In the 1940s and ’50s the lawyer (later Justice) Thurgood Marshall had led the most successful such initiative-using the Civil War amendments to enforce racial equality through the courts. As the preeminent commentator on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it two centuries ago, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” Since the Civil War, most American social movements have relied on the potent equality-enforcing constitutional amendments passed in the wake of that engagement. Social revolution through law is a particularly American phenomenon.
They chose to become lawyers when there was not even a whisper of a women’s legal movement, but their choice of career placed them perfectly to make a social revolution through the law when the opportunity arose. Ironically, toward the end of her life, she became an icon on that most populist of mediums, the Internet.
#Who was sandra day o connor professional
When she spoke or wrote, it was almost always in a professional context-women judges, women lawyers, the bar association, law school events, essays in law reviews. She was nowhere to be seen in the legendary Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 or, indeed, marching for anything. Ginsburg, the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s movement, was not a conventional movement activist either. O’Connor’s only formal “feminist” affiliation was with the exceedingly mainstream Associations of Women Judges. They did not lead a social movement in the conventional sense, marching and sitting in.
How did they do it? First, they were lawyers. This is an excerpt from the new book by Linda Hirshman, “Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.”
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