Not only were women physically excluded from the body that gave framework and structure to modern Switzerland, neither were they mentioned by the constitutional legislators in speeches and notes, explains Brigitte Studer, a historian at the University of Bern.


Picture: Albert Anker: Eine Gotthelf-Leserin


Women were excluded right from the beginning of the process: the Federal Revision Commission, which met between February and April 1848, was made up solely of male political representatives of the cantonal and local elites.

Unlike discrimination against Jews, the exclusion of women from 'freedom' and 'equality' remained a blank space in the debates, as the official minutes of the Revision Commission and private notes of individual participants show. Behind this is what historian Brigitte Studer calls 'historiographic mimetism', or excluding women twice over. The silence about female exclusion also shaped historiography, she explains.

Parliamentary Services: What sources ignore, is frequently ignored by historians as well...

Brigitte Studer : Yes, and instead it could have been asked what self-perception of the state and gender order lay behind the silence of these statesmen of 1848. To what extent, therefore, is the Swiss state system based on a conception of society that mentally and practically banished women from the political sphere. Until a few decades ago, historians dealt almost exclusively with institutional areas of the past from which women long remained formally excluded in the modern federal state because of their sex.

Since when has academia been interested in the role of Swiss women in the public sphere?

Only since the rise of social history, historical anthropology and, in particular, gender history from the 1980s onwards. However, it's mainly individual local studies that have highlighted female participation in the turmoil of the third and fourth decades of the 19th century, known as the Regeneration period. During the Volunteer Movement (Freischarenzzüge) and the Sonderbund War, women on both sides took on important social tasks – mostly in the form of relief societies and other activities supporting the men in battle. Although the historical reappraisal of this question is difficult simply because few original sources survive, it's striking that historians didn’t ask this question at all for a long time.

What’s the next step?

An important next step will now be for historians to compile the remaining disparate findings and integrate the historical role of women from cantonal accounts into national history books.

Petition by a group of Fribourg women in 1849 against the lack of political rights


On 5 January 1849, a group of Fribourg women submitted a petition to the Swiss federal authorities indirectly objecting to women's lack of political rights. The petition was officially published in the Federal Gazette a year later, recalls historian Brigitte Studer.

The female patricians of Fribourg were outraged: the radical cantonal government that had just come to power had sentenced the group to pay a monetary penalty as "authors and perpetrators of the Sonderbund War and the armed resistance". They couldn’t believe that they were being held responsible for the outcome of fights and political maxims when the law declared them to be minors and placed them under permanent guardianship. And how could one threaten to deprive them of their political rights if they never had them in the first place?

The idea of equality reflected the spirit of the times

The principle of equality was by no means outside the scope of people’s imagination in 1848, Brigitte Studer emphasises. "The female sex should be placed on an equal footing with the male sex in all human rights," demanded the Bernese scholar Beat von Lerber in a submission to the Bernese government as early as 1830. However, at the time the federal state was founded, the idea that the principle of equality should also apply to women was still very radical, and by no means acceptable to the majority.

Nevertheless, the Enlightenment had given birth to the idea of this possibility. In December 1795, for example, the Friday Society in Lucerne discussed the question of whether there were generally valid reasons for excluding the female sex entirely from public affairs. The demand for women's political participation was being voiced in several countries in the revolutionary year of 1848. In Switzerland, women's demands for participation are not documented until the 1860s democratisation movements in Zurich and in Sissach.

Missed rendezvous with universal suffrage

The expansion of people's rights with the revision of the Federal Constitution in 1874 bypassed the female sex, and interventions in favour of the legal equality of women in civil law and at economic level were ignored. From the 1880s onwards, however, a growing number of voices began to call loudly and aggressively for the principle of legal equality for Swiss women as well. As is well known, it took until 1990 until all female citizens were granted the supposed 'universal' right to vote introduced in 1848.

The middle-class family ideal

From the middle of the 19th century, the family ideal also found resonance in the workers' movement and shaped the political representatives of the working class until well into the 20th century.

A non-working wife and mother who was 'allowed' to stay at home was considered a sign of progress and prosperity. The socio-political advancement of this model was increasingly seen as a way of protecting the family.


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.