Every year on the 8th of March, it’s International Women’s Day, the annual day dedicated to celebrating women. In this blog, we’d like to shed some light on four important women of the University of Groningen! 

Before we dive into it, let us first give a little Women’s Day history lesson for all of those who don’t know about it yet or need some freshening up. The first International Women’s Day was celebrated 110 years ago when German revolutionary Clara Zetkin proposed at the 1910 International Socialist Women's Conference that the 8th of March should be an annually celebrated day to honour working women. Seven years later in 1917, the 8th of March was the first time women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia, which made it an iconic day for the socialist movements across the world. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the feminist movement started to bloom and since 1975, the United Nations has been celebrating the day worldwide. 

Throughout the years, the University of Groningen has accommodated some pretty important women. We’ll elaborate on (in our opinion) the most notable four over the past 100 years, two from the last century and two from this century.

Anda Kerkhoven (1919-1945)

Anda Kerkhoven is a famous feminist medicine student who studied at the University of Groningen. Anda transferred to the University of Groningen from Batavia, Indonesia (now known as Jakarta) after not wanting to conduct experiments on animals, which wasn’t necessary in Groningen, in 1938. Once arrived in Groningen, she wrote about her pacifist beliefs in the student newspaper Der Clercke Cronike. When the Second World War broke out, she became a member of the Dutch resistance, acting as a recruiter of other pacifist resistance members and an important messenger for the resistance. She was eventually caught in 1944 and executed in 1945. Anda is forever remembered at the University of Groningen, in the stained glass window memorial in the Academy Building.

Wilhelmina J. Bladergroen (1908-1983)

Wilhelmina was a professor in orthopedagogy at the University of Groningen and was regarded as a recognised authority in her field after the Second World War. Within 10 years, the number of orthopedagogy students rose from 6 to 600. She founded the Psychological Pedagogical Institute in Amsterdam and the Foundation Institute for Remedial Teaching in Groningen. These institutions focused on children with learning and development difficulties, with Bladergroen always striving to integrate theory and practice. She died at the age of 75 in Glimmen, Groningen.

Amina Helmi (1970-) 

Another important woman for the University of Groningen is Prof. Dr. Amina Helmi, an Argentinian astronomer and professor at the University of Groningen. In 2019, Helmi was named winner of the Spinoza Prize (basically the Dutch Nobel Prize), the most prominent scientific award in the Netherlands, honouring researchers who are the best in their field. Helmi’s research focuses on the evolution and dynamics of galaxies, known as ‘stellar archaeology’. Fun fact: a stellar stream in the Milky Way was named after Amina Helmi, now known as the ‘Helmi Stream’.

Jacquelien Scherpen (1966-) 

Lastly, we’d like to shed some light on our rector magnificus, Prof. Dr. Jacquelien Scherpen. Scherpen is an applied mathematician and a professor of measurement and control engineering (Systems and Control). Before becoming our rector magnificus in 2023, she worked within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen. She has more than 400 publications in her name, including 103 articles in scientific journals and 16 contributions to scientific books. In 2019, she was crowned a Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion. She won the Prins Friso Ingenieursprijs, which is a Dutch award given annually by the Royal Institute of Engineers (KIVI) to an engineer who stands out in expertise, innovative capacity, social impact and entrepreneurship, in 2023.

While there are countless more important women whom we would love to write about and praise, we’ll keep it to these four women for now. Hopefully, they can act as an inspiration to all women (and men!) studying at the University of Groningen today. Maybe in 20 years, someone will be writing about one of you!