During her student years, Leydesdorff, born in Jakarta in 1949, became active in the student movement and feminism. She is one of the founders of the action group Dolle Mina, but was also part of the group that wanted to shift the struggle from women’s emancipation to a broader struggle. During a turbulent two-day conference in Arnhem in 1970, she was chairman (“who tightly led the meeting,” according to a reporter present) and there she clearly showed that her protest could be a little louder. “Playful action is very good at a certain stage, but it must be followed by tough action,” said the then twenty-year-old chairman. In a broadcast of Andere Tijden in 2010, she looked back on her role with some self-criticism: “I think that by not choosing the women’s groups, I was not always right.”
Leydesdorff also asserted himself as an activist at the Municipal University in Amsterdam, the current UvA, says historian and former NIOD director Hans Blom, “a young lecturer” at the time. In those heydays of democratization, students demanded a say in the educational program. Leydesdorff was one of those who advocated women’s history in the curriculum. “There was no serious objection to that,” said Blom. “We just didn’t think that students should determine their own grades for exams.”
Afterwards, Leydesdorff himself came to work at the Faculty of Political and Socio-cultural Sciences. Together with colleague Jaap Talsma, she campaigned for the development of oral history as a historical method. This partly came from cultural anthropology and was more than just a methodology for which a new form of source criticism had to be developed. “I had also done interviews for my dissertation on the mutiny on the ship De Zeven Provinciën,” says Blom. Oral history also had an ideological background; to give voice to groups who until then rarely read their words back into history. “It was a form of social history, and in that sense it also resulted from the democratization movement of the 1970s,” says Blom. “It was a methodological enrichment of historical scholarship.” Leydesdorff himself formulated the value of oral history in an interview with the student magazine Folia as follows: “People’s experiences, their subjective experiences, are, in addition to the actual events, also a part of history. A beautiful part, because it is about feelings, which is still too often forgotten.”
Leydesdorff’s publications were all based on that method. For her dissertation We have lived as human beings (1987) she interviewed members of the Jewish proletariat of Amsterdam before the Second World War. For Leaving the void behind us (2008) she spoke with wives of murdered residents of Srebrenica. She came clean about the fact that in her research she sided with the people she wrote about. In a guest lecture for Journalism students at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, she said that she was only interested in victims because she also had an activist motive with her oral history research: Victims have no voice, and perpetrators are more likely to bend reality to their will.
NRCreporter Jorg Leijten was present at that guest lecture and remembered the discussion about whether you can also portray perpetrators speaking using this method. “Yes, we thought, provided you do proper research into them and hold them accountable.”
In 1992, Leydesdorff became professor of women’s history at the Belle van Zuylen Institute, and in 2004 professor of oral history and culture at the Faculty of Humanities of the UvA. When she had long since retired, Leydesdorff was involved as an editor Handbook of Global Oral History which will be published at the end of October, according to Atria, the knowledge institute for emancipation and women’s history, which also houses part of Leydesdorff’s archive.
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