Voormalige HBS
In order to gain admission to university, Aletta Jacobs attended classes at this school, which was then a HBS.
Becoming a doctor was Aletta Jacobs’s great dream. But attending the HBS (now VWO) was not yet an option for girls. When she heard that a girl had passed the apprentice pharmacist’s examination, Aletta immediately decided to do the same. And she enrolled at this Rijks Hogere Burgerschool (HBS), which was normally reserved for boys only. The headmaster of the HBS in Sappemeer was forward-thinking. He welcomed Aletta as the first and only girl to attend his school as an auditor, unaware that years later the school itself would be named after her. By the time she was 16, Aletta had effortlessly completed both her pharmacy training and her HBS studies – a unique achievement for a girl in 1870.
Aletta’s younger sister Frederika was born in…
Becoming a doctor was Aletta Jacobs’s great dream. But attending the HBS (now VWO) was not yet an option for girls. When she heard that a girl had passed the apprentice pharmacist’s examination, Aletta immediately decided to do the same. And she enrolled at this Rijks Hogere Burgerschool (HBS), which was normally reserved for boys only. The headmaster of the HBS in Sappemeer was forward-thinking. He welcomed Aletta as the first and only girl to attend his school as an auditor, unaware that years later the school itself would be named after her. By the time she was 16, Aletta had effortlessly completed both her pharmacy training and her HBS studies – a unique achievement for a girl in 1870.
In 1872, Aletta’s younger sister Frederika became the first girl – along with two other girls from the village – to be officially enrolled at this Rijks HBS. Aletta’s father had sent a special letter to Minister Thorbecke to this end. There was quite a stir about this ‘sensational case of Miss Jacobs in Sappemeer’, almost more so than about Aletta’s enrolment at university. Frederika was one of the first full-time female pupils at the Rijks HBS and was the first woman in the Netherlands to sit examinations in mathematics and bookkeeping. Later, her younger sister Charlotte also attended the HBS. She went on to become the first female independent pharmacist.