Patsy Mink

Twenty schools said no. Patsy Takemoto was 21 years old. Her grades were excellent. She had majored in zoology and chemistry at the University of Hawaii, and she had wanted to be a doctor since she was 4. The reason for every rejection was always the same. She was a woman.

"It was the most devastating disappointment of my life," she said later.

But here's what nobody knew yet. Patsy had been training for this moment her whole life.

She turned 14 the day before Pearl Harbor. On Maui, where her family had lived for three generations, Japanese-Americans were taken in the night. Her father was one of them. He came home the next morning. The Takemotos lived in fear after that, and Patsy watched her father burn his Japanese mementos.

"It made me realize that one could not take citizenship and the promise of the U.S. Constitution for granted," she said.

In 1944, she graduated Maui High School. Class valedictorian. Class president. Captain of a basketball team that was forced to play half-court because someone had decided full-court was "too strenuous" for girls. She was already learning the rules. She was already deciding which ones to break.

After the 20 rejections, she pivoted to law. The University of Chicago accepted her by accident, because they thought Hawaii made her a foreign student. She did not correct them.

She graduated in 1951 and married a WWII veteran named John Mink. They returned to Hawaii. The territory told her she had lost her residency by getting married, so she could not take the bar exam. She challenged the law. She won. She took the test. She passed.

Then NO firm in Hawaii would hire her. Too Japanese. Too married. Too motherly.

So her father helped her set up a practice in 1953. She became the FIRST Japanese-American woman to practice law in the state of Hawaii. In 1964, she was elected to Congress, the FIRST woman of color in U.S. history to win a seat in the House.

Then in 1970, she sat in a House hearing room and listened to woman after woman testify. About medical school quotas of one woman per year, two if they were lucky. About being told they could not be doctors because they had children. About being told the slot was for a man.

She had heard every one of these stories.

She had LIVED them.

She sat down and helped write 37 words. "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."

Title IX. Signed June 23, 1972.

Before those 37 words, fewer than 30,000 American women played college sports, and fewer than 10 percent of medical students were women. Today, more than 3.4 million high school girls play sports. More than half of American medical students are women. Most of them have never heard her name.

"Her hope was that the next generation would not endure the same obstacles that she had to encounter," her daughter Wendy said.

She died of viral pneumonia on September 28, 2002. She was 74. She was on the ballot for re-election, and she won by a landslide a month after she was buried.

At her funeral in the Hawaii State Capitol, a conch shell sounded and a traditional Hawaiian chant began. About 900 women formed a human lei around her casket and sang her home. "I've never seen so many tears flow from hard-headed politicians," Hawaii historian Dan Boylan said.

That same year, Congress renamed Title IX the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. In 2014, Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Posthumously. In 2022, her portrait was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol. She had been gone 20 years.

Twenty schools said no to a girl from Maui in 1948. By 1972, she had made it illegal for any school in America to ever say it again.

Some people break barriers. She made the barriers illegal.

Aloha Hawaii