Women Without the Vote

"In 700 years of democracy," rumbled Orson Welles in the film The Third Man, "the only thing the Swiss have invented is the cuckoo clock." This gibe was not even correct: a German in the Black Forest invented the cuckoo clock. But it barely ruffled the Swiss, who often appear to think that they, not the Greeks, invented democracy, and that only they understand its proper practice. The cardinal rule of Switzerland's unwritten democratic law is that only men shall vote. In the rest of Europe, only tiny Liechtenstein and Monaco also deny the ballot to women.

In Switzerland's 22 cantons last week, this bulwark of the Swiss way of life was meeting its supreme test: the first nationwide referendum on whether women should vote. Typically, the campaigning --both pro and con--was conducted with sobriety, even with somnolence. No suffragettes surged in milling thousands through the streets; there were no feminist rallies, no raised voices. Even the potent Frauenverein, the women's organization responsible for the lack of alcohol and night life in Zurich, only went as far as to say that it was "not against" women's voting. The liberal newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung gingerly suggested that chaos might not inevitably follow female suffrage since "the character of the Swiss woman does not point to extravagance."

The antisuffrage contingents argued as usual that "woman's place is in the-home," ignoring the fact that 46% of Swiss women go out to work, implied that the "mess" clearly visible in other democratic countries was "partly due" to women's suffrage. They did not get too excited, knowing that the male votes alone would decide the issue. Half an hour after the polls closed, the Swiss could dial 168 on their efficient "telephone system and learn that women's suffrage had been defeated by a two-to-one vote.

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