Suzanna Jansen switches smoothly between memory and history, but fills in a little too much ★★★☆☆

A good subject for a book is often close by. This applied to Suzanna Jansen’s two previous non-fiction books, The pauper’s paradise (2008), which tells how her ancestors lived in the educational institution in Veenhuizen, and Despite gravity (2018), in which Jansen, who grew up in the then fresh, neat, culture-poor Amsterdam garden city of Slotermeer, pursues her girlhood dream: to become a ballerina. Both books are about people who break free from their environment and yearn for a different life.

Also Jansen’s new book, The revolution or the age of the woman, has roots in her family history. Even now they struggle in an attempt to escape. This time by Betsy Dingemans (1922-2015), the writer’s mother. Unlike her mother and grandmother, she did not become a maid, but, after graduating from high school, she worked in the office to her great delight. Until she married Chris. She became pregnant, became a housewife and mother of five daughters. Her life consisted of caring for others. The fact that her husband occasionally made nasi on Sundays was considered particularly emancipated.

Jansen beautifully describes how dissatisfaction grows among mother and daughters with this doomed woman’s fate, and how feminism catches on with Betsy and her daughters. The differences are big: for the daughters it goes without saying that they will not allow themselves to be kissed as housewives by a handsome prince, that they will go to college and have a career, even if they have children. Betsy carefully starts volunteering at the library, does evening pre-university education and gets a small paid job.

It is touching when they work together. In 1981, the mother and her youngest daughter Sanne (Suzanna) participate in the strike against the controversial abortion law with a five-day cooling-off period. Betsy hangs a sheet on the balcony as a sign of solidarity. Without text, that would be too provocative, but still. It is also nice how mother and daughters, all students, talk about the books they put on their reading list at Dutch.

Slow emancipation

Jansen draws this ‘small’ history of the family in which she grew up in a broader context. She sketches the slow, inevitable emancipation of women in the Netherlands in the 20th century. That is a huge subject, and it also moves through the century in great strides, but it is interesting, especially because of the reflection of history in the events in Betsy’s life. This interaction gives this book a pleasant relief.

We go from a women’s march in Paris in 1789, during which women claimed their human rights – in vain – through 1878, when Aletta Jacobs became the first Dutch woman to graduate from a university, to 1922, the year that women’s suffrage was enshrined in the Constitution; Jansen’s grandmother Roza was allowed to vote for the first time as a young woman. She describes the modern office life in which her mother briefly participated after the Second World War; women were cheap, convertible labor – they got married anyway. We see Catholic married life in the 1950s, with the ‘marital duty’ for wives and the constant fear of another pregnancy.

In the 1960s, ‘the pill’ provided relief; the families became smaller. But the ‘discomfort with the woman’ grew; Joke Smit wrote a startling essay about it in 1967. Many women, like Betsy, felt useless and became depressed, to which the GP had no other answer than to prescribe their sleeping pills or Valium. Little by little, girls are getting better educated, women are working more often and inequality between men and women is getting smaller, although the difference in power never disappears.

Fictional passages

It is a fascinating story, even for those who are largely familiar with it. Jansen switches smoothly between historical information, his own memories and those of others and makes connections effortlessly. Unfortunately, she alternates this ‘I’-told story with passages in which she ‘puts in’ the skin of Betsy, Roza, Chris and herself as a girl. The latter is of course possible, although the alternation between the ‘I’ and the girl ‘Sanne’ is tense. It becomes annoying when Jansen fictionalizes her protagonists and attributes thoughts and feelings. That has the effect of kitsch: the whole story comes into question if we don’t know what is real and what is made up. The family members are real people, not characters that can be molded as they see fit.

When Jansen wants to show how small her grandmother was when she was allowed to vote for the first time, she writes: ‘She is not used to being listened to.’ In a scene where her parents argue about Chris’s stinginess, she makes him think, “Don’t fall for it. Don’t act authoritarian.’ This makes the zeitgeist a very easy exercise to fill in. The fact that these fictional passages are written in a childish style, in contrast to Jansen’s own lively narration, does not help.

The nice thing about non-fiction is that reality is more unruly than much fiction. A novel about Betsy Dingemans, in which the entire 20th century vibrates, could have been done. The genre in which Jansen is so skilled cannot do without empathy and imagination, but it can do without fiction.