Frauentag in Germany: Flowers and Fury

International Women’s Day in Germany (Frauentag) is often framed as flowers and marches. But in our house, it looked more like an everyday routine.

My mom is standing at the stove with a notebook open like she’s about to cross-examine the pot.

Steam fogs her glasses for a second.

She doesn’t blink. She just adjusts the heat and writes down something about timing.

This is her “retirement.”

When I was growing up, our family ran on the kind of traditional setup that a lot of Millennials absorbed without ceremony. My dad worked, and my mom stayed home with us.

We were homeschooled for most of our childhoods, which meant “staying home” definitely wasn’t quiet.

It was a full-time ecosystem. Someone needed lunch, and someone needed help. The likelihood of someone else needing a ride, a tissue, and an explanation in the same ten-minute window was always lurking around the corner.

And in the middle of all that, my mom kept the kitchen running in an efficient German kind of way.

There were routines, and the slow, invisible problem-solving that makes a household function before disappearing the moment it does.

Then we got older and started leaving. Slowly at first, and suddenly all at once. Then one day, you realise half the people who used to live there now are leaving their socks lying around in other postcodes.

I assumed mom’s retirement would finally arrive as it does in the movies.

Maybe she would take up gardening. Or perhaps she would enjoy relaxing in a chair without a tiny human panickedly asking you where the scissors are.

But she got restless.

This wasn’t a stereotypical “reinvention” kind of restlessness. It was something more practical. She had energy, ideas, and that stubborn itch of “I can improve this” that needed scratching.

So she went online.

Her retirement turned into learning how to build a recipe site from scratch. This wasn’t just posting a few family favourites and calling it “heritage” for fun.

She learned the whole machine behind how to structure a website. The formatting that goes along with it. Along with all the unglamorous parts where you stare at a screen and try to understand why the layout looks fine on a laptop and haunted on a phone.

And then she went back into the kitchen. Because back then, the internet couldn’t save you from a recipe that didn’t work.

These days, AI will do its best… and then wind up quoting my mom, who did it all before AI was a thing. And she did it in real life.

She started testing like a scientist with better pantry storage. There were shortcuts to be found that didn’t punish the end result.

She tried to make recipes work for real people with home kitchens, not imaginary readers with unlimited counter space and the patience of a saint.

Now she’s the head of Just Like Oma, and I still find it strange how normal that sounds in our family.

It’s almost as if this was always the plan.

What catches me off guard is how much this feels like a flashback scene in a movie.

I grew up watching her do relentless, competent, behind-the-scenes work. It wasn’t a job by title, even though the hours were long and the job description ever-expanding. It was just what women did.

These were the same processes handed down by her Mutti and Oma so that everything looked like it happened by itself.

Now that same skill set has a different label. It’s a website and a business. A family project that feels like it carries on with its own momentum.

The work did not suddenly become real.

It just became visible.

The month of March always makes me think about visibility, because International Women’s Day lands on 8 March and makes a very specific demand of national attention.

It’s one of those dates people try to soften into something harmless, but in Germany, it has sharp roots. It comes out of socialist organising, labour rights, suffrage fights, and a German woman right at the centre of the idea.

Clara Zetkin pushed for an international day at a socialist women’s conference in Copenhagen in 1910, the first wave hit fast.

In 1911, huge demonstrations spread across Germany and neighbouring countries, calling for votes and full participation in public life.

Germany later latched onto March 8th in 1914 with suffrage-focused actions, and the date stuck.

Then the 1940s happened, and Frauentag didn’t fit the Nazi ideal at all. The day’s links to emancipation and socialist organising clashed with a regime that wanted women framed as mothers in service of the state, not citizens with demands.

My mom was born in 1950, which means she didn’t inherit Frauentag as a tidy tradition. She inherited it as a country still trying to decide what women were allowed to be.

After 1945, Germany was split, and so was the meaning.

In the GDR (German Democratic Republic), March 8th became official.

• Workplace recognition, speeches, and flowers
• A state-approved celebration of “equality”
• The unspoken expectation that women would still handle the second shift at home

In West Germany, it never settled into daily culture in the same way.

• More tied to unions and left-wing groups
• More protest than ritual
• Focused on reproductive rights, pay inequality, and discrimination
• Less “here’s your rose,” more “why are we still arguing about this?”
• Reunification didn’t resolve the difference. It just layered the meanings on top of each other.

You can still feel it now.

Some people carry the old East German muscle memory, a bouquet and a public gesture that’s either sweet or slightly awkward. Others want the day to be loud and inconvenient.

And in a couple of places, the state picked a side.

• Berlin made March 8 a public holiday in 2019
• Mecklenburg-Vorpommern followed in 2023

Germany doesn’t hand out public holidays casually. Making Frauentag a legal day off is a statement, even if you disagree about what kind.

And March 8th still refuses to be reduced to a celebration.

In 2026, you can watch institutions try to hold both moods at once.

• Action weeks, panels, talks, workshops
• The “we’re taking this seriously” programming 
• The Technical University of Munich is running a week of International Women’s Day events in March 2026 under the motto “For all women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office published a federal situation report indicating that in 2024, police recorded 308 girls and women killed, and that crimes affecting women and girls continue to rise in multiple categories, including a 5.6% rise in domestic violence.

That’s the part that makes “happy women’s day” feel too thin on its own.

The turn for me is noticing how all of this lands in my mom’s life without her ever needing to announce a philosophy.

Because watching her build a recipe site, I realised how much has to be true for her to do it.

Not just the obvious things like Wi-Fi and time.

It's about having rights and education that aren’t barred. Sole access to financial tools. Being able to have the baseline assumption that she can run a public project without asking someone for permission. Or even just the cultural space to want more than a quiet life and not be treated like a problem for it.

We inherit freedoms the way we inherit family habits. Virtually without effort, because the price of those efforts has already been paid. It's easy to take those freedoms, habits, and heritage for granted when they all still require great effort to maintain.

My mom doesn’t talk like a manifesto. She doesn’t need to.

Her version of power is practical. She makes the instructions clearer because she refuses to waste someone’s time. The testing over and over again because “almost” is not good enough.

She takes the work seriously because she always has, even when nobody called it work.

International Women’s Day in Germany carries that same tension.

Flowers and fury in the same room.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, there’s my mother, back in the kitchen, improving a recipe so someone else’s dinner goes right.

That’s not small.

That’s history, continuing in a very modern, very unglamorous form.

Some women don’t retire. They just move the work to a place where it finally has a name.

 FAQ

did you know?

There are more bridges in Hamburg than in Venice, Amsterdam, and London combined!

---

---

Words to live by

Wir leben alle unter dem gleichen Himmel, aber wir haben nicht alle den gleichen Horizont.

We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.

 - Konrad Adenauer

---