Today is a very, very important 40th anniversary. It is the 40th anniversary of womens’ right to vote in Switzerland. Fortieth, you ask? Only the fortieth? Yes, folks, women in Switzerland have had the right to vote for less time than I have been alive.
Shocking, is it not? I certainly think so.
In the run-up to this anniversary, there have been a number of news reports about the referendum that took place forty short years ago. The vote was, of course, open only to men. Swiss men, not usually known for their progressive, open, liberal nature, had to decide if, in the future, women would be allowed to take part in the political process, or if 50 percent of the population would continue to live in silence. Fortunately, a majority of these men noticed that the times, they were a-changin’ (only seven years after the song was released) and voted “yes”.
In the recent news coverage, the media dug up a few classic referendum campaign posters, which I would not want to withhold from my international readership. They range from the simply unbelievable to the simply unbelievably absurd.
For the English-speakers among you, here just a quick German-English mini-dictionary of words used in the posters:
Frauenstimmrecht = Womens’ voting rights
Nein = No
So ladies – look and weep. This is what we would have had to deal with, had we been born a generation earlier, in Switzerland.
Interesting. No flies on my pacifier.
“Is this the kind of woman you want?"
(And… what kind of woman would that be? Possessed? Terrorized? Frazzled? Shell-shocked? Demented? Witch-like?)
"Leave us out of the game!"
(Somehow I can not believe this young woman actually volunteered to have her photo on this poster. And notice the very subtle claws…)
This last poster I find particularly disturbing, because it seems to me not only to support the “no” vote, but also to be advocating violence against women. Or maybe it just challenges the viewer to find 101 household uses for a carpet beater, at least one of which surely has to do with female suffrage.
I am simply aghast.
Fortunately, on that fateful Sunday in 1971, a majority of Swiss men had the good sense to decide that running the country alone was a miserable task. So they offered women the opportunity to join them in the political trenches. One lonely backwater Kanton in eastern Switzerland needed 20 more years to grant women the right to vote on regional issues. Today there are more women (4) in the federal cabinet than men (3), and so far, they seem to be rather successful at what they do.
In corporate life, however, there is still a veeeerrrrry looooong way to go. Don’t even get me started on that.
Evelynn Starr 