The World - News from May 1, 1989

Five thousand Swiss men in Appenzell Outer-Rhodes state decided, by a show of hands, to give women the right to vote. Four times in the past 17 years, the voters in this state had rejected women’s suffrage. “I can look my wife in the eye again,” said one man after the balloting. Neighboring Appenzell Inner-Rhodes now is the only one of Switzerland’s 26 sovereign states--or cantons--that still denies women the vote on local issues ranging from budget questions to alcohol laws. Swiss women won the right to vote in national elections in a 1971 referendum.