Liede Tilanus

Liede Tilanus (30 March 1871 – 31 March 1953) was a Dutch politician, socialist, and feminist. She was a member of the Amsterdam City Council and was on the national board of the Association of Social Democratic Women's Clubs. Biography Tilanus was born in Amsterdam as the youngest of eight children. With her two brothers and five sisters, she grew up on Herengracht in Amsterdam. She was the daughter of Johanna Victoire Liotard (1831–1906) and Jan Willem Reinier Tilanus (1823–1914), professor of surgery at the University of Amsterdam. Tilanus went to a private school and then traveled through Europe. In Sweden she studied homework and crafts (slöjd). On 9 August 1899 she married artist Michel Duco Crop (1863–1901) in Bloemendaal. They had been married for less than two years when her husband died in a mental institution. On 11 May 1905, she remarried with Jan Eisenloeffel (1876–1957). She continued to use her own name. Not long after the death of her first husband, Tilanus became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party. Together with Mathilde Wibaut, Carry Pothuis-Smit and Henriëtte van der Mey, among others, she founded the Amsterdam Women's Club in 1905, later the Association of Social Democratic Women's Clubs (BSDVC). Tilanus became secretary of the union and pleaded for a women's section in Het Volk in 1913, but that proved in vain. From 1914 she became involved in the women's suffrage movement.