#2: Patsy Mink’s fight for women’s rights as human rights
This post is part of a series of narrative articles I wrote for Nearpod, an interactive classroom tool for students. My essays were incorporated into high school history and social studies classes.
In July 1960 in a packed auditorium in Los Angeles, Patsy Takemoto Mink got up in front of an audience of about 10,000 people, and delivered a speech from notes she had scribbled on the back of an envelope. “If to believe in freedom and equality is to be a radical,” she said, “Then I am a radical.”
Mink was on the drafting committee for the Democratic National Convention that year, and was giving a speech to second the Democratic Party’s civil rights plank. Some news accounts the next day made comments about “the lovely Oriental doll of a delegate” and her “diminutive and attractive” appearance, but they also recognized that her passion “drew repeated, prolonged, and swelling cheers.”
Patsy Mink spent her whole career fighting for what she believed were not radical causes at all, with the simple argument that they were exactly the opposite of radical — they were basic, fundamental needs for a society. Four years after this speech, she became the first woman of color ever elected to Congress — a move that historian Gavan Daws said “broke every rule in American politics: she was Japanese, she was a woman, and she was married to a white man.” She would become most famous for authoring Title IX, a watershed piece of gender discrimination legislation. Throughout her career, Mink became known for her exhaustive contribution to the field of civil rights, from discrimination in education and the workplace to banning nuclear testing and labor rights.
Patsy Mink was born in December 1927, in Maui, Hawaii, where her grandparents had emigrated from Japan to work on a sugar plantation. Her father, the only Japanese American on an all-white staff of engineers at an irrigation company, had repeatedly had to report to less qualified white men. He followed local elections closely, though he didn’t often talk about politics at home. He would take his children to election rallies and sit them down on mats made of grass cloth under the stars, and they would listen to Hawaiian music and speeches late into the night. Here, perhaps, according to Esther K. Arinaga and Rene E. Ojiri’s tribute to her is where Mink realized that “politics was an important thing, that being a citizen was important”
At the University of Nebraska, Mink began her long career of activism and resistance to discriminatory practices, launching a campaign against the school’s housing segregation policies, such as the practice of not allowing American students of color in student dorms and sorority and fraternity houses, placing them instead in international housing. That year, after a ferocious fight against the university, the board rescinded the segregation law.
After college, Mink was rejected from every medical school she applied to, largely because she was a woman, so she got a job instead, working as a typist at Hickam Air Force Base where there was so little to do that her supervisor once had to tell her, “Look busy — type your name over and over again if you have to.” Frustrated, she applied to law schools at the last minute. She was one of the only two women in her class at the University Chicago, where she met and married her husband, John Mink.
When they moved back to Hawaii, though her husband was able to get a job easily, Mink had difficulty getting hired at law firms. They insisted that the roles required long hours and that it was unwise for women to be out traveling late at night. They were immediately skeptical of the fact that she had a child. So Mink set up her own practice, accepting a fish as a payment for her first case, and teaching business classes at the university to supplement her income.
While she was in Congress, Patsy Mink authored, along with Edith Green, one of the most watershed pieces of legislation in the country: Title IX, which was signed into law by Richard Nixon as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. The bill prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender in all aspects of education: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” This legislation was a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin..
The original Title IX bill made no particular mention of athletics, but that is what the bill has come to be known for because it was in this field that the outcry was the loudest. Before Title IX, 98 percent of college athletic budgets went to men’s teams, and the idea of diverting this money caused huge controversies. “If we’re asked to reduce expenditures in football drastically,” said William Gerberding, the Chancellor of the University of Illinois, “We’ll fall out of the big ten competitive structure, and we won’t generate all those revenues.” According to him, less funding for men’s teams could be catastrophic: “The goose that laid the golden egg will be killed.” Men’s coaches and teams all over the country lobbied to exempt athletic teams from Title IX.
The day the vote on whether the legislation should apply to athletics was to take place, Mink got news that her daughter had been in a car accident. Immediately, she left, and when the time came to place a vote, Mink was absent. Her measure lost by one vote. Because of her family emergency, though, House Speaker Carl Albert scheduled a re-vote — and this time the regulation the keep sports as a part of Title IX passed.
“Women have a tremendous responsibility to help shape the future of America,” Mink said, “To help decide policies that will affect the course of our history.” Title IX has had lasting impact in several fields besides athletics, though; last year, for example, the number of women enrolled in medical school exceeded the number of men for the first time.
But Title IX is only one of many significant progressive laws in the United States that Mink has had a hand in. Since the beginning of her political career, when she was in the territorial legislature in Hawaii, she has been championing causes like environmental and human rights. Immediately after assuming office, she put forth a resolution protesting nuclear testing in the South Pacific by the British. A few years later, in territorial Senate, she co-authored a law that demanded equal pay for equal work.
She also took considerable interest in education, long before she drafted Title IX.The vice chairman of the Department of Education in Honolulu, Sakae Takahashi, remembered that Mink demanded an inventory in every single school of how much equipment they had, down to the number of pianos, looking with a tooth comb for inequalities between schools.
Mink was also one of the earliest critics of the Vietnam War, not only for its gross violation of human rights but also its resulting in massive cutbacks for civic services at home, education being one of them. Her criticism drew the ire of other politicians, who came up with the nickname “Patsy Pink.”
But perhaps her most lasting general legacy, especially in recent years, is her dedication to women’s rights in all forms. In 1970, she opposed the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Harrold Carswell, writing that she was doing so “on the grounds that his appointment constitutes an affront to the women of America” (Carswell had voted against rehearing a case against a corporation that had refused to hire a woman because she was a mother of preschool aged children.) Twenty-one years later, Mink and six other congresswomen demanded that the Senate investigate the sexual harassment claims against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas before they put their decision to a vote.
Despite her immeasurable contribution to women’s rights, Mink felt ambivalent towards the idea of women’s rights, or women’s liberation, as a separate category at all. “Just because I’m interested in women doesn’t mean I’m for women’s liberation. I support all groups when what they do coincides with what I believe in,” she said in 1970. “The women’s agenda is not a special interest agenda. Women’s rights are about fundamental justice.” Here one can see the same person who resisted calling herself a radical until she had to, until basic human rights became “radical,” fringe-demands.
Mink remained a dedicated public official until her death in 2002. In 2014, President Barack Obama said, “Every parent, including Michelle and myself, who watches their daughter on a field or in a classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink. Patsy was a passionate advocate for opportunity and equality and realizing the full promise of the American Dream.” In 2014, posthumously, Patsy was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
