Yesterday, I was watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills , where they were dissecting events and each other in the season finale (please don’t judge me!).
Yolanda was being accused by another Real Housewife of being standoff-ish, upon which Brandi rushed to defend her (bear with me here). “No, I think that it’s just that Yolanda’s got that foreign vibe thing going on,” Brandi explained.
You see, Yolanda is Dutch, and all of the other housewives are full-blooded affluent Americans — gushy personalities, plastic surgery and all.
Yolanda, on the other hand, despite being equally as affluent and as optically appealing as her reality star peers, really does have a European vibe thing going on.
She’s undeniably different and magnetically fascinating, too, because she’s unapologetically true to herself and her Dutchness… and it’s this which rankles with the other homegrown US housewives.
I TOTALLY get Yolando. And if you’re a female expat in Switzerland, then I’m pretty sure that you get her, too, even if you’ve never seen a single episode of the show.
In fact, you probably get her if you don’t fit the Swiss housewife stereotype in any way, shape of form, whether you’re an expat or not. Because like Yolanda, we’ve simply got a different vibe going on.
BUT bear in mind that Swiss women only first got the right to vote in federal elections after a referendum in 1971, so they’re some way behind their female peers across the rest of the western world.
The Swiss Federal Supreme Court even had to intervene in 1991 to force Appenzell Innerrhoden — the smallest canton in Switzerland — into giving women the right to vote within their own canton, because the men there had refused to let them (voting takes place at three levels in Switzerland — municipal, cantonal and federal). And that was only 28 years ago!
Swiss women’s suffrage explains much of the housewife mentality here. Those of us with a different vibe have simply been brought up with more emancipated female role models than our Swiss counterparts.
I was brought up, for example, by a single, full-time working mother in the 70s. My grandmother was married with two children and worked part-time and that was back in the late 50s/early 60s. My great-great grandmother raised 11 children in the 1930s, so she was doing a full-time job and a half just by keeping the hearth clean and her children fed.
All three women had the right to vote and to work without their husbands’ permission.
Friends and colleagues who weren’t brought up in Switzerland or who had mothers who weren’t Swiss tell a similar story.
My husband’s mother, for example, was an emancipated French Swisswife living in Appenzell Ausserrhoden (which only gave women the right to vote at cantonal level in 1989). Not only did she scorn the Swisswife role model already back in the 1960s by being a working mother of four (she had her husband’s permission and support), but she also defied the female norm by riding around on a motorbike. How cool is that?!
My ex-mother-in-law, on the other hand, was forbidden from going out to work back in the Swiss 1960s and 70s because her husband was worried that people would think that he wasn’t earning enough money.
And it’s the remnants of this Swiss mentality that many of us in Switzerland are still fighting against.
By contrast, stay-at-home moms in countries where being a working mother is the norm often have to defend the fact that they’ve made a conscious decision to devote themselves solely to being the family homemaker.
They face the same discrimination that we working women do here in Switzerland, just the other way around.
As I read on social media the other day, these women live under the mantra: “We expect women to work as if they don’t have children, and raise children as if they don’t work.”
Whether in Switzerland or elsewhere, housewife or not, we’re all ultimately trying to fit into a world created by men, and it’s just not working anymore for many women (nor for many men).
The point is, regardless of whether we choose to be a working mother, stay-at-home mom or a combination of both, we should be able to choose the model that suits us, instead of being dictated to by a patriarchal system and society, nor shamed into fitting in with a blinkered mentality.
The Dalai Lama famously said, “The world will be saved by the western woman.” But the only way this will happen is if more and more of us start honouring our own vibe — just like Yolanda from the Real Housewives — even if this means going against the local grain.
But as long as we try to forge a brave new world while still believing that we have to hang on to our historically traditional roles, all we’re setting ourselves up for is failure and burnout.