The Solothurn film festival opens with a cinematic work on women’s voting

Curtain up in Solothurn – Eight days of cinema: 179 films with a program focused on “travels away from the country”.

The 52nd Solothurn film festival opens with Die göttliche Ordnung (The Divine Order), written and directed by Italian-Swiss Petra Volpe. It tells the story of belated female emancipation. Switzerland was one of the last European countries to adopt universal female suffrage in 1971.

It’s been a long time coming!

It seems two centuries have passed, but it is the story of forty-six years ago: until 1971 in our country, the evolved and wealthy Switzerland, one of the most solid and historic democracies in Europe, women could neither vote nor be elected. In the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, this paradoxical asymmetry of civil rights continued until 1990.

On February 7, 1971, 621’109 Swiss men approved of the right to vote and of eligibility for women. The YES reached 65.7%, the participation amounted to 57.7%. In autumn 1971, the Swiss men and women elected the first ten female Federal National Councillors and the first female on the Council of States, the radical Genevan Lise Girardin.

For the very young men and women who experienced for the first time in 2010 a Federal Council finally with a female majority (Leuthard, Calmy-Rey, Widmer-Schlumpf to which Sommaruga was added) it must seem like science fiction.