"In 1848, it was gender that determined your right to political participation," explains Brigitte Studer, emeritus professor of history at the University of Bern. Just like their female counterparts in 1789 France, women in Switzerland were excluded from participating in any form of public life, explains Studer in an interview with the Parliamentary Services.

PS: Did the authors of the first Federal Constitution of 1848 literally exclude women from political rights?

BS: No, the authors of the original Federal Constitution didn’t make the exclusion of women from political rights an issue, just like those who wrote the Helvetic Constitution of 1798 or the liberal cantonal constitutions of the 19th century didn't explicitly stipulate it either.
It took the new government in France four years into the French Revolution to close down women's political clubs and ban women from the newly constituted public sphere. For their part, the drafters of Switzerland’s 1848 Federal Constitution excluded women quietly and without discussion. They simply established universal male suffrage, which guaranteed political rights to all Swiss men throughout the territory (and not just cantonal citizens). For 123 years, this was justification for Switzerland's sense of pride in its Confederates having founded the 'oldest democracy in the world'; a democracy that was supposedly incomparable with others, and one that had nothing to learn from the young democracies abroad.

What was behind the virile federal state?

The two historians Brigitte Schnegg and Christian Simon have commented that, at the time of the Helvetic Republic in Switzerland, the great struggles of women had already been decided by proxy in France, where the men had learnt their lesson. The emerging middle-class society distanced itself from what it saw as the effeminate aristocratic social order and its mixed-gender forms of socialising, which were also cultivated in Switzerland by the urban patrician upper classes in Bern, Neuchâtel, Geneva and Lausanne.

The Swiss Enlightenment, led by the Zurich circle around Johann Jakob Bodmer, took its inspiration from the old Swiss virtues of fortitude, thrift and moral rigour. They were idealised by Émile Rousseau and also held up as a role model by the French republicans. Femininity was considered the antithesis of reason, which – like politics – was a man's business.

Didn’t Rousseau want a mixed-gender society?

No, women were supposed to work in the family home, where they could do as they pleased as a wife and mother. The family – which functioned as an economic unit based on the division of labour – was represented externally by the man, who was the civil legal entity.

It wasn't only in Switzerland that segregating the sexes was essential for the formation of the new political public sphere in liberalism. In the first half of the 19th century, evoking the 'women's rule' of the Ancien Regime with its 'salonnières' served to warn of a return to the arcane politics of the old elites; in the new bourgeois era, Rousseau's republican counter-model propounded virility, propagating the rigid separation of the public and private spheres and an equally rigid separation of the sexes in the state and public spheres in order to prevent a relapse into the old social structures. Women were not to influence politics – either formally in parliament or informally through the family.

Was Condorcet's vision of an egalitarian society already passé?

Political representation fell to the head of the family and this was male. Organising society in this way corresponded to the nature of the sexes, declared those theorists who excluded women in an almost unending torrent of legal, philosophical, literary and medical statements and writings. They strove to legitimise this notion throughout the 19th century and most of the 20th century. To make the point clear, the famous Swiss constitutional lawyer Johann Caspar Bluntschli asserted shortly after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1852: "The state is decidedly male".

Ultimately, a social construct – a polarised civil gender order – became the norm. In promoting this order, the theorists were not only writing against the feminist voices that had been speaking out since the Enlightenment, for example Mary Wollstonecraft, but also against individual representatives of their own sex, such as Condorcet, who professed that all human beings are equal and rejected the lack of political rights for women on the basis of – however understood – a biological difference.

Did the Federal Constitution set back women's rights in cantonal, communal or civil legislation? For example, the Bernese Communal Law of 1833, which granted landowning women political participation in the communal assembly.

This can't be said in general terms. Women also benefited from the abolition of class privileges and discrimination. On the other hand, the modern-day Federal Constitution established the strict and long-standing exclusion of women from political rights, without it being explicitly stated in the text.

The politicisation of gender as a category of differentiation occurred more blatantly in the context of civil law. Despite numerous petitions and requests from both men and women, women remained under male guardianship in many cantons until almost the end of the 19th century. It wasn't until 1881, when the Federal Act on the Personal Capacity to Act was passed, that gender guardianship was abolished for single and widowed women. Married women, on the other hand, remained under a husband's guardianship, a status that was only renamed with the Civil Code of 1912, but was by no means eliminated, and continued until 1988. Social law, meanwhile, anchored women in the family, i.e. their place was preferably at home. The long term, however, shows that the 1848 promise of equality also opened up the possibility of emancipation for women, even if against much resistance.

About Brigitte Studer

Brigitte Studer was a professor of contemporary history at the University of Bern. She has also taught at the universities of Geneva, Zurich and Washington in St. Louis (USA) and at the EHESS (Paris). Her book "La Conquête d'un droit. Le suffrage féminin en Suisse" (The Conquest of a Right. Women's suffrage in Switzerland) was published in 2020.