycares and children’s libraries, organizations to help with unemployment and poor housing; plus she started a credit union to give poor people access to nonprofit banking.