Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World

Linda Hirshman's dual biography traces the intertwined lives and careers of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first and second women appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Hirshman argues that these two women, despite vastly different backgrounds, together transformed the legal status of American women by arguing for equality, embodying it as role models, and ordering it into law from the bench. She frames their story within the tradition of American social revolution through law, following the model pioneered by Thurgood Marshall in the racial civil rights movement.

Sandra Day grew up on the isolated Lazy B cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona, where her intellectual father treated her as a capable equal, instilling self-reliance and a habit of absorbing unfair treatment without complaint. At Stanford University, she studied under Harry Rathbun, a nonpracticing lawyer and engineer who led seminars urging students to better the world without prescribing what that world should look like. His philosophy shaped O'Connor's pragmatic approach to governance: Solve the problem at hand without insisting on grand principles. Ruth Bader grew up in a modest Brooklyn home, the surviving only child of Jewish immigrant parents. Her mother, Celia, instilled a love of reading and a commitment to justice before dying of cervical cancer the day before Ruth's high school graduation. At Cornell University, government professor Robert Cushman taught her that lawyers could earn a living while making society more just, a framework that empowered her to see women's inequality as oppression the law could remedy.

Both women excelled at elite law schools and married supportive husbands, but both collided with sex discrimination upon graduation. O'Connor graduated near the top of her Stanford Law School class in 1952, only to be told by roughly forty firms that they did not hire women. Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School in 1956, transferred to Columbia, earned the highest grades in the entire third-year class, and still could not secure a clerkship from any Supreme Court justice because none would hire a woman. During law school, her husband Martin Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Ruth cared for him and their infant daughter while attending classes, an experience that taught her nothing was insurmountable.

Their paths diverged in the 1960s. O'Connor settled in Phoenix, volunteered for the Republican Party, and rose to become the first female majority leader of a state legislature in 1972, pursuing women's equality through legislative reform. Ginsburg taught at Rutgers Law School until students asked her in 1970 to teach a course on Women and the Law. Her research awakened her feminist consciousness; she concluded that protective legislation for women did more harm than good by reinforcing dependent stereotypes.

Ginsburg's constitutional campaign began when Martin brought her a tax case challenging a sex-based distinction. She pressed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to let her work on Reed v. Reed, the first constitutional sex-discrimination case headed to the Supreme Court. The Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause had been interpreted to apply almost exclusively to racial discrimination. Ginsburg marshaled historical evidence and identified an obscure 1920 precedent requiring discriminatory laws to "fairly and substantially" advance a legislative purpose. In November 1971, the Court unanimously struck down the Idaho law at issue, the first time it refused to accept legal distinctions between the sexes as self-evident.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have forbidden all government discrimination based on sex, passed the U.S. Senate in 1972 and went to the states for ratification. O'Connor, caught between political ambitions in an increasingly conservative Republican Party and her support for women's rights, allowed a conservative committee chairman to delay it in the Arizona legislature. Conservative opposition ultimately defeated the amendment nationwide.

As founding director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, Ginsburg argued five landmark cases before the Supreme Court over the next decade. In Frontiero v. Richardson in 1973, she urged the Court to apply strict scrutiny, its most demanding standard of review, to sex discrimination. Four justices agreed, but Justice Lewis Powell argued the Court should not equate sex with race while the ERA was pending. That same year, the Court decided Roe v. Wade on privacy grounds rather than women's equality, a choice Ginsburg later criticized for centering the physician's judgment rather than the woman's autonomy. Ginsburg's greatest victories came with male plaintiffs: In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she won unanimously for a widowed father denied Social Security survivor benefits available only to widowed mothers, and in Craig v. Boren, Justice William Brennan's opinion established that sex-based classifications must serve "important governmental objectives" and be "substantially related" to achieving them. By 1979, Ginsburg considered the campaign against explicit sex lines in federal law essentially complete. She was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1980.

O'Connor's path to the Supreme Court ran through Republican politics and personal connections. After serving as a state trial and appellate judge, she caught the attention of Chief Justice Warren Burger during a 1979 houseboat trip, and Ronald Reagan selected her to fulfill his campaign promise to appoint a woman. Confirmed 99 to 0, O'Connor wrote the majority opinion in Hogan v. Mississippi in her first term, ordering a public women's university to admit men to its nursing program and declaring that sex-based classifications must not reflect "archaic and stereotypic notions." Over the following years, she joined unanimous rulings on sexual harassment and employment discrimination while providing the crucial fifth vote to preserve affirmative action. In the 1983 Akron abortion case, she proposed an "undue burden" standard—holding that abortion restrictions are constitutional unless they place a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking the procedure—and in 1992, she joined Justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, preserving the core right to abortion while adopting that framework.

President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg in 1993, and she was confirmed 96 to 3. On the Court together, the two women played complementary roles: O'Connor defended existing gains while Ginsburg pushed for stronger protections. When the Court confronted the Virginia Military Institute's exclusion of women, O'Connor turned down the opinion assignment, saying it should be Ginsburg's to write. Ginsburg's opinion in United States v. Virginia raised the standard for sex-discrimination review, requiring an "exceedingly persuasive justification" for any gender classification.

O'Connor provided the decisive fifth vote in Bush v. Gore in 2000, stopping the Florida recount and installing George W. Bush as president. She retired in 2006, driven by her husband John's worsening Alzheimer's disease, and was replaced by Samuel Alito, who had voted to require married women to notify their husbands before obtaining abortions. With Alito on the bench, the conservative majority rolled back women's gains. In Gonzales v. Carhart, five justices upheld the federal "partial birth abortion" ban, and Justice Kennedy wrote that women may "come to regret" their abortions, which Ginsburg condemned as reflecting "ancient notions about women's place." In Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, directing it at Congress, which passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as President Barack Obama's first signed legislation.

Martin Ginsburg died on June 27, 2010; Ruth was on the bench the next day. A series of blistering oral dissents transformed her into a cultural phenomenon. After her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down preclearance (the requirement that certain jurisdictions obtain federal approval before changing their voting laws), NYU law student Shana Knizhnik created the Notorious R.B.G. blog. Ginsburg's most potent dissent came in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, where she argued that allowing a craft store chain to exclude contraception from employee health insurance based on the owners' religious beliefs burdened only women.

Hirshman concludes that the two women's differences strengthened the movement for women's legal equality. O'Connor's conservative credentials and 24-year presence on the Court normalized women in power. Ginsburg's legal brilliance built the constitutional architecture of equality, and her dissents planted seeds for future change. The appointments of Justices Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010 brought the number of women on the Court to three. Ginsburg refused calls to retire, and on November 25, 2014, had a stent implanted in her artery, returning to the bench four days later.