Posted on 07/02/2005 9:15:52 PM PDT by Lorianne
With her retirement, Sandra Day O'Connor did to many American feminists what she's done during her tenure as a Supreme Court justice: Eluded them. She left, in part, to spend more time with her husband, John O'Connor, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease and who has been known to spend his days in her chambers while she works.
Surely your average successful lawyer has faced this dilemma: give up a career or take care of the family. But not the Chief Woman Lawyer of America -- she shouldn't quit to take care of her family, should she? What kind of message does that send?
A feminist would say: 'Well, why would she do that?' " O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, and that alone seals her place in American feminist history. It makes her arguably the most powerful American woman, one rung short of the first female American president. She was third in her Stanford law school class at a time when a woman was lucky to get a job as a secretary at a law firm. That's the job she was offered upon graduation, so she invented her own career path.
In her autobiography, "Lazy B," she wrote about growing In the mid-'80s, feminist legal theorists made an attempt at embracing O'Connor. Sherry wrote an article describing the jurist as the archetype of "difference feminism," a theory popularized by feminist Carol Gilligan and which holds that men and women reason differently and write in different styles.
O'Connor, she wrote, had a uniquely "feminine perspective"; she consistently valued communities over individuals, moderation over confrontation, wrote in a way that's more contextual, less "abstract" and more "caring."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
sacrilege
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