Die Großmütter und wir: Freiwilligkeit, Feminismus und Geschlechterarrangements in der Schweiz

Abstract

What is voluntarism, and how can we conceptualise it as a subject of historical research? In this article we address these questions with regard to the relationship between gender arrangements and voluntarism in modern Switzerland. Our considerations are based on the assumption that voluntary aid is not a spontaneous act or an amorphous activity but rather constitutes a mode that regulates social relations and structures social order. Building on this premise, we first outline the emergence of a political culture in the nineteenth century that organised public life and the social division of labour around a gendered discourse on rights and duties, and accordingly assigned different tasks to men and women. In the second part of this article, we argue that feminists in the 1970s radically challenged this arrangement, a rupture we interpret as the recodification of voluntarism. Corresponding with the emergence of new practices of solidarity among feminists, such reclassification changed the significance of voluntarism. Instead of providing services in support of the state and the common good, feminists defined voluntary engagement as a means of women’s liberation and an instrument for revolutionising power relations in society.