Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [73]
All these arguments, however, paled in comparison to the strongest, most enduring, and most uniquely Swiss objection to women’s suffrage: that it would annihilate the all-male tradition of the Landsgemeinde and everything it stood for. Ironically, one of the things it stood for was Switzerland’s unusually long and rich relationship to democracy. The feeling among antisuffragists, said Lee Ann Banaszak, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University who studied the Swiss suffrage movement, was that “there was this unique political and historical institution that was very important, that represented the origins of direct democracy, and that would be destroyed by giving women the right to vote.” Antisuffragists even commissioned studies showing that the town squares where voting was traditionally held were not large enough to accommodate the entire adult population—meaning that either the Landsgemeinde had to go, or male-only suffrage had to stay.
But the Landsgemeinde represented something else, too. In Switzerland, the right to vote had always been linked with military service (hence the swords and bayonets)—and, like the military, the Landsgemeinde fostered both a no-girls-allowed clubhouse mentality and a distinctly masculine sense of honor and duty. “By the 1960s, communal voting was one of the last strongholds for men,” said Regina Wecker, a professor of women’s history in Basel. “It’s not just that you vote; it’s that you go there, you vote, and afterwards you go to the pub. So what was involved was their entire sense of community, their entire sense of who they were and the influence they held.” Letting women vote threatened to undermine all that—terminating centuries of tradition, destroying community bonds, and robbing men and women alike of their unique place in society. Or so the argument went: women’s suffrage would obliterate the very characteristics that made Appenzellerland unique.
From the vantage point of our own era and culture, in which opposition to women’s suffrage strikes most people as Paleolithic*, it’s tempting to mock the antisuffrage Appenzellerites, in the boys-and-their-toys tradition of justified feminist disgust. This is, after all, a group of people who passionately believed that the right to vote was contingent on the possession, passed down from father to son, of a…well, let’s call it a sword. I’ll talk more about this temptation toward mockery at the end of this chapter—about our instinct to despise and differentiate ourselves from the likes of these antisuffragists. For the moment, though, I want to focus instead on something we have in common with them. This isn’t their belief in the political inferiority of women (which I trust most readers will find risible), nor their desire to honor their community’s history and traditions (which I trust most readers will find reasonable). It is, instead, a problem that bedevils all of us as members of communities of believers. I call this problem our disagreement deficit, and it comes in four parts.
Boiled down to their barest essence (we will unboil them in a moment), these parts are as follows. First, our communities expose us to disproportionate support for our own ideas. Second, they shield us