On July 23, 1870, Aletta Jacobs was born in Sappemeer, in the northern Netherlands — the eighth of twelve children of a country doctor who believed, against the culture of his era, that his daughter should be educated.

Jacobs applied to attend the University of Groningen in 1871. Women were not admitted. She appealed to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. He granted an exception. She became the first woman to attend a Dutch university and, in 1879, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the Netherlands.

She established the world's first birth control clinic in Amsterdam in 1882, providing diaphragms — then called pessaries — to working-class women who could not afford more children. The medical establishment was opposed. Jacobs conducted the clinic for two decades.

She was also a committed suffragist. She attempted to register to vote in 1883 and was refused; the legal argument over her attempt produced a law explicitly excluding women from voting, which at least forced the question into the open. She co-founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904 and spent thirty years organizing for women's suffrage across Europe.

Dutch women received the vote in 1919. Jacobs was 49. She had been working toward it for over thirty years.

She died in 1929.