Desperate Swisswife was initially inspired by an article (left) that I wrote in 2005 for Swiss News, a now-defunct newspaper for the English-speaking community in Switzerland.
The article was called The Housewife Conspiracy and related my experiences of inadvertently morphing into a stereotypical Swiss housewife after the birth of my first child.
Before my first daughter was born, I thought Switzerland was a bastion for working women and women’s rights. I suppose that having worked in Geneva for a global news agency for two years, my perception had been warped by the influence of the city’s buzzing international community.
Yet dealing with motherhood and the realities of being a Swiss housewife in a small village in the heart of German-speaking Switzerland opened my eyes. Switzerland was, I realised, a throwback to 1950s Britain where a woman’s place was in the home and a man’s in the world of work.
This probably shouldn’t come as any surprise considering women in Switzerland only first won the right to vote in 1971 (yes, you read that right!) — something British women had literally hungered for and gained already at the turn of the 20th century.
Yet if you consider that Swiss women have never had to keep their country running while their husbands went off to fight in two world wars, then maybe this gives some insight into why patriarchy and the housewife paradigm are still the norm here.
Sixteen years and two children (plus two step-children) later, I’ve got used to getting round the patriarchal obstacles of the Swiss system and mindset. But like for all mothers who seek self-realisation beyond their family and home, it’s tricky.
That’s not to say that Swiss men have it easy either. Not all of them are content with being the sole family bread winner. Many, in fact, want to be able to work part-time and be directly involved in the day-to-day lives of their children and family. But that has a certain stigma and difficulties attached to it, too, which my husband is all too familiar with (keep an eye out for his Desperate Swissman blog coming soon.)
Desperate Swisswife is therefore a place to observe, reflect, share and philosophise for all those women living in Switzerland who don’t (want to) conform to the Swiss housewife ‘ideal’…