No Votes for Women

Democratic, progressive Switzerland finds itself in strange company on one point. It is one of only 14 countries in which women are barred from voting. The others: Afghanistan, Colombia, Costa Rica, Haiti, Honduras, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia.

Last December the nation's chief executive body, the Federal Council, ruled that the woman suffrage question was "too premature" for national consideration. It recommended that votes for women be tried out first on the local level. Last week in the canton of Vaud, a test referendum was held. Result: Vaud men turned down woman suffrage, 35,856 to 23,153.

According to Geneva's famed political scientist, Professor William Rappard, the explanation is social. Says he: "Switzerland is governed by its dominant lower middle class. It is neither an aristocratic nor a proletarian country. Now all history and all geography show that woman comes to her political rights in the drawing room and the workshop long before she does so in the kitchen." A Swiss gas-station owner in Rolle had a more personal explanation: "I have to talk to my wife too much anyway. If she had politics to talk about, I'd never get to my radio at night." But the strongest opposition in the Vaud referendum came from the wives of farmers who had urged their husbands to vote no. The Swiss have many referendums; some voters go to the polls 20 Sundays in the year. The farmers' wives said that they were too busy cooking to be bothered.

Egyptian suffragettes led by Doria Chafik, president of the Bent el-Nil Feminist Union, marched on Cairo's parliament house last week demanding votes for Egyptian women. Gaining the office of Senate President Aly Zaki el-Orabi Pasha, Madame Chafik found it empty, picked up the telephone, called Orabi Pasha, who was ill at his home. Said she: "I am speaking from your own office. A thousand women are outside demanding their political rights."

A bill granting women the right to vote in national elections and to run for Parliament is now before the Egyptian Chamber of Deputies. It may not easily become law since many Moslems frown on female independence; this is in keeping with the spirit of the Koran, which says: "Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God hath gifted one above the other, and on account of the outlay they [the men] make from their substance for them [the women]." Turkey, which has had woman suffrage since 1934, Albania, Pakistan and Indonesia are exceptions among Moslem states. Last week at a noon prayer meeting in Cairo's Haddara Mosque, Moslem Leader Sheikh Mohamed Hamed Elfiqi described Egypt's votes-for-women movement as a conspiracy by Christians, Jews and Communists to destroy Islam.

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