First: Sandra Day O’Connor by Evan Thomas (review)

During a Supreme Court argument in 1991, a lawyer blithely addressed the justices by stating, “I’d like to remind you gentlemen,” prompting Sandra Day O’Connor to mischievously retort, “Would you like to remind me, too?” (p. 269). Despite breaking down barriers in myriad male spaces throughout her career, O’Connor is not remembered as a revolutionary figure for women’s rights. Her success was more rooted in an ability to “marry ambition to restraint,” and, in turn, she approached law from a moderate perspective. In First, biographer Evan Thomas confronts the tepid enthusiasm for O’Connor’s legacy. Thomas delves beyond O’Connor’s status as the first woman to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and presents an intimate portrait of how a self-described “cowgirl” from Arizona became the most powerful justice on the Supreme Court between October 1981 and January 2006. Thomas asserts that O’Connor’s keen sense of fairness, coupled with her pragmatism and commitment to compromise, positioned her as the swing justice on a deeply divided court. O’Connor’s decisive votes shaped the court’s rulings on society’s most pressing issues, including abortion, affirmative action, and religious freedom .

Despite graduating from Stanford University Law School near the top of her class, established law firms were not hiring female lawyers. After rejecting secretarial work, O’Connor followed her father’s maxim of “no excuses” and opened her own firm, emblematic of the independence she learned while growing up on the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona. Struggling amidst the pressures of work and family, O’Connor became a legislator, where she prioritized women’s issues, such as abolishing the eight-hour workday and challenging discrimination based on sex. O’Connor experienced a meteoric rise, moving from assistant attorney general to Arizona state senator, before becoming the first female majority leader of a state senate and later a judge on the Arizona State Court of Appeals.

Thomas uncovers two seemingly disparate forces that intersected to propel O’Connor to the highest court in the land. Both the Right, with its anti–big government conservatism, and the Left, with its more open embrace of social movements seeking the elevation of women and marginalized communities into positions of power, coalesced around Ronald Reagan’s promise to appoint a conservative woman to the Supreme Court. O’Connor, a darling of the Right with connections to key figures like Barry Goldwater and Justice Warren E. Burger, was unanimously confirmed by the senate while tens of millions of people watched from their televisions. The media vacillated between two extremes, painting O’Connor as both a “new feminist” and a “traditional woman.” However, O’Connor rejected both of these labels, refusing to accept her moniker “the Supreme Court’s mother” (p. 267). Instead, O’Connor saw herself as a “bridge between an era where women were protected and submissive toward an era of true equality between the sexes” (p. xii).

Despite feeling dismissed during her first Supreme Court argument, O’Connor found her footing, shifting more leftward toward a centrist position over time. Thomas attributes this shift to O’Connor’s trust in facts and her sensitive judgement, rather than political partisanship, arguing that O’Connor was willing to loosen up her judicial restraint and occasionally embrace more activist positions, depending on the case. Abortion proved to be the most pivotal issue of her tenure. While personally believing abortion “abhorrent,” O’Connor reaffirmed it as a constitutional right in 1992. O’Connor’s most pressing concern was whether a woman’s right to privacy granted her the right to terminate a pregnancy; Thomas posits that she answered yes, with the caveat being that abortion be subject to state control, so long as the state did not impose an undue burden. Thomas argues that O’Connor was no absolutist in the cause of women’s rights. Instead, she approached issues of gender equality on a case-by-case basis, supported...