Cécile de Jong van Beek en Donk

Jkvr. Cécile Wilhelmina Elisabeth Jeanne Petronella de Jong van Beek en Donk (19 May 1866, in Alkmaar – 5 June 1944, in Méréville) was a Dutch feminist writer.

Personal life De Jong was born on 19 May 1866 as the daughter of the lawyer Sir Johan Jan François de Jong van Beek en Donk and Anna Cécile Wilhelmine Jeanne Jacqueline Nahuys, as the second of three children. She married Adriaan Eliza Goekoop on 25 August 1890. The couple did not have children and the marriage was dissolved on 20 November 1899. In 1900, she moved to France. She remarried in Paris on 28 May 1904, to Michel Frenkel and gave birth to a son, Pierre Michel, in 1905. Her earlier divorce had caused a break with her family, and her death in Méréville, France, on 15 June 1944 went mostly unnoticed in her native country, the Netherlands.

Career De Jong was a fervent feminist. Even though many historians dismissed her because she was from a higher class, she was one of the, if not the, most famous feminist authors in the Netherlands around the 1900s.

Her career as an author started in 1897. Her first published work was "Aan de vrouwen van Nederlandsch Oost-Indië" ("To the women in the Dutch East Indies"). This piece was written in honor of an exhibition about female workers. This piece was not given a lot of attention, unlike her next book "Hilda van Suylenburg" (1897) which is when her writing career really took off. This novel was a great success within the Netherlands and around it, but caused a lot of controversy. The novel encompasses a story about the first female lawyer (fictional) in the Netherlands, and also touches upon how women can build their own meaningful lives without having to depend on others. On top of that, it promotes marriages only when there is equality and love involved.

Her second novel is "Lilia" (1907) about an unmarried woman who becomes pregnant. It was not received as well as her other novel, even though there were positive reviews. Because of this pamphlet in novel form, the book did end up with the desired public, namely women from the bourgeoisie.

The novel also received positive reactions. Hilda was a role model for higher class women, because she was able to combine her career as a lawyer with a good marriage and motherhood, This prevented the readers from seeing Lilia like she really was. Moreover, Lilia is not ashamed of her immoral behavior and her illegitimate child. On the other hand, Smissaert says, she is a person of flesh and blood, in contrast to Hilda and Corona in Hilda van Suylenberg. Lilia's free love was seen as the demise of morality. Author Anna de Savornin Lohman argues that it is bad to exercise free love, because the change in morality would not lead to the liberation of women. In addition, Lilia is seen as egoistic, because she only thinks about herself and not about her child, who will now have to live with the backlog that Lilia has given him as an outcast. The story is also unbelievable, according to Lohman, because the novel ends where the struggle begins in real life.

Works

Aan de vrouwen van Nederlandsch Oost-Indië (1897); [To the women of the Dutch East Indies] Hilda van Suylenberg (1897) Lilia (1907) De geschiedenis eener bom (1912), translation with an introduction from the Polish Dzieje jednego pocisku by Andrzej Strug (1910) La Marchande de cierges (1929); Dutch publication: Bij de waskaarsen (1930)