Ode to Grietje Schavemaker | I struggle with the fact that I find that I very much want to be proud of you

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Dear Grietje Schavemaker,

My ode to an Amsterdam woman I am very happy to do to you. You were born in 1902 as Margaretha Cornelia Veldt, in Bakkum. But it became Grietje Schavemaker after your marriage to Gerrit Schavemaker in 1925. A word about your first name: it actually means something like 'girl'. The English 'girl' is similar but I have been told that it is etymologically unrelated. Nevertheless, in the context of this letter to you, it is significant to me. For I am writing to you because the Amsterdam Museum wants to enrich the history of the city with the perspective of the women who lived and worked in it. Together with a great many people, we are writing to women from the city's past. People who have made and shaped the city into what it is today. In this way we hope to counterbalance the prevailing historiography of the city that is still mostly about men.

But first let me introduce myself, because we don't know each other: a little more than a year after you died in 1969 behind the counter of your milk store in the Van der Hoopstraat in the Staatsliedenbuurt, I was born to Diny Middelhuis and your middle son Cor. They gave me your name in a somewhat corrupted form, as an ode to you. But for a very long time I knew very little about you. I also noticed a kind of discomfort when I asked about you as a child. 'A hardworking but otherwise hard woman,' my parents said. 'Little sense of humor. 'Little sense of culture.' The latter was important in our family and I left it at that.

Over the past few years, however, I started to learn more about you. I wanted to know more about how you lived, what you thought was important, what you liked, and who you loved. I started biking past your store, which is now a house whose curtains are always closed and the owners never answer the door when I ring the bell. I would have loved to go inside for a moment to feel what it must have been like to stand there behind the counter, looking out over Van der Hoopstraat and the intersection with Fannius Scholtenstraat. What was it like to move there as a young couple in your mid-twenties and start your business? Was it exciting to find your way in the city after farm life in North Holland? Were you afraid it would fail? And what was it like to have nine children there in 15 years, eight of whom stayed alive? You didn't have much space, did you? A living room behind the store, a kitchenette, an alcove and an attic upstairs where the six boys slept. But because business was good, you were able to rent part of the building next door at the end of the 1930s, my father told me. By the way, that part is now the kitchen of a fancy Italian restaurant. 

By the way, two years ago my father sadly passed away and shortly thereafter your oldest daughter Rie. Those two were inseparable for the last few years. Now only Gerard is still alive. One of your favorites I now understand. From their stories it became clear to me that you were always the more serious, hard worker and your husband Gerrit the joker of the family. Did he make you laugh a lot too? I try to imagine what it must have been like when you met at the fair in Alkmaar in the early 1920s. Was it love at first sight right away? Your lives were kind of the same, right? You had left Bakkum from the age of twelve to work as ' maid' on a farm in the Beemster. And Gerrit worked from the age of fifteen with one of his brothers on the farm in Assendelft after his mother committed suicide and his father couldn't handle caring for all the children on his own.

I see in the records that after your marriage in 1925 you first tried to start a store in Assendelft but failed. Because two of Gerrit's brothers had already moved to Amsterdam, you managed with a little help to start a third 'Schavemaker Melkslijterijen' in the Staatsliedenbuurt area. A real chain thus, spread throughout Amsterdam. With its own logo painted with ornate letters on the window I see on the preserved photos. And a ceramic chicken in the window that was a small attraction in the neighborhood.

I understand that many of the children had to help in the store. So some got their own milk district where they brought the cans by before they went to school and made a round on Saturday to pay the bill. And your oldest daughter Rie did the housework, helped with the little ones and earned extra in the evenings with sewing. Your fourth child Pete was groomed as fast as possible to help you full-time in the store. 

It was unfortunately more than necessary because what a tragedy it must have been when Gerrit died of cancer in the summer of 1943. You were forty-one and suddenly you were all alone in a country at war. Did you mourn him for a long time? Did you have time for it at all? I understand you had a lot of support from some clients and friendly families. Your own sisters and parents were not well off but the family from De Beemster where you had worked for so long was successful and saw you as a daughter, and Gerrit's brothers also helped out. But above all you were supported by the right you had as the widow of an entrepreneur to "take over" the business. Women's right to paid work was rather dramatic at the time but entrepreneurship was a happy exception.

Rie's oldest daughter Annemieke told me that you realized that very well. Because when customers asked you in those first years after Gerrit's death whether you should not sell the shop, you always answered resolutely: 'absolutely not, then for me there will be nothing left but a bucket and a mop'.  

You were really proud to have your own business. You were an entrepreneur at heart. And you derived status from being a small business owner. It offered you independence and also a social life, because according to Uncle Gerard, you enjoyed the conversations with the customers and you always knew everything about everyone: from where they lived to what was going on in their families. You also saw the poverty around you in the neighborhood. Were you yourself afraid of losing everything? You spoke to the mostly female customers in your store whose men had become unemployed and were put to work in the south of Amsterdam by the municipality for a meager stipend to build the Amsterdamse Bos with their bare hands. You shivered at the thought and considered yourself lucky to have a thriving business.

And then, of course, there was the Roman Catholic Church that played an important role in your life. After the war, one of the children, my father, was "allowed" to go to the seminary in Brabant to become a priest. One less mouth to feed and he could do grammar school, unlike his siblings. 'On study' you proudly called it. As a counter-presentation, you then had to clean your church, Our Lady of Lourdes Church on Jacob Catskade, with a few women from the neighborhood on Tuesday evenings. I just can't imagine that: taking care of all those children, doing the housework and keeping the store running six days a week, and then also one evening cleaning the silver in the church. Wasn't that very hard? According to my Uncle Gerard, you actually liked it. Women among each other. And especially that as a "reward" you could go out to dinner together once in a while at the church's expense was wonderful. Then you went to the Chinese restaurant on Geldersekade, which you loved.

The fact that the business flourished in the fifties and sixties must have done you good. You were able to renovate in the late fifties. You had saved up, as you always did. And in addition, a customer had pointed out to you that you had been entitled to a widow's pension since 1943. You didn't know that, and when the allowance was paid out after all, you felt rich. And Pete was wonderful to you. He was a purebred entrepreneur and made sure that the larger Catholic companies in town, such as the Volkskrant, bought their milk products for their company canteens through you. So big orders meant less door-to-door sales. And Pete also took you traveling in the summer. You toured Europe on your motorcycle with sidecar and you especially loved the wide open views in the mountains. I can so imagine that: just getting away from those stony high streets, the busy traffic. The contrast could hardly be greater. Maybe it was also a bit of a spiritual experience? 

I actually don't think so. From the stories, I understand that you were a very earthy woman. You were strong and tall in build. Sturdy they called it then. And you were particularly concerned with money I hear from different quarters. You came from a life where you didn't have to turn over every cent, "but every half" as you said yourself. Once when Gerard's daughter Ellen, as a little girl, asked you "Grandma what are you saving?", you said sternly, "money child, money".

But you also loved crowds and sociability around you. Everyone could stay for dinner. You liked to cook for yourself. You took time for that at the end of the work day, because it was Pete's job to clean up the store and take stock. And on free Tuesday afternoons, you would cook for one of your children or friends and visit with a pan of meat and gravy.  

We are nearing the end of my ode to you and I wonder if we would have liked each other? I'm not entirely sure. On the one hand, you were generous. For example, for my father who at twenty-three wanted to quit the priesthood. It was no problem and he was able to come back home in no time and study philosophy at the University of Amsterdam which he wanted to do. And when Gerard and his wife Ria had an opportunity to buy a house but were short of money you turned out to have saved enough to support them.

But your generosity was not for everyone. Especially the stories of your oldest daughter Rie and her daughters hurt me. Why did you grant her so little? Why did you stop her from working and saving for herself for so long? Working day and night for your family. It feels like modern-day slavery. Even later, when you had the chance to give something back to her you didn't do it. You had your darlings and she clearly wasn't. And my intellectual reading mother, who had suffered the same fate in her family as eldest daughter, was certainly not a favorite of yours either. Harsh jokes, no understanding of otherness or what was weak in your eyes.

And then of course there's Piet, who has been connected to you all his life: did you know he was gay? Did you talk about that? He got rid of the store a few years after your death and never really became happy after that, in my opinion. He started drinking and didn't grow old.

That ambiguity that comes up in the stories about you has been keeping me busy for a while. I struggle with it because I find that I very much want to be proud of you. My Amsterdam foremother who ran a store for over forty years and raised a large family! And on the other hand, there is really that hard side that has marked the lives of others. Why do I find that so hard? Why do I want that to actually not be there?

I also notice it when I look at your photos: I keep returning to a photo taken a few weeks before your sudden heart attack in 1969. You are sitting on a terrace in the Vondelpark and you look a little awkward and vulnerable. While in all the other photos you look tough into the camera: standing in front of a store or in a photo studio. A woman who knows what she wants and what she can do. But whom I also feel a lot of distance from.

But with this desire to love and like you, am I not just stuck in the classic man-woman thinking where the woman is sweet and caring and the man is strong and hard?

Writing this, I suddenly think of my grandfather Toon Middelhuis on my mother's side. You knew him well. He was the Catholic trade unionist who eventually ended up in the Senate and did all sorts of tough things. I remember very well that he was on the news when he died in 1977. I was very proud. There were stories about him, too, that he was a hard man, with loose hands and little interest in culture. And he, too, had bothered his children, especially the daughters, when it came to education. It never stopped me from identifying with him or being inspired by him.

My search for you is perhaps a kind of penance for this "internalized patriarchy". And so it is also a rite of passage to find out that really counterbalancing that male perspective can only be done by making room for a layered image of women. That process takes a long time with me I notice. But this insight is perhaps the most important counterbalance we are looking for with this entire project Women of Amsterdam - an ode. Layered odes, in other words, that make history richer and more realistic.

Grietje, I am grateful that I got to know you better in this way and I hope that with this honest ode I have given you the honor you deserve.

Warm greetings and also much love,

Margriet Schavemaker