In addition, gender-segregated organizations in schools privileged and maintained old boys’

networks, which reinforced unequal access to employment and academic opportunities. Finally,
barring the federal enforcement agency from withholding funds from schools that violated the
law would turn Title IX into an empty gesture.
Despite these efforts, the Casey Amendment passed on July 16, 1975 by one vote (212 to 211).
That day, Patsy’s daughter, Wendy, suffered serious injury in a car accident and was hospitalized
in intensive care. Patsy spoke against the amendment. But upon learning of Wendy’s accident,
Patsy rushed to the hospital in Ithaca, New York, leaving the House of Representatives without
casting her vote.14 One supporter commented, “How ironic it is that the demands of motherhood
should come at a time when your vote could have kept defeated the unconscionable Amendment
of Casey. How truly difficult to meet both private and public demands.”15
Feminist supporters refused to allow the vote to stand. The Washington Post described how
“several hundred” women roamed “the corridors” of Congress, “handing out literature, pursuing
House members onto elevators, meeting in hallways and cafeterias to map tactics.”16 Casey
himself described the mobilization as “the heaviest lobbying I’ve ever seen around here.” The
women “found enthusiastic backing among most women lawmakers and among congressional
staff aides, particularly women.” The lobbyists chanted “Give Women a Sporting Chance” to
demand a revote. This collaborative political pressure led to a revote in the House on Casey’s
amendment. This time, opponents defeated the amendment (215 to 178).17 The number of votes
against Casey increased a little, while a substantial number of Casey’s supporters declined to
vote. Still caring for Wendy in upstate New York, Patsy followed these developments while away
from Congress. In her place, feminist activists worked collaboratively to block or at least
politically embarrass some of the critics of Title IX. Some journalists describe Patsy Mink as “the
mother of Title IX,” now renamed after her. Mink’s “heroism” represented a collective endeavor.18
Feminist activists inside and outside of Congress disrupted the regular work and power dynamics
of Capitol Hill.
In writing about Mink, then, I had both the opportunity to foreground her collaborative model of
leadership and to actually practice feminist collaboration through research and authorship. When
I began research on Mink in 2012, the fortieth anniversary of Title IX, I was advised to reach out
to her daughter, political scientist Gwendolyn Mink. I began interviewing Wendy, who offered
such rich insights about her mother and their close-knit family. We ate many dinners together
over a period of ten years, usually after I finished my day of research at the Library of Congress.
Wendy lived down the street in her parents’ former home in Washington, D.C. However, when I
learned that Patsy wanted her daughter to write her biography, I began collaborating with Wendy
as co-authors. Our partnership gave space for Wendy to write personally about her mother,
something which gave her pause, given her training as a political scientist. As she has explained,
Wendy was uncertain even how to refer to Patsy: as Mink (according to academic convention and
the expectations of “objectivity” in intellectual inquiry) or as Mom (given their relationship). Our
decision to write with two voices (mine as a historian and Wendy in memoir form, although
informed by her analysis of politics) confused some publishers. One press offered to accept the
project, if Wendy was not a co-author. The editor did not want the appearance of an “authorized”
biography. But, we believed that the intermingling of the personal and the academic was
particularly fitting for a historical figure who valued collaboration.
History, like many humanities-oriented disciplines, tends to value solo-authorship. The discipline,
like other social sciences, also tends to claim the ground of objectivity. But, intersectional
feminism foregrounds the need to be cognizant of positionality, how our positions and identities
shape knowledge and the power of storytelling. In co-narrating a story of the power of feminist
partnership, it was particularly fitting to do this together, with respect for our individual
perspectives but also in chorus to one another.
Conclusion
As I approach my mid-fifties and consider my remaining years in the academic profession, I am
grateful for the opportunity to work on projects that are so deeply meaningful for me. When I hit
those roadblocks that inevitably inflict writers, I reflect on the remarkable individuals whose lives
I have the honor to research, analyze, and share with wider audiences. People like Chung, Bunch,
Mink, and others have challenged me to think about history in ways that I had not anticipated
thirty some years ago. I hope that my efforts to foreground the personal and the historical, the
intersectional and the incommensurate, the individual and the collective do justice to their life
journeys.
Notes
My deep gratitude to Estelle Freedman, who modeled ethical and caring mentorship and who
inspired so many of us to craft intersectional feminist scholarship.
1.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime
Celebrity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2005); Ibid, Radicals on the Road:
Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Viet Nam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2013); and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto
Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (New York: New York University Press, 2022).
2.
Frank Costigliola, “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration”: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in
George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (March
1997): 1309–39.
3.
Ann Laura Stoler et al., Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (December 2001): 829–92.
4.
“Manuscript of Autobiography,” 403, folder 1, box 3, Bertha Van Hoosen Papers, Bentley
Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
5.
Bessie Jeong, interview by Suellen Cheng and Munson Kwok, 17 December 1981, and 17 October
1982, Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project, Special Collections, University
of California, Los Angeles.
6.
I am grateful