March Fong Eu, California most influential Asian politician, dies at 95

When then-Oakland Assemblywoman March Fong Eu took a sledgehammer to a porcelain toilet on the steps of the state Capitol in 1969, it was more than the chains around the commode that she was smashing.

Fong Eu, who died Thursday at the age of 95, gained notoriety in that crusade against pay toilets in California. But her career spanned decades in which she shattered barriers — for women, and particularly for Asian American women.

Fong Eu “was a pioneering woman who helped open doors to public service for more women and Asian Americans,” Gov. Jerry Brown said Friday. She succeeded Brown as secretary of state when he became governor in 1975.

“She was a true trailblazer, from being the first Asian American woman elected to the state Legislature to serving nearly 20 years as California’s first female secretary of state,” said Alex Padilla, California’s current secretary of state. “She was a champion for transparency and increasing voter access to registration and the ballot box.”

It was a different world for Asian American women in 1922, when Fong Eu was born in the Stanislaus County town of Oakdale. Raised in the back of a Chinese laundry in San Francisco, she went to high school in Richmond, where a guidance counselor told the straight-A student to back off her dream of becoming a teacher because no school district would hire a Chinese woman.

It wasn’t much better at home, she said in a 1990 interview with the San Francisco Examiner. “My parents had no perception of my possibilities,” Fong Eu said.

But as she proved in years of political battles, Fong Eu wasn’t worried about what other people thought.

She received her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley, a masters from Mills College and a doctorate in education from Stanford University.

She worked for years as a dental hygienist and spent three terms on the Alameda County Board of Education before winning an Assembly seat from a district that included Oakland and Castro Valley in 1966. At the time, Fong Eu, a Democrat, was one of only three women in the Legislature.

From the beginning, Fong Eu made it clear she wasn’t willing to sit back and accept business as usual in the Legislature.

In 1967, she blocked the Assembly from adjourning early for the Press-Legislature golf tournament, an annual — and all-male — event that she had been barred from attending. She presented a resolution calling for “an end to this crass discrimination.”

She received the support of only two men in the 80-member Assembly, which referred her resolution to the state Commission on the Status of Women. And the members then headed out to their golf game.

Fong Eu’s signature issue, a statewide ban on pay toilets in public buildings, was also a matter of gender fairness, she said, “because women must pay twice as often as men.” Her sledgehammer assault on the toilet, which attracted attention from news outlets across the nation, also showed Fong Eu’s political instincts for what would make a good show — and resonate with voters.

Despite drawing plenty of ridicule as “the pay toilet assemblywoman,” Fong Eu saw Gov. Ronald Reagan sign the ban in 1974, just six weeks before voters elected her as secretary of state.

She was re-elected four times, resigning in 1994 to become ambassador to Micronesia. As the state’s top election official, she pioneered voter registration by mail and added candidate statements to the state ballot pamphlet. Fong Eu also allowed voters to use absentee ballots for any reason, the first step toward the heavy mail-voter turnout now seen in every state election.

Fong Eu’s political career also had it disappointments. In 2002, she lost an attempt to win back her old post as secretary of state. But even more jarring was her decision to drop out of the 1988 U.S. Senate race after her husband, Singapore businessman Henry Eu, refused to release the family financial information required of every candidate.

“I am, to a significant degree, forced to choose between my marriage and my candidacy for the Senate,” she told The Chronicle at the time. “Put to such a choice, there is not contest.”

In 1998, Fong Eu backed away from her Democratic roots to support her son, Republican state Treasurer Matt Fong, in his losing race against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. Matt Fong died of cancer in 2011.

Fong Eu was pleased with her place as a role model for women and Asian Americans. But she also had pride in her legacy as a lifelong public servant.

“People perceive me as a nonpolitician, which is good,” she told the Examiner in 1990. “I would say people know I’m honest and have their trust.”

Fong Eu lived in recent years in Orange County. No information about services has been released.