She was born in what was then the territory of Hawaii, on December 6, 1927—a third-generation Japanese American who grew up in plantation society.
She demanded to go to school when her brother matriculated, passionately pursuing an education even when she encountered racial and class hierarchies in her classrooms.
She arrived at college, in the mainland United States, and learned that only white students were allowed into the main residence halls. (She was assigned to a dormitory for international students.) She formed an organization for students of color and fought successfully to desegregate on-campus housing. “When I arrived here, I hoped I could find some link with what I was told America was like,” she wrote to the campus paper. “I cannot understand how people, believing they belong to the greatest nation on this Earth, can tolerate such lowly practices.”
She had dreamed since childhood of becoming a doctor, but despite her outstanding record of achievement, she was rejected from a dozen medical schools because she was a woman. She ended up becoming one of only two Asian students and two women admitted to the University of Chicago Law School.
She had to fight to take the bar. After she passed, she was rejected at every firm to which she applied because she was a wife and mother, so she opened her own practice.
She launched her first political campaign in 1956—as a candidate for the Territorial House of Representatives— and ran as a woman and a housewife. “I believe that the rights of the individual are the highest and truest responsibility of government,” she announced, “and that government exists for the people; to provide for the well-being of all; to raise their level of life above mere existence; to assure and achieve the fullest possible employment; and to increase the opportunities for a better life for ourselves and our children.”
She was pushed out of the race by her own party in favor of a male candidate. But she ran again—and won. Eventually, in 1964, she became the first woman of Asian ancestry and the first non-white woman to ever be elected to the US House of Representatives.
She often focused her efforts on education equity, believing it was “the best route to equality and social justice.”
In 1972, she became the chief sponsor of Title IX.
“What you endure is who you are,” Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink once declared. “I can’t change the past. But I can certainly help somebody else in the future, so they don’t have to go through what I did.”
Before Title IX, girls were forced to study home economics in middle and high schools. Arbitrary quotas or outright bans on female applicants allowed institutions of high er education to reject women without cause. Girl athletes “retired” after high school because there were no scholarships or sports teams open to them on campuses across the country. Text books propagated sexist gender norms, and schools discouraged girls from pursuing certain subjects.
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbid discrimination on the basis of sex in private employment and public accommodations, Title VI of the law omitted sex discrimination protections for federally funded institutions. In 1965, when President Johnson extended via executive order civil rights protections to federal employees and contractors, he omitted protections on the basis of sex, infuriating women’s rights advocates. He added sex as a protected category to his order two years later, in 1967.
In 1969, after being denied a promotion at the University of Maryland (UMD) for “coming on too strong for a woman,” Bernice Sandler filed over 250 complaints against colleges and universities, including UMD, for sex discrimination. She then helped Rep. Edith Green (D- OR) organize the first congressional hearings on sex discrimination in employment and education in history. During these hearings, they suggested a measure like Title IX.
When the Higher Education Act came up for an extension in 1972, Mink, with Green’s assistance, authored a critical addition, modeled after Title VI: “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.”
Patsy Mink offering the first feminist critique of a supreme court nominee in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, winter 1970. Photo courtesy of Gwendolyn Mink.
“What you endure is who you are. I can’t change the past. But I can certainly help somebody else in the future, so they don’t have to go through what I did.”
On June 23, 1972, those 37 words became law. Fifty years later, they still echo loudly in the fight for equality.
The legacy of Title IX can be told in numbers. When it was passed, women made up just nine percent of medical school students and seven percent of law school students, and only eight percent of women were college graduates. By contrast, today, women earn 60 percent of undergraduate and master’s degrees, and medical and law schools have nearly equal enrollment by gender. Over 3,000,000 women and girls now participate in high school and college athletic programs, as compared to the 300,000 who did in 1972.
But just as important as the legacy told in numbers is the legacy of feminist lawmaking Mink established with legislation like Title IX, lawmaking shaped by collaboration between activists and public officials and born of the personal experiences of a woman who experienced multiple marginalizations. “On the one hand, she was all alone very often as the woman in the room,” Mink’s daughter Gwendolyn told NWHM. “But she was all about collective action, and both tried to inspire it and also drew great strength from it in identifying the policy goals that she needed to work on.”
“She was there at the very heart of a lot of these conversations and debates. She brings a perspective as a woman of color. She brings a perspective of someone who’s from the Pacific and is aware of the US imperial history of that region of the world. She’s bringing all those perspectives with her when she’s going to Washington, D.C., and as she’s creating law,” notes professor and NWHM’s Scholars Advisory Council member Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, co-author with Gwendolyn of the new book Patsy Mink: Fierce and Fearless. “She was someone who really brought some of those outside ideas, those really radical ideas, with her to Congress. She was trying to formulate policy and find ways to implement those policies to transform the master’s house.”
“As a woman of color, [Mink] recognized the connections between the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. You can see that in the connection between Title IX and Title VI, and in the organizing that was done around Title IX,” National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) Vice President for Education & Workplace Justice Emily Martin explained. “It was really one of the first times that the women’s movement was organized in partnership, in collaboration, with leaders in Congress, and was a really inspiring example of how the inside game and the outside game can work together.”
“She’s a great example of agency—that you don’t have to just take it,” added Kimberlee Bassford, the director and writer of the 2008 documentary, Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority. “She used the legislative process to help change laws or to put laws into place that would open up opportunities for others.”
Mink embraced feminist activism in that process, giving advocates a seat at the table and bringing the language of the women’s and civil rights movement into halls of power.
Tzu-Chun Wu identifies Mink’s work as a form of “bridge feminism”—a phrase coined by Professor Anastasia Curwood to describe Shirley Chisholm’s connecting of feminist and civil rights movements to legislative politics. “Mink amplified the voices of those not traditionally welcome in policy venues,” Tzu-Chun Wu explained in an essay for TIME. “This approach created the ideal environment for the pursuit of Title IX.”
“The vision of organizing, the vision of feminist lawmaking that Title IX created…it’s the blueprint that, in many ways we’ve all been building from in the last 50 years,” Martin added, noting that NWLC took shape in 1972, when Title IX became law. “How do we connect organizing and narrative change and a movement with law and policy change, and where are the opportunities to do that? How do you create this space for those demands, and how do you help channel demands for change into law and policy? All of that Title IX created a model for.”
Activism has continued to nourish and expand the fight for education equity—despite, and in response to, consistent attacks on Title IX.
