Which is why private matters are still politics for women

My great-great-grandmother found work in the kitchen of a spa in central Switzerland. Her husband had emigrated to America with their son, and their daughter stayed with her. My great-great-grandmother was waiting for her husband to come to her new home country. She never heard from him or her son again.

Her daughter, my great-grandmother, went to Milan at the age of 17 to work for an aristocratic family. Two years later she returned: pregnant and unmarried. She never said who the father of her child was.

My great-grandmother eventually married a widower who was looking for a mother for his six boys. The illegitimate child died early. The couple had a child together in 1915: my grandmother. When my father died of pneumonia while on duty at the Swiss border, my great-grandmother supported the family with her widow’s pension, sewing and what the stepsons brought home.

My grandmother had a good childhood. The mother was strict, the six half-brothers spoiled her. After eight years of elementary school, she attended a home economics school in Zurich, a bit of freedom away from her mother. One day she received a letter. A ten-year-old farmer’s son from her home village courted her. She thanked her for the honor and wrote back that she was still too young. He waited a few months and then repeated his request. Again she said no, she didn’t want to get married yet. The third time she said yes. My great-grandmother – marked by the shame of having an illegitimate child – had spoken a word of power.

My grandfather and grandmother had three children. First a son, then two daughters. My mother, the middle child, would rather have studied chemistry than become a chemical laboratory assistant, but the father said it wasn’t worth it for a girl. My grandmother, who served and cleaned in addition to housekeeping and working in grandfather’s workshop in order to have some money of her own, did not earn enough to finance her daughter’s studies. For her 20th birthday in 1962, she gave my mother a narrow gold ring with a turquoise and the inscription “vom Müetti”.

Four years later my mother was married and had a young daughter, me. She spent the Summer of Love in 1967 as a housewife and mother in her own home in Feldmeilen. In 1970 my sister was born and the Canton of Zurich introduced women’s suffrage.

For me it was a matter of course that I could study. Nobody said it wasn’t worth it for a girl. I have always worked since my studies; during the first years with my daughter part-time, later full-time. My 18-year-old daughter also takes it for granted that she can study. She grew up with a father who tells her you can be anything you want.

She says she wants to get through life on her own, independent and comfortably prosperous. But she also says that the doctorate has become less important since more women than men are doing doctorates. This shows that women still have a different position than men. Her cousin, who is three years her senior and a business student at the University of St. Gallen, says she knows what she can and wants to do professionally. She would like to marry one day, “but not a man with the ideal image of a housewife”. She also says: “Many boys at the HSG take me less seriously than the other boys.”

Seven women, six generations – in the 130 years that have passed since my great-great-grandmother found work as a cook in a spa, many things have improved for women, but not everything. Most of the family work still falls on them. In 2021, 59 percent of women worked part-time, compared to 18 percent of men. According to the most recent federal wage statistics, the average wage for women is around 11 percent lower than the average wage for men. About four fifths of this difference can be explained by factors such as experience, age, education or level of employment. The remaining 20 percent are unexplained. It has been proven that the steeper a woman’s career progresses, the greater the difference in wages compared to male management.

The pay gap and the prospect of raising the women’s retirement age at the ballot box led to a women’s strike on June 14. The strikers wore purple or T-shirts with the inscription “Dini Mueter isch hässig”. The outrage was repeated when the AHV revision was actually accepted on September 25th. The SP women’s president Tamara Funiciello presented the advocates of the revision as traitors and said: “You still have a year to prove that you are serious. Otherwise it doesn’t need pink, but a red wave.”

The outrage is legitimate. Anyone who loses a vote or quarrels with the prevailing conditions can and should be outraged. The claim of the women’s movement to speak on behalf of all women and to give instructions is presumptuous. As a liberal, am I not a real feminist? Would my long-dead mother be cross if she said yes to a reform that was unilaterally at the expense of women, like my sister is? Or does she see gender equality, as I do, as an inevitable adjustment to secure AHV?

Men are good or bad, clever or stupid, successful or losers, fathers or childless – but women are obviously just women and as such needy. When the AHV was first voted on in 1925, poverty in old age was a major problem. Today, the elderly own more wealth than the young – a fact that is discussed largely without emotion. Not so with women, who have gone through a similar development in society.

If equality bureaus and street name commissions have their way, they are doomed to be victims forever. Numbers are needed as proof, statistics like the list of street names from Gütersloh. There, 23 percent are named after men and only 2 percent after women. The working group that formulated the “Guidelines for street names” in 2021 is concerned and is considering a remedy.

When it comes to women, symbolic politics is often pursued. It’s good when cities name new streets after women. But when they begin to rename streets and, as in Zurich, to consider whether the Rudolf Brun Bridge should not be better called Frau Minne Bridge, they also rewrite the history of women: a history in that of a wealthy Jewish woman A woman from Zurich from the 14th century would never have been given the honor of being honored with the naming of a Limmat bridge 500 years after her death.

The upcoming Federal Council elections show that history is still harder on women than on men. Since the founding of the Confederation in 1848, 119 men have held office. According to the SP, a woman should now follow the ninth Federal Councilor: the tenth in 177 years since the founding of the state. The SP found three women who fit the profile. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for women. Ideally, the new Federal Councilor should also be a young mother. If you then actually find a woman with children who assures her that she can reconcile work and family, that’s still not good enough. Depending on your point of view, the state government should become more family-friendly or the candidate should disclose the care plan for her children. It’s like the Federal Council candidate Eva Herzog says: women are either too young or too old, they stupidly don’t have children or stupidly have children, while men can be as old, young or have many children as they want.

It’s slowly getting better, but it’s probably only good when women are equal to men even when they fail. If they don’t have to be better at everything they do in this male-dominated world. When they can drive a company to the wall without the gender question being asked, when they are allowed to be average as members of the state government – ​​like most men. The power company Axpo, which is kept alive by the state, has a boss who, like all his companions and sponsors, comes from the telecommunications industry. Imagine if they were women.

The world is still different for women than for men. But women are not a minority and they are not eternal victims. They’re half of humanity, and they’ve caught up with men in six generations. Elizabeth II gave birth to four children, repaired trucks and ruled a kingdom. A woman’s job.

I didn’t name my daughter after the Queen of England. Neither to Rosa Parks nor to Virginia Woolf. My daughter has the same name as my grandmother. The woman who spent many hours cleaning and serving for the modest gold ring she gave my mother for her 20th birthday. My grandmother was sometimes ugly. And she never wanted to be a victim.