International Women’s Day: What It Commemorates and Whether to Give Flowers

March 8 is International Working Women’s Day. It’s the date on the calendar when the most flower shops get the tone wrong, so it’s worth starting with what is actually being commemorated.

What it commemorates

It isn’t a day of celebration: it’s a day of labor and political demands. It grew out of the early-20th-century labor movement. The proposal for an international day was formalized at the International Conference of Socialist Women in 1910, and March 8 was finally settled after the strike by women textile workers in Petrograd in 1917, one of the triggers of the Russian Revolution. The United Nations made it official in 1975.

A fire at a New York textile factory is often cited as the origin. The fire did happen — the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in March 1911, with 146 dead, most of them immigrant women — but it came after the first commemorations and is not the origin of the date, although it did become associated with it.

Is it appropriate to give flowers?

It depends on how. We’ll be direct, even though we sell flowers:

• A bouquet saying “happy day” to an employee, from a company that hasn’t reviewed its pay or working conditions, reads as exactly what it is. In recent years this has drawn quite a bit of backlash, and rightly so.
• A gesture between people who care about each other — a mother, a friend, a daughter, a colleague — is something completely different, and it works.

The rule of thumb: if the gesture replaces something that should be happening, don’t do it. If it accompanies something genuine, it’s fine.

If you’re going to give something

• The flower of the day is mimosa (Acacia dealbata), yellow, adopted in Italy in 1946 because it was inexpensive and in bloom in the northern March. Here March is fall and it’s practically impossible to find; yellow serves the same symbolic purpose.
• Violet tones: one of the movement’s historic colors.
• Avoid the romantic register: no red roses and no hearts. It’s not Valentine’s Day.
• The card matters. “Happy day” is generic; something specific about what that person does is worth far more.

Our position

March 8 is not a commercial date for us, and we don’t treat it as one. If you want to send flowers that day to someone specific for a specific reason, we’re glad to help. What we won’t do is run a campaign that turns a day of demands into a promotion.