A pioneering eccentric

Posted on August 29, 2011 by doradueck

Sien van Hulst (internet image)

Mennonite Heritage Tour: encounters with women, Part 3 (of 8). Introduction, Part 2.

Sien van Hulst (1868-1930) was a single woman, daughter of a prosperous Mennonite family in Harlingen, NL, who made a positive difference in the maternal death rates of her time.

We hear about Sien from Jan Meester. Jan is a Harlingen Mennonite who brims with knowledge and enthusiasm. He takes us on a brisk walking tour of relevant sites in his town. (The day before, he showed us the Pingjum Mennonite Church, where Menno Simons lived and worked, as well as the local, formerly Catholic church where Simons learned as a priest.)

The "hidden" Mennonite church of Pingjum, NL.

There are two strands of Dutch Mennonite (Doopsgezinde) history that keep bumping against each other for me during these days. One is the great persecution the Anabaptists experienced. We’re reminded of the outcome of that, as many fled to other parts of Europe (such as Poland/Prussia, which we will visit the following week); the Witmarsum church, in fact, currently has an exhibition on the Mennonite diaspora. We notice the secrecy it necessitated. Meeting places (called vermaning or Admonitions) often resemble houses or were hidden in other ways to escape detection.

The other strand is how those who remained in Holland eventually became accepted, respectable, and many of them wealthy and influential. Crossing the Afsluitdijk that connects north Holland and Friesland, for example, we see a statue of Cornelis Lely, engineer and designer of the plans for the Zuiderzee works. A Mennonite. There were the Honigs and the Breets. And the Harlingen van Hulsts and their daughter Sien.

The Harlingen Mennonite Church

Back home, I google Sien van Hulst to learn more about her. Most of it’s in Dutch, but the translations tell me she was a “contrary woman” with “a great sense of social justice.” Another sentence speaks of her “eccentric personality.” Maybe so, but she was a pioneer. A change agent. She founded a Society for District Nursing and Health Care in 1896, expanded the work of Green Cross across her region when it was founded in 1902, gave courses in maternal care and hygiene, paid attention to the importance of breastfeeding, and trained midwives and home nurses. She became a threat to the medical establishment of the time with her ideas, but perhaps it was her “eccentricity” that kept her going in her radical commitment to the poor. I want to think that it was also something in her Mennonite origins and beliefs.

Statue of Cornelis Lely, poised against the sea that his "works" hold back.

(P.S. This post is especially for my engineer son and doula/maternal-care expert daughter-in-law!)

Death by laundry

Posted on August 27, 2011 by doradueck

Mennonite Heritage Tour: encounters with women, Part 2 (of 8). Introduction.

The Honig Breethuis, Zaandijk, NL.

The tour begins while we’re still bleary from the flight to Amsterdam, at the Honig Breethuis (house/museum) in Zaandijk, on the river Zaan and across from the Zaanse Schans where “old” Holland lines up in a series of picturesque windmills and where we’ll go next. I hasten to add that windmills are decidedly part of a Mennonite Heritage Tour, early Mennonites being good drainers of water and makers of dikes! As for a personal connection, my married name Dueck (with its variations Dyck, Dyk, Dick) probably comes from the Flemish word dike or pond and its first bearers likely lived by the sea.

The Honig Breethuis was home to several generations of a wealthy merchant family that happened to be Mennonite. (Our guide, Ayold Fanoy, tells us this; as far as I know the museum doesn’t mention it.) Cornelis Honig owned a paper mill and Jacob Breet, the fourth owner of the house, expanded the business by acquiring other paper mills. Built in 1710, the house is now exhibited as it looked in the mid-nineteenth century. There’s the fine accoutrements of the upper classes. They also lived with steep stairs and the fear of fire.

And water. Contained, but everywhere — water. This is the Netherlands, so I shouldn’t be surprised that Neptune, the god of water and sea, appears as a decorative figure. (Though I am; I’d assumed the Mennonites left Greek and Roman mythology behind.) Then when we view a row of portraits on the wall, I’m startled to hear that one of the daughters – was her name Grietje? and was she 21, or 22? – drowned while washing clothes in the river.

View from the Honig Breethuis, across the Zaan River to the Zaanse Schans.

Death by laundry: if it wasn’t so tragic, it would seem comical. It’s the weight of her own clothes that sinks her. The long skirts, the layers. Carolyn Heilbrun again, reminding in her chapter (in The Last Gift of Time) “On not wearing dresses,” that the purposes of nineteenth century women’s clothing were “to attract attention and impede movement.”

The few sentences I hear about the young woman’s death are a fragment of story that persists in my imagination. In the meanwhile, I find myself oh-so-very thankful for the allowable, generally comfortable, and easy clothing for women today! On this European tour, it’s jeans and shirts. No hat boxes, no trunks to be dragged along with crinolines, stays, ruffles, or satin.

What I like about being a tour-ist

Posted on August 26, 2011 by doradueck

H. and I are back from two-and-a-half weeks in Europe, on a Mennonite Heritage Tour in the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Poland. We were a small group: five of us from Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and Toronto, plus tour leader and driver Ayold Fanoy, a Dutch Mennonite. It was full, varied, and interesting. We visited sites relevant to the Mennonites/Anabaptists, who originated in Europe in the early sixteenth century, and also places of more general interest, such as Berlin, Krakow, and Auschwitz. We drove some 3600 kilometers through cities, towns, and countryside on our way from one place to another.

Can you tell I'm a tourist?

I’d taken along Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, to read on the plane and in rest periods, and discovered she disliked travel, had “never been a sightseer, never understood the attraction of having been somewhere, taken pictures, had the sights pointed out, and then returning to inflict the details of your journey upon acquaintances.”

“Touring” is an odd kind of endeavor, to be sure, for we touch down upon places briefly, and what we snatch up by our “tourist gaze” is usually what we’re told is worthwhile or necessary to see. It’s a visual encounter above all; we arrange our memories with the eye of a camera and our views are numerous and fleeting.

I’m convinced, however, that even first and brief impressions have merit. We may be creating context by what we do and it may be superficial, yes, but in the process we can gain or deepen the context of what we already know. There’s surprise in nearly every day, it seems, and to me it’s the surprises that make travel a pleasure. Best of all, curiosity is aroused for further exploration.

At least that’s what I like to think our weeks of travelling, the six of us looking together, accomplished. We saw many things new to us. Admittedly a great deal of it has already massed — for me, at least — as an indistinguishable clutter of the baroque or monumental or beautiful. But all of us saw some things in some new ways.

I’m still sorting and sifting it all. In subsequent posts over the next few days, I’d like to share a few things that captured my imagination and interest. Mostly, I think, I’ll pick out a few encounters with women, dead or alive.

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