Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O Connor
President Obama took office in 2009, he has appointed two women to serve as Supreme Court Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Supreme Court Justices are the judges that make up the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land.
Only four women have served as Supreme Court Justices in the history of the court, and three of them Sotomayor, Kagan, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by President Bill Clinton are serving now.
The very first woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court was Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Sandra Day was born in El Paso, TX on March 26, 1930, and spent her early childhood on her parents ranch in Arizona. Because the ranch was isolated, educational opportunities were limited. Sandras parents already knew she was very bright, so when it was time for her to start school, her parents sent her to live with her grandmother. She would spend the school year there and summers on the ranch, where she would do chores and learn to ride horses.
Sandra was an exceptional student. She attended Stanford University in California, graduated with honors, and remained at Stanford to attend law school, where she held the prestigious position of editor of the Stanford Law Review. During law school, Sandra met her husband, John O’ Connor. She graduated with honors, third in her class, in 1952, a year ahead of her future husband. First in her class was future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Despite Sandras exceptional academic achievements, no law firm in California would hire her because she was a woman. Her only job offer was a legal secretary position.
She turned to public service, working as a county attorney, and when her husband, upon his own graduation, was drafted into the military, she served as a civilian lawyer for the US military in Frankfurt, Germany.
The O’ Connors eventually settled in Phoenix, AZ, where O’ Connor, again unable to get hired by a law firm, briefly started her own firm, then had three sons, and took time off from work to raise them.
In 1965, she took a part-time job with the Arizona Attorney Generals office, and her star quickly began to rise. O’ Connor had become very active in state Republican politics, and when an Arizona state senator resigned in 1969, O’ Connor was appointed to fill his seat. She won re-election twice, becoming the first woman in the US to rise to majority leader.
In 1974, she was elected as a judge to the Maricopa County Superior Court. O’ Connor was urged to run for governor of Arizona, but declined. Shortly after, she was appointed to the Court of Appeals.
Ronald Reagan had campaigned on the promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, but when he nominated O’ Connor, no one had heard of her. Congress unanimously approved her appointment. The lawyer who nobody would hire because she was a woman was now serving on the highest court in the land.
Although O’ Connor was considered to have conservative views, she became known for her independence, a jurist whose votes reflected her understanding of the law, not her personal or political views. This made her extremely influential on the court.
Sandra Day O’ Connor retired from the Court in 2006 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2009.
