Sisters in Law by Linda Hirshman Page B

Republic.”

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Goldwater Girl and Card-Carrying Member of the ACLU
    DEMOCRACY AND DISTRUST
    Professor Ginsburg wasn’t the only young woman lawyer cataloguing laws that made unwarranted distinctions between men and women. So, as it happened, was newly elected State Senator Sandra O’Connor.
    O’Connor’s files from the early 1970s, like Ginsburg’s, might be titled “The Unexpectedly Radical Feminist Clippings File of an Apparently Unthreatening Professional Woman.” In 1971, O’Connor was reading about the edgy new feminists of Los Angeles and single-by-choice New York radicals in filthy Greenwich Village walk-ups.
    Most strikingly, State Senator O’Connor obtained—and kept—the 1970 special issue on women from the distinctly cosmopolitan Atlantic Monthly . Why, the introduction to the special issue asked, were “American women, while enjoying more material, political, and social advantages than any other women in history . . . nonetheless so discontent with their lot?” And the editors got an earful. The writer Catherine Drinker Bowen speculated that the Revolution was imminent, in light of the falling birthrate, since, surely, “no woman can devote a life to the raising of [only] two [kids].” Paula Stern, fresh out of graduate school at Harvard, described marriage as a refuge from a hostile world and an agency in making sure it stayed bad in the future: “Once married she can stop fighting cultural stereotypes and start teaching them to her children.”
    Sociologist and women’s rights activist Alice Rossi told the magazine the insulting stories she had been gathering from working women, stories that must have been resonant and reassuring to the Stanford law grad who was offered only a secretarial berth when she applied. “I never wanted to teach grade school children,” one woman had told Rossi. “But I found so much prejudice and resentment against me in my first job in an architectural firm . . . that I couldn’t take it. I left and switched to teaching art. At least I feel welcome in a school.” Another reported that she “had the experience last year of seeing a job I had filled for two years upgraded when it was filled by a man, at double the salary I was paid for the same work. College-trained women are lumped with the secretarial and clerical staff, while college-trained men are seen as potential executives. A few years of this and everybody is behaving according to what is expected of them, not what they are capable of.”
    Rossi’s article included this now-commonplace but then-revolutionary insight: “If [women] are vital and assertive, they are rejected as ‘aggressive bitches out to castrate men.’ If they are quiet and unassuming, they are rejected as ‘unlikely to amount to much.’” O’Connor struggled visibly to thread that same needle. She ran for office, but she ran home to make dinner every night for her husband and three sons. In an early speech to women students at the local university, she extolled the virtues of dependence on a male spouse: “Those women who are fortunate enough to have husbands or other means to support them can truly enjoy the freedom of choice to select that work which is most satisfying to them, and to select work of a part time or occasional nature.” She repeated without irony John O’Connor’s joke about her career in speeches about how to combine love and work. “I think it is a tribute to American democracy,” O’Connor’s lawyer husband said, “when a cook, who moonlights as a janitor, can be elected to high public office.”
    When O’Connor wrote to President Nixon in 1971 on the subject of the two Supreme Court nominations he had before him, it was merely “to encourage [him] to consider” for appointment “one of the well-qualified women lawyers in our country today.” Butshe