Moving Mountains

Illuminates a transformational event in the development of Asian American and Pacific Islander feminisms

In November 1977, over twenty thousand participants, mostly women, gathered in Houston for the first and only US National Women’s Conference, funded by the federal government with the goal of creating a national women’s agenda. In Moving Mountains, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Adrienne Winans center the more than eighty Asian American and Pacific Islander delegates who politically mobilized around women’s rights and other issues to transform their communities and their status in the nation-state.

Foregrounding figures like Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink and poet Mitsuye Yamada, Wu and Winans position AA and PI women as central actors in the era’s feminist politics, engaging with, and at times resisting, state institutions to forge paths toward racial and gender justice. From Guam to New York, the women articulated intersecting demands—for inclusion, sovereignty, labor rights, and education reform – at a moment when conservative backlash and racial realignment were reframing feminist movements. More than a recovery of voices, this book offers a layered analysis of coalition and tension between Asian American and Pacific Islander feminisms, complicating assumptions of unity and illustrating how feminist praxis evolved through disagreement, difference, and shared commitment.

This book is vital reading for anyone interested in feminist history, Asian American and Pacific Islander activism, and the unfinished work of collective liberation.

Author Biography

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is Chancellor’s Professor of the Departments of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she also serves as an associate dean in the School of Humanities and faculty director of the Humanities Center. She is coauthor of Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress. Adrienne A. Winans is an independent scholar.