|
Justice
Sandra Day O’Connor (l) and President Judith
Shapiro |
“How a Cowgirl
got to the Supreme Court”
By Nazneen Malik
“I was not seeking a position on the US Supreme Court,” says
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a recent lecture at Barnard
College. Originally intending to speak about women and the
law, she instead decided to share her personal story with students,
weaving together memories and experiences like a masterful
storyteller, thus revealing an underlying principle that has
governed much of her life—the unwillingness to take no
for an answer.
Although Justice O’Connor is the first woman to be appointed
to the United States Supreme Court in our country’s then
205 year history and became the first woman majority leader
in the Arizona State Senate, her road to success was littered
with many obstacles. But O’Connor has never been one
to shrink away from challenges. After all, her first pet was
a bobcat.
Growing up on a cattle
ranch in the American Southwest in an old adobe house with
four rooms, and no running water or indoor plumbing, O’Connor learned self-reliance at an
early age. “It [the ranch] was so remote and out of town
that we would go once a week to get groceries, the mail and
to pick up any supplies that were needed. If anything on the
ranch needed to be built, or repaired, or doctored, or whatever
it was, it was a place where you had to do it yourself,” she
declares. But she loved it, nonetheless.
It was education, however,
that eventually played a significant role in shaping her
future aspirations. When she was ten, O’Connor
was sent to live with her grandparents in El Paso so that she
could attend school. My father never had a chance to go to
college, says O’Connor. Her mother, however, had briefly
taught school after graduating from the University of Arizona.
Both parents loved to read and understood the importance of
providing their daughter with an education.
When she was sixteen,
O’Connor enrolled in Stanford
University and recalls being terrified because all the other
students seemed better prepared and knew more than she did.
Nevertheless, O’Connor made the Dean’s List in
her first year and decided to major in economics.
But it was an undergraduate
class at Stanford, taught by a persuasive professor with
legal training that inspired O’Connor
to pursue a law degree. She applied to Stanford Law School,
and was accepted as one of five women, at a time when the school
allowed fourth year undergraduates to complete a law degree
in three years. Today, over fifty percent of law school students
are female; however, back then, they represented no more than
three percent, nationwide.
Despite her high academic
standing and having been editor of the Stanford Law Review,
O’Connor experienced tremendous
difficulty obtaining employment. Intrepid firms confidently
disclosed their reasons for not hiring women, and there were
no mavericks who wished to break precedent and hire a female
lawyer. One firm went so far as to offer her a secretarial
position instead.
In response, O’Connor took matters into her own hands,
approached the California district attorney’s office
and negotiated the terms of her first job—no pay.
But when her husband
was drafted and sent to West Germany as part of the JAG unit,
O’Connor decided to leave her
treasured job and accompany him. When they returned, firms
were still not hiring women so she opened up a law office with
a colleague. Shortly afterward, O’Connor gave up her
practice to stay home and raise her children. Aware that if
she simply stopped working she would never get another job,
O’Connor kept busy. Among other things, she opened up
a lawyer referral service and took bankruptcy court appointments
to be a trustee in bankruptcy for smaller estates she could
manage from home. “All of this was fine but I was so
busy I needed a full-time job so that I could have a little
peace and quiet in my life,” she chuckles.
She was subsequently
hired by the Arizona attorney general’s
office. “At first they didn’t know what to do with
me and sent me out to the Arizona state hospital for the mentally
ill,” she explains, “but you start at the bottom
and you try to make something of it.”
O’Connor was
later appointed to the Arizona State Senate and became the
first female majority leader. Ironically, it was the same
man who had offered her the secretarial position in the beginning
of her career that introduced her to President Reagan and
played a central role in her appointment to the Supreme Court
in 1981.
“It’s a hard job,” admits O’Connor, “[but]
I always knew that I wanted to work and I wanted to work at
work worth doing and I have been privileged to have that kind
of work.”#
