Ode to Noor van Crevel | She embraced that outsider position

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In Memoriam Noor van Crevel (1929 - 2019)                                                      

Noor van Crevel was a social worker, teacher, group therapist and feminist activist. She was a member of the lesbian action group Purple September (1972-73). In 1974 she founded the first Blijf van Mijn Lijf house in Amsterdam. From 1986 she was part of the critical Jewish think tank Blanes. When we met, Noor was forty-two and I was twenty-two. Our friendship lasted almost fifty years. 

Noor was born April 4, 1929, and grew up in The Hague, with two sisters and a brother, in a family rich in culture. The children were read to a lot, which Noor had lifelong detailed memories of. The father Marcus van Crevel was a musicologist - a doctorate on the medieval composer Adrianus Petit Coclico - and rector of a secondary school in The Hague. He counted Menno ter Braak among his friends. Her mother Carrie was much younger. Her father, Noor's grandfather in other words, was Jewish and was in hiding with the family during the war. Noor felt strongly about the fate of him and his Jewish family. She found herself in the intermediate position that she later came to see as characteristic of her life: connected to Judaism but not Jewish, married and mother of four children but lesbian, feminist in a movement most of whose members were a generation younger, intellectual but without university studies. She embraced that outsider position: it brought her knowledge of both sides, of two worlds, she felt. Virginia Woolf's “Society of outsiders” - from A Room of One's Own - was right up her alley. 

Between the ages of five and 12, Noor suffered from a burdensome kidney disease. As a 10-year-old, she spent a long time in the hospital where she was treated by a sadistic doctor, an experience she carried with her for life. She was smart and wanted to study psychology. It became social work school, “more suitable for a girl,” according to the vocational counselor. She then wanted to join the child police, but she turned out to be an inch too short for that. Nevertheless, she got a rich professional life. She wrote a thesis on Jewish war foster children and became a social worker in Helmond at textile mill Vlisco. Later she showed me the Vlisco staff magazine, where as a twenty-two-year-old she addressed the male bosses on how they should treat the factory girls. 'Girls like sociability, put a bunch of flowers in the canteen.' The oppressive quiver in which women were trapped in the early 1950s also held her captive. In Helmond, she did meet Stephanie de Voogd, who became her friend. But lesbianism was not yet an option for young women around 1950. Noor married Henk Krekel, with whom she had four children. In Lesbian Splendor (1979) she later described how she survived this marriage, how little support she could ask for from her own mother and how painful the divorce was with four young children. In 1970 she left for Amsterdam, still with Stephanie de Voogd, and two of her children. Meanwhile, she was working, at Social Academy De Aemstelhorn. That's when I met her. 

I had responded to an advertisement in Vrij Nederland, early 1971: '2 girlfriends, fed up with the COC and other contact and reception possibilities are looking for women 18-95 years'. Indeed, the COC offered meeting opportunities if you were a young lesbian from the province, but few women came there and contact was not made. So I joined Noor and Stephanie's lesbian support group. That evolved into the “Purple September” action group (1972-1974). We intervened in media and social discussions by sending in letters and organizing debates. An important slogan became “lesbianism is political choice,” by which we challenged the coercion of heterosexuality as a “natural” norm. We published a newspaper - Purple September, alternative women's newspaper - and challenged other feminist and gay groups, such as the heterosexual discussion group movement (because of its implicit endorsement of the heterosexual norm) the feminist monthly magazine Opzij (too well behaved) the COC (too male-oriented). After a year and a half, we disbanded our magazine: our point, the ubiquity of the heteronorm, had been made. Purple September had a great influence on feminist thinking in the Netherlands and was continued well into the 1980s by the broader Lesbian Nation movement. 

Noor wanted to do something more concrete. With several colleagues, she identified what she felt was the most pressing social wrong that affected women. Women's abuse was a tacitly accepted practice at the time. With Martine van Rappard and Anita Aerts, and inspired by the first shelter for abused women in London, they founded the Blijf van m'n Lijf home in Amsterdam in 1974, for women as well as children. A huge building was squatted on the Stadhouderskade in Amsterdam. A hospital donated a batch of rusty beds: the women were given a wire brush to prepare their own bed for use. It became a great success: the welfare law allowed refugee women to receive benefits and thus build a new existence.  They had to run their safe place themselves, even if it was primitive and overcrowded. 'Women are very capable people,' as Noor liked to quote Erin Pizzey, who shortly before had founded the first English Staying House. Staff worked voluntarily, and the project was flanked by numerous training sessions for police, GPs, social workers and politicians. Noor worked there for eight years, turning women's abuse into a widely recognized abuse. 

In 1986 Noor became one of the co-founders of Blanes, a platform for cultural and political activities on topics of particular concern to Jews. She could write beautifully and in the 1990s often contributed articles to Blanes, Jewish critical quarterly magazine, of which she was also editor. Meanwhile, she worked Amsterdam South-East in which she made primary care work better together. After retirement, she trained volunteers for Humanitas. She received the silver pin of stadsdeel Oost in 2008, for me it could have been a knighthood in the order of the Dutch Lionesses. All this time we kept following and seeing each other. We could talk so long and delightfully about everything. Her interest in me, in plants and animals, her allotment, people, especially children, was inexhaustible. She endured the serious ailments that afflicted her and mourned the loss of her eyesight. She felt she had grown far too old. She died shortly after her 90th birthday, on May 6, 1919.