Today, the House of Representatives unveiled a new portrait of Representative Patsy Mink. The first woman of color and first Asian-American woman elected to Congress, in 1964, Mink’s work led to significant changes in education in the United States, including Title IX of the Education Act of 1972.
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Fifty years ago, the final version of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 passed the U.S. House of Representatives. One of the women at the center of this landmark legislative effort was Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink of Hawaii, who was first elected in 1964 becoming the first woman of color to serve in Congress. After its initial passage, Mink spent the balance of her political career defending Title IX. This month’s Edition for Educators highlights Representative Mink and the statute which eventually bore her name.
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After the 83rd Congress (1953–1955) adjourned
sine die in late August 1954, a reporter from the
Baltimore Sun caught up with Representative Edward Tylor Miller of Maryland and asked about his late summer plans. The first thing on his to-do list, Miller said, was to go fishing.
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During the 1970s, amid the women’s liberation movement, women across the country fought for equal rights and for a louder voice in the decision-making process on a wide range of domestic and international issues. Capitol Hill also became more diverse, as women of color—Members and staff alike—won election to and took jobs in the House, changing a powerful workplace which had been dominated by White men since its inception.
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Art on November 3, 2021
About 30 years after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, political campaigns increasingly targeted women for votes. Political appeals to women were by no means a new idea. However, women’s relatively recent victory in winning the right to vote, coupled with postwar sexism, added modern twists to old traditions of looking for women’s political support.
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Art on September 16, 2021
Congressional license plates may have been just thin strips of metal affixed to the top of a regular license plate, but the plates ended up giving Members of Congress motoring superpowers.
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As a young man, James Tallmadge of New York challenged policymakers to uphold the principles of equality in the Declaration and make real a world devoid of slavery. Two decades later, when Tallmadge was one of those policymakers, he turned away from idealism of his youth and toward the legal might of the Constitution to limit slavery’s spread.
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In 1915, a year after World War I engulfed the European continent, Democrat Frank Buchanan of Illinois declared that he was willing to go to any length to stop the United States from getting drawn into the conflict. Within months, however, the Congressman found himself in a little war of his own, not against a foreign adversary but with his own Justice Department.
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Five paintings in the House Collection show how Science Committee chairs shared national enthusiasm for extraterrestrial exploration and embedded allusions to America’s space program in their portraits.
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On March 15, 1910, House Speaker Joe Cannon of Illinois suffered a rare legislative setback when 14 of his fellow Republicans joined Democrats to cut funding for the routine maintenance of his official government automobile. By all appearances, it seemed like a minor, personal rebuke. But in this case, it foreshadowed a much larger problem for one of the most powerful Speakers in American history.
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Art on February 26, 2021
A dramatic backstory helped to launch Robert Smalls’s congressional career in the 1870s. A century later, the daring ship captain and Civil War hero’s story reappeared in the public eye as the subject of a volume of
Golden Legacy, a comic book format Black history series for children.
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In 1909 Congress appropriated money specifically to purchase automobiles for the President; only months later, it considered providing the Speaker and the Vice President with similar funding. But not every Member believed the government should spend public money on what would essentially be a private car, and not every Member wanted to give Joe Cannon such a generous perk.
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