Patsy Minks – “It is more often more important to be ahead of the majority…”

When I look at the statistics on gender equality in this country I don’t know whether to feel rage or despair. According to the UK government’s Gender Equality Roadmap, published in 2019, women are more likely to enter the workforce with higher qualifications than men, but earn less per hour. Even worse, the pay gap increases sharply at the point couples have children. By the time their first child is aged 12, mothers’ average hourly wages are a third below fathers. With more than three quarters of mothers having primary caring responsibility, they are three times as likely to be working part time. Since jobs available part-time tend to be less well paid with fewer opportunities for progression, their ability to save is hindered. Women aged 55 to 64 are almost 20% less likely to have a private pension, and those who do have almost 40% less wealth held in them.

I passionately believe that the availability of free, or at least more affordable, childcare, is utterly crucial in closing the gender pay gap. Parents across the UK face some of the highest childcare costs in the western world, with some spending more than a third of their income on it. The average monthly cost of childcare in the UK is more than the cost of the average mortgage. These high costs can completely price women on low to medium earnings out of work. It is a dilemma I know many of us can relate to. When I went on maternity leave I was pretty certain I didn’t want to return full-time to my previous role as Head of History in a local secondary school since it would leave me little quality time to spend with my son. Ironically, I had gone into teaching believing that it would be an ideal career to pursue whilst raising a family. But working late every evening, at weekends, and during the school holidays soon disabused me of that notion. I never felt there were enough hours in the day to fulfil my leadership responsibilities as it was, so I couldn’t imagine doing the job part-time. Returning to work would therefore mean having to take a demotion and pay cut. Which raised the question of whether I really wanted to be separated from my gorgeous little boy when I wouldn’t be much better off financially.

It is hard enough on an emotional level to balance the desire to be successful in one’s career with spending enough time with one’s family. It will always be a juggling act, but women should be able to choose whether to stay at home or go back to work without it being dictated by prohibitive childcare costs. The woman I have chosen as the subject of my fifth blog post, Patsy Mink, shared my views on the importance of affordable childcare. She was responsible for introducing various landmark laws passed by the United States Congress in the 1960s which outlined federal programs and funding for childhood education from pre-school through kindergarten. Patsy focused much of her work in Congress on education issues, and was also a passionate advocate of gender and racial equality. As the first Asian American woman ever elected to the House of Representatives, Patsy was an inspiration to the next generation. In the words of Senator Cortez Masto:

“Representation matters. Our government works better when it looks and thinks like the people it represents. Patsy Mink was a trailblazer as the first woman of colour ever elected to the House of Representatives over fifty years ago…She paved the way for people like me to serve in office, and I’ll continue to honour her work by making sure Washington reflects our nation’s beautiful diversity,”

But let’s go back to the beginning. Patsy Matsu Takemoto was born on 6 December 1927 in Paia, Hawaii. She was a third-generation Japanese American, born and raised on the island of Maui. She started Maui High School one year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Despite the local Japanese being treated as if they were enemies, Patsy won her first election, becoming the first female student body president in her senior year. After graduating as valedictorian in 1944, she attended the University of Hawaii at Mānoa for two years, before enrolling at the University of Nebraska. The university had a long-standing racial segregation policy whereby non-white students lived in segregated dormitories from the white students. Patsy successfully lobbied to end this policy, but illness forced her to return to Hawaii to complete her studies there. She graduated in 1948 with majors in zoology and chemistry, but her hopes of becoming a doctor were dashed when she was rejected by all 12 medical schools she applied to. Being a woman counted against her, especially as the schools were receiving large numbers of applications from returning veterans.

Following a suggestion by her employer, Patsy decided to apply to study law instead, and was accepted at the University of Chicago Law School. While at university, she met and married a graduate student, John Francis Mink. Patsy graduated from Law School in 1951 but kept her job at the University of Chicago Law School library. The next year, she and John moved to Hawaii after having their daughter Gwendolyn. While in Hawaii, Patsy registered for the bar exam to be able to practice law in the territory. When she was refused due to the loss of her Hawaiian territorial residency upon marriage, Patsy challenged the sexist statute. Though she won the right to take the test and passed the examination, she could not find public or private employment because she was married and had a child. Patsy's father helped her open her own practice in 1953 and she became the first Japanese-American woman to practice law in her home state of Hawaii.

Around the same as opening her own firm, Patsy became a member of the Democratic Party and founded the Oahu Young Democrats in 1954. Hoping to change discriminatory customs through law, she worked as an attorney for the Hawaiian territorial legislature in 1955. The following year, she ran for a seat in the territorial House of Representatives. Winning the race, she became the first Japanese-American woman to serve in the territorial House and two years later, the first woman to serve in the territorial Senate. During this time, Patsy established her reputation for liberalism and independent decision-making. On her first day in office as a congresswoman in 1955, she submitted a successful resolution protesting British nuclear testing in the Pacific. She authored a bill in 1957 to grant "equal pay for equal work", regardless of gender, and supported legislation to increase per capita spending on education.

When Hawaii became a state in 1959, Patsy immediately began campaigning to be elected as a congresswoman, but her first attempt was unsuccessful. In 1960, Patsy became vice-president of the National Young Democratic Clubs of America and worked on the Democratic National Convention's Platform Committee drafting team. That year at the national convention in Los Angeles, she gained recognition when she spoke on the party's position in regard to civil rights. She urged that equal opportunity and equal protection be afforded to all Americans. Patsy returned to politics in 1962 when she won a seat in the Hawaii State Senate and continued to campaign for a seat in the U.S. Congress even after the Democratic party decided to support another candidate. In 1964, a second position was created in the U.S. House of Representatives. With the help of her husband and several unpaid volunteers, Patsy won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, making her the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress. Serving six consecutive terms, she was in office from 1965 to 1977.

Patsy concentrated on the same issues that had been the focus of her attention in the Hawaii legislature. Having secured a post on the Committee on Education and Labour, Patsy introduced the first comprehensive initiatives under the Early Childhood Education Act, which included the first federal child-care bill and bills establishing bilingual education, Head Start, school lunch programs, special education, student loans, and teacher sabbaticals. She also worked on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and bills promoting adult education, Asian studies, career guidance programs, and vocational education. Starting in 1967, she also put significant effort into passing a bill to institute a national daycare system to support low-income households. But it failed to become law, in part, because opponents objected that it offered too many incentives for mothers to work outside the home and that it promoted a “communal” approach to rearing children. God Forbid! Although the Economic Opportunity Act passed both houses of Congress, President Nixon vetoed it in December 1971. Patsy later called the bill’s failure “one of the real disappointments” of her political career.

Patsy advocated many women’s issues in Congress, including equal rights. In 1970, Patsy was the first witness to testify against President Nixon's Supreme Court nominee George Harrold Carswell. In her testimony, she cited his refusal to hear the case brought to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding Ida Phillips' employment discrimination case. Phillips had been denied a position because she was a woman with children and Mink's objection highlighted, for the first time in an evaluation of a court nominee, the inequalities faced by working women. Carswell would eventually be rejected by the Senate and Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, would later be confirmed instead. One of the things for which Patsy is best known, is co-authoring and advocating for the passage of the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act (1972), prohibiting gender discrimination by federally funded institutions of higher education. The Title IX law was later renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act following her death.

Another of Patsy’s great legislative triumphs was the Women’s Educational Equity Act, passed as part of a comprehensive education bill in 1974. It provided $30 million a year in educational funds for programs to promote gender equity in schools, to increase educational and job opportunities for women, and to remove gender stereotypes from textbooks and school curricula. The previous year she had authored and introduced the Equal Rights for Women Act, but unfortunately it never made it out of committee. Patsy said that she had realised early in her House career that “because there were only eight women at the time who were Members of Congress, that I had a special burden to bear to speak for [all women], because they didn’t have people who could express their concerns for them adequately. So, I always felt that we were serving a dual role in Congress, representing our own districts and, at the same time, having to voice the concerns of the total population of women in the country”.

Patsy also took representing her constituents’ interests very seriously. While she worked in Washington, D.C., she travelled back to Hawaii every other week to make sure she was connected to the issues and concerns of the Hawaiian people. An issue, however, on which she disagreed with many of her constituents, particularly in a state with a heavy military presence, was the Vietnam War. During the Johnson presidency, Mink strongly supported the administration’s domestic programs that were part of the Great Society legislation, but she was critical of America’s increasing involvement in the Vietnam War. In September 1967, she refused to support the President’s request for an income tax increase because she feared that the money would be used for military action rather than the expansion of social programs. She suggested that if inflation threatened the economy, the administration should raise taxes on big business and not just ordinary taxpayers. In April 1972, she cosponsored Massachusetts Representative Michael Joseph Harrington’s resolution calling for an immediate termination of military activity in Vietnam, but the House took no action on it. The following month Patsy received only 2 percent of the vote in the Oregon presidential primary, where she ran as an anti-war candidate. On the plus side, she had made history by becoming the first Asian-American woman to run for president. Years later Mink recalled, “It was such a horrible thought to have this war that it really made no difference to me that I had a military constituency. It was a case of living up to my own views and my own conscience. If I was defeated for it, that’s the way it had to be. There was no way in which I could compromise my views on how I felt about it”.

In 1976, Patsy gave up her seat in Congress to run for a vacancy in the United States Senate created by the retirement of Senator Hiram Fong. After she lost the primary election to Hawaii's other U.S. Representative, Spark Matsunaga, President Jimmy Carter appointed Patsy as Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. She worked on environmental issues such as deep-sea mining, toxic waste, and whale protection, holding the post from March 1977 to May 1978. Patsy resigned from the Carter Administration in 1980, accepting a position as president of the Americans for Democratic Action in Washington, D. C. She was the first woman to head the national organisation and served three consecutive one-year terms. After returning to Honolulu, she was elected to the City Council in 1983, serving as Chair until 1985 and remaining on the council until 1987. In 1986 she ran for governor of Hawaii and in 1988 for mayor of Honolulu, but was not successful in either bid for office.

Despite these setbacks, Patsy kept her sights set on returning to public office, and in 1990 she was re-elected to Congress. In her second tenure as a House member, Patsy worked to restore protections in the social welfare programs she had worked for in her first six terms, which had been scaled back by subsequent administrations. Concerned that gender discrimination still persisted in the United States 20 years after the passage of Title IX, Patsy co-sponsored the Gender Equity Act of 1993 and chaired the Democratic Women’s Caucus in 1995. Believing that voters cared more about quality health coverage than any other domestic issue, she also advocated a universal health care plan that would allow people of all economic backgrounds to receive medical treatment. In 1996, Patsy opposed the welfare-reform legislation proposed by the Republican-majority House and supported by the Clinton administration. She authored the Family Stability and Work Act as an alternative welfare reform measure and repeatedly, though mostly unsuccessfully, lobbied for increased federal safety nets for children and families living in impoverished conditions.

Patsy was an advocate of racial as well as women’s equality, championing the rights of minorities and other groups who faced discrimination. In May 1994, she joined Representative Norman Mineta of California and other colleagues in forming the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, declaring “we have felt that we have not been consulted on important steps taken by this administration and ones in the past.” The caucus welcomed Representatives and Senators as full members, regardless of ethnicity, as long as they represented a district with a large APA constituency. Patsy served as chairwoman of the caucus from 1995 through 1997. In 2001, Patsy co-sponsored the DREAM Act, which granted temporary residency to unauthorised immigrants who entered the United States as minors and gave them the opportunity to gain permanent residency if they satisfied further qualifications. That same year, Patsy staunchly opposed the creation of the United States Department of Homeland Security, fearing that it might violate civil liberties and result in another occurrence of policies like the internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

Patsy died of viral pneumonia on September 28, 2002, at the age of 74. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered all flags at military institutions lowered to half-staff in her honour. A state funeral was held on October 4 in the Hawaii State Capitol Rotunda. Women's groups honoured Patsy by forming a human lei of 900 women, who surrounded the tent where her casket stood in the capital atrium, and sang Hawaiian songs. She was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Due to the upcoming election, Patsy’s name was still on the ballot in November even though she passed away a month before. She won the election by a landslide but was replaced by Ed Case.

Patsy is remembered today as a woman who dealt with the gender and racial discrimination she experienced by dedicating her career to creating policies which opened doors for women and minorities. In 2002 Congress renamed the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act, which Patsy had co-authored, as the ‘Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act’. In 2003 a scholarship program, the Patsy Takemoto Mink Education Foundation, was established to provide educational funding for low-income women and children. That same year, she was also inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, the Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame of the Institute for International Sport. In 2007, Central Oahu Regional Park on Oahu was renamed "Patsy T. Mink Central Oahu Regional Park" and Patsy was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama on November 24, 2014.

Bibliography

Alexander, Kerri Lee. “Patsy Mink.” National Women’s History Museum. 2019. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/patsy-mink. [Accessed 28 January 2021]

Chalfant, Morgan. “Patsy Mink.” The Hill. 2020. https://thehill.com/100-women-who-have-helped-shape-america/518347-patsy-mink [Accessed 28 January 2021]

Denham, Katherine. “Changing the childcare system is the answer to closing the gender pension gap.” City AM. 2019. https://www.cityam.com/we-should-look-to-the-childcare-system-to-close-the-gender-pension-gap/ [Accessed 28 January 2021]

Dougan, Val. “Five reasons why free childcare for under-fives can tackle pay inequality and end the 'motherhood penalty'.” The Insider. 2017. https://www.insider.co.uk/special-reports/five-reasons-free-childcare-under-11442466 [Accessed 28 January 2021]

Hirono, Mazi K. “Senator Hirono Introduces Resolution to Honor Patsy T. Mink”. Mazi K. Hirono – A voice for Hawaii in the US Senate. 2019. https://www.hirono.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senator-hirono-introduces-resolution-to-honor-patsy-t-mink [Accessed 28 January 2021]

History, Art and Archives. “MINK, Patsy Takemoto.” United States House of Representatives. 2021. https://history.house.gov/People/detail/18329 [Accessed 28 January 2021]

HM Government. “Gender equality at every stage: a roadmap for change.” 2019. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/821889/GEO_GEEE_Strategy_Gender_Equality_Roadmap_Rev_1__1_.pdf [Accessed 28 January 2021]