Early years
Class council, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Class of 1948. Patsy Takemoto is on the far left. Future governor George Ariyoshi is in the back row, far right.
Early years
Patsy Takemoto, born in 1927 in Hāmākua Poko, Maui, enjoyed a relatively peaceful childhood. Her father’s job as a surveyor for the East Maui Irrigation Company afforded the family a comfortable lifestyle, and Patsy was encouraged to pursue her studies.
A growing recognition of power dynamics on the sugar plantation, as well as experiences in college on the U.S. continent, helped shape her political beliefs and inspire her activism. For example, the President of Wilson College in Chambersburg, PA, assuming that Patsy did not speak English, warned her that she may have trouble getting along with other students. When she transferred to the University of Nebraska, she was placed in the segregated International House, a dormitory for international students and non-white American students. She responded by organizing a letter-writing and publicity campaign that resulted in overturning the university’s discriminatory policy.
"[Experiences of discrimination] left me with a feeling that it wasn’t just me; it was the whole society, and that there was no point in just sitting at home and weeping about your own shortcomings or defeats--that there were bigger agendas in the world that needed to be fixed.”
Patsy Mink, interviewed by Tom Coffman in 1994
ASUH constitutional convention steering committee in the university newspaper, Ka Leo o Hawaii, March 28, 1948.
Increasing political involvement
Over ten years before statehood, in spring 1948, the Associated Students of the University of Hawaiʻi (ASUH) held a model constitutional convention to introduce students to the process of drafting a state constitution. Patsy Takemoto, who had transferred back to UH for her last year of college, served as chair of the ASUH planning committee, as the convention's secretary, and as an elected delegate from Maui. Samuel Wilder King, former territorial delegate to Congress and then-chair of the state constitution committee of the Hawaiʻi Statehood Commission, was an invited guest speaker at the convention. The final constitution was adopted on May 27, 1948.
A Honolulu Advertiser editorial dated April 12, 1948, praised the effort: “Students at the University of Hawaii who are undertaking to draft a model constitution for the future State of Hawaii are making the right approach to their future responsibilities of citizenship. They are getting a first-hand working knowledge of the problems of government with which in the near future they will be immediately concerned. Equally important, it is more than probable that these young constitution-makers will come up with sound new ideas for inclusion in the state constitution’s final draft.”
Ka Leo o Hawaii, March 28, 1948
ASUH model constitution, with signature of Patsy Takemoto, secretary and delegate from Maui.
Bigger agendas
Patsy had aspired to be a medical doctor since she was 4 years old. In the spring of 1948, she applied to more than a dozen medical schools, and was rejected from all of them due to her gender. In interviews, she describes this as one of the biggest disappointments of her life.
In summer 1948, she applied to law schools and was accepted by the University of Chicago under their foreign student quota. When she returned to Hawaiʻi after obtaining her law degree, however, Patsy (by then married to John Mink) again faced discrimination due to her gender: no law firm would hire her. So she set up private practice, served in the Hawaiʻi state legislature, and served as vice president of the National Young Democratic Clubs of America.
When Hawaiʻi became a state in 1959, Mink ran for Hawaiʻiʻs seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Well, it [serving as national Young Democrats vice president] gave me a focus of national politics. Where my experience in Hawaii had been totally local politics, local issues, local platforms, local problems that we were having--like the quest for statehood, a better educational system, a more equitable tax law and various other things. And, suddenly to be thrust into a focus which was entirely different and much broader, I think, was just so compelling that it was just natural that when we did get to be a state in 1959, at the end of my term of office with the YD's, I decided to run for Congress.”
Patsy Mink, interviewed by Fern S. Ingersoll, March 6, 1979