ABSTRACT
Through the work of Carry van Bruggen and Ina Boudier-Bakker, this chapter examines contrasting responses to the women's movement which nevertheless both share a professed antifeminism. The two writers respond forcefully in both fiction and non-fiction to early attempts to emancipate Dutch women. The existence of Van Bruggen's political-philosophical essay and Boudier-Bakker's political tract make it easier to detect the political content of their fiction. Carry van Bruggen and Ina Boudier-Bakker have many things in common, most notably a shared sceptical attitude towards the women's movement, but not their views on women's position and role in Dutch society. From the vantage-point of the early twenty-first century it is easy to see that Carry van Bruggen's analysis of the way forward for the twentieth century was correct in the sense that she had understood the direction of development towards widening democracy.
