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This introduction shows how, from a ‘migrant’s perspective’, the defects of a newly adopted home country become particularly visible. Such voices, while always individual, allow us to paint a picture of Switzerland’s past that until now was seldom part of either Swiss historiography or collective memory. In this way, they bring to the fore not only private, but also structural conditions. And they make it possible to capture the political impact of everyday occurrences that are not passed down in other historical sources.

This chapter develops the conceptual basis of the book and explains its key terms. History systematically told from a perspective of migration changes national self-perceptions. However, it is not a question of adding a history of migration to so-called general history. Hence, migration should not only be brought to the fore in domains where its influence is obvious. Instead, all fields of society have to be looked at differently: democracy, agriculture, or, as is the case here, gender equality. What we need is a ‘migrantisation’ of our understanding of the past. Besides introducing key terms and concepts such as ‘gender innovation’, I explain why this book aims to overcome the often unproductive splitting apart of different forms of mobility that so far have rarely been analysed together.

This chapter discusses how migration changed gendered divisions of work. A sedentary bias can also be detected when the gendered effects of emigration from Switzerland are studied. Moreover, when studying emigration, its colonial contexts and, in particular, their relation to gender inequality have to be addressed. In colonial constellations, certain privileges intersected with specific forms of discriminations to produce an ambiguous potential for new social and political reconfigurations. A somewhat similar situation was also created by the migration of nurses from Kerala to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Both a sedentary bias and an orientalising way of looking at this kind of migration once again become visible. But such stories could also be told differently, as we will see.

In the long boom following the Second World War, it was working ‘migrant’ families and their specific needs that fostered the expansion of a nursery infrastructure. This was not done because mainstream values had changed, but because there was a practical need for such services. Indeed, it can be argued that it was the presence of this infrastructure that, together with other influences, led to a progressive normalisation of nursery childcare in Switzerland. 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. In order to complete the revised picture of the relation between migration and gender innovation in Switzerland, this chapter ends with an examination of the personnel working in nurseries, this time focusing specifically on male staff members in the present day.

Switzerland was one of the first countries in the world where women could pursue regular studies at universities open to both sexes. This right to education was not, however, fought for by Swiss women. Moreover, the professors opening the doors for female students were mostly German while the first female professors were of ‘foreign provenance’. Once again, the impact of migration on these processes becomes clearly visible. Nevertheless, the impact of these ‘foreign’ students on Swiss society is often made invisible, as this chapter shows.

Even if the history of female suffrage in Switzerland is well documented in many respects, its relation to migration has never been systematically analysed. This chapter shows how some of the most prominent figures in the struggle for female suffrage were connected to experiences of migration. It also discusses the example of a woman who lost her citizenship because she married a ‘foreigner’ and shows why it is heuristically productive, when studying migration, to take such experiences into account. In addition, the connections between women’s right to vote in cultural memory and its interrelation to migration are brought to the fore. In this context, the chapter points out that it could be a productive undertaking to systematically investigate how, in Switzerland, women with an experience of migration played a formative role in the establishment of women’s and gender history. Moreover, I discuss what the invitation of twelve Nigerian students in 1958 had to do with the invisibilisation of democratic deficits in Switzerland and how this can be historically connected to fighting women in Nigeria and Switzerland.

My findings show that contemporary and historiographical discourses which predominantly frame migration as a problem to be tackled, neglect the historical evidence for sociopolitical innovation that can, at times, result from international, transnational, internal, and even indirect experiences of migration. For instance, this book gives various examples that show how the existence of privilege and discrimination can generate social change. To illuminate such links between migration and gender innovation does not mean glorifying migration or propagating a naïve notion of diversity. Migration is per se neither good nor bad, but the conditions under which it takes place are good or bad, and these conditions are made, not given. The political, economic, and social conditions under which migration takes place depend on how past and present migration is perceived. This is precisely why, today, we have to make visible these often hidden histories. Looking at history through the lens of migration not only adds new insights to an established body of work, but changes the perspective under which our past and thus also our present is told—and our future imagined.