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EPISODE 21: SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR
Howdy folks, it’s the fourth week of March 2025, and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West—and those still shaping it today.
Her parents knew that Sandra was a curious child, interested in reading and learning. But living on their ranch, The Lazy B, the young girl spent most of her time riding horses, helping to mend fences and riding around the sprawling southeastern Arizona property.
So they sent her to live with her grandmother in El Paso, and from there, she thrived.
Next, she attended Stanford University, graduating from law school in 1952. Then, she crafted an ambitious career through Arizona’s political and legal landscape that eventually led her to the United States Supreme Court.
Today, we remember Sandra Day O’Connor, a Great Westerner and America’s first female justice, on this the week of her birth, March 26, 1930.
O’Connor graduated near the top of her class at Stanford Law School, but law firms in the 1950s were reluctant to hire women, and she had a difficult time finding employment. Her first job was an unpaid position as a county attorney in California. Other government positions followed.
Eventually, she and her husband moved to Arizona, where O’Connor became involved in Republican politics. She was named the state’s assistant attorney general, and when a vacancy opened in the Arizona State Senate in 1969, she was appointed to fill the spot.
The next decade saw O’Connor rocket her way to higher and higher offices. She was re-elected twice to that state senate seat, eventually becoming the majority leader, a first for a woman. But the law still lay at the heart of O’Connor’s career.
In 1975, she left the state senate to become a judge of the Maricopa County Superior Court, and in 1979, she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals.
Then, in one of those fateful turns of history, in 1981, after 23 years, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart decided to retire.
Ronald Reagan had promised on the campaign trail the year before that if he was elected, he’d name a woman to the Supreme Court. He was, and he did, choosing O’Connor.
In his announcement of the nomination, President Reagan said: “She is truly a person for all seasons, possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity, and devotion to the public good…”
O’Connor was unanimously approved by the Senate, becoming a key swing voter in an increasingly divided Supreme Court.
“Being a member of the Court,” she once said, “is a little like walking through fresh concrete. We look back and see our footprints in those opinions that we’ve written, and they tend to harden after us.”
With O’Connor on the Court, many important cases came before them, including Bush v. Gore and issues ranging from affirmative action to Native American rights.
“The power I exert on the court depends on the power of the power of my arguments, not my gender,” she said.
O’Connor would often harken back to her humble roots and Western upbringing in describing how she managed to become a legal pioneer. She often said she considered herself “the first cowgirl on the Supreme Court.”
She wrote: “We don’t accomplish anything in the world alone, and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that create something.”
When she was honored with induction into our Hall of Great Westerners in 2001, she said something similar.
“As a product of an old-time ranch in the Southwest, the Great Westerner Award is one I will treasure. It really belongs not to me but to all those remarkable people who learned how to survive in an area that is a tough place to live by any standard.”
Throughout her tenure on the Court, O’Connor remained deeply committed to preserving the integrity of the judiciary and fostering civic education.
She retired from the Court in 2006 to care for her husband, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Even in retirement, she continued to advocate for judicial independence and launched initiatives like iCivics, a program designed to educate young people about the Constitution and the role of government.
Her legacy would change the expectations of women in the law and the courts.
When she was appointed in 1981, 36% of law students were women. By the time she retired in 2006, that number had risen to 48%. In 2024, it is 56%. Four women Justices now sit on the Supreme Court.
In October 2018, O’Connor announced she was stepping away from public life after revealing her diagnosis of early-stage Alzheimer ‘s-like dementia.
O’Connor died away on December 1, 2023, in Phoenix. She was 93.
Following her death, Chief Justice John Roberts described her as “an eloquent advocate for civic education” and “a fiercely independent defender of the rule of law.”
And with that, we’ll bang the gavel on another episode of “This Week in The West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler
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We leave you today with the words of Sandra Day O’Connor: “As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.”
Much obliged for listening, and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
