Lizzy van Dorp

Elisabeth Carolina "Lizzy" van Dorp (5 September 1872 in Arnhem – 6 September 1945 in Banju Biru, Java) was a Dutch lawyer, economist, politician and feminist.

Lizzy van Dorp (1904)

Van Dorp studied law at Leiden University, becoming the first woman in the Netherlands to obtain a law degree in 1901, and to be promoted in 1903. She then practised private law, and became active in various feminist movements, although she opposed the more radical forms of feminism—her focus was on instituting female suffrage.

In 1915, she was invited to join the editorial team of De Economist, a leading Dutch economics journal. In the 1920s she became swayed by the political ideas of another (orthodox) liberal, Samuel van Houten.

In 1922, Van Dorp became a parliamentarian for the Liberal Party, until 1925. After that she supported the Liberal State Party.

At the end of the 1930s, she became an avid traveller, with stay-overs in Switzerland and Turkey. In 1940, she could not risk going back to the Netherlands, as another economist she had heavily criticized over the years, had become a powerful force in the National Socialist Movement and was close to the German occupier. Instead she veered for the Dutch Indies, her mother's country of birth.

On her 72nd birthday in 1944 she received a particular notebook. It served as a gift from other women in camp Tjihapit II in Bandoeng on West-Java. It was a collection of recipes from the Indonesian kitchen to which they added their own recipes.

Van Dorp died in a Japanese internment camp on Java, three weeks after the capitulation of Japanese forces. She had been interned there for over three years.