St. Gallen native Margrith Bigler-Eggenberger, who made history in 1972 with her appointment to the Federal Supreme Court, died last Monday, her family announced on Saturday.

Bigler-Eggenberger was first elected as a substitute judge to the country’s highest court one year after women in Switzerland gained the right to vote at the federal level. In 1974 she became a full federal judge and subsequently served in the court’s second civil division for 20 years.

The lawyer, lecturer and journalist was an expert on social security law and the status of women. Confronted at an early age by the fact that her brother could vote and she could not, Bigler-Eggenberger became a champion of equal rights. As a federal judge she was involved in Switzerland’s first equal pay trial in 1977.

Born in 1933 in canton St. Gallen, Bigler-Eggenberger nearly missed her chance to accede to the highest court after her application file was tampered with. Although she had been a cantonal judge and university lecturer, the file presented to parliament claimed she was a trainee and housewife. She became the subject of negative comments in the Swiss-German press and was elected by parliament by a razor-thin majority.

“Obviously my CV had been cut down to reflect this false image of the incompetent woman who wants to move from the stove to the Federal Supreme Court,” she later said. “That hurt a lot.”

“Those early days at the federal court were not easy,” she added. “Some of my colleagues even refused to talk to me.”

Bigler-Eggenberger remained the country’s lone female federal judge for 17 years. She resigned from the court in 1994 but continued to work as a part-time federal judge for another two years. She later worked as a journalist and published a seminal work on inequality between women and men.

She was married to the German-Swiss educator and Holocaust survivor Kurt Bigler, who died in 2007.

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