[2] However it was not until a 1990 decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland that women gained full voting rights in the final Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden.
[5] The principal reason for the delay of the Swiss relative to the other European countries was the importance of direct democracy in the political system.
The introduction of federal and cantonal universal suffrage necessitated the vote of the majority of the electors, men in this case, for a referendum.
Another reason was the tight connection, since the constitution of 1848, between the right to vote and military service in the Swiss Army, which was compulsory for men.
[8] Lise Girardin (member of FDP.The Liberals) served as the first female Councillor of States from 1971 to 1975, and was also the first mayor of a Swiss city, namely Geneva in 1968.
[8] Since 2019 there are three female members of the Federal Council: Simonetta Sommaruga (elected in 2010), Viola Amherd (since 2019) and Karin Keller-Sutter (since 2019).
Corine Mauch (member of the Social Democratic Party) presides the largest Swiss city Zürich as its mayor since 2009.
From 1860 to 1874, the first feminist movements were organized and, contemporaneously, the first constitutional revision of 1874; the political rights of women became the object of numerous discussions.
The attention attracted by this initiative opened the way for the first article about the claims of women in a large daily, Ketzerische Neujahrsgedanken einer Frau (Heretical New Years' Thoughts of a Woman), by Meta von Salis published in 1887 by the Zürcher Post.
[12] In 1894, von Salis organized meetings in the principal cities of Switzerland on the theme of the right to vote for women.
The importance that these demands acquired in the public debate led to the creation of the first parliamentary commission for the "woman question."
In December, the first two advances for women's suffrage at the federal level were made by the National Councillors Herman Greulich (SP) and Emil Göttisheim (FDP).
However, the responsible Federal Councillor, Heinrich Häberlin (FDP), postponed the action, due to "urgent problems."
Fifteen years later, in 1934, Häberlin handed over the unfinished business to his successor with the instruction, "The material for women's suffrage lies in the middle drawer to the right of your desk."
Five years later, Leonard Jenni applied to the Federal Council with a petition demonstrating that the concept of "Stimmbürger" (elector) in the German language included both sexes.
The petition was rejected on the following grounds: In the summer of the same year, the Swiss Exhibition for Women's Work (Schweizerische Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit (SAFFA)) took place.
On many occasions, the women and men of the League, among them Emma Rufer, wrote to the Federal Council and the parliament and implored them to abandon the project.
In 1945, the Swiss Action Committee for Women's Suffrage (Schweizerische Aktionskomitee für Frauenstimmrecht) was established as an opinion-forming instrument.
The women's associations rephrased the motto as "a people of brothers without sisters", and symbolically presented the Federal Council a map of Europe with a black blot in the middle.
With the argument that the cantonal constitution at that time did not explicitly exclude women's voting rights, they went with their demand before the Federal Court.
Thus Unterbäch was the first community in Switzerland to establish the communal voting and election rights for women – in spite of the ban by the Valais (Wallis) executive council.