Every political movement eventually finds its flower. The choice is never arbitrary — it is always a compression of history, of feeling, of shared experience seeking a visible form. The flowers associated with International Women’s Day carry within them the entire story of the movement that adopted them: the suffrage marches and the factory floors, the hunger strikes and the harvest fields, the decades in which women’s demands for equality were dismissed and the decades in which they could not be.
The Mimosa — Southern Europe’s Emblem of the Day
Scientific name: Acacia dealbata Colour: Brilliant yellow Principal symbolic regions: Italy, France, Albania, Russia, and much of southern and eastern Europe Adopted: Early 20th century, formalised through mid-century socialist and feminist organisations
Of all the flowers associated with International Women’s Day, the mimosa is the most widely used and the most deeply embedded in the political culture of the day itself. In Italy — where International Women’s Day is known as La Festa della Donna — the gifting of mimosa sprigs to women on the 8th of March has been a national tradition since 1946, when it was proposed by the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) as the symbolic flower of the newly revived celebration in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
The choice of mimosa was practical as well as symbolic. Teresa Mattei, the partisan and UDI activist credited with its selection, later explained that the decision was driven partly by the flower’s abundance in the Italian countryside in early March — a time when few other flowers were blooming — and partly by its cost: mimosa was cheap enough for working-class men to buy for the women in their lives, which was precisely the democratic spirit the organisers intended. A symbol that could only be afforded by the wealthy was not a symbol for a movement rooted in the lives of factory workers, rural labourers, and the urban poor.
But the practical rationale does not exhaust the mimosa’s symbolic fitness. Acacia dealbata is an extraordinarily vivid presence in the early March landscape: its clusters of tiny spherical yellow flowers — each one a dense ball of stamens, bright as a small sun — transform the grey-green Italian hillsides into something approaching incandescence, a visual announcement of return and renewal that seemed, to those who chose it, exactly right for a day marking the return of women’s political visibility after the long suppression of the Fascist period.
The mimosa’s yellow carried its own symbolic weight. Gold and yellow have been associated across many cultures with light, energy, and the sun’s generative power — qualities that aligned easily with the movement’s aspirations. In a more specifically Italian context, the yellow of mimosa read against the memory of the partisan yellow star as a reclamation: a colour that had been used to mark and exclude now returning as a colour of celebration and solidarity.
In Russia and many post-Soviet states, where International Women’s Day has been officially recognised since the Soviet period’s early decades, the mimosa holds equivalent symbolic centrality. Soviet-era cards and posters routinely depicted mimosa blooms alongside images of women workers, mothers, and intellectuals, creating a visual vocabulary for the day that persisted well beyond the Soviet Union’s dissolution. In contemporary Russia, mimosa is still the characteristic gift of the day, sold from market stalls and metro stations across the country in quantities that suggest a commercial infrastructure as well-developed as any holiday floristry.
The mimosa’s fragrance — light, faintly sweet, with a powdery warmth that is immediately recognisable to anyone who has encountered it — is itself part of its symbolic life. Scent is the sense most directly connected to memory, and for the many millions of women across southern and eastern Europe for whom a mimosa sprig on the 8th of March is among their earliest recollections, the fragrance carries the emotional weight of all those commemorations simultaneously. It is the smell of the day itself: of recognition, of celebration, of the complicated relationship between a movement’s aspirations and the world’s resistance to them.
The Violet — The Suffrage Flower of Britain and America
Scientific name: Viola odorata and related species Colour: Purple-violet, occasionally white or gold in combination Principal symbolic regions: Great Britain, the United States, Australia Adopted: Late 19th and early 20th century, particularly through the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)
The violet’s association with women’s suffrage in Britain and the United States predates International Women’s Day by several decades and formed the foundation on which the day’s symbolic visual language was partly built in the English-speaking world. The Women’s Social and Political Union — the militant suffragette organisation founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 — adopted purple, white, and green as its official colours in 1908, and purple, the deepest and most historically charged shade of which was closest to violet, carried the ideological weight of the three-colour scheme.
The purple of the WSPU’s palette was explicitly described by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, the organisation’s treasurer and a principal theorist of its symbolism, as representing loyalty and dignity — the dignity of the cause and the loyalty of those who served it. These were not abstract qualities: in the context of a movement whose members were being imprisoned, force-fed during hunger strikes, and subjected to systematic social and professional punishment, the invocation of dignity was a direct counter to the dehumanisation that the suffragette’s opponents deployed as a tactical weapon. To wear purple — to carry violets — was to assert a self-understanding that the dominant culture sought to deny.
The violet’s own historical associations reinforced this symbolic function. The flower had been associated with Athens and Athenian culture — the city called iostephanos, violet-crowned — since antiquity, and Athens was, in the 19th-century imagination, the cradle of democracy. The connection between the violet, Athens, and democratic aspiration was available to educated suffragettes and suffragists who knew their classical culture, and the flower’s deployment as a symbol of democratic demand — votes for women as the extension of Athenian democratic principle — drew on this historical depth even when it was not made explicit.
American suffrage organisations independently adopted violet and purple as symbolic colours, and violets appeared in suffrage parades, on the badges sold to raise funds for the cause, and in the buttonholes of marchers throughout the campaign that culminated in the 19th Amendment of 1920. The convergence of British and American suffrage symbolism around the same flower — arrived at partly through shared cultural traditions and partly through the direct connections between the two movements’ leaderships — created a transatlantic visual language for women’s political demand that the later International Women’s Day celebrations inherited.
The violet’s scent — fleeting, paradoxically self-defeating, perceived most intensely in the first moment of contact and then apparently vanishing as the olfactory receptors adapt — was sometimes used as a metaphor for the suffragettes’ situation: a presence that the dominant culture wished to ignore, visible and fragrant one moment and apparently absent the next, but always returning. The metaphor was rarely made explicit, but the flower’s sensory character and its symbolic use were not unrelated: those who chose the violet as the movement’s flower chose well, and not only for its colour.
The Rose — Labour, Socialism and the Long Women’s Movement
Scientific name: Rosa species, particularly Rosa damascena and garden hybrids Colour: Red principally, also pink and white Principal symbolic regions: International, with particular strength in the United States and the broader socialist tradition Adopted: Late 19th century through labour and socialist movements
The red rose’s association with women’s rights is inseparable from its association with the broader labour and socialist movements within which the early women’s rights movement was, in many countries, embedded. International Women’s Day itself — first proposed at the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, inspired by the American garment workers’ strikes of 1908 — emerged from a political tradition that used the red rose as its primary floral symbol, and the flower’s presence in the iconography of women’s rights is a direct expression of that political genealogy.
The phrase bread and roses — which became one of the most enduring slogans of the women’s labour movement — was coined in the context of the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike, in which women workers from dozens of immigrant communities walked out over wage cuts and working conditions. The demand captured in the phrase was for both economic survival (bread) and human dignity and beauty (roses) — a rejection of the premise that working-class women’s aspirations could or should be limited to bare subsistence. The roses in this formulation were not luxury: they were the full humanity of those who demanded them. To claim the rose was to claim the right to a life worth living, not merely a life sustained.
This association between the rose and the full realisation of women’s lives — economic justice and beauty, survival and flourishing — shaped the flower’s symbolic presence in the International Women’s Day tradition in ways that distinguished it from both the mimosa’s Italian democratic warmth and the violet’s British suffrage associations. The red rose of the labour movement carried with it the history of the strike, the picket line, the factory floor, and the international solidarity of workers across national boundaries. When a red rose appeared in International Women’s Day imagery in the 20th century, it carried all of this.
Pink roses — softer in their associations, more easily detached from their political context — became the commercial floristry choice for the day in many markets, a domestication of the red rose’s political charge that has been observed and critiqued by feminist commentators across several decades. The commercial rose of International Women’s Day is not the rose of the Lawrence strike; the softening of colour from red to pink is a softening of political meaning as well, a translation of collective demand into individual sentiment. The history of the red rose’s political deployment is, in part, a history of this tension between the flower’s radical origins and its commercial absorption.
The Daffodil — Rebirth, Spring and New Beginnings
Scientific name: Narcissus pseudonarcissus and cultivated hybrids Colour: Yellow and white Principal symbolic regions: Wales, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand Adopted: Informal adoption as a spring and renewal symbol through 20th century feminist traditions
The daffodil’s association with International Women’s Day is less politically specific and more broadly cultural than the mimosa, violet, or red rose. In Wales — where the daffodil is the national flower, worn on St David’s Day on the 1st of March, a week before International Women’s Day — the temporal proximity of the two occasions gives the flower a natural connection to the celebration. More broadly, the daffodil’s status as the pre-eminent flower of early spring across northern Europe and the Anglophone world has made it a natural symbol for a day whose essential meaning — the return of something long suppressed, the announcement of a season’s change — maps onto the flower’s own seasonal character.
The daffodil blooms early and abundantly, often in conditions that remain wintry and inhospitable. Its yellow is assertive rather than delicate — a colour that does not ask permission to be noticed — and its form is architectural and commanding: the trumpet projecting forward as if in announcement. These qualities have made it, for a tradition of feminist visual symbolism that values visibility and assertiveness, an intuitively satisfying choice.
In Australia and New Zealand, where March falls in the early autumn rather than the spring, the daffodil has nonetheless been adopted in International Women’s Day contexts through the cultural inheritance of the northern hemisphere celebration, imported with the traditions of the majority European-descended population and maintained as a global symbol even where its seasonal character is reversed. This displacement — a spring flower used in autumn — has itself been noted by feminist writers in the southern hemisphere as a minor but telling example of the northern hemisphere’s cultural dominance in global symbolic traditions.
The Lily — Purity, Strength and the Contested Symbol
Scientific name: Lilium species, particularly Lilium candidum (Madonna lily) and Lilium longiflorum (Easter lily) Colour: White principally Principal symbolic regions: Ireland, various Christian feminist traditions Adopted: Through overlapping traditions of national and religious symbolism
The lily’s presence in International Women’s Day symbolism is complicated by the flower’s extensive prior symbolic life in religious and nationalist contexts, which feminist traditions have sometimes adopted and sometimes consciously resisted. In Ireland, the Easter lily — worn to commemorate the Easter Rising of 1916 — carries a nationalist symbolism that has been in productive tension with feminist readings of the Rising and its aftermath. The women of the Rising — Countess Markievicz, Helena Molony, and the members of Cumann na mBan who fought alongside the male rebels — have been recuperated in recent decades as feminist forerunners, and the Easter lily as their symbol has been carried into International Women’s Day contexts by Irish feminist organisations who wish to honour this specific revolutionary tradition.
The white lily more broadly — as a symbol of purity and strength, divested of its specifically Christian Marian associations — has been deployed in feminist contexts that seek to reclaim the symbolism of feminine virtue from its historically constrained applications. The argument, made explicitly by some feminist theorists and implicitly by the symbolic choices of many women’s organisations, is that purity and strength are not qualities that women should be required to embody on others’ terms, but qualities that women can claim for themselves on their own terms. The white lily in this reading is not the passive purity of the Madonna; it is the active, self-defined strength of women who have determined the conditions of their own symbolic life.
The Sunflower — Warmth, Solidarity and the Contemporary Symbol
Scientific name: Helianthus annuus Colour: Yellow and gold Principal symbolic regions: Global, with particular strength in contemporary feminist visual culture Adopted: Late 20th and early 21st centuries, through feminist and LGBTQ+ solidarity traditions
The sunflower is among the most recently adopted of the flowers associated with International Women’s Day, and its adoption reflects the changing visual culture of the feminist movement in the era of social media and digital communication. Its primary qualities — scale, brightness, facing toward the light, turning through the day to follow the sun — lend themselves to a visual language of aspiration and solidarity that translates effectively across the compressed formats of digital communication: a sunflower emoji, a sunflower photograph, a sunflower graphic carries its meaning immediately and universally.
The sunflower’s associations with Ukraine — where it is the national flower — have given it a more specific political charge in recent years, connecting the feminist symbolism of the day to the broader politics of national sovereignty and democratic resistance. The convergence of sunflower symbolism across feminist and Ukrainian national solidarity contexts has been negotiated differently in different communities, but the flower’s capacity to carry multiple symbolic registers simultaneously — warmth, solidarity, democratic aspiration, resistance — has made it an unusually versatile political flower for the contemporary moment.
The heliotropic quality of the sunflower — its following of the sun’s movement through the day — has been used as a metaphor for feminist aspiration across a range of cultural contexts: the movement toward the light as a movement toward liberation, the consistent orientation toward warmth and growth as a model for political commitment. This metaphor is not uniquely feminist — the sunflower’s heliotropism has been symbolically interpreted across many traditions — but its application to the feminist movement has been made with sufficient frequency to give it a recognised place in the symbolic vocabulary of the day.
Lavender — Feminist, Queer and the Purple Tradition
Scientific name: Lavandula angustifolia Colour: Lavender-purple Principal symbolic regions: International, particularly through LGBTQ+ feminist traditions Adopted: Mid-20th century through LGBTQ+ rights and feminist movements
Lavender’s symbolic presence in feminist and women’s rights contexts is inseparable from its symbolic presence in LGBTQ+ culture, where it has carried specific meaning since at least the 1960s and possibly earlier. The lavender menace — a phrase used dismissively by Betty Friedan in 1969 to refer to lesbian women in the feminist movement — was defiantly reclaimed by lesbian feminists who wore lavender clothing to a subsequent feminist congress, transforming the dismissal into a badge of solidarity. The colour lavender subsequently became associated with the intersection of feminism and lesbian identity, carrying a political charge that the flower of the same colour inherited and amplified.
The lavender’s history in women’s spaces — in the herbal medicine of women’s healing traditions, in the gardens of female religious communities, in the domestic economies of women who grew and processed it for medicine, fragrance, and household use — gives it a historical depth in women’s culture that predates its specifically political symbolism. To claim lavender as a feminist flower is, in part, to claim the continuity of women’s relationships with the plant across centuries of practical and spiritual engagement.
In the contemporary visual culture of International Women’s Day, lavender occupies a specific position within the day’s palette: it is the purple of the feminist movement’s colour tradition, the cool counterpart to the mimosa’s warm yellow, and the marker of a political lineage that runs from the WSPU through the second-wave women’s liberation movement to the contemporary intersectional feminist organisations that have, in many contexts, become the primary organisers of the day’s public events.
The Forget-Me-Not — Memory, Continuity and the Women Who Came Before
Scientific name: Myosotis species Colour: Pale blue, occasionally pink or white Principal symbolic regions: Germany (particularly in the socialist tradition), broader European feminist culture Adopted: Early 20th century through German socialist women’s organisations
The forget-me-not’s name is its symbolism, and for a movement that has always been conscious of its own history — conscious of the women whose struggles made subsequent advances possible, conscious of the dangers of amnesia about what was won and at what cost — the flower’s essential meaning is directly relevant to the day’s purpose. The German socialist women’s movement, which was one of the primary organisers of International Women’s Day in its early decades, used the forget-me-not as a symbol of remembrance and continuity — a visual reminder that the movement’s demands were not new, that women had been fighting for their rights for generations, and that the obligation of those currently engaged in the struggle was to honour and continue the work of their predecessors.
The blue of the forget-me-not adds a chromatic counterpoint to the feminist colour palette dominated by purple, yellow, and red. It is a colour associated with constancy, with the sky and with water, with the faithful endurance that political struggle requires. For a movement that has always had to sustain itself across years and decades of incremental progress and periodic reversals, the forget-me-not’s associations with faithful persistence are not merely aesthetically pleasing. They are politically appropriate.
The flower’s small scale and apparent fragility — easily overlooked, easily trampled — is also part of its symbolic resonance. The forget-me-not is not an imposing flower; it does not command the visual field in the way of the sunflower or the rose. Its power is cumulative, the power of many small flowers together creating a field of blue that is, in aggregate, impossible to ignore. This cumulative model of power — individual women, individually unimposing, collectively transformative — is precisely the model of collective political action that the women’s movement has always embodied.
The Iris — Justice, Wisdom and the French Republican Tradition
Scientific name: Iris germanica and related species Colour: Purple, blue, white, yellow Principal symbolic regions: France and Francophone feminist traditions Adopted: Through the overlap of French national and feminist symbolic traditions
The iris — the national flower of France, the fleur-de-lys of the French royal tradition subsequently reclaimed as a republican symbol — enters the symbolic vocabulary of International Women’s Day through the specifically French feminist tradition’s relationship with the ideals of the French Republic. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité — the founding ideals of the Republic — have been claimed by French feminist movements as promises that the Republic has persistently failed to keep for women, and the iris as the symbol of those ideals has been deployed by French feminists in contexts that simultaneously invoke the Republic’s commitments and demand their fulfilment.
The iris’s ancient association with justice and wisdom — the goddess Iris as divine messenger, the iris planted on graves to guide the souls of the dead — gives it a symbolic history that feminist appropriation of the flower can draw on. Justice and wisdom are precisely the qualities demanded by women’s rights movements from legal and political institutions, and the iris’s historical embodiment of these qualities makes it a symbolically appropriate flower for a movement making those demands.
The flower’s colour range — including the deep purples that link it to the broader feminist colour tradition — allows the iris to operate within the visual language of International Women’s Day without requiring translation. A purple iris in a feminist context reads immediately as part of the purple tradition of women’s political symbolism, even for observers without specific knowledge of the iris’s role in French republican culture.
Colour and Coalition — Reading the Feminist Flower Palette
Any close attention to the flowers of International Women’s Day reveals a palette that is neither accidental nor merely aesthetic. The colours that recur across the day’s floral symbolism — purple, yellow, white, red, and their variations — form a visual language whose meanings have been consciously developed and contested across more than a century of feminist political culture.
Purple — the colour of the violet, the lavender, the iris, and the mimosa’s complementary shade in the WSPU palette — is the primary colour of women’s political identity across the English-speaking world and much of Europe. Its historical associations with royalty and with the Catholic Church have been deliberately subverted by feminist adoption: a colour that historically marked the powerful is claimed by those whom power has excluded, transforming its meaning through the act of reclamation. The rarity and expense of purple dye in the ancient world — Tyrian purple, extracted from murex shellfish at enormous cost — gave the colour associations of value and dignity that feminist symbolism inverts: those who wear purple are dignified not by their wealth or power but by their demand to be recognised as fully human.
Yellow — the colour of the mimosa, the daffodil, and the sunflower — is the warm counterpart to purple in the feminist palette. Where purple carries associations of dignity, seriousness, and the historical weight of political struggle, yellow carries associations of vitality, renewal, and the sun’s generative energy. The combination of purple and yellow in feminist visual culture — formalised in the WSPU’s three-colour scheme (purple, white, and green, where yellow sometimes substituted for green) — creates a visual tension that is itself politically productive: the gravity of purple and the energy of yellow together produce a palette that is neither solemn nor frivolous but insists on holding both dimensions simultaneously.
White — the colour of the lily, of white roses, of the purity strand in feminist symbolism — has always been the most contested of the feminist palette’s colours, for the obvious reason that the symbolic associations of purity and femininity that white historically carried are precisely the associations that feminist movements have often sought to challenge. The white of suffragette dress was a reclamation: women who were expected to be pure in ways that constrained and diminished them wearing white as a demand for a self-defined rather than an externally imposed femininity. This reclamation has continued in various forms across the subsequent century, with white entering feminist contexts as a demand for transparency, for honesty, and for the visible recognition of women’s full complexity rather than the simplified purity that patriarchal traditions have imposed.
Red — the colour of the red rose, of the labour movement’s political tradition — is the colour that connects International Women’s Day to its roots in socialist politics. It is the colour of solidarity across difference, of collective action, of the shared political identity of workers regardless of national origin. In the international feminist tradition that grew from those roots, red continues to carry its original meaning: a reminder that women’s liberation has always been entangled with the liberation of the labouring classes from economic exploitation, that bread and roses are demands that belong together.
The Politics of the Gift — What It Means to Give a Flower
The question of what it means to give a flower on International Women’s Day is not a simple one, and feminist commentary on the practice has ranged from enthusiastic endorsement to sharp critique, often within the same tradition and sometimes within the same organisation.
The endorsing position holds that flowers — like the day itself — are best understood as celebrations of women’s lives and contributions: expressions of appreciation and recognition that dignify rather than diminish their recipients. The mimosa tradition in Italy, with its roots in the working-class and partisan culture of post-war UDI activism, carries enough political weight and historical specificity to support this reading. A mimosa sprig given on the 8th of March in Milan or Rome is not simply a pretty flower; it is a visible participation in a political tradition, a small act of solidarity with a movement whose history is encoded in the gift.
The critiquing position holds that the commercialisation of flower-giving on International Women’s Day has progressively stripped the political content from the gesture, replacing the mimosa’s specific political history with a generic floral sentiment that is more comfortable and less demanding. The softening of the red rose to pink in commercial floristry for the day, the dominance of pastel-coloured marketing in the day’s commercial presentation, and the tendency of corporate entities to adopt International Women’s Day aesthetics while resisting the substantive demands of the feminist movement — these are, for many feminist commentators, symptoms of the same process: the absorption of a radical political tradition into a form of consumption that neutralises its political charge.
Both positions contain truth. The flowers of International Women’s Day are simultaneously symbols of genuine political commitment and objects of commercial exchange, and these two identities are not easily separated. The mimosa sold from a Roman market stall in the early morning of the 8th of March by a woman who has been there since before dawn, and purchased by another woman on her way to a commemoration, is both a commodity and a political act. The same mimosa purchased online and delivered to an office in the spirit of corporate social responsibility is something different — not nothing, but different.
The flowers themselves are not responsible for this ambiguity. They carry the meanings their users bring to them, and those meanings are as diverse as the women who give and receive them. What the history of International Women’s Day’s floral symbolism suggests is that the most meaningful flowers are those whose histories can be told — whose connection to specific political struggles, specific moments of solidarity, specific demands and refusals, gives them the depth that distinguishes a symbol from a decoration.
The mimosa that Teresa Mattei proposed in 1946 was chosen because it could be afforded by the women on factory wages and the men who loved them. The violet worn by a suffragette in 1910 was chosen because its colour named the dignity that the movement claimed. The red rose carried by striking textile workers in Lawrence was chosen because it named the beauty that labour alone could not provide. These are not arbitrary choices. They are decisions made by people who understood that political movements are sustained, in part, by the symbols that make their values visible and their solidarity tangible.
To know these histories is to give and receive the flowers differently — with more weight, more awareness, and a more complicated relationship to the pleasure they bring. The mimosa is still beautiful in March. It is more beautiful for knowing what it has meant.
A note on the day’s history: International Women’s Day was first observed in the United States in 1909, following a proposal by the Socialist Party of America. It was adopted internationally at the 1910 International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, on a proposal by Clara Zetkin. It has been officially recognised by the United Nations since 1975 and is a public holiday in more than twenty-seven countries. The date of the 8th of March commemorates the Russian women workers’ strike of 8 March 1917, which was one of the opening events of the Russian Revolution.
0 responses to “Flowers of the Movement: A Guide to the Blooms of International Women’s Day”