Defender of Reproductive Rights, First Female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day
Sandra Day O’Connor, formerly known as Sandra Day, was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006.
She was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. A moderate conservative, she was known for her dispassionate and meticulously researched opinions.
Sandra Day grew up on a large family ranch near Duncan, Arizona. She received undergraduate (1950) and law (1952) degrees from Stanford University, where she met the future chief justice of the United States William Rehnquist.
Upon her graduation she married a classmate, John Jay O’Connor III. Unable to find employment in a law firm because she was a woman—despite her academic achievements, one firm offered her a job as a secretary—she became a deputy district attorney in San Mateo county California.
After a brief tenure, she and her husband, a member of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, moved to Germany, where she served as a civil attorney for the army in 1954.
Swearing in as Justice of the Supreme Court
On July 7, 1981, Reagan – who had pledged during his 1980 presidential campaign to appoint the first woman to the Court announced he would nominate an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Potter Stewart.
Sandra received notification from President Reagan of her nomination on the day before the announcement and did not know that she was a finalist for the position.
Reagan wrote in his diary on July 6, 1981: "Called Judge O'Connor and told her she was my nominee for the supreme court. Already the flak is starting from my supporters. Right to Life people say she is pro-abortion. She declares abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she'll make a good justice."
Sandra told Reagan she did not remember whether she had supported repealing Arizona's law banning abortion. However, she had cast a preliminary vote in the Arizona State Senate in 1970 in favour of a bill to repeal the state's criminal-abortion statute.
In 1974, Sandra had opined against a measure to prohibit abortions in some Arizona hospitals. Anti-abortion and religious groups opposed Sandra's nomination because they suspected, correctly, she would not be willing to overturn Roe v. Wade.
U.S. Senate Republicans, including Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Steve Symms of Idaho, and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, called the White House to express their discontent over the nomination; Nickles said he and other pro-family Republican senators would not support Sandra. Helms, Nickels, and Symms nevertheless voted for confirmation.
Conservative activists such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Howard Phillips, and Peter Gemma voted against the nomination. Gemma called the nomination "a direct contradiction of the Republican platform to everything that candidate Reagan said."
Sandra's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee began on September 9, 1981. It was the first televised confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court justice. The confirmation hearing lasted three days and focused mainly on the issue of abortion.
When asked, Sandra refused to telegraph her views on abortion, and she was careful not to leave the impression that she supported abortion rights. The Judiciary Committee approved Sandra with seventeen votes in favour and one vote of the present.
On September 21, Sandra was confirmed by the U.S. Senate with a vote of 99–0. Only Senator Max Baucus of Montana was absent from the ballot, and he sent Sandra a copy of A River Runs Through It by apologising. In her first year on the Court, she received over 60,000 letters from the public, more than any other justice in history.