Swiss Maid: The Untold Story of Women's Contributions to Switzerland's Success by Margrit V. Zinggeler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Swiss Maid: The Untold Story of Women's Contributions to Switzerland's Success by Margrit V. Zinggeler Carola Daffner Margrit V. Zinggeler. Swiss Maid: The Untold Story of Women's Contributions to Switzerland's Success. Peter Lang, 2017. 384 pp. Cloth, $64.95. In Swiss Maid: The Untold Story of Women's Contributions to Switzerland's Success, Margrit Zinggeler wonders why women's labor and contributions have not been adequately recognized or included in the success story of Switzerland. For Zinggeler, R. James Breiding's work Swiss Made: The Untold Story behind Switzerland's Success (2013) is a recent example of this phenomenon, and her own study, as implied in the title, is designed as a direct response. In Swiss Made, Breiding almost exclusively focused on stories of male achievers and entrepreneurs who had built Switzerland's enterprises into global empires. To prove her point fürther, Zinggeler also refers to a wide range of other examples, ranging from the German literary canon and popular introductory textbooks on Swiss economics to contemporary reality TV and docu-fictions, all of which helped create a myth of female Swiss identity. In Swiss Maid, however, Zinggeler presents a detailed study of the importance of "invisible, silent, and silenced women" (xxviii) in all sectors of Switzerland's private and public life. This includes the domestic realm, farms, workshops, and businesses as well as schools, hospitals, the manufacturing and service industries, and the military. Women, as Zinggeler convincingly argues, have always formed the backbone of Swiss society as a whole; their visible and invisible efforts in areas as diverse as homeopathic medicine and hospitality enabled economic growth which, in turn, resulted in high profits for the Swiss nation. In order to fill the void resulting from the fact that women's work was simply not recorded in chronicles and history books, Zinggeler uses an impressive number of unaccounted, forgotten, or hidden personal testimonies and various other data. In addition to historical documents and records, she also takes artifacts, illustrations, and literary descriptions into consideration. Swiss Maid fürther includes responses from question-naires and small studies (oral conversations and written interviews) in order to provide a better understanding of how the situation of women has changed in recent years while still being influenced by generational and gender conflicts. Reiterated in all chapters and within different contexts is the important fact that Swiss women only gained full suffrage in 1971, equal rights in 1981, and gender equality in the constitution in 1996. It is therefore fitting that the author includes an analysis of Switzerland's reaction to the recent political happenings in the United States and the [End Page 153] new wave of worldwide feminism. Zinggeler draws particular attention to the similarities between the current situation regarding women's politics in the United States and the atmosphere in Switzerland in the late 1950s, when an attempt to give Swiss women active and passive voting rights was rejected. Zinggeler's Swiss Maid is an easily accessible and fascinating study, written for a wide array of possible readers. Despite a few repetitions, the study is well organized and clear, taking into account both obvious and subtle differences between communities and cantons. Especially intriguing is Zinggeler's discussion of early Swiss industries. As she explains, Swiss industry as a whole started out in the textile cottage industry, and textiles remained the most important goods produced in and exported from Switzerland until the early twentieth century. Women, however, were the first and foremost producers of textiles and continued to help improve the production with their enormous specialized knowledge of techniques and skills. Zinggeler makes clear that this legacy still remains immensely strong in the twenty-first century: Michelle Obama's inauguration gown was made of embroidered fabric from St. Gallen. [End Page 154] Carola Daffner Southern Illinois University Carbondale Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press