Jolanda Withuis in gesprek over haar nieuwe boek Moeder, antimoeder

Mother, anti-mother - Jolande Withuis

Jolande Withuis grew up in a communist family with a mother who worked very hard, both inside and outside the home, who wanted to be financially independent and who wanted to raise her daughter and son as equals.

Nowadays, few people are surprised by this, but in the fifties and sixties Jenny van Ringen was an exception. She was caught between her own professional ambitions and the dominant views on mothers and children. The bans on work for married women and for communists frustrated her deeply, and she was convinced that intimacy, nurturing and comfort weaken children.

In Moeder, antimoeder Jolande Withuis reconstructs the life of her mother and investigates what the upbringing by this powerful woman meant for her as a daughter. Once again she proves that she is able like no other to connect individual lives and feelings to major socio-cultural and political-historical developments.

Jolande Withuis (1949) was a researcher at the NIOD until 2014. She writes for NRC Handelsblad, Trouw and de Volkskrant. De Bezige Bij published Recognition (2002), After the Camp (2005), The Woman as a Person (2007) and in 2008 Be Manly, Be Strong, a biography about resistance fighter Pim Boellaard, which was awarded the 2009 Great History Prize and the 2010 Erik Hazelhoff Biography Prize. In 2016, the bestseller Juliana. Vorstin in a Man's World was published, which was nominated for the Brusse Prize and the Dutch Biography Prize. In 2018, her autobiographical quest Riddle Father was published. In November 2021, Withuis' major biography about Jeanne Bieruma Oosting was published: No Time to Lose. In 2023, Woman and Freedom was published, an argument for a more critical feminism, based on the Huizinga lecture that Withuis delivered in 2018.