Making the Personal Political

Making the Personal Political is an interdisciplinary account of a now forgotten success story in the history of the society and culture of the Netherlands. While Dutch women had apparently retreated into domesticity after gaining the vote in 1919, women writers were out there in the market place selling the inside story of women's lives.

Eight case studies of women writers between 1919 and 1970 trace the unconscious politics of the personal in narratives of women's identity and experience through close readings of texts located in the culture of the time. Jane Fenoulhet, whose knowledge of Dutch literature and culture in the twentieth century is unparalleled in the English-speaking world, tracks the public representation of women's private project of self development to the moment when the personal is finally accepted as politically important in Dutch society.