Why I Voted for a Dead Woman

By TAD BARTIMUS

The election is over. The losers will forget us, and the winners won't need us until next time. Like the father of the bride, our single duty -- "Who giveth this vote to this politician? I do." -- is finished. Did we choose well?

I did, when I voted for the late Congresswoman Patsy Mink, and so did 60 percent of voters in Hawaii this election day.

In the middle of a win-in-a-walk re-election campaign, the 74-year-old Democratic lawmaker died of pneumonia on Sept. 28. Her name remained on the ballot for Hawaii's 2nd Congressional District because the deadline for changes had passed.

The first woman of color elected to the United States Congress, Patsy Takemoto Mink served in the House of Representatives from 1965 until 1977, and from 1990 until the present. She was eulogized by many of her peers. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., summed up Mink's career by calling her a lawmaker who "changed the course of history -- and how many people can we say that about?"

Too few. This country is littered with highways, bridges, airports and buildings named for dead politicians best remembered for pork-barrel politics. Mink's legacy will always be equality for women.

One week before the election, President George W. Bush signed a Congressional resolution renaming the Title IX law as the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. Mink was a primary sponsor of the landmark legislation that mandated gender equality in education, which has benefited millions of American girls and women.

Passed in 1972 after a tough fight, Title IX's initial aim was to guarantee equal funding for girls' sports -- its impact was exponential. Three decades later, the number of females in all professions has exploded because Title IX gave women equal choices.

Mink's personal experiences with racial and gender bias fueled her fight for equal rights. She was a second-generation Japanese-American who grew up in Hawaii during World War II, when Japanese-Americans were being interned. In 1948, she was denied entry into 20 medical schools because she was a female. She applied to law school and was accepted as a "foreign student" at the University of Chicago when its administration didn't realize Hawaii was part of the United States.

As a new lawyer, she could not practice law in her home state because it's bar's bylaws specified that members had to be residents of Hawaii, a woman had to take her husband's residency, and John Mink (whom she had met in law school) was a resident of Pennsylvania. Mrs. Mink challenged the rule and, in 1953, became the first Asian-American woman admitted to the Hawaii bar. It was her first frontal assault against gender barriers; she never looked back.

Mink's success is apparent in this year's Hawaii gubernatorial contest: Republican Linda Lingle (the eventual winner) and Democrat Mazie Hirono faced off in Hawaii's first all-female governor's race. Hirono was the first Japanese-American woman to run for a governorship.

I voted for Patsy Mink to send a message that I support what she fought for, and to say "thank you" for what she accomplished. She wasn't a perfect lawmaker -- she took very good care of labor unions, she grabbed every federal dollar she could lay her hands on to send back home, and she was an old-fashioned, arm-twisting pol with a long memory for enemies as well as friends. But she had courage. Lots and lots of courage.

With luck, it's a quality that won't be lacking in the Congressional Class of 2003. Hard times demand strong leaders. On the stump, every candidate promises to be honest, sincere, humble -- and to fight for what's right, not what's politically expedient. Despite repeated disappointments, we voters once again went to the polls in hopes that this time the men and women we elected were telling the truth.
Congresswoman Patsy Mink can no longer make new promises. But the man or woman chosen to replace her in next January's special election would do well to remember she kept the old ones.

© 2002 The Women Syndicate

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