Having taught STEAM and Robotics for the past eight years and computers/technology for over 15-years before that, I made a point some time during class to ask students if they thought someone’s gender (or ethnicity) had anything to do with whether someone could be good at their work? Most classes being evenly mixed with boys and girls always said, No! The young ones especially were drawn to whatever interests they were drawn to and I never heard any of them put another student down, saying that they couldn’t or shouldn’t be doing whatever because they’re girls (or boys depending on the stereotypes).
There were instances when boys tried to dominate building or playing with the robots, but just as often, when the boys lost interest or got distracted I saw girls grab their teams’ robots and iPads and tried to figure out what had stumped the boys. Working with robots or computers or programming or any form of technology had nothing to do with the gender of the person wanting to do the activity. That said, I also knew that as they got older they would have a tendency of preferring activities that they saw same gendered (and same ethnically grouped) people doing. I grew up loving football, in part because my best friend loved football, even though I was a bit too small and too slow to really be any good at it. That’s what kids do, we follow in the footsteps of those around us .
That’s one thing that makes the story of Patsy Mink all the more extraordinary. She grew up in my father’s generation, third generation Japanese-American growing up in Hawaii, coming of age during World War II, one generation removed from working in the sugar cane fields. She graduated from university and when she couldn’t get accepted at any medical school, she switched to law and in 1948 was one of two female students at the University of Chicago School of Law. While at the university she met and married her husband. She got her Juris Doctor degree in 1951 but no one would hire her because she was female, married and Asian-American. After having her daughter, the family moved back to Hawaii, where she had to sue the state just to allow her to take the bar exam as a Hawaiian resident (her residency had been switched to her husband’s state even though she had never lived in Pennsylvania, where her husband was originally from). After passing the bar she couldn’t get a job with any public or private law firm because she was a married woman with a young child. So, with the help of her father, she open her own private firm handling mostly criminal and family law and became the first Asian-American woman to practice law in the Hawaiian territory.
Throughout her time in university she was involved in student government and continued into her professional life. From 1954 to 1964 she worked with various Democratic Party organizations and campaigns, and held territorial and state legislative offices. From 1966 to 1977 and from 1990 to 2002 she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives serving Hawaii. Throughout her career she supported legislation to improve child-welfare, education and gender-equity. In the 1960s she support President Johnson’s Great Society programs but was a vocal opponent to the continued involvement in the Vietnam War. She’s best known for co-authoring Title IX that sought to prohibit gender discrimination in federally funded higher education institutions.
Representative Mink faced a lot of obstacles in her life and she spent her life doing something about it, not just for herself and not just for her home state of Hawaii, but because she believed that equity for children and women was good for everyone. The video ends with the question: What barriers do we want to see our elected representatives tackle today? The American Dream is an ongoing process that we work towards and is never really done and each of us has a role in its progress. What things can you do to help further the goals that Representative Mink began?
Sources:
- Patsy Mink: Groundbreaking Congresswoman by Untold History (2023-02-14), https://youtu.be/7xzeKQveHfw, retrieved 2023-08-23
- Patsy Mink from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patsy_Mink, retrieved 2023-08-23
