Rally Rijkschroeff PhD’s research while affiliated with Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau and other places

Women's history was included as a compulsory examination subject for all secondary school students in the Netherlands in 1990 and 1991. We present some of the results of a research project regarding the impact of teaching women's history to young women. Three levels of women's history content included in the curriculum and the exam are identified—women in traditionally male roles, women in traditionally female roles, and gender as a historical construct—and then considered in the individual responses of the young women included in the study. Attitudes of girls toward history and the implications of historical content for gender identity are the primary focus of this work.

In this article we present women's care in the Netherlands as a case study of the effects of a government's policy favoring integration. Women's care has been expanded considerably over the past fifteen years, both inside and outside of the institutional framework. Most of these initiatives started without substantial governmental support. In the 1980s the Dutch government subsidized five national women's care projects. The government assigned an experimental status to them and expected these experiments to serve as a national example for further development of women's care in the Netherlands. After 1986 experiments were expected to develop a system of women's care which could be integrated into the official health care network. While our research shows this policy has significantly furthered the growth of women's care, there is a danger that integration may coincide with depoliticization. Integration is often limited to those aspects of women's care that fit into the institution's existing structure and culture. Women's care is then stripped of its political aspect. This tendency is reinforced by the wish of the women's care providers for professionalization of treatment.