Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [66]
7.
Our Society
Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
—WILLIAM JAMES, “THE WILL TO BELIEVE”
Here is Switzerland—that bastion of political stability, military neutrality, excellent chocolate, and hyper-accurate clocks—and here is a startling fact about it. Although it is one of the world’s oldest and most established democracies, women there were not allowed to vote until 1971.
By the standards of other democratic nations, this is, needless to say, stunningly retrograde. Women were enfranchised in New Zealand in 1893, in Finland in 1906, in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, and Poland in 1918, and in the United States in 1920. Even France and Italy, although rather late to the party themselves, extended the vote to women by the end of the Second World War. Within a few years, Argentina, Japan, Mexico, and Pakistan had followed suit. By 1971, Switzerland was one of just a tiny handful of nations where women remained disenfranchised; the others included Bangladesh, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Samoa, and Iraq.
Unlike those countries, Switzerland has long been a world leader with respect to other global benchmarks: per capita income and employment, political stability and personal liberties, healthcare, education, and literacy (including for girls and women), and overall quality of life. How, then, did it come to be an island of dissent on the issue of women’s suffrage? More broadly, how does membership in a community—whether it is as large as a nation or as small as a neighborhood—influence our beliefs about the world? And why does sharing a belief with others sometimes make us virtually immune to outside opinion that we are wrong?
Switzerland didn’t start off seeming particularly exceptional on the issue of women’s rights. As in most developed nations, the struggle for suffrage there began in the late 1800s and gained momentum after the turn of the century. But somewhere along the line, while suffragists elsewhere were chalking up a steady stream of victories, Switzerland started drifting away from the emerging Western consensus on the political equality of women. This was evident as early as 1929, when the prominent U.S. suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt chided her friends across the Atlantic for being “behind the times.” She could not understand, she said, “why the men and the women of Switzerland do not follow the example of all the rest of the world.”
Catt, who died in 1947, would be left wondering for the rest of her days. A proposal for women’s suffrage didn’t even make it onto the national ballot in Switzerland until 1959, thirty years after her remarks, and it was soundly defeated—67 percent to 31 percent. There was, however, a glimmer of hope amid that trouncing: for the first time, a Swiss canton—Vaud, in the southwest part of the country—extended local voting rights to its female citizens. Within a few years, other cantons (there are twenty-six in all) began to follow suit.
This was a welcome development for suffragists, but also one that led to a certain amount of absurdity. In Switzerland, the cantons determine who can vote in local and cantonal elections, while the federal government decides who can vote on national initiatives and referendums. That power-sharing arrangement worked just fine until significant discrepancies started to develop between national and cantonal voting rights—such that, for instance, Lise Girardin, who became the first female mayor of Geneva in 1968, was allowed to run the nation’s second largest city but not allowed to vote in national elections.
The same year that Girardin took office, another event galvanized the long-suffering Swiss suffrage movement. For the first time, Switzerland indicated its willingness to sign the eighteen-year-old European Convention on Human Rights—but only if the nation was granted an exemption from those sections that extended political rights to women. Outrage over this proposed caveat led suffragists to organize the March on Bern,