As we enter Women’s History Month this year, marking the anniversary of the pandemic and subsequently bringing a new wave of anti-Asian sentiment, it’s important to realize how integral Asian women have been to the United States. The following five women not only changed history but set precedents for future generations and continue to encourage and inspire people today:
- Grace Lee Boggs
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Born in 1915 to Chinese immigrants, Grace Lee Boggs spent seventy years fighting for social and political change in the United States. Along with raising awareness of the Asian American experience, she was an intersectional feminist active in the Black Power and women’s rights movements of the 1940s and 1960s. She was also a prolific writer, and her books memorialize the admirable spirit that she infused in her advocacy for civil rights, fair labor and environmental protection.
- Maya Lin
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Maya Lin is a Chinese-American architect best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Civil Rights Memorial. Despite anti-Asian discrimination and her lack of professional experience, Lin’s design was selected for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial among thousands of entries when she was still an undergraduate student at Yale University. As an artist and architect, she is passionate about environmental concerns and has used her work to illuminate such issues, including the biodiversity crisis and the importance of sustainability.
- Patsy Mink
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Patsy Mink changed history when she became the first woman of color elected to the US House of Representatives. Before that, she had become the first Japanese-American woman to practice law in the territory of Hawaii in 1954. As soon as Hawaii was granted statehood, Mink campaigned to be a congresswoman and won her seat in 1964. While serving, she strongly supported the Title IX law, which, upon her death in 2002, was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in her honor.
- Kalpana Chawla
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On November 19, 1997, Kalpana Chawla became the first woman of Indian descent to go to space. After earning her degree in India, she became a naturalized citizen in the United States and was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1994. Unfortunately, she was aboard the NASA space shuttle Columbia when it was destroyed upon re-entry in 2003. Chawla is remembered for her contributions to space exploration and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
- Yuri Kochiyama
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After the 1941 Pearl Harbor bombing, Yuri Kochiyama was incarcerated at a Japanese-American internment camp in Arkansas; from there, her political activism began. Post-World War II, she and her husband moved to Harlem, New York, where she immersed herself in community activism, learned about Black history and eventually befriended the well-known Black activist Malcolm X. Throughout her life, she also fought for Puerto Rican independence, ethnic studies in schools and compensation for Japanese American incarceration. After passing away in 2014, Kochiyama left behind a legacy of intersectionality and solidarity.
Much of the anti-Asian racism being spread today is rooted in the idea that Asian people are foreigners to this country, but in reality, Asian people helped to shape the society we live in today. The lives and stories of Asian-American women are notoriously left out of history textbooks; however, these women have made invaluable contributions to the United States, in fields ranging from civil rights to space exploration to architecture, and deserve to be celebrated for their accomplishments.