On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, granting American women the right to vote. Forty-six years later, the first woman of color elected to Congress was serving her second term.

Patsy Takemoto Mink was born on December 6, 1927, in Paia, Maui, Hawaii, to second-generation Japanese American parents. She wanted to be a doctor. Twelve medical schools rejected her. She was qualified; she was a woman; they were not interested. She went to law school at the University of Chicago instead, graduating in 1951, and returned to Hawaii to practice law. Several Honolulu firms would not hire her because she was a woman. She opened her own practice.

In 1964, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Hawaii, becoming the first woman of color in Congress. In 1972, she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination — the first Asian American to run for a major-party presidential nomination. She withdrew after the Oregon primary.

On August 7, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed Congress 416 to 0 in the House. In 1968, Mink voted against the military appropriations bill that funded the Vietnam War. In 1972, she testified that the bombing of Hanoi should stop immediately. She was one of a very small number of elected officials making that argument publicly in that year.

She lost her House seat in 1976 and spent years in Honolulu city and state politics before returning to Congress in 1990. In 2002, the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 — Title IX, which she had co-authored and championed — was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. She had been working on education equity law for thirty years.

She died in September 2002, two weeks before the Hawaii primary she was expected to win. She won the primary anyway. She was re-elected posthumously.