Study of revolutionary feminist wins Libris prize for history

A biography of a radical feminist thinker who published a series of influential revolutionary tracts while raising a family of three children has won this year’s prestigious Libris history prize.

Dubbelleven (“Double Life”), a study of the life of the Dutch philosopher Geertruida Kapteyn-Muysken by historian Maite Karssenberg, was praised for “exposing the shockingly subordinate role of women in the 19th century.

The jury also highlighted Karssenberg’s “completely original” approach to her work, using diaries and letters to recreate Kapteyn-Muysken’s life and lead the reader through the writer’s eight-year trawl through the archives.

Born in Hillegom in 1855 and raised in Haarlem, Kapteyn-Muysken spent 20 years in England with her husband and children before moving to Zürich, where she became known in radical intellectual circles.

She campaigned for votes for women, sexual ethics, pacifism and non-religious education in the early 20th century. After her return to the Netherlands in 1908 she held salons at her home in Scheveningen and counted progressive icons such as Clara Wichmann and Aletta Jacobs among her circle of friends.

“After her death she was praised as ‘one of the most free and unrestrained minds’ of the Dutch revolutionary movement, with an ‘almost universal knowledge of the intellectual and social movements of our time’,” Karssenberg wrote on her website.

Other nominees included Isabel Casteels for De kronieken van de dood, a study of torture and executions in the 16th century, Maarten van Ginderachter for Arm Vlaanderen, which focuses on poverty and famine in 19th-century Flanders, and Dik Verkuil for his biography of the former VVD party leader Frits Bolkestein.

The €20,000 prize is part of the Month of History, organised in collaboration with the magazine Historisch Nieuwsblad and the Dutch Open Air Museum (Nederlandse Openluchtmuseum) in Arnhem.