Dissertation by Sarah Probst

"Frauenräume in Solothurn. Eine mikrohistorische Untersuchung des feministischen Milieus, 1970er bis 1990er Jahre"

In 2019, the feminist strike movement pointed out a before rarely noticed fact, namely the significance of feminist activism beyond the big urban centers. To date, historical research has barely examined such activities in peripheral areas. My PhD project addresses this research deficit. I chose a microhistorical approach to explore the feminist milieu in Solothurn of the 1970s to the 1990s. My research questions focus attention on the emergence of voluntary practices and the production of knowledge based on feminist experiences: How did activists occupy spaces in the local context and how did they use these spaces? What practices did they develop? What kind of knowledge grew from these activities and how did it circulate among different groups? The research relies on a multimethodological approach by combining records from various archives with findings of oral history interviews. Microhistory, thus the assumption of the dissertation, allows to shed light on unexplored configurations and interactions in the history of feminism. Five different locations form the core of the examination: the inn Hirschen which was run by a women’s charity, a women’s center founded in 1977 by activists close to the second-wave association FBB, the cooperative Kreuz, an institution of the alternative movement, which was an important laboratorium for leftist feminists, various locations which served as “interspacies” for migrant feminists and, finally, the refuge for victims of domestic violence founded in 1991.