 Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Judy. It's the dream blue I'm a professor of history and Asian-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and I'm looking forward to talking to you today about a book that I co-authored with Gwendolyn mink Gwendolyn Hi, I'm Gwendolyn mink. I am the daughter of the subject of this book that we're talking about today Patsy Takimoto mink and I am honored to be the co-author with Judy Wu of this biography That you will be hearing about. I'm a political scientist by training And that's what sort of brought me into the subject area in addition to the fact that my mother's story seemed like one that needed to be told Thank you so much. I'm going to go ahead and start a PowerPoint presentation and I'm going to be speaking for about 30 40 minutes something like that And then we're available both of us are available for Q&A Let me go ahead and get started Here we are the the title book is fierce and fearless Patsy Takimoto mink first woman of color in Congress and When title when she passed away in 2002 title nine was renamed after Patsy mink and given that this is the 50th anniversary of title nine We wanted to remember Patsy and everything that she did Not just the title nine, but the breadth of her political career I Like just to begin by introducing who she is because unfortunately not as many people know about Patsy mink as I think we So we think shouldn't know about her She was the first Japanese American female lawyer in Hawaii and just given the racial demographics in the United States She was likely the first in the States Was not necessarily her first choice of occupation She had from a very young age wanted to become a doctor but when she was applying for medical school in the aftermath of World War two the returning GIs are receiving support from the federal government to Reignite their educational plans support for them to purchase homes and Women were really squeezed out these opportunities. It's not that women had huge numbers of opportunities in medicine on average Maybe they constitute about five percent of the student body in medical schools in that in the middle decades of the 20th century But it was especially rough doing this applying for medical school After World War two and it was something that was really devastating to Patsy She had aspirations from a young child and to be told that she would not be able to pursue these dreams because she was a woman Was something that left a deep imprint on her. She decided to go to the University of Chicago Law School and Unfortunately Earning early 50s. It was very difficult for women for Asian Americans for Asian American women Especially those of her mothers of young children to get a career Opportunities commensurate with her teaching and so she ended up going back to Hawaii and starting a small practice there She was the first woman of color to be elected to the House of Representatives She served two long terms are several terms that were contiguous so 65 to 77 and then also to sorry 1990 2002 when she passed away and Many people think that show eachism was the first woman color in Congress and tourism was actually elected after Patsy make But I think that historical memory says something about the way we tend to think about race the United States and perhaps even about geography With Patsy coming from Hawaii as opposed to the continental United States She is a co-author author and defender of title nine and I think the defender part is very important because even After title nine was passed. That's when the obstacles started merging in great with great intensity Schools athletic lobbies start realizing the implications of title nine We're just to mandate gender equity for schools that receive federal funding And there were intense that tens of allotting efforts to try to narrow the scope of title nine to minimize its impact And that's when Patsy mean especially was such a keen defender of The legislation and it wasn't just in that immediate after period of the mid 70s But really the duration of title nine Duration of her political career Something that most people don't know about as well as she ran for the US presidency in 1972 This is actually the same year that Shirley Chisholm also ran and Chisholm and link were often on the same Legislative committees. They were also political allies And so there was an agreement between them to to support each other or do not compete with each other directly But for Patsy her motivation to run was very much was connected to her anti-war Her opposition to the Vietnam War. I think it's really important that we remember her and I think in remembering Patsy it raises broader questions about how do we think about Asian American women in the United States? And whether they're capable of leadership and a feminist leadership The predominant representation of Asian Americans are that their model minorities that they work hard They have strong families as they put their heads down They just move ahead and that representation There's different moments in history in which that model that representation emerges But one of the moments was in the mid-60s just as Patsy made this entering Congress And it was very much in response this racialized representation of Asian Americans as model minorities was very much in response to the Thoreau movement trying to contrast The African-American community in the ways in which they're advocating for a racial equality and racial justice Injects the position presumably to Asian Americans who are able to overcome obstacles Just their self-effort and not through government intervention or not through redistributive redistributive justice So Patsy may really challenges that idea as someone who is a political leader as someone who advocate for various issues including civil rights She also challenges the ways in which racialized sexualized representation of Asian American women Tend to be projected on to her along with other Asian American women This idea that Asian American women are Oriental dolls that they are prostitutes that they are there to please White men and that representation goes back in history 19th century and beyond But it really becomes intensified especially during the Cold War as the US military Expanded its military bases around the world, especially in different parts of Asia This kind of daily contact between US military personnel and Asian women in these various locales Oftentimes through commercial leisure sexual industry really fuels this representation So as someone from who's Asian American women and Asian American women someone who's coming from Hawaii There were all these expectations of her for being is exotic For being decorative and it's really interesting that that media coverage and the ways and people way people interact with her Really are inflected through that lens and that projection on to her She also challenges the ways in which we tend to narrate feminism the history of feminism So there's oftentimes three different waves that have identified both by scholars But also by the general public the first wave The culmination of the efforts to obtain suffrage The 19th amendment the second wave often associated with the 60s and 70s and the social movements of that time period And then the third wave in the 1990s in which Intersexual understandings of feminism the ways in which gender race class ability Sexuality and so on are intertwined But this typology really doesn't quite make sense of someone like Patsy mink who was a woman color and who really centered women of color working people in the ways in which she was designing legislations in 1960s There's also a tendency to think about second wave feminism in these different ideologies So someone like Patsy mink could be characterized as a liberal feminist in the sense that she's trying to work within the system So to create opportunities in terms of economic opportunities political opportunities other feminists are considered more radical because they're trying to Transform systems of inequality at the personal level and and how to connect how the personal is political So asking questions like who's doing housework who's taking care of children? How do these power hierarchies and are inflected in these very daily interactions? And there's other typologies You're socialist feminism with color feminism and again Someone like Patsy mink is someone who I think moves between these different political strategies as opposed to saying she only had one approach towards political activism And here I like to share the work of Shayla Sandeville in which she talks about women of color feminist methodology operating through a differential consciousness that refuses any similar approach Resisting multiple intersecting oppressions right this kind of political fluidity Political expanses this I think that really characterizes someone like Patsy mink So for the remainder of my talk, I'm going to share with you three different ways in which I think Challenges or expands the way we think about feminism The first idea is bridge feminism Even though she's in Congress in operating at a very formal level in terms of political leadership She was someone who was very much in conversation with grassroots activists. So instead of seeing this juxtapose Opposition between electoral politics versus social movement activism She was someone who was in conversation with movement activists and trying to think about how do you translate those ideas into legislation? So one example I do offer is the ways in which she opposed the Vietnam War There are various reasons why she did so but one argument that she makes is the ways in which the war racialized Asian people And this phrase I'm going to reveal next might be triggering for some people But in the aftermath of the me line massacre Which took a long time to become exposed to the American public. They were Sort of limited opportunities or limited there was a lot of opposition to prosecuting some of the US military personnel and That mentality Which described as a mere guk rule So it's just that life is less valuable for people in Asia that laws that protect other humans do not apply to so-called Gooks and this is really embedded in terms of the entire mentality of the war So one of the shocking statistics that I but I always tell people about the Vietnam War I said if you take all the bombs that were dropped during World War two Which is a global war and you triple that that's how much was dropped on Vietnam and Two-thirds of those bombs were actually dropped on the south, which is the US ally There's a famous quote by this military personnel who said we had to destroy it in order to save it We had to destroy this village from communism in order to save it from communism Also the ways in which the war was fought was not necessarily geographic geographical because it was a guerrilla war So the forces were occupying the same ground over and over again depending on what day what time of day So one of the key indicators for US success was about body counts How many people were killed so that whole mentality she's trying to point out is one that really racializes People in Asia there was also a tendency to confuse the fence from the enemies in many of the US mental mindsets And she points out this is not something that was just a Vietnam war phenomenon But it's something that happened previously during World War two in the ways in which Japanese Americans were presumed to be enemies of the state Enforcibly incarcerated en masse without individual proof This is in particular is a is a speech that she made to the Association for Asian-American Studies This is the first meeting of that association and she talks about this this kind of Dynamic of war making race making as intricately interconnected This is something that not only mean is arguing but also other Asian-American anti-war activists at that time that their Criticism of the war had a different angle compared to If there is such a thing as a mainstream anti-war activist movement in which the slogan company You know bring the boys hall like we want to protect American lives as opposed to thinking about how war Create some mentality that really justifies the killing of Asian people She also engages with feminist Diplomacy in an experiment. She may see this picture. She along with Bella Opsu Who comes from an organization women's strike for peace? They traveled to Paris to meet Madeline T. Bin and Madeline T. Bin is arguably the most recognizable Vietnamese woman during that time period She was often a host for anti-war activists around the world She was in Paris to try to negotiate for peace and she was the only female head of state who was there And so you see here this effort by three women coming together to see if they might come to some sort of Solution that their male contrapouts were not able to achieve They were not successful, but this is the type of Work that that's me was interested in engaging in It was quickly dangerous to do this She got a lot of flap from her voters and from the media But she was going to take that chance to see if there's an alternative to war making And as I mentioned before she became a US presidential campaign A candidate because of her anti-war stance anti-war activists in Oregon enlisted her Monitor to run for the US presidency so that she could use that platform to argue for peace So here's an example of how she in electoral office is being in conversation and collaborating with grassroots activists The second approach that I wanted to highlight is what I'm describing as intersectional legislative feminism Oftentimes we think about law as being universal that is applies to everybody And then the presumption often is that we're making law for the universal citizen But the universal citizen often defaults to whiteness and maleness But Patsy mink really was thinking about people who tended to be excluded and marginalized within the US society and How to how to design legislation to really advocate for for their interests? This is a quote by Kimberly Crenshaw whose Legal scholar critical race theorist feminist who coined the term intersectionality But she also talks about the fact that she's drawn from decades of work by other feminists, especially feminist of color And here she's saying you can't just use a single axis framework And you can't just think about race as if it doesn't isn't isn't shaped by other power dynamics and identities And you can't only think about gender as if all women are white But you need to think about when the color You need to think about poor women. Do you think about women who might be limiting their mobility? So really think about the intersection of these social hierarchies and identities And one example of this is Patsy mink's advocacy of the child care for federally funded child care and actually she is the term early childhood education because she really wanted a place Where young children can develop intellectually not just in place where they can be parked for a certain number of hours Here you see the need for this by 1967 four million working mothers with children under six years of age But the existing facility were less than 350,000 Right. So what were these women doing with their children when they needed to work and needed family care as well? This is something that she herself Faced is that here's a beautiful picture of my co-author when do you think with her father and mother? This is from a political brochure Both Patsy and John mink were professionals and they You know really kind of struggled to figure out what child care could be available for Wendy And they were really horrified by the very traditional gender Understandings that she was exposed to when she went to child care It's also comes from a longer tradition of women especially working women in the plantation system that they had to face an experience so John Japanese immigrant women were recruited by the plantation system for several reasons One is that they were seen as this dampening effect on Japanese men that maybe they were less likely to protest if they're Wides and their family were there But they also provided all this additional labor, so they worked in the fields for less pay and After they left the fields they cooked they cleaned sometimes they did this not only for their their families, but also for other Working men in those those plantations Not given childcare not given Matarie leave so understanding and recognizing this plantation hierarchy, which is very much racialized classed and gender segregated That that awareness really leads Patsy me to advocate for federally funded child care So that it's not just left up to the individual family to try to figure out what they're going to do But that there's a government or recognition that this is a national need I Really love this statement in which she talks about why it's so important to pass laws at the federal level It not only provides a specific program and specific amount of money and that was very important She would always let her constituents know when something passed when there's pots and money available So that they can they can apply for those those resources But symbolically it represents a national state and the purpose and support It provides inspiration for action the leadership at other levels of government thus having effect far beyond the simple provision of laws themselves So here's the second point that I was making that she's trying to think about Various people that constitute the United States in the ways in which their needs can be met with their resources and the legislative power The legislative might of the federal government And then the final point I want to share with you is the way in which her location in the Pacific Shaped the ways that she thought about politics Um Hawaii was a US territory. It had been a native Hawaiian kingdom and its location in the in the middle of the Pacific really Opened and framed the ways in which passing me thought about the islands and waters surrounding her and One example of this is her opposition to nuclear testing in the Pacific this Statistics about US testing the equivalent of one Hiroshima sized bomb every day from the 19 years refers to the Marshall Islands the ways in which the United Nations Designated that as a trust area for the United States, but it becomes a location for nuclear experimentation By the time that Pat seeming is in office The there's international agreement so that you can't test in open waters open air Open land instead what the US government proposed to do was to dig very deep wells in Places like in chair, which is off the over just part of the bearing straight There was a series of three tests the largest which was 1971 and you can see how How powerful the bomb was that they tested The opposition to this aroused Environmental activists and other activists as well, and that's this is one of the origin points for the organization Greenpeace Mink opposed it for multiple reasons So one is that it's not something that can just be isolated to Amchika Here's a Telegram from teachers in Hawaii Pointing out that this proposed test on Amchika is really like playing Russian lead because it's one of its located one of the Areas that's near the San Andreas fault and even though there are very studies done about you know, whether it could be safe and What's the level of acceptable kind of loss? They're pointing out that it could trigger a earthquake which in turn can trigger tsunami This diagram is from a science magazine and all the different red dots Indicate seismic activity is one of the highest concentrations of seismic activity in the world But that was when I thought that was part of the test and design You a scientist what I know you could tell the difference between a nuclear bomb going off versus an earth quick So this awareness that that people in Hawaii are really part of broader specific even though it seems like it's so far away It's something that Mink also was aware of She also talked about the fact that even though Proposal is to dig a very deep well and somehow contain that level of violence Inevitably there's going to be leakage and it's going to have an impact on the waters and oceans And again the Pacific touches many life forms It touches many different lands and that radioactivity is going to have a long-term impact and then finally of this impact had a particular Importance or significance for indigenous peoples So the places where nuclear testing tends to take place But also the places in which nuclear waste store tends to be on indigenous land around the world And here you have the Association American Indian Affairs pointing out that either seepage radioactive seepage into the ocean It's going to affect salmon and that is an important Food source and culture as part of their central cultural identity as indigenous people. I Just wanted to show you what Egypt it looks like and then ironically it's a nature preserve So there's another great quote by a passive ink saying well, are you allowed to kill wildlife on nature preserves? Can you use a BB gun? Can you use a slingshot? Can you use a five megatons big on bomb nuclear bomb? and in the studies I mentioned about the impact of this testing there were Statistics, you know, how many fish might die? How many seal might die was all-power calculus of whether to go forward with that testing And here I just want to show you a map of the Pacific That many of these islands including Hawaii came into US possession in the mid to late 19th century and These islands were so important as part of the US global Campaign to become a world power that each of these islands in many ways were pit stops They were naval stations. They were Economic stations that led from the continent United States across the Pacific to Asia And these islands again take on significance during World War two where I think many of the islands become known because those are sites of war and In the Cold War because they're kind of a line of defense against Socialist expansion in Asia So I just want to end With reminder of the three different concepts. I talked about bridge feminisms Intersectional legislative feminism and Pacific feminism and I'd like to just show a quick video about Patsy mink This is from a really wonderful documentary by Kimberly Bassford called the head of the majority This is the head of the phrase ahead of the majority comes from a Speech that Patsy mink makes when she's running for the Senate She didn't win actually none of the women candidates that year 1976 one In the senatorial runs so saying something about our bicentennial and the status of gender at that time But I I love this quote because she points out that it's easy to vote for something. That's already popular It's easy to vote with the majority But that you really need to take a stand be ahead of the majority and be willing to be the first person to do it Necessary because you're trying to advocate for something. That's that's just so let me just show you the video and Look for your true questions What you endure is who you are and If you just accept and do nothing then life goes on But if you see it as a way for change Life doesn't have to be this unfair It can't be better. Maybe not for me. 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 Patsy mink grew up among the cane fields of Maui and made her mark on Capitol Hill as the nation's first woman of color in Congress Women's rights are about fundamental justice She was one of a kind I'd never interacted with an Asian woman who was in the power circles Who was creating public policy and moving the women's agenda? She had no patience for injustice and she had no patience For intolerance our whole government operates under the notion of secrecy of not Informing the people of not honestly dealing with the issues She ran for president of the United States and wrote laws that overturned decades of discrimination Against women in higher education and sports You must have in any movement people who are insistent and demanding Somebody has to be your conscience to make you ashamed of yourself I've run many many times and I've lost many times, but I've never given up a Feeling that I as an individual and you as an individual can make the difference. I hope you find that inspiring It always gets to me so we'd love to hear your questions were available to to Yeah to respond I say there's there's a quote or there's a comment that people are hearing double audio I hope the sound was okay Maybe I'll begin with a question while we're waiting to see if anybody posts on YouTube When the one of the questions that we often get asked is how we started collaborating with each other so as one of you wanted to share more about how you approach this project and What the collaboration means for you? I Yes, I think by way of Introducing the book itself to the audience that's with us today Because there are some fairly distinctive aspects of what we've created In the process of telling the story and foregrounding the themes that you've just walked us through and in your presentation I I began working on Something like a biography of my mother Around 2007 2008 or so I had a kind of a mission and a duty and an interest in writing this Biography or making sure that it did get written, but I had a very hard time sort of gaining traction on What Writing a biography actually would entail as a political scientist I sort of stand aloof and look at policies and historical or Implementation perspective. I don't get into the interior Decision-making of individuals so much And as an author who was the daughter of the subject I encountered Interpsychic difficulties in in trying to figure out the best way to Sustain a coherent voice but to tell a Story that would be accepted as objectively scholarly Over the course of my hemming and hawing and belly aching over exactly how to proceed The goddess struck Judy and introduced her to some of my mother's materials and Judy embarked on a project to write the biography and we connected in Washington and our I think wonderful book is the consequence of that collaboration Thanks so much Wendy I remember just being surprised and no one had written about passing me in a very expensive way and that she was someone who deserves our attention and So I was surprised that no one had and I loved being able to connect with you because I remember going to the archives Doing research and then walking down the street and talking to you about what was happening in your lives at the time and Sharing many delicious meals together Um Could I ask so there's for those who don't know each chapter of the book begins with a beautiful vignette that Wendy writes and Then there's chapters in which I talk about the history of the time period And I'm just curious Wendy if you felt like it was if there were certain episode that you particularly enjoyed Writing about or that you felt was the most difficult Where they all sort of equally challenging and joyful Uh Some were a little painful to write The Choosing what to write about sort of was an interactive process, right? it kind of depended on what the narrative chapter was going to be about and What the narrative project was going to include necessarily and What it wasn't necessarily going to include which was the stuff that that would open up My own personal sort of storytelling I think writing about the stuff that's much longer ago writing about My mother's anti nuclear testing work in the 1950s and writing about Sort of growing up in an oppositional family with respect to the vietnam war And the emergence of the second wave of feminism in the sixth season early 70s I think those were kind of fun chapters To write I sort of like I got things off my chest in in In conceiving of the the stories not necessarily in writing of them the the later years were more difficult to To conceive of as merely vignettes because they were much closer in time to projects that I was working on that she and I were collaborating on And it just made the the sense of loss all the more acute Since I knew that there was a point at which there would would be no more Vignettes that I could write that would illuminate any aspect of her life One of the things that really strikes me about your family. Is it how tight knit it was that Your father was so supportive of your mother and this is unusual for um, I think a man especially in the 1950s to Respect his wife and to support her in her political career Um, it was also a multiracial family. Um, you talked a lot about politics together And I think that that connection continued, you know, it just continued to grow So i'm just curious about what your thoughts about your family and and What it was like to kind of grow up in that in that context And how maybe your thoughts about your family as you became older and became a partner with your mother as opposed to being a daughter Well, you know, that's a kind of it's always you ask me that or other people ask me that and it's always hard to To figure out the right track to answer it because I didn't know any other family Right. I didn't grow up in any other family. So the family I grew up in seemed perfectly normal to me perfectly ordinary to me, although Um, as I aged I began to appreciate that other families worked a little bit Uh differently and and certainly when I was in elementary school and Uh, my peers observed, um, my father's participatory role in parenting and so forth, which was not that typical For fathers in that day and age Um, I and they would make comments about it, you know, I realized that Um, there was just something Very Sort of out of out of the mainstream in the way in which family life was was organized Uh, in the nuclear family in the in the extended family everything was very, um traditional and patriarchal and you know, sort of normatively aspiring bourgeois and so forth, um, but you know, it was a, um There were lots of even as a five-year-old there were lots of political discussions that I Uh witnessed and or participated in lots of political lessons that Were explained to me and so forth. So, you know, I suppose I was Uh, nobody was trying to cultivate me into a political thinker or a political activist or a political scholar but that was the effect of growing up in that sort of, uh, Uh, you know, sort of that cauldron of of political Uh agitation and and thinking That said, I shouldn't I don't want to pay pay or give short shrift to the fact that my mother and father talked a lot about science also Right that they weren't always necessarily embarked on political projects they were often embarked on environmental projects or health and safety projects and things like that that oftentimes, uh, you know Touched, uh, policy questions, but were actually of themselves. They were about preserving the the interior Forest and so forth of Oahu and Um, that kind of thing I just love stories about your parents and just how what a true partnership they had, um with each other Um, I don't know. Is there anything else that you would like to share? You know reflect upon either for the book or maybe Yeah Or your parents No, I just I just, um, hope that readers can enjoy, uh The different voices that we offer right in the in the core in the structure and in the course of the Biographical story that we tell Um, I think that when we initially set out we thought we would do three distinct voices yours mine and my mother's My mother's voice is not Um, distinct in that there's not a there aren't separate sections of her writings and speeches and so forth But her writings and speeches permeate all of the narrative chapters So her voice is very clearly there in addition to the fact that she's a subject. So I think it's a wonderful sort of Collaboration admixture whatever you want to call it of of feminist takes of feminist Ideas on You know sort of the important issues of our time in a context in which many of her struggles are also the struggles of the second half of the 20th century. So um, you get a purchase of sort of the the progressive feminist experience of 20th late 20th century uh politics Thank you so much Wendy and that reminds me we actually have a forthcoming collection of primary sources That's been inspired by our book and that's going to be coming out with women and social movements Hopefully soon it's coming out this fall I want to thank the national archives for inviting us and hosting us for this event and for everybody who joined Um, we hope you enjoy the book