The Stauffacherin is a Swiss legendary figure. According to Swiss folklore, she was the wife of Werner Stauffacher, the Landammann of the Canton of Schwyz and a founding father of the Old Swiss Confederacy. She was depicted in Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play William Tell as an advisor to her husband, advocating for Swiss independence from Habsburg rule. The image of the Stauffacherin, often viewed as the feminine counterpart to Wilhelm Tell, has become a symbol for Swiss national pride, spiritual national defence, democracy, and women's suffrage.
Painting by Ferdinand Wagner of the Stauffacherin at the Town Hall in Schwyz
Statue of the Stauffacherin in the Federal Palace
Josef Rickenbauer's 1976 statue Stauffacherin in Steinen
William Tell is a folk hero of Switzerland.
According to the legend, Tell was an expert mountain climber and marksman with a crossbow who assassinated Albrecht Gessler, a tyrannical reeve of the Austrian dukes of the House of Habsburg positioned in Altdorf, in the canton of Uri. Tell's defiance and tyrannicide encouraged the population to open rebellion and a pact against the foreign rulers with neighbouring Schwyz and Unterwalden, marking the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy. Tell was considered the father of the Swiss Confederacy.
Tell is arrested for not saluting Gessler's hat (mosaic at the Swiss National Museum, Hans Sandreuter, 1901)
Tell's leap (Tellensprung) from the boat of his captors at the Axen cliffs; study by Ernst Stückelberg (1879) for his fresco at the Tellskapelle.
Page of the White Book of Sarnen (p. 447, first page of the Tell legend, pp. 447–449).
A depiction of the apple-shot scene in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia (1554 edition).