Introduction

Abstract

This introduction shows how, from a ‘migrant’s perspective’, the defects of a newly adopted home country become particularly visible. Such voices, while always individual, allow us to paint a picture of Switzerland’s past that until now was seldom part of either Swiss historiography or collective memory. In this way, they bring to the fore not only private, but also structural conditions. And they make it possible to capture the political impact of everyday occurrences that are not passed down in other historical sources.

Switzerland as a Straggler in Relation to Gender Equality

In the boom years after the Second World War, Italians were by far the largest group of immigrants in Switzerland.¹ According to a common narrative in the history of migration, female ‘migrants’ coming from the south discovered ‘women’s emancipation’ through living in the supposedly more advanced north.² But Italian women coming to Switzerland also experienced the opposite. From a ‘migrant’s perspective’, the defects of a newly adopted home country become particularly visible. Of course, Italian laws were not more progressive in every aspect. For instance, it was only in 1970 that divorce was introduced in Italy.³ Nevertheless, some social and political rights for women—such as female suffrage, wage equality, or a family law involving equal duties and responsibilities—had been introduced years, in some cases even decades before this was the case in Switzerland.⁴ For instance, gender equality before the law had been included in the Italian Constitution of 1948 as a result of Lina Merlin’s work in the constituent assembly.⁵ In Switzerland, it was only in 1981 that a similar article was added to the Constitution. Regarding maternity protection, women in Italy have benefited from job protection and financial compensation since the 1950s,⁶ while in Switzerland the legal implementation of compulsory maternity insurance with universal coverage failed in several federal referendums and therefore remained unrealised on the national level until 2005. In 1975, Italy instituted a family law that abolished the legal status of the man as head of the family, replacing it with the concept of the husband and wife as equal partners. In Switzerland, such a reform came into effect only in 1988. In the federal referendum on this law in 1985, more than half of Swiss men still rejected the reform, and the new law was only adopted thanks to the support of Swiss women.⁷ According to the marriage law that remained in force until 1988, a married woman needed the consent of her husband if she wanted to work and the male head of the family had the right to choose where the family would live, even if such provisions were often no longer put into practice towards the end. Such unequal treatment also had an impact on children. For instance, if my mother had been Swiss and my father Italian, I would not have received Swiss citizenship when I was born in 1977.⁸

Already in 1967, such shortfalls were described by Maria Bonada in the newspaper Emigrazione italiana.⁹ In Switzerland, this type of critique gained traction more broadly only with the rise of the new women’s movement in the 1970s, as Sarah Baumann has shown in her inspiring book.¹⁰

An Exploratory Interview

I conducted an oral history interview with my mother in 2014 and a follow-up interview in 2018. In the first interview, I requested my mother to describe what she noticed about gender equality when she moved to Switzerland.¹¹ In the second, I asked her how she felt her experience of migration had shaped her political commitment. The fact that I was interviewing my own mother certainly had a substantial influence on the course of our conversation.¹²

I chose to conduct an exploratory interview, as this makes it possible to combine a biographical interview with a thematic expert interview.¹³ In such interviews, the course of the conversation is shaped interactively, so to speak ‘step by step’. One of the most important strengths of such an approach is the possibility of switching between the roles of the interested but relatively silent listener, the involved, committed interlocutor and the ‘annoying’ questioner.

Oral history thus allows us to construct a retrospective interpretation of certain incidents.¹⁴ Interviews of this kind therefore reflect not only how the interviewees experienced historical change, but also how they give their lives meaning in the present, deciding on what to include in and exclude from their account. This, in turn, can differ depending on who is listening.

‘As If I Had Made a Journey Back in Time’

My mother migrated in 1974, at the age of 25, from a Northern Italian city to a village with a population of 3000 in the Rhine Valley. This area of Switzerland, right at the border with Austria, is known for the prevalence of conservative politics. Here, my father had grown up. Both his father and his mother traced their family genealogy in this village back to at least the seventeenth century. My mother, by contrast, came from the leftist region of Emilia-Romagna. In her city of origin, she participated, as a medical student, in the occupation of a psychiatric clinic. According to her, the student body was very politicised at the time. She also remembered that as a high school student she already experienced situations in which street demonstrations led to confrontations with neo-fascists.

My mother’s reason for moving was that she wanted to live with my father, whom she had met in Italy while he was travelling, and not because she was looking for a job abroad. In fact, the medical degree that she was in the process of obtaining ended up not being fully recognised in Switzerland and my mother was not allowed to work in a hospital or to open a practice.

My mother summarised her initial experiences in Switzerland as follows: ‘It seemed to me as if I had travelled back in time, I don’t know, a hundred or at least fifty years’. According to my mother, the ideas associated with the social movements of 1968 arrived later in Switzerland, and certainly in our village, which had various repercussions. My mother found the Swiss family law of that time absurd—including its consequences for daily life.

For instance, a wife required the signature of her husband when making larger purchases. Once, my mother ordered different skin creams from a local company. The bill was delivered to my father, as the head of the family was generally expected to be the one who pays the bills. My mother had not even given his name; in other words, the employees had gone to the trouble to research it, on the assumption that the male breadwinner would pay.¹⁵ Moreover, in contrast to the situation in our village, my mother explained that in her home city, a woman with children who went to work was not considered a bad mother, a Rabenmutter, as this is called in German. According to her, in the cities of northern Italy, it was more common than in Switzerland for women to do wage-work¹⁶ and, therefore, core time¹⁷ at schools had been implemented already when she was a child. In our village, they still did not exist when I went to school in the 1980s and 1990s, as it was simply taken for granted that mothers would stay at home.

It wasn’t just my mother who noticed this. Dinahlee Obey Siering arrived in Switzerland in 1992. She came from Liberia and had lived for two years in Washington, DC, before moving to Switzerland. In an interview, she recounted the following incident: ‘Once, when I was with my then sister-in-law, first the eldest child went to school, then the second eldest, and when the youngest left, the eldest was already back. I said: “What the hell is going on here?” and my sister-in-law replied: “Welcome to Switzerland, darling! Here the mother has to stay at home and be available every minute!”’.¹⁸

A similar statement was also made by Delia Krieg-Trujillo, a lawyer and journalist who immigrated from Bolivia to Switzerland: ‘When I came to Switzerland, I was shocked, because there were no core times at school. For me and many other migrant women this was a matter of course back in our country of origin. And still, core times have not been generally introduced. This is structural discrimination!’¹⁹

My mother also mentioned the case of a Swiss family friend who was a teacher in our village and who lost her job when she got married. Married female teachers were often let go because they were seen as providing unnecessary competition in a tight labour market.

Cooking and Sewing Courses for Girls, Geometry for Boys

Another example that shocked my mother concerned the didactic content of schoolwork itself. When I went to secondary school in the early 1990s, girls were sent to cooking, needlework and sewing courses, whereas the boys were taught geometry and technical drawing. However, pupils wishing to take the entrance examination for high school—i.e. the intermediate level between mandatory schooling and university—needed geometry. Correspondingly, if a girl wanted to take this examination, she had to ask to be admitted to the geometry classes—and this meant that, after the cooking course, she had to rush to the ‘boys’ lessons.’ I hated this domestic education curriculum and above all its claim to being scientific. In fact, it was the only time that a teacher seriously complained about my behaviour in class.

Regarding my background, I was clearly one of the privileged ones—both my parents had a university degree. This was very rare in our village. It comes as no surprise that only a very few girls, at the age of 12, opted for what was, after all, an extra study load. In my class, perhaps three girls attended the geometry lessons. In our cooking lessons, we usually prepared an appetiser, a main course and a dessert, whereas in our family, we only ever ate a little something for lunch. Not being used to such a heavy meal, I almost fell asleep in the geometry lessons that followed.

It is very interesting to analyse the historical contexts that led to the introduction of domestic education in Swiss schools. Many factors that had a formative influence on the history of Switzerland converged there in an exemplary manner, as we will see.

The discussions on the introduction of female handicrafts and home economics can be followed throughout the nineteenth century.²⁰ In the so-called poor schools, handicrafts were established as a school subject from the eighteenth century onwards. In turn, cantonal school laws gradually made this subject compulsory in the nineteenth century.²¹ On the other hand, a compulsory home economics course was only introduced on a broad scale in the 1940s, but the subject has been taught in various forms since the nineteenth century.²² Numerous organisations had campaigned for the education of women in domestic work, but the different actors did not always pursue the same goals.

Domestic education was, for instance, part of a comprehensive disciplinary process to instil bourgeois norms in the lower classes. Home economics was supposed to teach order, cleanliness, economy and diligence, and to serve as a means of stabilising a class society.²³ The aim was to keep employees productive and healthy, even at low wages, and to keep the workforce calm. From the example of the hard-working housewife, who is happy to get away with a mere fifteen-hour day, the family will ‘get to know work not as a curse but as a blessing’.²⁴ The family will thus see those who are better off without envy, closing the door to the idea of revolution. An advocate of domestic education wrote in 1893 that more domestic sense would lead the working class to a greater desire to work, greater attachment to employers and more satisfaction with its situation. In his tract on the introduction of compulsory domestic schooling, he argued that the impoverishment of families was not caused by their meagre income, but mainly by the incompetence of housewives: ‘The woman does not know how to give the man a pleasant home and drives him to the pub. Badly made coffee, an inadequately cooked or misprepared meal, an unmade bed, a hole in a stocking or gown are factors that can push a country down more than much of what a higher theory believes to be the cause of impoverishment, family breakdown and misery’.²⁵

Through domestic education, young women were supposed to learn to keep family maintenance costs as low as possible. At the same time, this was also intended to combat alcoholism and the breakdown of marriage. Order in the house ought lead to order in the state. Bourgeois women, on the other hand, found a publicly recognised field of activity through their commitment to education in home economics. Moreover, they also wanted to rectify the lack of qualified maids, as well as to professionalise and, at the same time, upgrade the status of domestic and thus female work.²⁶ The working class advocated free home economics lessons as well.²⁷ The commitment to this kind of education also had to do with the idea that Swiss homes should be prevented from being overrun with ‘foreign’ maids. Through more efficient household management, the Swiss housewife was supposed to be able to get along without domestic workers.²⁸ It was sometimes also claimed that Swiss men preferred foreign women as wives because these women were more skilled in domestic work, which would result in a creeping ‘foreignisation’ of Switzerland, which had to be prevented.²⁹

It was no coincidence that in the political climate before the Second World War, many cantons were prepared to comply with the old demand to make such education compulsory.³⁰ In the 1930s, the idea was in fact propagated that women and mothers were Switzerland’s second army.³¹ The able housewife was thus placed at the soldier’s side.³² The preparation of food was thus put at the service of security policy: war-related food shortages were to be avoided, and the percentage of men fit for service was to be increased through a good diet. From this perspective, domestic schooling for girls appears as a counterpart to the military education of boys.

Unequal Opportunities at School

As we have already seen, inequality of educational opportunities was produced by the introduction of these home economics classes, as girls were consequently ‘relieved’ from other subjects. Only with the equality article of 1995 was such gender-specific discrimination no longer legally permissible.³³

This unequal treatment of girls and boys in Swiss schools has still not undergone comprehensive historical investigation. The reason for this may be that each of Switzerland’s today 26 cantons had the authority to create its own curriculum, and each municipality even enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy with regard to school issues. A survey published in 1968 showed that, on average, girls received fewer teaching hours in all subjects relevant for high school entry examinations.³⁴ For instance, in the canton where I grew up (St. Gallen), boys received 380 more teaching hours in German than girls.³⁵

However, it was not only girls who were systematically disadvantaged in their education. For example, when I went to school, all children had to take an examination at the end of grade six, in order to decide who would go to secondary school and who would go to the so-called Realschule. Those who entered the Realschule had the opportunity to repeat the examination after one year. Most of the children from working-class families were first sent to the Realschule. Some passed to secondary school after a year. Only those who attended secondary school could later go on to high school. There were always very few that did so. Children from so-called guest worker families practically didn’t attend high school. There was exactly one student with such a background in my high school class. I remember that our secondary school teachers sometimes advised even good students from a so-called migrant background not go to high school. Many people report similar experiences from their childhood.³⁶ Today, in high schools, the number of female students has now overtaken the number of male students in all cantons.³⁷ Nevertheless, only about twenty percent of university professors are women.³⁸

Bring to the Fore Not Only Personal, But Also Structural Conditions

Of course, in terms of gender equality, Switzerland was not more backward than other countries in every respect. In this context, the early implementation of a liberal divorce law in Switzerland, for instance, has already been mentioned. In addition, regarding the debate about the use of gender-inclusive language, my mother stated that Switzerland was in fact more progressive than Italy in the 1990s.³⁹ However, the experiences my mother had when she first moved to Switzerland were an important reason for her engagement in political activities. First, she became part of the local women’s group of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland.⁴⁰ For her, this political engagement was a way to get to know people on the same wavelength, since—according to her—there were not many of them where we lived. Later, my mother was elected to the local school board for eight years and to the cantonal parliament for twelve years. She was not aware of any other politicians with dual citizenship in the cantonal parliament at that time. There, she fought for, among other things, a hospital emergency centre for rape victims and for gender-neutral language in laws.

Her experience of migration shaped her political engagement. For example, when it had to be decided how to spread the holidays over the whole year, she knew that long Christmas holidays were important for Italian families, in order to be able to visit their relatives. She was also acquainted with other school models, as both her parents and sisters worked as teachers in Italy. On her view, longer school days based on the model of a day school were ‘not a cruelty to children’. Not everybody appreciated this sort of political engagement. I remember that as a schoolgirl, a friend told me that his parents did not like my mother as a ‘foreigner’ getting involved with Swiss politics.

It is of course a subjective narrative that my mother presented during the interview. However, similar experiences were also articulated by Irena Brežná, for instance, who moved to Switzerland after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.⁴¹ According to the literature, there is in fact a great deal of evidence that in Switzerland, in the boom years after the Second World War, the social and subjective exaltation of the housewife’s role was particularly marked.⁴² It would be very interesting to carry out a systematic project focusing on different accounts of such experiences. These narratives would of course differ from person to person. For example, moving from a city to a small village or vice versa would, presumably, affect how the specific situation was perceived and, later, described. Such voices, while always individual, allow us to paint a picture of Switzerland’s past that until now was seldom part of either Swiss historiography or collective memory. In this way, they bring to the fore not only personal, but also structural conditions. And they would make it possible to capture the political impact of everyday occurrences that are not passed down in other historical sources.⁴³