Meet Sandra Freels, author of Anneke Jans in the New World (She Writes Press, 2026).
From Amazon:
Timed perfectly to publish just as New York celebrates its 400th birthday, a riveting story of a spirited young mother who faces the unknowns of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam after fleeing the Old World in search of a better life.
It’s 1630, and Anneke Jans has just arrived in the fledgling colony of New Netherland with her husband, Roelof, and their two young daughters to create a new life for herself and her family. One of very few women in the colony, Anneke quickly realizes that she will need to make her own rules if she is to survive.
When Roelof dies, Anneke marries Everardus Bogardus, the flamboyant minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. With this marriage, Anneke joins the elites of the colony—but when the colony’s new director provokes war with the region’s American Indians and her new husband emerges as the head of the anti-war opposition, she also finds herself in the midst of political turmoil. As difficulties mount, she must rely more than ever on her quick wits to protect herself and her growing family.
Based on real events, Anneke Jans in the New World tells the story of an ordinary woman who lived an extraordinary life.
Female Empowerment in Seventeenth-Century New Netherland by Sandra Freels, author of Anneke Jans in the New World (She Writes Press, 2026)
Anneke Jans in the New World tells the story of a young wife and mother who left her home in Amsterdam and traveled with her husband and their two young daughters to create a new life for themselves in the Dutch colony of New Netherland (today’s New York). Anneke Jans (pronounced “Yans”) was a real person who lived 1605–1663. She came to New Amsterdam in 1630 and for the next thirty years played her part in creating a new and vibrant society unlike anything the world had ever seen before.
I came upon Anneke through genealogy—I believe she is my 11G Grandmother—and my initial reaction was Golly! How could any one woman survive that many pregnancies? And it wasn’t just the pregnancies. How could the mother of ten children take care of them all, and how, oh how could she deal with the inevitable losses? Anneke married at age eighteen. She had a total of ten children and lost three of them—one as an infant, one as a teenager, and one as a young adult. Anneke’s pattern was typical but not inescapable. Her sister, Marritje, for example, whether by chance or design, had a total of three children—one per husband—and seemed to feel just fine about it.
When you look at the marriage records of New Amsterdam, you notice that women tended to marry young, at least the first time, and often with older men, but you also notice how quickly people remarry after losing a spouse. Anneke was thirty-two when her first husband died, and in less than a year, she married a man about five years her junior. At first, I attributed Anneke’s haste to financial necessity, but then I realized that widowed men sought new partners just as quickly. Clearly, life in the early modern world was just too difficult without a helpmate.
There were two peculiar naming conventions in New Amsterdam that tell us a lot about how women were regarded. Many people, including Anneke and her family, used patronymics, forms of their father’s name that meant “son of” or “daughter of,” instead of surnames. Anneke’s patronymic “Jans” tells us that she is the daughter of a man named Jan. Her oldest daughter, Sara Roelofs, is Sara daughter of Roelof, and her oldest son, Jan Roelofsen, is Jan son of Roelof. This convention drives genealogists nuts, but on the bright side women like Anneke didn’t change their names when they married. Anneke’s first husband was Roelof Jansen and her second was Everardus Bogardus, but she remained Anneke Jans throughout.
Patronymics don’t bother me, but there’s another naming convention of the time that strikes me as downright demeaning. Anneke’s real name is “Anna,” but she is almost always referred to, even in legal documents, by the diminutive name “Anneke” (“Annie”). Her sister “Maria” is almost always “Marritje” (“Molly”), and so on for every single woman regardless of age or station. Grown women, but referred to and often treated as children.
OK, so where’s the empowerment? The women of New Netherland had considerably more autonomy than did their sisters in neighboring English colonies. The Dutch valued literacy and educated their girls as well as their boys. Anneke was illiterate, but in New Amsterdam all of her daughters learned to read and write. And with their education, many women worked—either managing a family business or outside of the home—and some, like Margaret Hardenbroeck, became successful merchants in their own right. Anneke’s daughter, Sara, was an interpreter, and her granddaughter, Blandina, opened a trading post in what is now Mahwah, New Jersey.
Under Dutch rule, property within a marriage was held jointly by husband and wife, to be inherited jointly by their children, girls and boys alike. When Anneke’s first husband died, his estate was appraised at two thousand guilders, half for Anneke as her widow’s portion and two hundred guilders apiece for each of his four daughters and his son. And Anneke’s widowed daughter, Sara, operating later under English law, actually insisted on a prenuptial agreement before remarrying to protect the inheritance of the children from her first marriage.
My Anneke lived in a world of constraints that I can scarcely imagine, and yet within those constraints she achieved so much. Given the chance, she boarded a flimsy wooden sailing vessel and crossed an ocean to a totally unknown land. Coming from a background of poverty, she became a property owner and one of the leading members of her community. She suffered trauma and grief but raised strong, courageous daughters and sons who carried on after her. An ordinary woman, but what an amazing life!
