Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi was born in Los Angeles on October 17, 1921, the second of four children—and oldest of three sisters—of Hatsu and Tahei Matsunaga. She grew up in a very musical family, and dreamed of becoming a concert pianist in her early years. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at the University of Southern California as a music major. But with the onset of World War II, and growing pressure to oust Japanese Americans from the West Coast, Setsuko was unable to pursue a career in music and instead set down a very different path.

Patsy Takemoto Mink was born in Pā`ia, Maui, on December 6, 1927, to Nisei parents Suematsu and Mitama Takemoto. Like many Japanese Americans growing up in Hawai`i at that time, she was raised on a sugar plantation. However, as the Sansei daughter of a land surveyor allotted a private cottage, company car, and two acres of land, her experiences were very different from her mostly Nisei peers in the overcrowded and heavily segregated plantation camps—differences she began to see clearly once she started attending school. As a young girl, she would accompany her father to local election rallies, sparking an early interest in politics.

There’s a tendency during women’s history month to focus our celebrations on the women who accomplished great things as activists, artists, and thinkers. And indeed these women should be celebrated! But there’s also something to looking back at the lives of everyday women and the unique challenges they faced as they navigated racism, misogyny, and other social barriers just to simply be. Peggie Nishimura Bain’s life was interrupted by WWII incarceration, but it was also profoundly shaped by toxic masculinity and structural racism before and after the war. Here we draw from photos and oral histories in our digital archives to give you a look into that life.