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How did Betsy and her daughters fare after The Pauper's Paradise? In De omwenteling, master storyteller Suzanna Jansen, author of Het pauperparadijs, sketches the past century from a new perspective: that of the woman. One morning in 1981, Betsy Jansen-Dingemans hangs a sheet outside. It is not laundry day and the sheet is not even wet. Her youngest daughter, the author, knows: my mother is now doing an act, she is joining the women's movement. Betsy was born in 1922, the year when women could vote for the first time. Yet they barely count: they get less pay, are fired on their wedding day, and are incapacitated by law.
A hundred years later, her daughter has more rights and her world is bigger than the living room. In no century did women's lives change so much - and with it, the lives of all of us. From the perspective of her mother, her older sister and herself, Suzanna Jansen tells how women lived within the margins of subordination and servitude, and how much struggle it took to break free of them. As time passes, Betsy discovers that a woman may also long for another life. In her personal, compelling style, Suzanna Jansen exposes in De omwenteling the anatomy of the agonizingly slow but unstoppable revolution of emancipation. And she shows that the gender relations of our time have their roots in this. In De omwenteling, Suzanna Jansen knows like no other how to tell a big history with a small story. (Paperback)