The Supreme Court justice who blazed a trail for women

Sandra Day O’Connor 1930–2023

During her 24 years on the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor was the most powerful woman in America. A rancher’s daughter who became the first female justice, she was such a pivotal force at the ideological center that pundits referred to it as the O’Connor court—even though William Rehnquist was chief justice for most of her tenure. From restrictions on abortion to the dispute over the 2000 presidential election, it was O’Connor’s position that largely dictated the law. She projected unflinching confidence, yet when she learned she was President Reagan’s choice to fill a court vacancy in 1981, she got nervous. “It’s all right to be the first to do something, but I didn’t want to be the last woman on the Supreme Court,” she said. “If I took the job and did a lousy job, it would take a long time to get another one.”

Sandra Day grew up on her family’s Arizona cattle ranch, the Lazy B, riding horses and doing chores. There was no electricity or running water until she was 7, and during the school year she would stay with her grandmother in El Paso. She excelled in school, “skipped two grades,” and enrolled at Stanford University at age 16, said

The New York Times. At Stanford Law School, she dated Rehnquist, a fellow student. But then she met John O’Connor III and married him after graduating in 1952—disappointing Rehnquist, who had also proposed.

While O’Connor finished near the top of her class, she couldn’t get a job practicing law, said Politico, as firm after firm told her, “We don’t hire women.” Instead, she worked in the public sector, had three sons, and then got involved in Republican politics in Arizona. In 1969, when she was an assistant state attorney general, she was appointed to fill a vacancy in the state senate and won reelection twice. That gave her a background as a legislator that became key to her later views on states’ rights and on the primacy of the legislature over the judiciary in determining the law.

Reagan appointed O’Connor “as a conservative,” said The Washington Post, but “she never went far enough in any area of the law to fully satisfy either conservatives or liberals.” In 1986, she cast a decisive vote in Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a sodomy ban, and in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, she crafted the “undue burden” doctrine that preserved Roe’s right to abortion. By the ’90s, said Slate, she was “the court’s swing vote,” writing decisions aimed at “the moderate center.” She appeared partisan, though, when she sided with the conservatives in Bush v. Gore, handing George W. Bush the presidency.

O’Connor “inspired generations of female lawyers” in a time of overt sexism, said CNN.com. After liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the court, male lawyers frequently confused the two—even though they looked nothing alike—prompting O’Connor to wear a shirt saying “I’m Sandra, not Ruth.” She worked through a bout with breast cancer and retired in 2006 to care for her husband, who had dementia. While she often lamented the court’s rightward turn, she maintained pride in her historic career. “In terms of having the American people look at the court and think of it as being fair,” she said, “it helps to have women, plural, on the court.”