Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.

• Author: Gwynn, Ellen B.
• Position: Book review

Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World By Linda Hirshman

Although Justice O'Connor probably would not have described herself as a feminist during her legal career, she was extremely bright and ambitious, yet was rejected by 40 law firms after graduating near the top of her class in 1952 from Stanford Law School because the firms "did not hire women lawyers." One doesn't have to identify as a feminist to consider this iniquitous. After holding a couple of government positions and staying home to raise her children, O'Connor entered the Arizona state senate in 1969, soon becoming the first female legislative majority leader in the United States. She kept a list of Arizona laws that treated the genders differently, and successfully worked to repeal or amend all of them. When O'Connor was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981, she had been urging presidents to appoint a woman for 10 years. She believed that by entering public office, women would change society, and her life stands as proof.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg encountered the same barrier upon graduating from Columbia Law School in 1959. No firms would hire her, and numerous justices and judges (such as Felix Frankfurter, William Brennan, and Learned Hand) refused to take the brilliant graduate on as a law clerk. She eventually taught at Rutgers Law School and later Columbia Law. When students urged her to teach a course on Women and Law, Ginsburg studied what little had been written on the subject, later reporting that "her consciousness was awakened." Beginning in 1970, she won a number of significant cases involving gender-related discrimination before the U.S. Supreme Court. She successfully challenged an Idaho law that automatically appointed men over women to administer a family member's estate; a federal law that automatically provided housing and medical benefits to military men, but required military women to first prove their husbands were dependent upon them in order to qualify; and a Social Security law denying survivor benefits to the husband of a woman who died in childbirth.

Sisters in Law describes the justices' youths, O'Connor growing up on a ranch in Arizona and Ginsburg in Brooklyn, New York. O'Connor became active in Republican politics; Ginsberg co-wrote the first case book and co-founded the first law reporter on gender discrimination law. In 1980, O'Connor...