the SCI Archives the SCI Archives
International Archives

  

Service Civil International

From the SCI Archives: Les Soeurs du Service Civil

by Heinz Gabathuler (Feb 8, 2015)

Les Soeurs du Service Civil - Booklet cover

Amongst the propaganda brochures issued by SCI in its early years, my clear favourite is the 32-pages booklet titled “Les Sours du Service Civil” (in English “The Sisters of Voluntary Service”) - in A5 format and a dark blue cover, issued 80 years ago, in 1935, by the one and only SCI Secretariat in Bern, Switzerland, and sold for the incredible price of 60 Swiss Cents.

Needless to say that unlike nowadays, in these times there were neither EU commission nor Swiss government grants available for printing such material – so our forefathers and foresisters did have to ask a price!

 

 

On top left of the cover, we can distinguish an old-fashioned version of what still today is the logo of SCI: The broken sword and the shovel with the three-letter word “PAX” (Latin for Peace) on it. Everything else, however, looks less familiar, if not to say: strange, to contemporary SCI activists. Starting with the title (“Sisters”!) and continuing with the language (a mixture of French and German texts, usually without translation into the respective other language, and no English at all), readers may wonder how just 80 years ago, our movement could have been that old-fashioned?

Indeed, the “normal” pick-and-shoveling work in early SCI services had exclusively been executed by men, and the title “friend”, still distinctive nowadays from the socialist “comrade”, had exclusively been granted to them. The role of girls and women in these services was limited to kitchen work, and they were called “sisters” rather than “friends”, and the brochure describes their tasks as follows:

Les Soeurs du Service Civil -some photos of Sister in SCI Services

“In all voluntary services, the household work is entrusted to women and girls, also volunteers themselves and called 'sisters'. […] If the women understand the task imposed on them by the nice expression 'sister' well, their presence contributes to the creation of the very family atmosphere which should be the characteristic of voluntary services. […] The sisters bear an important responsibility they should be fully aware of.”

The brochure contains a few lengthy testimonials of “sisters” who took part in one or the other of the 18 services that had taken place in the first 15 years of SCI's existence spiced up by photographs of smiling faces (“we are enjoying the fresh mountain air while peeling potatoes”).

All this may appear less bizarre if we take into account that at the origin, international voluntary service was established as an alternative to military service, and some of the men participating in it were in fact conscientious objectors. In contrast to military service, where women were not admitted to the barracks, and outside the barracks were often “serving” as sexual objects selling their bodies to the soldiers, SCI gender role patterns appear more friendly, if not to say emancipatory: Even though fulfilling different roles, men and women were living together in the same camps and had the opportunity to meet as human beings. Furthermore, co-ordination and selection of new “sisters” was the business of experienced and committed female volunteers.

 

 

Heinz Gabathuler, International Archives Coordinator

 

In the SCI International Archives, the booklet is stored forever under the number 11101.29.




Service Civil International - International Archives (2004-2024) - Conditions of Use - Contact