Schooling in Switzerland: Young Emigrants in the Seventies

During the Sixties and Seventies, thousands of Italian youths attended schools in Switzerland. They were born between the forties and the seventies and belonged to what can be regarded as an intermediate generation, between the so-called first and second generations. Most of the younger ones attended Swiss schools, starting integration processes. Others, especially teenagers, attended the “Istituti italiani all’estero”. In the archives of one of the latter, thousands of school essays are stored, which were written by male and female students in the time span considered in this study. Here, only the essays produced by female students will be examined. Firstly, the focus will be on the peculiarity of their migratory experience, and on their representations of their country of origin and of their host country; descriptions of both are shown to depend on how the writers felt treated in them as women.