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Back in college, I lived on a steady diet of frozen yogurt, falafel, and Simone de Beauvoir. She was my heroine, and her book The Second Sex was my Bible. I also read Germaine Greer and many obscure French and Swedish feminists who were in vogue at the time. All of this led me to assume that women’s lives were far better in Europe. After all, people there seemed so sophisticated, with their cafés, academics and universal health care.

But then, ta-da: In 2002, I moved across the pond.

For the past six years, my husband, the Amazing Bob, and I have been living in Geneva, Switzerland. An international city that’s home to the United Nations and the promotion of human rights, Geneva is known as the “City of Peace.” It’s an elegant town, full of well-dressed people strolling along lakeside gardens.

When we first arrived, I couldn't wait to shed my red-white-and-blue skin. Oh, how I wanted to assimilate, to become a cultured, erudite, worldly European woman!

Until I moved here, I believed that sexism was big, abstract and blatant: pay discrimination. Sexual violence and harassment. The fact that breast cancer studies had once been conducted only on men.

But in Switzerland, alas, I’ve come to learn just how subtle and insidious it can be, too. Certain innocuous things—like store hours and attitudes—can make an enormous difference in women’s lives. And as Joni Mitchell put it: Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?

In Geneva, shops are only open from 8am until 6pm, and not at all on Sundays. Most children are sent home from school midday, so it goes without saying that lunchtime, evenings, and Sundays are sacred family times. At 7pm, the Swiss believe people should be home with their loved ones, not manning a check-out counter or pricing a lawnmower.   

Sounds nice, huh? And on one hand, admittedly, I’ve found this calming. Once Bob and I got used to stocking up on groceries before the weekend, we found that Sundays here force us to chill-out magnificently. 
   

That is, until Monday, when I alone brave the supermarkets to restock our Lilliputian fridge, hit the post office and pay the bills. I do this because as a writer, I work at home, and therefore have the more flexible hours. But even if I didn't, the Swiss would expect me to do these things.
   

Because here's the flip side of such a genteel, European life: it’s predicated on the assumption that someone will always be home—home to do the shopping between 8am and noon during the week, home to prepare a hot lunch for the children, home to make sure that all is in order for Sunday. And guess what? This someone is presumed to possess a vagina. If it's not the femme de foyer (housewife), it's the femme de menage (housekeeper). 
   

A few years ago, the Swiss, who vote on referendums every 2-3 months, considered a proposition to allow cantons (the Swiss equivalent of states or provinces) to extend their store hours. Huge posters opposing the measure sprang up all over Geneva. They showed a cherubic baby, tears streaming bathetically down his face, beside the quote, "Mama, I want you, but you are gone. You have to work." Subtle, it wasn’t. Longer store hours were demonized because they meant women might work more.
   

Mind you, the proposition at issue allowed stores to stay open for exactly one extra hour. One day a week. Thursdays.
   

Geneva passed the referendum. Other cantons in Switzerland did not.
   

Renowned for watches, efficiency and punctuality, Switzerland is perversely behind the times when it comes to women's rights. Women didn't get the vote here until 1971. Age requirements, gender, and implicitly, appearances, are still included in job listings. Abortion was only de-criminalized in 2002. Women are still defined by marital status and age: We’re either Mademoiselle or Madame, not “Ms.” And the marketplace, with its “family-friendly” hours, is structured as an impediment to women working. 
   

The cafés, the languid pace of life and the day-of-rest Sundays. It's all good stuff. But as an American woman, I’m discovering these benefits come at a cost—one I’m not so sure I’d be willing to pay back home.

Susan Jane Gilman is the bestselling author of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Kiss My Tiara, and her most recent book, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Ms. magazine, among others, and her fiction and essays have received several literary awards. She currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland, yet she remains, eternally, a child of New York City.