Leave Us Out Of It

Whether because of the momentum created by the Human Rights Convention kerfuffle, because of the increasingly untenable disparity between cantonal and federal voting rights, or simply because of the times – even famously neutral, isolationist Switzerland wasn’t immune to the social revolutions, taking place around the world in the 1960s and 7-s – the days of an all-male Swiss electorate were numbered. On February 7, 1971 the matter was put to vote again, and this time, the men of Switzerland decided that their female compatriots deserved the ballot. The final tally was 66 percent in favor to 34 percent against – a near-exact reversal of the outcome in 1959

But the story doesn’t end there. Communities came in all sizes, and if the collective national community of Switzerland decided in 1971 that is was wrong to exclude women from the vote, the same could not be said of all the smaller communities that together comprise the nation. After the federal referendum passed, most of the cantons that still barred women from voting at the local and cantonal levels amended their laws as well. But two cantons held out. One of these was Appenzell Ausserrhoden, whose male citizens didn’t extend the vote to women until 1989. the other was appenzell Innerrhoden, whose male citizens never did so. Women there gained the right to vote only when the Swiss Supreme Court finally forced the issue – ironically, to comply with federal Equal Rights Amendment that was by then on the books. That was in 1990. On average across the globe, the women of any given nation have had to wait forty-seven years longer for the rights to vote than their male compatriots. In Switzerland, where male citizens began gathering in town squares for public balloting in 1291, universal suffrage took exactly seven centuries ~ Pages134 - 136

Here in Switzerland – that bastion of political stability, military neutrality, excellent chocolate, and hyper-accurate clocks – and here is a startling fact about it. Although it is one of the world’s oldest and most established democracies, women there were not allowed to vote until 1971

By the standards of other democratic nations, this is, needless to say, stunningly retrograde. Women were enfranchised in New Zealand in 1893, in Finland in 1906, in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, and Poland in 1918, and in the United States in 1920. Even France and Italy, although rather later to the party themselves, extended the vote to women by the end of second World War. Within a few years, Argentina, Japan, Mexico, and Pakistan had followed suit. By 1971, Switzerland was one of just tiny handful of nations where women remained disenfranchised; the other included Bangaladesh, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Samoa, and Iraq.

Unlike those countries, Switzerland had long been a world leader with respect to other global benchmarks per capita income and employment, political stability and personal liberties, healthcare, education, and literacy (including for girls and women), and overall quality of life. How then, did it come to be an island of dissent on the issue of women’s suffrage? More broadly, how does membership in a community – whether it is as large as a nation or as small as a neighborhood – influence our beliefs about the world? And why does sharing a belief with others sometimes make us virtually immune to outside opinion that we are wrong?

…….the prominent U.S suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt chided her friends across the Atlantic for being “behind the times.” She could not understand, said, “why the men and women of Switzerland do not follow the example of all the rest of the world.”

Catt, who died in 1947, would be left wondering for the rest of her days. A proposal for women’s suffrage didn’t even make it onto the national ballot in Switzerland until 1959, thirty years after her remarks, and it was soundly defeated – 67 percent to 31 percent. There was, however, a glimmer of hope amid that trouncing: for the first time, a Swiss canton – Vaud, in the southwest part of the country – extended local voting rights to its female citizens. Within a few years, other cantons (there are twenty six in all) began to follow suit.

This was a welcome development for suffragists, but also one that led to a certain amount of absurdity. In Switzerland, the cantons determine who can vote in local and cantonal elections, while the federal government decides who can vote on national initiative and referendums. That power-sharing arrangement worked just fine until significant discrepancies started to develop between national and cantonal voting rights – such that, for instance, Lise Girardin, who became the first female mayor of Geneva in 1968, was allowed to run the nation’s second largest city but not allowed to vote in national elections.

The same year that Girardin took office, another event galvanized the long-suffering Swiss suffrage movement. For the first time, Switzerland indicated its willingness to sign the eighteen-year-old European Convention on Human Rights – but only if the nation was granted an exemption from those sections that extended political rights to women. Outrage over this proposed caveat led suffragists to organize the March on Bern, one of the very few large-scale national protests in the history of the Swiss suffrage movement.