The Yellow Flag: How a Spiky Little Tree Became the Symbol of Women's Resistance
The story of how mimosa — fragile-looking, ferociously resilient, and stubbornly cheerful in the coldest months of the year — became the defining symbol of International Women's Day is a story about improvisation, politics, and the surprising power of a flower to carry meaning across generations.
There is a moment every year on the morning of March 8th in cities across Italy when something shifts in the visual texture of ordinary life. Men appear on street corners holding bundles of yellow branches. Vendors set up impromptu stalls outside metro stations. Office workers arrive at their desks to find small sprigs of mimosa left there by colleagues. The yellow is everywhere — the particular saturated, powdery yellow of Acacia dealbata in full bloom, a color so specific and so charged with association that most Italians would recognize it in their sleep. It is the color of International Women's Day. It is, in Italy at least, practically the color of womanhood itself.
But this didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen through any grand symbolic decree. The story of how mimosa became the emblem of one of the world's most politically significant annual observances is messier, more human, and more interesting than official histories tend to suggest. It is a story about a group of women in postwar Rome who needed a flower and couldn't afford roses. It is a story about timing — botanical timing, historical timing, the lucky collision of a calendar date with a bloom season. And it is a story about how symbols, once they take root, grow wild in ways their creators never imagined.
The Holiday That Needed a Face
International Women's Day did not begin with flowers. It began with labor. The holiday's origins lie in the socialist and trade union movements of the early twentieth century, in the garment factories and textile mills where women worked brutal hours for wages that were a fraction of what men earned for equivalent work. The first National Woman's Day was observed in the United States in February 1909, organized by the Socialist Party of America. The following year, at the International Socialist Women's Conference in Copenhagen, the German activist Clara Zetkin proposed establishing an annual international day for women's rights — a day of demonstrations, demands, and political solidarity.
The date of March 8th became fixed after a period of variation, and the holiday spread through the socialist and communist world with considerable speed. In Russia, the February Revolution of 1917 — which began when women textile workers in Petrograd went on strike to mark International Women's Day — gave the holiday a particular revolutionary prestige. After 1917, it was formally observed throughout the Soviet Union, and Soviet influence helped cement its adoption across Eastern Europe, China, and other countries within the communist orbit.
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In the West, however, International Women's Day had a more ambivalent history in the middle decades of the century. Its socialist associations made it politically complicated in countries nervous about communist influence. In the United States it was largely dormant through the 1940s and 1950s. In western Europe, its adoption was uneven. France observed it fitfully. Britain barely acknowledged it. Italy, emerging from fascism and occupied by competing visions of what the country should become, was a different case.
It was in Italy that the holiday would receive something it had lacked everywhere else: an image.
Teresa, Teresa, and the Problem of the Rose
The women most responsible for giving International Women's Day its visual identity in Italy are remembered today primarily in academic histories and the institutional memory of the organization they helped to found: the Unione Donne Italiane, or UDI, the Union of Italian Women. The UDI was established in 1944, in the chaotic final years of World War II, as part of the broader anti-fascist resistance movement. Its founders were women from across the political left — communists, socialists, members of the Action Party — united by opposition to fascism and by a conviction that the liberation of Italy and the liberation of women were inseparable causes.
Among the founding figures were two women named Teresa — Teresa Noce, a communist militant who had survived imprisonment and deportation, and Teresa Mattei, the youngest member of the Constituent Assembly that would write Italy's postwar constitution, elected at just twenty-six years old. These were not gentle reformers. Noce had organized resistance cells and survived Nazi concentration camps. Mattei had fought with partisan brigades in the mountains of northern Italy.
When the UDI began planning how to mark International Women's Day in the immediate postwar years — 1945, 1946 — they confronted a practical problem that reveals how close to the ground this symbolic history really runs. They needed a flower. Flowers had been associated with women's political demonstrations in various traditions — violets, carnations, roses. The rose in particular had strong associations with socialist and labor movements. But roses in March, in the austerity of postwar Italy, were expensive. The country was rebuilding from devastation. The women of the UDI were not wealthy, and neither were the working-class women they were trying to reach.
The mimosa cost almost nothing. It grew wild on the hillsides of Liguria and Tuscany and Lazio, blooming in exactly the right weeks. Anyone could pick it from the roadside. Anyone could afford a bundle from a street vendor. And it was spectacular — that intense, generous, impossible yellow, the kind of color that insists on being seen.
The choice, according to accounts preserved in UDI archives and the recollections of surviving participants, was made partly by Teresa Mattei herself, though the historical record is somewhat disputed on the precise attribution. What is clear is that by the late 1940s the mimosa had been formally adopted as the symbol of the Italian celebration of International Women's Day, and that the UDI was distributing branches of it at marches, demonstrations, and gatherings across the country.
Why the Mimosa and Not the Rose
The practical argument — cost, availability, timing — explains the initial choice. But the people who made it were also readers of symbolism, and they understood that the mimosa carried meaning beyond its price and its bloom date.
Mimosa is a winter flower, or rather a late-winter flower, a thing that blooms when everything else is still bare and cold. To see a mimosa in full flower in February or early March is to experience something slightly shocking — a riot of warmth and color in a landscape that hasn't yet decided to wake up. That quality, of brightness persisting in hostile conditions, of vitality expressed in the face of cold, was not lost on women who had spent years in resistance movements. The mimosa didn't wait for spring to be told it was time to bloom.
There was also something in the texture and structure of the flower that carried its own meaning. From a distance, mimosa looks soft, almost fluffy — those tiny spherical blossoms packed so densely on their branches that the tree seems upholstered in yellow velvet. Up close, the branches are harder, more complex, and more resilient than they appear. The tree itself is almost impossible to kill. Cut it back and it regenerates from the root system. Remove it entirely and the seeds, which can lie dormant for decades, spring up in its place. For women who had survived fascism, occupation, bereavement, and poverty, the mimosa's underlying toughness beneath its soft exterior was, if not a conscious metaphor, at least a resonant one.
Teresa Mattei, who lived to be ninety-six and spoke about the mimosa symbol in interviews throughout her long life, emphasized these qualities when she discussed the choice. She described it as a flower of the people — not a hothouse luxury but something that grew freely, that could be given freely, that belonged to no single class or economic bracket. The rose, she suggested, carried too many associations with sentiment and romance. The mimosa was something else: cheerful, generous, a little wild, fundamentally democratic.
The Spread of the Symbol
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the mimosa became deeply embedded in the Italian observance of March 8th — known in Italy simply as l'otto marzo, the eighth of March, a phrase that needs no further explanation to any Italian adult. The UDI organized marches and events that featured mimosa prominently. Local chapters distributed branches at factory gates and in working-class neighborhoods. The image appeared on posters, on pamphlets, on the front pages of left-wing newspapers.
As the symbol established itself, it began to move in two directions simultaneously. On one hand, it deepened in political meaning, becoming associated not just with women's rights in the abstract but with specific campaigns: for equal pay, for divorce law reform, for access to contraception, and later for abortion rights. The mimosa appeared at demonstrations that were sometimes celebratory and sometimes fiercely contentious, and it accumulated the meanings of all those occasions.
On the other hand, it began to soften and broaden. As the decades passed and International Women's Day moved from a specifically socialist observance toward something more general — a day acknowledged by governments, corporations, and mainstream culture as well as by activist organizations — the mimosa traveled with it. By the 1970s and 1980s, giving mimosa on March 8th was no longer exclusively a political act. It was a cultural gesture, something Italian men did for the women in their lives — mothers, wives, colleagues, friends — as a sign of acknowledgment and affection. Florists who had no particular political sympathies began stocking mimosa in enormous quantities in the weeks before March 8th. Confectioners made mimosa-shaped cakes — torta mimosa, a sponge cake decorated with crumbled yellow cake to resemble the blossoms — that became a seasonal staple.
This domestication of the symbol troubled some of the women who had created and carried it. Teresa Mattei, in her later years, expressed ambivalence about the way mimosa had become detached from its political roots, given by men to women as a kind of obligatory pleasantry rather than as an expression of solidarity or demand. She worried that the flower had been absorbed into a sentimental tradition that actually softened the holiday's radical edge — that you could give your wife a sprig of mimosa on March 8th and feel you had done your part, when the work of equality was nowhere near done.
This tension — between mimosa as radical symbol and mimosa as pleasant cultural custom — has never been fully resolved, and perhaps cannot be. Symbols that enter mass culture always become contested in this way. The mimosa belongs now to many different Italians with many different understandings of what March 8th means and should mean.
Beyond Italy: The Limits of the Symbol's Travel
The mimosa's association with International Women's Day is, with some exceptions, primarily an Italian phenomenon. In Russia and Eastern Europe, where the holiday has Soviet-era roots and a different cultural character — more associated with femininity and gifts than with political activism — the snowdrop is the more common floral symbol, blooming earlier in the colder northern spring. In France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, International Women's Day has developed its own visual language of purple, green, and white — colors inherited from the British suffragette movement — without a dominant floral emblem.
Where the mimosa symbol has traveled beyond Italy, it has generally done so carried by Italian diaspora communities, or in countries — France, parts of South America — where Italian cultural influence is strong and where the mimosa itself grows abundantly. In the south of France, where l'otto marzo is observed by Italian communities with the full weight of tradition, mimosa bundles appear in early March just as they do in Rome or Milan. In Argentina, where Italian immigration shaped so much of the national culture, the association has some presence, though it competes with other traditions.
The globalization of International Women's Day — particularly in the twenty-first century, as social media accelerated the holiday's spread into contexts far removed from its original political roots — has brought the mimosa to wider attention as a symbol, even in places where the flower is not native or culturally familiar. Photographs of mimosa branches circulate widely on March 8th, their yellow warmth reproducing beautifully on screens. Whether this visual spread will entrench the mimosa as a global symbol of the day, or whether it will remain primarily Italian, is an open question.
The Flower and the Feminist
There is a persistent irony at the heart of the mimosa's story as a feminist symbol: it is, in the Italian tradition, primarily given by men to women. This is not entirely unlike the dynamic around Mother's Day, which began as a political and anti-war statement and was gradually transformed into a commercial occasion for gift-giving. The mimosa started as women giving women a sign of solidarity and shared struggle. It became, in popular culture, something that men purchase at street corners to give to wives and secretaries and mothers.
Feminist thinkers in Italy have written about this transformation with varying degrees of frustration. Some see it as an example of how capitalism and patriarchy absorb radical symbols and render them harmless — the flower as a substitute for actual equality, a way of performing acknowledgment without delivering change. Others take a more generous view, arguing that any occasion that brings the language of women's experience into public space — into offices, onto streets, into ordinary conversations — has value, even if that value is partial and complicated.
What both sides of this argument recognize is that the mimosa has done something extraordinary: it has made International Women's Day visible and tangible in a way that few other national observances achieve with a single image. In Italy, at least, you cannot be in a public space on March 8th and be unaware of what day it is. The yellow is inescapable. Whether you see it as a radical reminder or a pleasant custom or something in between, it is impossible to ignore.
Teresa Mattei, who died in 2013 and is now memorialized with a street name in Florence and the quiet reverence of Italian feminist historians, chose the mimosa because she needed something cheap and available and cheerful. She could not have known that her practical choice — the flower of the poor hillsides, the bloom that costs almost nothing and grows back no matter how many times it is cut — would outlast nearly everything else from that tumultuous postwar moment when Italian women were building a new country and a new idea of what they were allowed to be.
The mimosa blooms in the cold. It costs almost nothing. It comes back every year, relentlessly, insistently yellow, regardless of what the season has to say about it.
Perhaps that was always the point.
