A Brill Calendar: June 4

Few paleo-zoologists doubt that the primal division 'allotted' to Homo sapiens is the difference in gender.

Each tribe and people, culture and civilization deals with these complementarities in its own way. From its beginnings, Dutch ‘Academia’ as institutionalized in universities developed as a male – if not macho – undertaking. Convention and tradition denied girls and women in the Republic access to an ‘Alma Mater’. Later, national legislature in the Kingdom prohibited the slightly greater half of its ‘Human Resources’ to matriculate in – and graduate from – universities.

It fell to Aletta Henriëtte Jacobs (Sappemeer, Groningen Province, February 9 1854 – Baarn, Utrecht, August 10 1929) to be admitted to Academic Study as the first woman in 1872, aged 18. Aletta had written a personal letter to the Prime Minister, the great Johan Rudolf Thorbecke (Zwolle, January 1798 – The Hague, June 5 1872), pleading for exemption from this prohibition. On his deathbed, the emeritus Leyden Professor, still presiding over the third national Cabinet carrying his name, granted the request; the information reached Sappemeer in an envelope with a mourning garland.

It is seldom that a decision of a dying scholar-statesman was honoured with so much personal gusto and perseverance. Aletta Jacobs graduated in 1879 as a Medical Doctor at Groningen, appropriately enough on localizing physiological phenomena in the human brain; becoming also the first woman to get a Doctoral Thesis accepted by a Dutch University.