---
title: "Untold Swiss women’s history"
description: "Historians at the University of Bern use oral history to research untold Swiss women’s history, from women who loved women to early women in federal politics."
url: https://unibefoundation.ch/en/blog/where-were-the-women-research-project-untold-womens-stories
updated: 2026-09-16
---

# Untold Swiss women’s history

> Historians at the University of Bern use oral history to research untold Swiss women’s history, from women who loved women to early women in federal politics.

Blog

01. July 2024

# Where were the women? A research project puts untold women’s stories in the spotlight

## **In brief** [\#](#in-brief "Direct link to In brief")

There is still much to be researched about Swiss women’s history. The project “A Shared Space – Untold Swiss Women’s History/Stories” makes an important contribution to closing gaps in historiography and raising new questions. In this interview, Fabienne Amlinger and Corinne Rufli, two of the four historians involved, provide insight into their research and talk about their work, their findings and why their research is valuable to society.

## **The place of women in history** [\#](#the-place-of-women-in-history "Direct link to The place of women in history")

Leafing through Swiss history books, readers often wonder where the women actually were while seemingly almost only men were making history. To this day, women are written into history only marginally; they are still not given the place they deserve. The research project “Untold Swiss Women’s History/Stories” addresses these gaps in knowledge. In four sub-projects, four historians are uncovering previously unknown knowledge about Swiss women’s history from the second half of the 20th century onwards. The project sheds light on the lives of women who loved women before the emergence of the lesbian movement in the 1970s, on activists of the New Women’s Movement and their commitment to women’s rights, education and equality work, and on the early women politicians in the Federal Palace. The common denominator of the sub-projects is space. The project examines how shared spaces, such as women’s centres, came into being, how women appropriated spaces originally created by and for men, such as the Federal Palace, or what it meant to have hardly any space at all, as was the case for women who loved women in the 1950s/1960s. The researchers’ work makes an important contribution to the general history, political history and gender history of Switzerland.

To find out more about the research project, I meet two of the people involved for an interview: Corinne Rufli is a doctoral student researching the history of women who loved women in the 20th century. She will publish her results in her dissertation. Fabienne Amlinger, a postdoctoral researcher, is writing a volume of essays on the early women politicians in Switzerland. The two tell me about their own research and about the research project as a whole.

## **Interview with Corinne Rufli and Dr Fabienne Amlinger** [\#](#interview-with-corinne-rufli-and-dr-fabienne-amlinger "Direct link to Interview with Corinne Rufli and Dr Fabienne Amlinger")

**UniBE Foundation: How did the idea for the project come about?**

**Corinne Rufli:** We doctoral students had already been doing research on women in different ways for years and then asked ourselves how we could continue our work. That is how we got talking to Prof. Patricia Purtschert of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (IZFG). This gave rise to the idea for this project. We want to make untold women’s stories in Switzerland visible.

**Fabienne Amlinger:** I can highlight three points in particular that motivated us to carry out the project. Firstly, necessity: despite their social and political relevance, all the topics covered by the project have been little researched or not researched at all. Secondly, urgency: in all four sub-projects, we conduct interviews with elderly women. The project is therefore under time pressure, because the voices of the contemporary witnesses we interview are increasingly fading. And thirdly, we have all been working in this field for a long time and with great enthusiasm, and we know what knowledge needs to be generated.

**For your research, you use oral history as a method. This means that you base your research on orally transmitted history and conduct interviews with women about their personal life paths and memories. What are the advantages of this method?**

**FA:** Oral history has many advantages. The method can generate new findings and insights that cannot be found in written sources. Thanks to oral history, a great deal of background knowledge about written sources can be obtained, or it can even serve as a corrective to them. In addition, we can enter into a dialogue with our “sources”, which is not possible with written, visual or audio material.

**CR:** The conversations with the women are my main sources, because lesbian traces in archives are rare. Often it was the women themselves or their descendants who deliberately destroyed or falsified personal papers, out of fear or shame that their “way of life” – the way they felt and lived – would become known. Nevertheless, I found more in the archives than I had expected. Thanks to my research experience and the four-year duration of the project, I had important resources at my disposal.

**What are your own projects about, and what connects the individual projects?**

**FA:** Since my dissertation, I have been researching institutionalised politics at the federal level from a gender-historical perspective. To my surprise, I found that there is hardly any research on the women politicians in the Federal Palace. This finding led me to my current project, which focuses on the first and early women in federal politics. The question my research addresses fits into the concept of the overall project, which focuses on questions around spaces. Specifically, I examine how women politicians appropriated the Federal Palace as a space to which they had been denied access until 1971.

**CR:** Space is a connecting element of our project. I talk to women over 80 who love women about their lives, looking at their stories from a lesbian and queer perspective. In my research, the absence of spaces is a central point. Where and how did the women get to know each other, exchange ideas and live together? I ask about spaces of possibility for homosexual desire, about role models in public life, and about the consequences when their relationships became visible. What advantages could social invisibility bring? And why are older women who love women still barely visible today?

**FA:** In each of the four projects, space is thus linked to the category of “gender” or “women”. The questions are who was given access, how women became involved in spaces, shaped or created them, and how visible these spaces were in society. Related to this is the question of how specific spaces affected individual women or collectives. The spaces examined can be material – like the Federal Palace in my case – or immaterial.

**What did it take to establish spaces for women?**

**FA:** In my field of research, i.e. politics, it above all took the will to open up spaces for women. For a long time, this will was lacking both in institutionalised politics and among the majority of the then exclusively male electorate. For the Federal Palace to become a space for women too, it was above all the individual and collective commitment of women and the women’s movement that was needed.

**CR:** In my case, a lot is different. Most of the women I interview do not identify as lesbian and therefore could not create lesbian spaces. Instead, established women’s educational institutions or women’s professions such as nursing or teaching served them as places to meet. But there were also exceptions, such as a woman from St. Gallen who organised a dance evening for women in Zurich at the end of the 1960s. Although queer love is much more visible today, there is still no space for the oldest generation.

**What is the social value of the research?**

**CR:** My research in particular helps to tell women’s lives from a different perspective – to show what scope for action women who loved women had, and where they were forced into marriages or driven to the brink of despair. I show that even in the bourgeois 1950s, there were women who lived outside a heteronormative idea – and why these lives were kept silent.

> *My research in particular helps to tell women’s lives from a different perspective.*
>
> Corinne Rufli

We want to question the prevailing narratives and also hear the stories from the women themselves. My research also offers a new perspective on old age. The research is therefore absolutely relevant for understanding society from a historical as well as a contemporary perspective.

**FA:** With regard to relevance, I would like to highlight four points. Firstly, with institutionalised politics I am examining a highly relevant field, since it is there that important political concerns are negotiated, decisions with far-reaching social impact are made and future developments are thus shaped. Secondly, the question of who can participate in political processes, and how, is of fundamental importance. As is well known, women in Switzerland were excluded from political rights for an exceptionally long time. Whether and how they became involved at the highest political level after women’s suffrage was introduced is a fundamental question of socio-political and democratic theory. Thirdly, the research is important because it takes up a topic that is little present in history, political science and gender studies, as well as in the everyday knowledge of the population. Finally, little is known to this day about the first and early women in federal politics. The research is also relevant because it records the voices, memories and experiences of the Federal Palace pioneers and preserves them from oblivion.

**The project is now in its final year. What insights have you gained?**

**CR:** For me, the key insight is how different lesbian ways of life in old age can be and how diversely lesbian desire is lived. Most of the women I have spoken to live a life outside what society regards as a lesbian relationship. Many women entered into marriages – for lack of visible alternatives. Before, during, alongside or after marriage, they had relationships with women. So marriages are not nearly as heterosexual as we think.

**FA:** The research provides a wide range of insights into how the norms and rules as well as the structures and conventions of federal politics, originally created by and for men, affected women who appeared as new political actors from 1971 onwards. The research also shows how differently women politicians dealt with the nature of the political field they encountered, which strategies of exerting influence they developed in everyday political life, which existing rules they broke and how they used their scope for action.

**For example?**

**FA:** For example, the minutes record that “merriment” broke out in the National Council when the first female parliamentarians stepped up to the lectern. Some fellow council members made “jokes” about the women politicians or what they said, provoking general laughter. In some cases, this led to a kind of solidarity among the women. They supported one another in their speeches and refused to be silenced. Their parliamentary group colleagues did not like to see such cross-party support and further cooperation.

**How could the project continue?**

**FA:** With our research, we have contributed a further piece to the recent history of Switzerland and to women’s history. However, there is still hardly any research in my field. By international comparison, research on women in politics in Switzerland is more than modest. Yet this is research of relevance to society as a whole and to science, and it urgently needs further funding.

> *By international comparison, research on women in politics in Switzerland is more than modest.*
>
> Fabienne Amlinger

**CR:** Research is also needed to bring about political and social change. We provide facts that political actors can refer to. We work very broadly, which is a good basis both for revealing social transformations and for driving them forward.

My conversation with Fabienne Amlinger and Corinne Rufli made it clear to me how important the work of the project team is. Even the insight into two of the four sub-projects shows how much the historians have already found out. Both show that social structures were geared towards the male population, which still has an effect today. Research into Swiss women’s history must therefore definitely be continued in order to raise social awareness of it.

### About the researchers [\#](#about-the-researchers "Direct link to About the researchers")

**Dr Fabienne Amlinger** (left) is a lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (IZFG). As part of the project presented here, she is working on a volume of essays on the early women politicians in the Federal Palace with the working title “Unerhörtes aus dem Bundeshaus” (Unheard of from the Federal Palace).

**lic. phil. Corinne Rufli** (right) is a doctoral student at the IZFG and researches the lesbian history of Switzerland. The working title of her dissertation is: “Es gab mich nicht. Handlungsräume frauenliebender Frauen von der Nachkriegszeit bis zur Lesbenbewegung der 1970er-Jahre in der Schweiz” (I did not exist. Spaces of action for women who loved women in Switzerland from the post-war period to the lesbian movement of the 1970s). Rufli’s publications include “Seit dieser Nacht war ich wie verzaubert. Frauenliebende Frauen über siebzig erzählen” (2015).

### A Shared Space – Untold Swiss Women’s History/Stories [\#](#a-shared-space-untold-swiss-womens-history-stories "Direct link to A Shared Space – Untold Swiss Women’s History/Stories")

is a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). It examines women’s access to spaces historically occupied by men and the creation of women’s own spaces in recent Swiss history. It is an interdisciplinary project that takes a new look at Swiss women’s history using various scientific methods and theoretical approaches from cultural studies, history and gender studies.

The project is based at the [**Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (IZFG)**](https://www.izfg.unibe.ch/content/index_ger.html) (in German). The project team consists of the following people:

- Dr Fabienne Amlinger
(more information in the box)
- lic. phil. Corinne Rufli
(more information in the box)
- lic. phil. Bettina Staehli
Dissertation project with the working title:
“Wir waren so verschieden.” Die Bedeutung des “Wir Frauen” in der Neuen Frauenbewegung (“We were so different.” The meaning of “We women” in the New Women’s Movement)
- lic. phil. Lou-Salomé Heer
Dissertation project with the working title:
Ortswechsel - Wissenstransfer? Frauenbiographen und feministische Wissenspraktiken zwischen Frauenbewegungsprojekten, Geschlechterforschung und Gleichstellungsbüros (Change of place – transfer of knowledge? Women’s biographies and feminist knowledge practices between women’s movement projects, gender studies and equal opportunities offices).

The project is led by **Prof. Patricia Purtschert**, Co-Director of the IZFG. All four researchers work on their own sub-project.

[More information](https://www.izfg.unibe.ch/forschung/laufende_projekte/unerzaehlte_schweizer_frauengeschichten/index_ger.html) (in German)

Author

*Carol Blaser*

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