Jane de Iongh (1901–1982)

Adriana Wilhelmina de Iongh, called "Jane," and her brother were the children of an artistic family. She studied literature at the University of Amsterdam, with the Italian Renaissance as her doctoral thesis topic in 1924. After graduation, she got a job as a librarian at the Netherlands Economic History Archive (NEHA). She belonged to the small group of professional historians in the Netherlands during the interwar period. In 1935, Jane de Iongh resigned as librarian of the NEHA, to become a board member of both the International Institute of Social History and the International Archives for the Women's Movement (now IIAV). She studied the women's movement and conducted research in Britain and France. In 1936 she published a book that criticized the traditional, prejudiced view of women's role in history as that of wife or lover of a famous man. Jane was a member of the Dutch Society for Women's Interests and Equal Citizenship and the Women's Group of the Liberal Party. In the second half of the 1930s, as she frequently published articles in Dutch periodicals, Jane de Iongh developed into a well-known and respected personality. She worked also for more complete citizenship rights for women. During the German Occupation, she helped fulfill the need for cultural and historical works about the patriotic past by writing two biographies of the great female Regents of the Netherlands in the 16th-century: Margaret of Austria and Maria (or Mary) of Hungary. Her books offered a new interpretation of the political history of the Netherlands. Shortly after the Liberation, Jane de Iongh was named attaché for Education, Arts and Sciences in London, a position she would hold for 10 years. In the 1950s, in ailing health, she lived for a while in the south of French while she completed work on the biography of the third great female ruler of the Netherlands, Margaret, Duchess of Parma and Piacenza.