Who was Mary Zeldenrust?

In Amsterdam Oud-West I met Mary Zeldenrust, or at least her face, as I remembered it well. With a broad smile she looked at me from the cover of a book called Conversations with Mary Zeldenrust. It turned out to have been published in 1984 and was now free in a box of discarded books.

Who was Mary Zeldenrust, my younger readers, breathless with curiosity, now want to know. Mary Zeldenrust-Noordanus (1928-1984) was a well-known Dutch person who regularly appeared on TV, especially in her most important function: chairwoman in the sixties of the NVSH, the Dutch Association for Sexual Reform, which focused on assistance and information about contraception and sexuality. She died of cancer at the age of 55.

I remember her as an eloquent, passionate woman. She became a figurehead in “the liberation of sexual life from the hypocrisy of a civil-religious morality,” as stated in the foreword. She did not consider herself a full-blooded feminist. “Feminism has some good things,” she told Bibeb of Vrij Nederland , “but as a whole I cannot stand it.” She was irritated by “that excessive intensity and one-sidedness.”

The book contains numerous extensive interviews. What surprised me was a macabre similarity between the sixties and the present: Zeldenrust was also seriously threatened in her function as NVSH chairwoman. "If I had said somewhere that the pill had to be given to minors (...) I was immediately threatened with death. With tirades of abuse over the telephone, with threatening letters." She therefore decided never to leave her children home alone.

When she said that the NVSH should also think about homosexuality, a member of parliament snapped at her that this would mean that the subsidy for the consultation bureaus would not continue. What she advocated above all: more freedom to be able to fight. "Freedom within yourself, freedom to plan your children, financial freedom, to be able to fight on other fronts at all."

She also sought and found that freedom in her own private life, although she did not want to express herself about it in these interviews. The fact that she and her husband Dick lived together with a couple of friends, Jaap and An Muijlwijk, in Rotterdam, is repeatedly mentioned.

“Your commune has existed for five years now,” Bibeb tells her in 1975. Zeldenrust reacts irritated and does not want to call it a commune: “We live as one family, but the children and both couples have their own room. You have to be able to isolate yourself.” She elaborates on the practical use, not on the intimate cause.

Larissa Pans, who is working on a biography of Mary Zeldenrust to be published in 2026, said about this in Biografieportaal : "She fell in love with a married woman who moved in with her husband and two children. They had an open relationship, their husbands could also have other contacts."

This raises questions about her own sexual orientation. That she, as former NVSH chairwoman, wanted to remain silent about this was of course her right, but it also proved that the fight for more sexual freedom was far from over.