About Teresa Mattei
Teresa "Teresita" Mattei (1 February 1921 – 12 March 2013) was an Italian partisan and politician. == Early and personal life == Born in Genoa, in 1938 Mattei was expelled from all schools of the Kingdom of Italy for openly criticizing the Racial laws during class. Graduating in philosophy at the University of Florence in 1944, she joined the partisans under the nom de guerre of Partigiana Chicchi. She took part in the murder of philosopher and Fascist minister Giovanni Gentile. She was briefly married to Bruno Sanguinetti, with whom she had a son, writer Gianfranco Sanguinetti. == Career == After the war, Mattei was a candidate for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to the Constituent Assembly, in which she served as a bureau secretary. Mattei was the youngest to be elected to the Constituent Assembly and was thus called "the girl of Montecitorio". In 1957, Mattei was expelled from the Communist Party because of her opposition to Stalinism and to Palmiro Togliatti's politics. She later became national director of the Italian Women's Union (UDI) and introduced the use of mimosa for International Women's Day (IWD) at the request of Luigi Longo. Mattei felt that the French symbols of IWD, violets and lilies-of-the-valley, were too scarce and expensive to be used in poor, rural Italian areas, so she proposed the mimosa as an alternative.
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