40 years ago this week, Swiss men voted in favour of women's suffrage...

There are two great online galleries of campaigns for/against women's right to vote in Switzerland on Swissinfo :

old campaign posters and general campaign photos

Hmmm. Wow...Thanks. It does explain a bunch of things here. Still makes me wonder why would this issue wait so long, when in a lot of similar culture countries it was hot cca 50yrs before CH.

And Appenzell Innerrhoden didn't give women the vote at Cantonal level until 1990 ...

Crazy!

I know I'm kind of comparing apples and oranges here, but *according to Wikipedia* the only countries where women were given the right to vote after 1990 were Qatar, Timor Leste, Oman, Kuwait, and the UAE (no suffrage for women in Saudi Arabia).

Thanks for putting this post up, it's really interesting.
It's embarrassing to see those against poster campaigns.
"Mummy when are you coming home?" / "Leave us out of this" BS!

And they only gave it because the Swiss Supreme Court forced Appenzell Inn. to do so, as in the same year, 1990, the men of AI had voted against the women's suffrage.

...btw, from conversations I had, I know that most of those yokels till these days think that voting rights for women are not necessary.

I remember that there was a satiric report on tv at that time which for the first 5 minutes or so seemed to be about a newly discovered tribe in the amazonas that had never made contact with the rest of the world, but was in fact about Appenzell Innerrhoden.

On a more general level, the late introduction of womens suffrage in Switzerland was a shame. Appenzell Innerrhoden was more like the source for anecdotes than real debate, for its extreme smallness (arround 15'600 people, now).

Let's be honest here, there's many things that are "hot" in other countries around the EU that are yet to appear on the CH radar.

Anyway, has much changed for the average Swiss woman?

SFS - Swiss Frau Syndrome - suggests that the woman's place remains firmly rooted in the home in this country.

There's an article in this week's Weltwoche about how women are tending to vote more left than men.

This is not a link to the whole feature, just the discussion:
http://www.weltwoche.ch/weiche/artik...l?hidID=540298

Another proof why this newspaper shouldn't serve for anything else than fuel for the fire place:


"Als meine Ehefrau vor 2 Jahrzehnten einwanderte bemerkte sie, als erstes, dass Frauen in der Schweiz Männerschuhe tragen.
Da sich nun Emanzen Gleichstellerinnen und Weltverbesserinnen etabliert haben,und Kinderlose Lesben Alleinstehende und Geschiedene für Familienpolitik in Seldwyla zuständig sind, baden junge Frauen diese unappetitliche Suppe aus
Eine Frau hat heute noch etwa 2 Jahrzehnte Zeit, ihr Leben zu organisieren
Beruf Selbstverwirklichung Familie Karriere von ca 20 bis ca 35 unter den weltoffenen Hut zu bringen mag ja noch nett sein... Scheitern allerdings bezahlt die Allgemeinheit"

English translation

One example is the Swiss education system. School hours make it almost impossible for women to take a regular job. School hours change from day to day. With two or more children at school the varying hours mean that children will be leaving for school or returning at different times each day.

Fixed that for you in the spirit of gender equality

That is true. I only mentioned women in the context of the thread.

Wow that poster is shocking (and funny in a historical why).

But I really don't feel it is as bad as some of the SVP posters in the last couple years.

I somehow think those are just a logical continuation of something hard to define...

Only in some parts of the country, here they are the same every day.

Tom

Fortunately, things have changed in Geneva. The school hours are regular from term-to-term and year-to-year (from école primaire to cycle) with Wednesday (half-day or full-day) being the day off. This means that the picking up of children can be shared between working parents or one parent can work at 80% (taking Wednesday off). Several women in our company did this and the work culture is such that these women were not penalised in terms of advancement (well, at least in our company).

Three of the four cantons that were the first to give women the right to vote are francophone. Vive la suisse romande!

Women almost always vote to the left of men in every nation.

In any case, I'm not sure why Switzerland would be any different.

I don't just believe that (on average) women are less self centered (power hungry) than men, therefore more caring about others, but also they vote left, because more liberal people support women's rights issues, and indirectly these women may be supporting other things that usually group with that (foreign and minority rights, etc). Women (on average) are also not as xenophobic as men I would guess.

Personally I have always believed a world without women will look like prison (at worse) or the military (at best). A world without men would probably be more socially flat, but a lot more conspiracy, indirect backstabbing, and long term nastiness that goes on and on back and forth for awhile :-)

Personally I think it is laughable that anybody ever thought that women were some how inferior to men, I think, for the most part in the UK women and men have the highest level of equality, and places like Switzerland and Italy have the highest levels of open sexism.

One issue that arises from the emancipation of women that I don't agree with is the 'positive discrimination' attitude that is occasionally adopted by some women. This attitude generally manifests itself in a 'proactive' sexist or offensive attitude towards men, generally for no reason, or the general assumption by some women that all men are by default irrational sexists.

You guys might find this interesting...

it is a map based on a survey that shows where nations rank based on sexism and nativism...

See where Switzerland is...not too bad actually, not even by Euro standards...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn...t-or-nativist/