As the little Wil Jansen was born on March 28, 1931, her parents could hardly have imagined that she would become not only the Netherlands’ first football reporter, but also a feminist activist who would later, in the group Dolle Minna, dedicate herself to the social participation of older women.
She was a good swimmer and, in addition, played street football with neighboring boys; she also regularly attended Ajax Amsterdam matches with her father. At 14 she began writing for the local Sunday-evening sports paper Cetem, and gradually more jobs for smaller newspapers followed.
Actually Wil had higher goals: she was determined to write for the big Volkskrant. And so, at the age of 17, after finishing middle school for girls, she casually stopped by the newspaper and announced that she had come to apply as a sports journalist. “Girl, you won’t manage that,” replied the HR manager, “no women work in the editorial office.” He could offer her a job in the subscription department. Wil agreed. “I thought that I would come closer to my goal that way,” she explained later.
It wouldn’t be long before her chance came: a football tournament for journalists, which Wil reported on in 1949 in the staff newspaper. Shortly after, the 18-year-old was told she could start immediately in the sports desk under one condition: her name could not be used. “From our correspondent” would appear in the byline, but that did not last long either.
Disowning Her Own Sex
Wil was summoned by the editor-in-chief, who told her that there had been numerous complaints from subscribers that a woman was writing about football and hockey matches. That was not considered appropriate for a Catholic newspaper. The Volkskrant had been founded in 1919 as a newspaper for the Catholic working class. After a National Socialist was installed as editor-in-chief by the German occupiers in July 1941, the newspaper lost so many staff and readers that it ceased publication a few months later.
After the liberation, the Volkskrant became the only nationwide morning newspaper for a time, because De Telegraaf was not allowed to appear until the end of 1949 due to collaboration with the Nazis. Wil had agreed to publish only under the byline “From our correspondent.” “If I had refused, I would have lost my job,” she said later in an interview.
Until 1954 Wil stayed with the Volkskrant, but then she fell in love with a colleague. As soon as she married him, she was told she would be fired. The fact that in the Netherlands there was a (abolished only in 1958) “married women’s employment ban” was nothing new to her. Wil had seen in her own family how harsh the employment ban for women could be. Her mother, who had a higher level of education, suffered from it. From childhood Wil thus resolved to become financially independent.
In 1954 Wim Merkies and Wil married; both left their positions at the Volkskrant, moved to Amersfoort, and had four children. Wil then worked as a freelance journalist. With the surge of the women’s movement at the end of the 1960s, her life changed drastically: she wrote for the feminist Opzij, co-founded Utrecht’s Women’s Shelter, engaged among other ways with the “Dolle Minnas” — and fell in love with an American filmmaker. “For the first time in my life I was completely bowled over,” she recalled in 1993. After that she fell in love with another woman.
Wil remained journalistically and politically active. In February, Wil Merkies died in Amsterdam; she was 86 years old.
