March Fong Eu didn’t just break toilets. She broke barriers. One after another.
First woman elected California secretary of state, a post she held for nearly 20 years. First person elected to California statewide office with a margin of more than 1 million votes. First Asian-American elected to a state constitutional office in the nation.
“Not too bad for a lady born behind a Chinese laundry,” she once told the Los Angeles Times. Eu died last week at age 95.
Born in 1922 in Oakdale in Stanislaus County, she spent her elementary and high school years in Richmond, where her parents continued to run a hand-wash laundry. In her life, she racked up accomplishments that defied the high school counselor who told her no one would hire her as a teacher because she was Chinese.
A bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in 1943, masters of education from Mills College in 1947, and doctorate of education from Stanford in 1954. First woman to serve as a division chair at the University of California, San Francisco, where she headed the dental hygiene department. First woman and the first Asian-American elected to the Alameda County Board of Education.
Yet, for all she achieved, for all the gender and racial barriers she broke, for all the improvements she made to the state’s election process, she will be best remembered by many long-time Californians as the assemblywoman who successfully fought to ban pay toilets in the state.
An iconic 1969 photo of Eu shows a woman in heels and business attire in front of the state Capitol wielding a sledge hammer and busting a porcelain toilet that was wrapped in chains.
It was a publicity stunt for a feminist cause championed by a woman who didn’t call herself a feminist. To her, pay toilets were an injustice: Urinals were free. Women shouldn’t be disproportionately burdened with a cost for having to go.
In 1974, at the end of her eight years in the Assembly, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed state legislation banning pay toilets. The issue propelled Eu’s campaign for secretary of state. She succeeded Jerry Brown, who was elected governor that year.
“In her first years in (statewide) office, almost all the correspondence she got related to the pay toilets,” recalls Caren Lagomarsino, who served as Eu’s spokeswoman her entire time as secretary of state. “It’s amazing how widely it was known that she was the pay-toilet lady.”
For two decades, before President Bill Clinton appointed her U.S. ambassador to Micronesia, she evenhandedly ran the Secretary of State’s Office. She started voter registration by mail and state candidate ballot statements. She expanded use of absentee ballots.
It was all part of what the California Political Almanac called her “thankless effort to boost voter registration and turnout in a state where campaigns dominated by money and media are driving voters away from the polls.”
The state’s election system is better because of Eu. And toilets in California are free.
