Sandra Day O'Connor broke the Supreme Court's glass ceiling, but don't call her a feminist

Sandra Day O'Connor broke an important barrier when she joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 and became the first woman ever to hold the job.

She's undoubtedly blazed trails for other women, including the five female justices who followed on the high court.

O'Connor didn't call herself a feminist — she explicitly said she wasn't one. But her position as a female in male-dominated spaces played a role in her decision-making and who she was as a justice.

O'Connor, who died on Dec. 1, 2023, eluded categorization. She frustrated feminists when her votes didn't go the way they hoped or her opinions didn't go far enough. O'Connor was even more frustrating for her party's right wing, columnist Adele Stan wrote after O'Connor's resignation in 2005.

"She represents everything they abhor and fear: a fully empowered woman who often stops the boys from having their way," Stan wrote.

O'Connor's legacy shows an "authentic, homegrown sort of feminist defiance," Stan wrote.

"However inconsistent her opinions may appear on their face, a consistent theme runs throughout the contexts in which they were rendered: Sandra Day O'Connor has time and time again acted as a hedge on male hegemony."

Role as first woman justice mattered to her

She assumed her status as the first female on the court with pride and rigor.

In 1983, when a New York Times editorial mistakenly referred to the "nine men" on the Supreme Court, she responded with a snarky, pointed letter to the editor, dubbing herself the "FWOTSC," or the "first woman on the Supreme Court."

"According to the information available to me, and which I had assumed was generally available, for over two years now SCOTUS has not consisted of nine men," O'Connor wrote to the newspaper of record. "If you have any contradictory information, I would be grateful if you would forward it as I am sure the POTUS, the SCOTUS and the undersigned (the FWOTSC) would be most interested in seeing it."

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In a 2013 interview with NPR's Terry Gross, O'Connor said she "felt a special responsibility" to do the job well so as to prove that women could serve on the court. If she didn't, she said, it could provide a reason not to appoint women in the future.

Sometimes, breaking barriers on the court meant something less significant than creating case law. For instance, when she first joined, she told Gross, there wasn't a women's restroom anywhere near the courtroom, so that had to change.

Actions more important than labels?

But she eschewed the label of "feminist," which is sometimes seen as a more activist or political term than some women are comfortable with.

Still, her policies and practices affirmed her status as a powerful female who looked out for other women and fought against gender discrimination in her various positions.

In a 2009 interview with The New York Times Magazine, O'Connor said she never called herself a feminist and still didn't at that time.

"I never did," she told the magazine. "I care very much about women and their progress. I didn’t go march in the streets, but when I was in the Arizona Legislature, one of the things that I did was to examine every single statute in the state of Arizona to pick out the ones that discriminated against women and get them changed."

Strong convictions: A frequent swing vote, O'Connor was no 'blank check'

She preferred to be labeled "a fair judge and a hard worker," she said.

In her decisions, O'Connor was similarly hard to pin down. Her ideology wasn't seen as rigid. She was viewed as a "swing vote," though she didn't like that term, either.

These days, conversations about gender equality and representation in elected and appointed offices are much more common, and more women run for and win elections.

Although the court's second female justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was a feminist icon worthy of pop culture T-shirts, O'Connor was not.

At least part of that can be explained by their different political parties — Ginsburg was a Democrat, while O'Connor was a Republican. Plus, Ginsburg embraced feminism throughout her life and her work.

Ginsburg built her career on fighting gender discrimination before she rose to the high court. The two women, who soon will be honored by statues on the U.S. Capitol grounds, enjoyed a strong friendship.

While O'Connor may not have called herself a feminist, simply focusing on the label "neglects the nature of her contributions to issues that matter to women," authors Judith Olans Brown, Wendy E. Parmet and Mary E. O'Connell wrote in the Indiana Law Review in 1999.

Instead, one needed to look at her work to see how her identity as a female informed it, and how that work affected women's lives, they wrote.

The authors examined O'Connor's work on the bench and found her writings had a "particular concern for and engagement with issues that have historically affected women’s lives."

She was a woman with children who experienced discrimination at work, and her work appears to show empathy for cases that relate to these experiences, the article said.

Complex life experiences were an influence

O'Connor's life and work held contradictions on women's issues. She was a working mother at a time when some parts of society still thought women belonged at home, taking care of children.

She fought for work after graduating from law school as law firms turned her down because she was a woman.

But she eventually left her job (which just happened to be one of the most powerful jobs in the country) to help care for her husband, who had Alzheimer's disease. Some women balked at that idea, saying a man would never leave such a high-powered job to take care of his wife.

"O’Connor brings her femininity to the bench, but she also brings her Protestantism, her wealth, her Western heritage, her careerism, and her personal courage," the authors wrote.

"Her particular feminism is rugged and self-reliant. The experiences she draws upon, like the experiences any judge draws upon, are as limiting as they are enlightening."

Rachel Leingang is a former reporter for The Arizona Republic.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Was Sandra Day O'Connor a feminist? She said no. Here's why.