Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the director of the Humanities Center. She specializes in Asian American, immigration, comparative racialization, women's, gender, and sexuality histories. Wu received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University and previously taught at Ohio State University. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013). Her book, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (2022), is a collaboration with political scientist Gwendolyn Mink. Wu is currently working on a book that focuses on Asian American and Pacific Islander Women who attended the 1977 National Women’s Conference and co-editing Unequal Sisters, 5th edition. She co-edited Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 8th Edition (2015), Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (2017), and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (2012-2017). Currently, she is a co-editor of Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 and editor for Amerasia Journal. She also serves as chair of the editorial committee for the University of California Press and as a series editor for the U.S. in the World Series with Cornell University Press. She is the co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.
NEW in 2022: Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (NYU Press)
From 1967 to 1971, Patsy Takemoto Mink – the first woman of color to become a United States congressional representative –introduced a series of bills to create comprehensive childcare in the United States. The legislation would have mandated government sponsored educational programs for pre-school children, regardless of their economic backgrounds. Such programs would have helped to rectify educational inequalities, which are sharpest along the lines of class and race in the U.S. In addition, comprehensive childcare would also have assisted working parents, particularly mothers who are the presumed caretakers of children. Despite Mink’s repeated efforts, the comprehensive childcare bills did not succeed. After four years, the legislation finally passed both houses of the U.S. Congress in 1971, but President Richard Nixon vetoed the proposal. This presentation examines how Mink conceptualized and argued for government responsibility for pre-school education and childcare. Child rearing and early education are commonly regarded as women’s obligations to be carried out within the private sphere. Mink, however, advocated for publicly funded programs to equalize the responsibilities of education and childcare between class, racial, and gender divides. She drew inspiration from her personal experiences as a working mother in the 1950s, an era that celebrated female domesticity. In the context of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Mink also observed how these political developments inspired experimentation in childcare and educational programs in her home state of Hawaii and her adopted political home of Washington D.C. Furthermore, while engaging in developing federal programs as part of the “War on Poverty,” Mink participated in fact-finding trips to Europe and Asia to observe social welfare and educational programs. My presentation focuses on how the local and the global shaped Mink’s visions for restructuring the relationship between the private and the public, between the family and the state. By reevaluating Mink’s call for comprehensive childcare, it is possible to have a better understanding of the resistance against government responsibility for early childhood education. An exploration of the rejection of comprehensive childcare provides an opportunity to understand how gender, racial, class, and neoliberal politics undergird U.S. state formation.