So the stigmatization of pink began with the Nazi's? This post just Godwin'ed itself!

Very interesting, though. I find it so hilarious when people try to posit "natural" reasoning for our arbitrary gender color schemes, obviously without doing any historical research at all.

:: a meaning that the Nazis’ appropriation of the swastika makes nearly inconceivable today. ::

Nearly inconceivable to some. The swastika is still in wide use by the religious traditions that the Nazis originally appropriated the symbol from.

I have a pre-1920 'Happy New Year' card with a big old Swastika on it. Found it in a box of family mementos. Creepy...

I've gathered that pink triangles were for male homosexuals, and lesbians were labeled "asocial"(/"work-shy") - avoiding their natural responsibility, as women, to get married and give birth - with black triangles.

To be clearer, this should have said that such use of the swastika is inconceivable in the western world - it still seems to be going strong in parts of Asia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#Contemporary_use_in_Asia

With regard to the flowers, it's interesting how 'gardening' is a relatively common theme  on cards for men, but often the garden-themed cards do not show any flowers; usually they will show bushes, treees, sheds, gardening tools, mowers etc.

That swastika has been used for hundreds of years in Buddhism and Hinduism, as well. I went to china last year, and when visiting temples and monasteries saw many buddhas with swastika symbols on their chests or as ornamentation in the buildings. I've also seen them on the packaging of some Asian food brands. It was very strange for me as an American.

ETA: to be clear, I am not the same person as Emma.

Agree with some of the comments above that the swastika is still in prominent use in much of the East.

I took two friends to India a couple of years ago (where my family is from). One happens to be Jewish. We were in a small jewelry store in Kerala, and my friend taps me on the shoulder and asks, "Is it okay that I'm here? There are swastikas everywhere!"

I think she seriously thought we had stumbled into the Neo-Nazi jewelry store of southwest India.

Moral of the story - in some parts of the world, swastikas are all over the place.

Thousands, not hundreds, of years....

Like foxxx, I have also read that the pink triangle was reserved exclusively for men accused of homosexuality, and that lesbians were grouped along with alcoholic women and prostitutes as black-triangle "anti-socials" because of their "failure" to fulfill their expected duty of heterosexual reproduction. During the Weimar era a huge variety of sexual identities could be found among the men, women, and people in between who would later be lumped into the "homosexual" and "anti-social women" categories of the camps. The use of "gays and lesbians" here confuses people who self-identify as such in the present with everyone who was ascribed a criminal sexual status during the Nazi regime...which would also have included a lot of other kinds of queers than simply gays and lesbians.

"The swastika is an equilateral cross with arms bent at right angles, all in
the same direction, usually the right, or clockwise. The swastika is a symbol of
prosperity and good fortune and is widely dispersed in both the ancient and
modern world. It originally represented the revolving sun, fire, or life. The
word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit swastika which means, "conducive to
well- being". The swastika was widely utilized in ancient Mesopotamian coinage
as well as appearing in early Christian and Byzantium art, where it was known as
the gammadion cross. The swastika also also appeared in South and Central America, widely used in Mayan art during that
time period.

In North America, the swastika was a symbol used by the Navajos..."http://www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1997/swastika.html

Btw: I posted here before Disqus as Azizi.

This was damn fascinating.

I am a bit surprised that no one has mentioned the idea that C. S. Peirce's semiotics helps us to comprehend the ways in which ALL signs are arbitrary. I hope readers will look at back issues of the journal Semiotics. The 1988 issue contains a very succinct discussion by T. L. Short of his view on the triadic semiotics of Peirce. He later did a book on Peirce's Theory of Signs (Cambridge U. P. 2007) which is excellent, but which provoked spirited debate. I like most of the posts about the swastika (Sk. sva-stika) but it is also useful to bring the abstract, general idea of each and every word, gesture, symbol, and even  "argument" into a Peircean framework! www.semioticsigns.com

Found an example in a 1907 magazine ad: http://books.google.com/books?id=DdVwBjHKOpYC&pg=PA683

"the Nazi’s use of pink to label gay and lesbian prisoners
led pink to be stigmatized as effeminate and, thus, an inappropriate
color for men…and over time it instead became the epitome of symbols of
femininity."

Do you have any evidence of this? That seems like a rather outrageous claim to make casually.

I would like to point out that though the Nazis approriated the swastika, they are different. Hitler got the symbol wrong.