A historical look at the relationship between the notorious RGB and Sandra Day O’Connor? Yes please. I’d been looking forward to this one ever since I heard the premise and it didn’t disappoint. Hirshman delves into the childhoods and legal careers of these groundbreaking women and leaves the reader with a concrete impression of them as real people with strengths and flaws.
I never realized just how different Ginsberg and O’Connor are from each other. O’Connor was one of Reagan’s few palatable options for Supreme Court appointment. He had promised to appoint a woman to the court, but the qualified women were mostly liberal democrats. O’Connor was his perfect nominee. She was a lawyer who had worked as a deputy county attorney for no pay straight out of law school and then eventually moved on to practice law privately, worked for the republican party, served as Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, became an Arizona State Senator, and then was appointed to the Court of Appeals. Congress confirmed her to the Supreme Court by a vote of 99-0! Although SDO clearly enjoyed being on the Supreme Court, she was relieved when RBG was appointed to the court. They didn’t always see eye to eye, but there was comfort in not being the only woman at the bench.
As interesting as SDO’s life was, I really enjoyed learning about RBG’s slow and steady strategy to gain equality for women by bringing very specific cases to the Supreme Court. So many of the legal freedoms we women enjoy today are a direct result of RBG’s strategy to equate sex discrimination with race discrimination. Her most famous cases dealt with women serving on juries, laws preferring men as estate administrators, military benefits being applied differently to the families of servicemen and servicewomen, and widowers not being able to collect benefits while caring for children. Although these cases were important, the most important aspect of those cases was getting the Supreme Court to slowly recognize sex discrimination as being unconstitutional, even without an ERA ammendment.
Sisters In Law was well written. A book like this with intersecting biographies could easily have become confusing, but Hirshman made it easy to keep everything straight. No small feat considering I read this via audiobook and that usually makes getting confused much easier.
