Patsy Takemoto Mink

First Woman of Color Elected to Congress

Patsy Mink (House.gov/Mink, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

If you were asked who the first woman of color elected to Congress was, you would likely guess any number of illustrious women, including Shirley Chisholm, Yvonne Braithwaite-Burke, Barbara Jordan, or Cardiss Collins, but you would be incorrect. Few people recognize that the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress was an Asian American woman named Patsy Takemoto Mink. First elected in 1964 from the state of Hawaii, she served a total of twenty-four years in the House of Representatives in split intervals, from 1965 to 1977 and 1990 to 2002. As we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month this May, it seems fitting that we recognize the obstacles Mink overcame to forge a path for Asian Americans and women in general.

Patsy Takemoto, a third-generation Japanese American, was born in 1927 on a sugar plantation in rural Maui. Her father, a civil engineer with a degree in engineering from the University of Hawaii, was passed over for promotion on the sugar plantation because of his race. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, a teenage Patsy absorbed with chagrin and sadness the anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States and the internment of about 1,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry from Hawaii. Epitomizing her own words, “Life doesn’t have to be this unfair—it can be better,” she developed a lifelong impatience with injustice and intolerance. Patsy won her first election as student body president in her senior year and graduated from Maui High School as the class valedictorian in 1944.

Intellectually, Patsy was a woman far ahead of her time; predictably, she encountered racism and misogyny at every turn. She studied at the University of Nebraska, where she was housed with the international students because students of color were not allowed in the regular student dorms. Aspiring to be a physician, she applied to twelve medical schools but was rejected by all because of her race and sex. She took a job as a typist but quit after two weeks when she was told to look busy even if that meant typing her name over and over again. In 1948, she applied to the University of Chicago Law School and was accepted as part of the “foreign” quota (Hawaii was annexed as a territory of the United States in 1898). On a happier note, she met a handsome young geology graduate student at the University of Chicago and married him within months. In addition to having a successful career as a hydrologist, John Mink repeatedly served as Patsy’s campaign manager and was her strongest supporter and confidant for the remainder of her life. Patsy and John had one child, Gwendolyn Mink, a feminist policy scholar and chair of the Patsy Takemoto Mink Education Foundation for Low-Income Women and Children.

Patsy quickly encountered prejudice in the legal community, finding that no law firm would employ her, including those in the legal community in Honolulu, where law firms were dominated by haoles (Caucasians and other non-native Hawaiians). Asians—let alone Asian women with children—simply were not hired. Frustrated, she decided to enter politics. Despite political and misogynistic challenges, she won election to the local legislature, where she championed education and equal pay for equal work. When Hawaii achieved statehood in 1959, she announced her intention to run for Congress but was figuratively stabbed in the back by the Democratic Party elders. Ever resilient, she ran and won a state senate seat.

Undaunted, she ran for Congress in 1964 and won, becoming the first woman of color in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1965. She supported Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society, but she opposed the war in Vietnam, feeling it was a civil war that should be decided by the Vietnamese people. In 1972, she traveled to Paris with Bella Abzug to meet with the North Vietnamese foreign minister, a woman, in an effort to find common ground for peace. For this, Mink was reviled and labeled an enemy sympathizer. However, the antiwar movement in Oregon embraced her and persuaded her to run (unsuccessfully) for president in the 1972 Oregon presidential primary.

Despite repudiation by the Democratic Party, Mink won a fifth term in Congress, where she worked tirelessly on issues relating to children, education, and women’s rights. With Representative Edith Green (D-OR), she wrote and sponsored Title IX, the landmark legislation that mandates equal opportunity for women in graduate admissions, financial aid, and sports. The requirement to provide equal opportunity for women in sports was especially contentious, and the bill barely passed in 1975. Today, women with successful careers in sports stand on the shoulders of Patsy Mink and Edith Green.

In 1975, Mink ran for the U.S. Senate against Spark Matsunaga (D-HI) and lost, with many voters deciding that the senior male was entitled to the position. Ever resilient, she moved back to Honolulu in 1982 and was elected to the Honolulu City Council, which she chaired until 1985. In 1990, she was again elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving until her death in 2002. During her second six terms in the House, she championed the rights of the poor, defending welfare as an essential safety net and, with Maxine Waters (D-CA), rejected the concept that the poor are “less deserving of our love and affection.” After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2001, she spoke out against militarism, and she voted against the Patriot Act.

In August 2002, Mink developed chickenpox pneumonia and died in Honolulu at the age of seventy-four. Upon her death, women lost a great voice of support, as Mink had tirelessly championed race and gender issues. Known for her stubborn adherence to her principles, she said, “We never must quit when it comes to these principles of equity and justice in America.” In her honor, Title IX was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.

Full disclosure: Patsy Mink was a friend of my father, and my uncle was press secretary for Senator Spark Matsunaga. Mink was a role model in my childhood. The status of women was greatly improved by her unbending principles and tireless persistence.

—Margan Zajdowicz, Co-chair, Healthcare Committee