Volunteering and gender. Renegotiating the social division of labor since the 1970s

SNSF project under the direction of Regula Ludi and Matthias Ruoss, with the collaboration of Sarah Probst, doctoral student (duration: 2021-2025).

In modern societies, volunteering is a highly relevant issue. In Switzerland, the willingness to volunteer remains continuously high. However, over the last few decades practices and conditions of volunteering have changed considerably.

A contribution to the history of the present - encouraging public dialogue

The project examines the causes and effects of this change with a focus on late twentieth century Switzerland. It is based on the assumption of structural interconnections between volunteering and the gender order in view of the current rearranging of the economy, the state and society. Since the 1970s, the neoliberal gospel of competition and individual success have penetrated all areas of modern life and fundamentally transformed societies. At the same time, second-wave feminism, the increase in women's employment and the admission of Swiss women to institutional politics have led to a renegotiation of the gender division of labor.

Feminist criticism of unpaid labor and volunteering in feminist circles

The traditional gender division of labor came under attack in the 1970s. Second-wave feminists condemned the expectation that women should provide essential services to society without remuneration. At the same time, feminist projects such as shelters for victims of domestic violence, counseling services for women and helplines sprang up to fill gaps in public services provided by the state. As autonomous spaces for women, these new areas of feminist activities were imagined as sites of emancipation and social change all the while they relied on the unpaid work of activists. In an exemplary way, their history illustrates contradictions and institutional constraints of unpaid work in the context of social protest movements.

Knowledge production as an engine of social change

In the 1980s, research interest in volunteering increased sharply, mainly as a response to transnational efforts at politicizing unpaid work and renegotiate the gender division of labor. At the same time, philanthropic organizations facing new challenges in enlisting volunteers requested reliable data to adapt their recruitment strategies. Responding to these demands, Switzerland in 1997 introduced volunteering as a subcategory of unpaid work in its labor statistics, a step that has changed the public significance of volunteering and at the same time made the work of volunteers economically measurable and allowed for the effective management of volunteering.

See also Publications, conference papers, media contributions