quarta-feira, 23 de setembro de 2009

Johanna Berends (born 1912 )

"I disagree entirely with people who argue that women have been discriminated against twofold, as women and as a lesbian women. Lesbians were not discriminated because they were not taken seriously in the first place. As Queen Victoria said: “That doesn’t exist.”

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Johanna was born in Dedemsvaart, a small village in Holland, where she grew up as an industrialist’s daughter. After grammar school, she trained as a nurse as social class norms at the time dictated that only male children could attend university. She was treated for tuberculosis in Leysin (Switzerland) in 1937 where she married in 1940. Following a divorce six years later, she remarried, this time a Greek anarchist. The couple emigrated to Canada where she fell desperately in love with an older woman, marking the beginning of her life as a ‘lesbienne authentique’. Shortly afterwards, Johanna returned to Switzerland with her little daughter and Irène, her lover, to live and work. Irène’s death in 1974 was incisive and Johanna followed a strong urge to return to Holland. She has moved back to the Lake of Geneva since and still writes combattive reader’s letters to the press.

(do pressbook de Katzenball, de Veronika Minder)

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