‘Hello chaps, I’m Marga’. With these words, Marga Klompé arrived at the first social event for ministers in the new cabinet, held at the Hotel des Indes in The Hague in October 1956. She was the first female minister in the Netherlands and caused a ‘revolution’ with this entrance according to her colleague, Veldkamp. Until that time politics had been a male world in which men addressed each other by their surnames. Politicians would henceforth switch to first-name terms. A Catholic politician, Klompé had participated in the Dutch delegation to the United Nations shortly after the war (1947-1952), and was then a member of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, the ECSC (1952-1956). She entered the cabinet in 1956, although not at Foreign Affairs but at the Ministry of Social Work, which had been set up four years earlier. When she attended her first cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Drees had an orchid put on the table for her; a remarkably elegant gesture, given his reserved character and frugal nature. It was generally observed that the appointment of the first female minister was a major event. In her column in the Leeuwarder Courant, ‘Saskia’ wrote that the emancipation of women was finally taking place: ‘All things considered – you might not believe it, but the facts speak for themselves – we’ve been trying desperately since the time of the Batavian Republic to show that we really are able to take responsibility as adults’. In interviews, Klompé herself said that on the one hand, women in politics usually took ‘a different approach to an issue’; but on the other hand, she declared that differences between men and women in politics were irrelevant: the only difference was a powder compact in one's desk drawer. She would indeed miss her work abroad a little, she declared somewhat awkwardly to the camera, but she could see a link with social work: