The First Nurseries

The first institution declared to be a ‘nursery’ (crèche) was opened in Paris in 1844. In Switzerland, the first city to acquire a nursery was Basel in 1870.Footnote 1 Some thirty years later, Bern had six other nurseries and had thus become the leader in the establishment of this kind of infrastructure in Switzerland.Footnote 2

Switzerland was industrialised early on, and its industries relied on female labour. By the middle of the nineteenth century, about half of factory workers were, according to Regina Wecker, women.Footnote 3 When the first nurseries were created, medical discourses were extremely influential.Footnote 4 It was a declared goal of these institutions to encourage mothers to breastfeed and to teach children and their parents civic hygiene concepts in order to guarantee a healthy and efficient workforce.Footnote 5 In this logic, a sterile environment was more important than a stimulating one. In addition, it was considered a central task of these institutions to convey to the working class the bourgeois way of life and due respect for the prevailing conditions in order to prevent political resistance and delinquency.Footnote 6 The function of such nurseries was thus also to implant bourgeois values and norms into the working class.Footnote 7

Regarding this first phase, it is still an open question whether the creation of this infrastructure had to do directly with migration. In fact, since it was in Paris that the first public nursery was established in 1844, it cannot be ruled out that people coming to Switzerland from places where nurseries had been created may have acted as brokers in the transnational diffusion of nurseries.Footnote 8 In addition, it might have been the case that already at that time ‘foreign’ children were placed in nurseries more often than their Swiss counterparts. But so far, we do not know for certain.

The So-Called Boom Years

Be that as it may, the important effect of migration on this process manifests itself at the latest in the so-called boom years. After the end of the Second World War, Switzerland experienced an exceptional economic boom and needed workers from other countries to sustain its high levels of growth.Footnote 9 There is an assumption in the literature about this period that post-war migration policies reinforced traditional gender roles. ‘Migrants’ satisfied the demands of the booming Swiss job market, thus making it possible for the vast majority of Swiss mothers to stay at home and take care of their children—or so the argument goes.Footnote 10 In this context, we can conceive of the following counterfactual argument: without migration, Swiss women would have been included in the labour market earlier and the use of nurseries would have been adopted more quickly by middle-class Swiss families. However, we cannot know whether this would actually have been the case—or whether there would have been an earlier outsourcing of industrial jobs, for example.

If, on the other hand, we start not from speculation, but from what is given, what do we see when we look with a different perspective at what happened? How can we challenge the assumption that ‘emancipation’ was prevented in Switzerland because of migrationFootnote 11—by highlighting another side of the story? In what follows, I will present some preliminary considerations, which I intend to follow up on in further studies.

There Is Never a Single Story

On the dangers of single stories, see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story (2009), in: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en (4 April 2016).

According to a commentary on the 1970 census, three-quarters of the growth in female employment between 1950 and 1960 was due to ‘foreigners’, and between 1960 and 1970, they were still responsible for more than half of the increase.Footnote 12 Married women were far more likely to work outside the home if they belonged to a ‘migrant’ family than to a Swiss one.Footnote 13 Many migrant women thus had to reconcile the conflicting demands of wage-work and family life well before this question was debated in ‘mainstream’ Swiss society.Footnote 14 At least in the case of Switzerland, therefore, the impact of migration on the development of an infrastructure that made such ways of living possible should not be underestimated.

In post-war Switzerland, there was, in fact, a broad and long-lasting consensus about the temporary character of nurseries. For instance, at its annual meeting in 1964 the president of the Swiss Nursery AssociationFootnote 15 stated that nurseries were merely a stopgap for cases in which nursery attendance could not be avoided.Footnote 16 And a Swiss encyclopedia published in 1947 confidently stated that nurseries could and should be made largely redundant by higher wages and family allowances.Footnote 17 And yet, in the post-war period, rising wages and family allowances in Switzerland did not result in a decrease in the number of nurseries—quite to the contrary.

As is the case with any form of historical change, various causes were responsible for turning nursery childcare from an exceptional to a more normal phenomenon in Switzerland. Important factors were, for instance, the so-called new women’s movement, which challenged the traditional division of labour, as well as the spread of part-time work as a model for mothers (though not in the same way for fathers).Footnote 18 In addition, we should not forget that the golden era of the housewife was in fact a very short one. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the ideal of the stay-at-home mother and housewife became a widespread reality in the Swiss working class.Footnote 19 In this context, Patricia Purtschert shows brilliantly how the restrictive requirements for women could be enforced by an affective integration of the Swiss housewife into a colonial imaginary. Purtschert outlines how the housewife emerges as the white head of a ‘civilised’ and consumer-oriented domesticity in constant differentiation from racialised others.Footnote 20 Clearly, then, migration is not the only factor that needs to be considered when analysing such complex processes that took place under site-specific conditions.Footnote 21 Furthermore, the development of the required nursery infrastructure was not, of course, completed by the end of the economic boom years; rather, this process is still ongoing (witness, e.g., the important decision by the Swiss Parliament, in 2000, to provide start-up funding to new childcare facilities).Footnote 22 Even today, there are still long waiting lists in some parts of Switzerland for a place in a nursery and nurseries are often very expensive. Therefore, for some families of the middle class, it is financially attractive to have the mother (who today still often earns less than the father) stay at home. Finally, we should not forget the far-from-easy working conditions in nurseries. This work is nowadays often done by generally very young ‘migrant’ or second-generation women who have experience of migration in one way or another. For these reasons, it is not a linear success story that I want to tell. There are good reasons not to equate wage labour per se with ‘emancipation’, especially from a perspective critical of capitalism. Moreover, we have to keep in mind that the working and living conditions of ‘migrant’ families were not at all easy. These parents often suffered from a particularly heavy workload, because, among other reasons, their own parents lived far away and were thus unable to offer assistance. The women in particular experienced a discrepancy between the role they had internalised and the way they actually lived.Footnote 23 Furthermore, female wage labour did not necessarily imply more personal autonomy for women, as female employment does not automatically result in gender equality in the family.Footnote 24 It has also been argued that the high regard for wage labour undervalues unpaid care work. As a consequence, some feminists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici called for a different concept of work that could not be reduced to subcontracted work and claimed that housework should pay a wage.Footnote 25 Moreover, they criticised the fact that the emancipation of women was often discussed exclusively with regard to female wage-employment and called for an egalitarian division of care work in society. In the Swiss case, it is also important to keep in mind that ‘migrant’ mothers were often obliged to work, as otherwise their residence permits would expire.Footnote 26 Once their situation allowed them to stay at home, this was perceived as a sign of social advancement by some—a phenomenon also observed in the Swiss working class at that time.Footnote 27

Migration and the Development of Nurseries

It is impossible to know how many nurseries were established in these years because they were founded by various entities such as companies, private organisations, and municipalities. However, we can take the membership numbers of the Swiss Nursery Association (founded in 1907) as a rough indicator for this development.Footnote 28 While the association only had 62 members in 1946, by 1961 the number had risen to 90. In 1970, there were already 120 members, and in 1978, membership had grown to 170.Footnote 29 In 1970, a book on The Socio-cultural Problems of the Integration of Italian Workers in Switzerland was published. According to the author, municipalities were reluctant at that time to tackle the issue of nurseries. As a justification for their attitude, municipal authorities emphasised that this was a task for the employers who had brought in the ‘foreigners’, that nurseries would encourage mothers to work (which was not perceived as desirable by the municipalities), and that nurseries financed with Swiss tax money would primarily benefit foreign nationals rather than Swiss citizens.Footnote 30 And yet, for ‘migrant’ families, public nurseries were not always the first—or even a realistic—choice. In particular, before 1964, it was often not possible for ‘migrants’ to obtain a residence permit for their children.Footnote 31 If children were allowed to take up residence, they would sometimes live with a Swiss family during the week and stay with their parents only on weekends. One reason for this was that placing one’s children with a Swiss family tended to be less expensive than any of the available nurseries. In addition, there were nurseries established by the Italian state and by the Missione Cattolica specifically for ‘migrant’ children, in part because some nurseries had to give priority to Swiss families.

At the same time, the actual numbers of ‘migrant’ children in nurseries show that it was quite common for a high percentage of the nursery clients to be of ‘foreign’ origin. For instance, when the nursery in Chur was forced to turn down some Italian children in 1964 because of an ordinance by the city, it ended up being undersubscribed, much to the dismay of its staff.Footnote 32 Another interesting case is the city of Bern, where, if there was a shortage of places, Swiss children had to be given priority.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, the proportion of ‘migrant’ children in the Swiss capital’s nurseries rose to 60–70% by 1965, in part due to the sharp decline in demand for nursery places by Swiss families.Footnote 34 In the official gazette of the Swiss Nursery Association, various examples of this kind can be found—and this trend is not limited to cities. In more rural Valais, the development of nursery infrastructure is described in 1982 in the following terms: ‘At the beginning of the century, the canton was hit by tuberculosis. To help the temporarily orphaned children, the first nurseries were established. Later the problem of single mothers who had to work in order to survive arose. Then the foreign workers arrived. Again new nurseries came into being’.Footnote 35 Here too, migration was seen as important for the development of this kind of infrastructure.

This was also the case because, for a very long time, a child was likely to be prevented from attending a nursery if there was insufficient proof that the family depended on the extra income. In the annual report from 1964 of the St. Leonhard nurseries in Basel, for instance, we read: ‘In the case of each admission, the material circumstances are […] checked as accurately as possible, to ensure that really only those mothers will be considered who absolutely need to work’.Footnote 36

The Normalising Effect of an Infrastructure

With the effects of the first and second oil crisis, the situation changed. In the recession years, many ‘migrants’—whose residence permits were often dependent on paid employment—had to return to their home countries. Under these circumstances, the established nursery infrastructure became under-used. The editor of the official gazette of the Swiss Nursery Association, for example, writes in 1982: ‘With the substantial reduction of foreign workers in Switzerland, a further development goes hand in hand: never before in the last, say, 30 years have so many infants coming from middle-class and even well-off circles been found in nurseries as in 1982. This is a reliable sign that children of all social classes meet with universally satisfactory reception in nurseries’.Footnote 37 In this statement, the changing social composition of children attending nurseries is both diagnosed and legitimised. Remarkably, the established infrastructure was, in the wake of the oil crisis, opened to a different clientele. The increasing presence of a different clientele went hand in hand with (slowly) changing attitudes towards the nursery ‘clients’. Increasingly, in the gazette of the Swiss Nursery Association contributions were being published that explicitly refrained from pathologising female work and which tried to take into account that couples had significant leeway in negotiating gender roles.Footnote 38 In 1985, for instance, we find an interview with a mother who, like her husband, worked 80%.Footnote 39

In the same year, the example is mentioned of a Finnish mother who was plagued by guilt because she could not find a nursery place for her child.Footnote 40 The article describes how she felt her child was being deprived of a valuable experience, and that she feared her offspring would grow up lonely. The readers of the journal of the Swiss Nursery Association thus learnt, through the perspective of this Finnish mother, that attending nursery could be assessed in a completely different manner that was common in Switzerland, and that ‘because of her socialisation, it was quite simply absolutely normal that children attend a nursery’.Footnote 41 In addition, formative experiences of migration can also be found among the staff working for the Swiss Nursery Association. For instance, in 1989, the new manager of this association stated that she had lived in Paris und Ghent for several years, and that her experience abroad had taught her ‘that day care does not always have to be seen as an “emergency solution” or “substitute”, but can be viewed positively in terms of a distinctive educational contribution to the education of young children’.Footnote 42 Such a change in mentality was essential for her.

We can thus observe multiple effects of migration on the creation and expansion of childcare infrastructure. In the long boom following the Second World War, it was working ‘migrant’ families and their specific requirements that fostered the development and expansion of this infrastructure. In the course of these years, nursery infrastructure was not expanded because mainstream values had changed, but because there was a practical need for such services. Indeed, I would argue that it was the presence of this infrastructure that, together with other influences, led to a progressive normalisation of nursery childcare. Hence, it is not only open criticism that served to undermine supposedly incontestable norms and standards. Rather, changing forms of life—whether adopted voluntarily or involuntarily—and the new infrastructure that emerged to cater to these needs assumed a force of their own and, gradually, effected a shift in social attitudes. This is an aspect that has so far been overlooked.

The Current Situation

Today, some argue that the outsourcing of care work de facto enables traditional gender roles to be preserved.Footnote 43 However, a recent study has shown that, in Switzerland, each newly created afterschool care slot not only motivated mothers to accept a job outside the house, but also encouraged fathers to reduce their paid workload and to assume more childcare duties.Footnote 44 Financial support for nurseries in Switzerland—compared to other OECD countries—is still low, and the so-called Male Breadwinner Model is dominant.Footnote 45 The employment rate of mothers with children of preschool age has, however, almost tripled since 1980.Footnote 46 The proportion of women in wage-work is now high by European standards, as we have seen, but this is mainly because a large number of these women work part-time (and unemployment is generally low in Switzerland).Footnote 47 For example, 82.7% of working mothers are not currently in full-time employment. By contrast, fathers are more fully and not less fully employed than their childless peers: almost nine out of ten fathers aged 35–54 are in full-time employment in Switzerland. For men without children of the same age, eight out of ten work full-time.Footnote 48 Women who become mothers therefore reduce their paid workload—men who become fathers increase it. This, in turn, has to do with the presence or absence of care structures, as research has shown. According to one study, the reduction in the workload of mothers is mainly due to structural factors rather than individual preferences.Footnote 49 At the same time, many fathers would like to reduce their paid workload.Footnote 50

In German-speaking Switzerland, the contribution to costs made by parents is generally considerably higher today (2/3 of the full costs) than in French-speaking Switzerland (1/3).Footnote 51 In the cantons of Vaud, Fribourg and Neuchâtel, companies are also obliged to co-finance nursery infrastructure via a fund. The question arises as to whether we see here the influence of the respective neighbouring countries on developments in Switzerland, for instance regarding perceptions of motherhood. Especially after 1945, very different political approaches to the expansion of a nursery infrastructure were dominant in the then Federal Republic of Germany and in France. However, there are also major differences within the Swiss language regions. For example, the cantons of Geneva and Vaud have far more nurseries than the other cantons of French-speaking Switzerland. The question therefore arises as to whether such differences map less onto language borders than onto the difference between urban and rural areas.

Male Staff Members with a so-Called Migrant Background

To complete the revised picture of the relation between migration and gender innovation in Switzerland, we will now turn to the personnel working in nurseries, this time focusing specifically on male staff members in the present day.

Today, in various countries, there are attempts to encourage more men to work in nurseries, because as a social institution, it should reflect the diversity of society.Footnote 52 In 2015, 2000 people started apprenticeships as specialists in nursery childcare in Switzerland, of whom 284 were men.Footnote 53 With respect to the background of male apprentices in nurseries, it would be very interesting to obtain accurate statistics, but at least at the moment they are not available.Footnote 54 It could be the case that among these male apprentices, the ratio of young men with a so-called migrant background is above average.Footnote 55 On the job, these adolescents become important role models and, at the same time, they renegotiate and redefine what masculinity means to them, as they have to find ways to manage ‘legitimate subject positions as both childcare workers and as men’.Footnote 56 Occupations that are considered as typically female are generally badly paid, and hence, compared to other professions, the remuneration of care work is comparatively low in Switzerland.Footnote 57 Young people who are perceived as ‘foreigners’ (e.g. because they have a name that ‘does not sound Swiss’) are moreover discriminated against when trying to find an apprenticeship.Footnote 58 For example, young people of ‘migrant’ families of the first generation with comparable formal qualifications to their Swiss peers have about four times worse chances of finding an apprenticeship.Footnote 59 This, in turn, increases the probability that they will finally choose a training position in certain specific professional fields. It is so far an open question whether the tendencies presumed to exist in this study can be proven statistically. In a future project, I would like to investigate this issue. Be that as it may, it seems to be the case that ‘gender norms can be shifted and the gendered division of work altered […] through the combined impact of international migration and of men’s employment in feminised paid work’.Footnote 60 Here again, certain privileges intersect with specific forms of discriminations and produce once again a quite ambiguous potential for new social and political configurations.