Festa della Donna

Lugano was full of pretty yellow mimosa flowers this weekend for Festa della Donna.  Everyone on the street seemed to buying some for someone. This holiday turns out to correspond with International Women's Day which, though inspired by oppression occurring in the US, is an oddly low-profile holiday there, in my experience. Not a flower holiday, in any case.

This day came at an appropriate point during my plod through A People's History of the United States so I am fresh on the details of oppressive early 20th century working conditions.  Eighty hour work weeks, dangerous and dirty buildings, incessant factory fires, child labor, repressive rules, and paltry salaries – the individual stories are too much to bear. The numbers are likewise disturbing. In 1914 alone, 35,000 workers were killed in accidents and 700,000 were injured. The income of 44 rich families equalled the total income of 100,000 families. Locked doors during a factory fire at the Triangle Company killed 146 workers, most of whom were women. 

In commemoration of tragedies such as these, and to honor the women's rights movement, groups in the US began observing National Women's Day and, later, groups in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland adopted International Women's Day. (The progressiveness of Switzerland is apparently patchy, since the last canton held out on giving women the right to vote until they were forced to do so in the 1990s!) After 1917, it was celebrated on March 8 in honor of a successful strike by women in Russia for peace and voting rights. Italy adopted the holiday during the 40s and added the mimosa flowers. (Here's a nice timeline of events.)

I often wish we had a better sense of history in the US. I love that we are an optimistic people but we miss much in glossing over the transgressions in our narrative. Not recognizing just how often we've failed, how human we are, how wrong we've been, is tragic.  But, if you'll permit me a moment of drama, I believe not appreciating how far we have managed to straggle along may be an even bigger tragedy. 

(Worse even than not buying mimosa flowers for the woman in your life on Festa della Donna, by the way.)