![]() Still, perhaps Sandra Day O’Connor’s most enduring legacy is not any particular opinion, but rather her encouragement of other women on the bench, specifically Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Gore in 2000, which awarded the presidency to George W. In her more than two decades on the bench, she would change the course of American history-not least by casting the deciding vote in Bush v. “By giving the brethren their first sister,” TIME noted when the news broke, “Reagan provided not only a breakthrough on the bench but a powerful push forward in the shamefully long and needlessly tortuous march of women toward full equality in American society.” After a brief Oval Office interview, in which Reagan asked her to confirm that she was opposed to abortion, he nominated her, praising her “unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity and devotion to the public good.” And, though she had fought hard against assumptions about what a woman could do in the field of law, by that point her selection was uncontroversial in the American mainstream. “She was so reserved and calm and just, ‘Well, let’s see what this is all about,'” her son Brian has said. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter And one of his major campaign promises was to appoint a woman to the nation’s highest court. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was running for President. ![]() “There wasn’t any evidence of the raw fire of ambition… the intense part of her ambition is focused against an internal standard rather than an outside goal or standard.” “She didn’t send out any signal of interest, much less send in an application,” Arizona’s then-Governor Babbit told the Washington Post in 1989. There, after taking some time off to raise her kids, O’Connor started to rise in Arizona politics, moving from assistant attorney general in Arizona in 1965, to State Senator in 1969, to State Senate majority leader in 1973, to Superior Court judge in 1975 and finally to the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979. Like her colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was difficult for her find work as a lawyer-few law firms would hire women, so she started her career as a deputy county attorney for San Mateo county before opening a tiny practice in Phoenix.
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