Wat Geertje overkwam en wat Marijtje d'er van docht. Literatuur als propagandamiddel van de Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht.

Abstract

On October 7th 1908, the board of the Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht (VvVK) invited the Dutch writer Johan de Meester (1860-1931) to one of their propaganda meetings where he presented fragments from his novel Geertje (1905). It is a remarkable fact that (non-political) literature was used for political purposes, but not uncommon: the VvVK was known to use literature as propaganda. In this article I will show that the VvVK adopted different strategies for literary propaganda: they used existing authoritative literature, but they also wrote texts themselves. Different types of texts were deployed for this purpose, such as authoritarian fiction with a certain degree of redundancy.