Frühe feministische Petitionen aus der Schweiz

The article deals with the oldest known and retrievable petitions with which women in Switzerland have attempted to improve their conditions of life. The article examines six petitions, written between 1846 and 1872 with regard to lexical expressions, speech acts, and argumentation. More precisely, it analyzes designations of those whose sides are taken, designations of aims, but also political requests and claims, standpoints, and recurring premises and arguments. The results suggest that women (Frauen) have only been a clearly identifiable interest group in the political discourse from the 1870s on, that the women’s movements in their early beginnings have not made use of political claims sensu stricto yet, that their experience and knowledge have not been great enough to prevent unclear, unstable, and misaddressed standpoints, but that they have already had a repertoire of central arguments that are still familiar today. Based on the results obtained, diachronic hypotheses on the language usage of the women’s movements in Switzerland are put forward at the end of the article. They could be tested in future research.