Secular Humanist Freethinker Pansy Pin

Wear this symbol to honor the global legacy of independent thinkers who believed that human reason should be as free and hardy as a wild flower.

Pansies were first cultivated around 1812 from wildflowers called viola tricolor. The word comes from the French pensée — meaning thought. To wear a pansy was to signal that you were a thinker, that your conclusions were your own.

The pansy became the freethought emblem. By the 1880s, freethinkers across France, Belgium, Spain, and Sweden were wearing it openly. An American Secular Union pamphlet from around 1890 called on every freethinker to wear it as “a silent and unobtrusive testimony of his principles.”

 At the 1920 International Freethinker Congress in Prague, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner noted that the streets were full of people wearing the Congress badge alongside the pansy — openly, proudly, in public.

The pansy represents the commitment to think, and to let others do the same.

1.25 inches round (30mm) silver frames pansy pin.

Features authentic article from The Freethinker: The Flower of Freethought.