1. Rosa Manus served as the President of the Society for Female Suffrage, the Vice President of the Dutch Association for Women's Interests and Equal Citizenship, and was one of the founding members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom as well as its secretary.
Rosa Manus firmly believed that women could work together across the world to bring peace.
Rosette Susanna Rosa Manus was born in 1881 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the second of seven children to affluent Jewish parents.
Rosa Manus's father was Henry Philip Manus, a tobacco merchant, and her mother was Soete Vita Israel, a homemaker.
At-home education was the norm for Jewish women during the time, and Rosa Manus's upbringing was no different.
Rosa Manus's father prevented her from attending university and becoming a nurse.
Rosa Manus became involved with the international women's suffrage movement in 1908 at the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, later renamed the International Alliance of Women.
Rosa Manus was devoutly loyal to the IWSA, and as its vice president, she actively resisted talk of its replacement with the World Women's Party.
In 1915, Rosa Manus played an integral role in organizing the International Congress of Women at The Hague, where she was appointed secretary of a new International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, later known as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Rosa Manus attended the 13th Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1939.
Rosa Manus participated in a number of peace movements throughout the 1930s.
Rosa Manus served as secretary of the Peace and Disarmament Committee, a women's international organization.
Rosa Manus's job consisted of collecting signatures to protest war in advance of the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932.
Later, in 1936, Rosa Manus served as secretary for the Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix and the World Peace Congress.
In 1935, together with Johanna Naber and Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot, Rosa Manus established the International Archives for the Women's Movement, later known as the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women's Movement and currently known as Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women's History which is located in Amsterdam.
Rosa Manus's papers are currently located in these archives they were only recovered in 1992 when they were found in Moscow.
Rosa Manus was made an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau by royal decree on August 22,1936.
Rosa Manus felt part of the international women's movement as evidenced from pieces of writing to Mary Sheepshanks about the publication of the feminist journal Jus Suffragii.
Catt and Rosa Manus toured Europe together and developed a close relationship.
Rosa Manus was part of the first wave of Jewish women who started to refer to themselves as feminists.
Rosa Manus spoke of her support for Carrie Chapman Catt's aide to Jewish refugees through her letters, but she found she needed to distance herself from that activism because of her own Jewish identity.
Rosa Manus's Jewishness brought her into conflict with other feminists, particularly those from Muslim countries.
At an IWSA meeting in 1939, Rosa Manus came into conflict with Sha'rawi who was a representative from Egypt.
In 1933, after attending the Geneva Disarmament Conference, Rosa Manus helped found and became the president of the Dutch Neutraal Vrouwencomite' voor de Vluchtelingen.
Rosa Manus was accused at various points of both communism and pacifism and was particularly targeted on top of these issues because she was Jewish and a woman.
Rosa Manus is a less well-known figure because she left few personal texts behind and she did not write a memoir like other feminists of her era.
Rosa Manus did not feel as though she was a particularly important person.
Rosa Manus often refrained from taking positions of immediate leadership because of her Jewishness, but she accepted on occasion because she was the lone Jewish female representative who had the chance and felt it was important in certain circumstances to step up - she always claimed her actions were for her feminism rather than her Jewishness.