50 years of women's suffrage in Switzerland: women as the eternal number two

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Edi Engeler / AP

There are two columns on the tax return of my home canton.

The first is for "Husband / Individual / P1", the second next to it for "Wife / P2".

P stands for person.

It is still common in many countries today for the man to be the first named.

But in hardly any other country is the term "Person 2" more appropriate for women than in Switzerland,

To the author

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Melek Kaya

Güzin Kar

is a screenwriter, film director and columnist for "NZZ am Sonntag" and comes from Zurich.

Since graduating from the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, she has written and directed numerous films in Germany and Switzerland.

Her series "Seitentriebe", which she realized for Swiss television SRF, was sold worldwide and won the European Script Award.

Your current film "Deine Strasse" has been nominated for the Swiss Film Prize.

Homepage: www.guezin.ch

As a woman you are the second named, the second most important, the one with the second income, the second existence as an appendix to the main character, a political and economic appendix.

The Swiss woman receives less wages for the same work, less pension than her husband, and in the event of a divorce she can only hope to slide into poverty and not into a relationship drama.

In the local media, these are the names of intra-family femicides.

Nevertheless, the Swiss can be satisfied, because even as a second person she enjoys rights such as the right to vote and vote, which she was granted in 1971, as one of the last in Europe.

That had to be decided beforehand in a referendum, which was wrongly called that because it was not the people who voted, but the Swiss men.

Before they let their wives into politics, it took more than half a century longer than in Germany, which was already so far in 1918.

The stubborn Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden did not follow until 1990, when it had to be forced by the federal court to grant women the right to vote and to vote at cantonal level.

Nobody made room here voluntarily.

Oppression disguised as care

50 years may sound like an outrageously short period of time, but when you consider that a dishwasher gives up the ghost after around 20 years, we are talking about two and a half times the life expectancy.

Or as Ueli Maurer, one of the seven Federal Councilors in the Swiss government, put it in 2018: »How many everyday objects that are 30 years old do you still have at home?

We don't have many anymore, except of course the woman who does the housework. ”This was the bon mot he used to advertise the purchase of new fighter jets for the Swiss Army.

Nothing is more sacred to the confederate than his ability to defend himself, whether against Habsburgs, refugees, garbage sinners or gender stars.

Historically, civil rights in Switzerland were closely linked to conscription.

Those who were ready and authorized to take up arms against the enemy were also allowed to have a say in politics.

The fact that women had to defend themselves less against foreign bailiffs and more against the laws of their own country was often overlooked.

The protection of the woman was taken over by father, husband or state - and protected them primarily from themselves.

The oppression of women disguised as welfare has a long tradition in Switzerland.

You don't want to have to renew them every 30 years.

Only for her own protection, and so that she would not wear herself out between the stove, the childbirth and the ballot box, and wear out prematurely, she was spared the burden of politics for a long time.

Unmarried, female, poor - a dangerous combination

And it was only for their own benefit that until 1992 they refused to view marital rape as a crime - for a change Switzerland was five years ahead of Germany.

Before that, sexual crimes committed by the husband were considered to be the invention of dried-up emancas who were just jealous that they couldn't get anything between their thighs and were ridiculed for having to tick the address "Miss" on forms in old age, which indicated them as an unmanned station who drifted through galaxies without a guide, while her lap, forgotten and untouched, grew moldy.

For a long time, the combination of unmarried, female and poor was seen as a particular threat to social order in Switzerland.

more on the subject

• 50 years of Swiss women's suffrage: why men resisted democracy for so longAn interview by Katja Iken

• Women's suffrage: "Girls and women, out of the darkness!" By Katja Iken

• Women's strike in 1975: When the Red Socks paralyzed Iceland by Martin Pfaffenzeller

Until the 1970s, penniless, single or underage mothers had their children taken away and placed outside the home.

Forced sterilizations were not uncommon.

These "compulsory welfare measures" have gone down as one of the most inglorious chapters in recent Swiss history.

But back then, in the 1970s and 1980s, we schoolgirls were warned, for our own protection and benefit, not to become "one of those" and to go astray.

In upper school, the subjects of housekeeping and manual labor were compulsory for us girls, while for the boys it was geometry, which was also open to us, but as an optional subject.

As we already had considerably more hours per week than the boys with our compulsory program, very few of us took it.

Nobody had told us that geometry was a mandatory requirement for attending high school.

Even 40 years later, we earn less

While we girls approached our life as Person 2 sewing, embroidering and boiling jam, the boys measured their possibilities with the set square.

This is how natural selection works.

This school law was not overturned until 1982, a year after the principle of equal pay was enshrined in the constitution, which made those of us who were aware of the scope of this law breathe a sigh of relief and look to the future with hope.

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Women's strike in Zurich 2019: half a million Swiss women demonstrated for more equality

Photo: GFC Collection / imago images

We didn't know then that even 40 years later we would earn less than men, would largely be solely responsible for bringing up children and looking after the elderly, and that in return, access to management positions made more difficult for us, but we for every step we did our appearance and our way of life should be disciplined.

All of this is not only the case in Switzerland, but we are lucky and unlucky to be one of the richest countries in the world, where all the demands we make are ridiculed as a luxury problem by people who do not know real life .

Seen in this way, the amazing thing about the designation "Person 2" in my tax return is perhaps not the number 2 at all, but the fact that a woman is already considered a person in Switzerland.

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