The foreword is a biographical narrative of two ordinary Swiss women, mother and daughter, born in 1890 and 1918 respectively. They represent the majority of women who only received compulsory Swiss schooling that encompassed a rigorous, mandatory homemaking curriculum including sewing, knitting, and cooking. The girls did not have equal access to education as their male classmates. Both women worked for a while as low-paid factory laborers. The daughter completed a customary apprenticeship in homemaking to become a certified household employee. The women were Swiss citizens, but they had no political rights. Eventually, they both married, the mother a poor farmer and the daughter a farrier and black smith who had his own small business. The mother worked on the farm, the daughter in the small shop of her husband besides keeping the house and raising the children as prescribed by Swiss marriage law (until revision in 1986). Their life-long subsistence work, their care-giving, their productivity, and contributions to society was never measured nor did it enter national accounting. They only were a demographic number. As generations of women in Switzerland before them, the history of the country did not reckon their contributions to nation building.