In Amsterdam Oud-West I came across Mary Zeldenrust, at least her face, as I remembered well. With a broad smile she looked at me from the cover of a book entitled Conversations with Mary Zeldenrust. It turned out in 1984 and was now free in a box with discarded books.
Who was Mary Zeldenrust, now of course my younger readers, breathless of curiosity, want to know. Mary Zeldenrust-Noordanus (1928-1984) was a well-known Dutchman who regularly appeared on TV, especially in her most important position: chairman in the sixties of the NVSH, the Dutch Association for Sexual Reform, which focused on assistance and information about contraception and sexuality. She died of cancer at the age of 55.
I remember her as a eloquent, enthusiastic woman. For example, she became a figurehead in “the liberation of sex life from the hypocrisy of a bourgeois-religious morality,” as stated in the preface. She did not consider herself a thoroughbred feminist. “Feminism has some good things,” she told Bibeb of Free Netherlands“But as a totality I can’t stand it.” She was annoyed by “that too great intensity and too great one -sidedness.”
The book contains numerous extensive interviews. What surprised me was a macabre agreement in the 1960s with the present time: Zeldenrust was also seriously threatened in her position of NVSH chairman. “If I had said somewhere that the pill had to be provided to minors (…) I was immediately threatened with death. With Scheldt canonades over the phone, with threatening letters.” She therefore decided to never leave her children home alone.
When she said that the NVSH also had to think about homosexuality, a member of parliament bit her that the subsidy for the consultation agencies would not continue. What she mainly argued: more freedom to fight. “Freedom in yourself, freedom to plan your children, financial freedom, to be able to fight on other fronts at all.”
Also in her own private life she searched and found that freedom, although she did not want to express herself about this in these interviews. The fact is repeatedly mentioned that she and her husband Dick lived together in Rotterdam with a friendly couple, Jaap and An Muijlwijk.
“Your commune has been around for five years now,” Bibeb tells her in 1975. Zeldenrust reacts irritated and does not want to call it commune: “We live as a one family, but the children and both the couples have their own room. You have to be able to separate yourself.” She elaborates on the practical use, not about the intimate cause.
Larissa Pans, who is working on a biography of Mary Zeldenrust to be released in 2026, said about that Biography portal: “She fell in love with a married woman who moved in with her husband and two children. They had an open relationship, their men could also have other contacts.”
As a result, questions arise about her own sexual orientation. The fact that she wanted to remain silent about this as an ex-NVSH chairman was of course her right, but it also proved that the struggle for more sexual freedom was far from complete.