Summary: A joint biography by Linda Hirshman examines how the first two women to serve on the Supreme Court have used their power to change the world.
Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg come from two different worlds. Linda Hirshman’s new joint biography on the two looks into their past and how they are able to come together to be allies in the fight for women.
O’Connor is a life-long Republican that was raised on a western ranch. She started her legal career as the majority leader of the Arizona Senate before being nominated by President Reagan in 1981 to the Supreme Court to be the first woman to ever serve as a Justice.
Ginsburg was nominated 12 years later by President Clinton to the Supreme Court. She was born and raised to a Russian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn. She has served as a professor, litigator, and advocate for women’s rights.
The book opens with the case where the women first worked together in 1996 to require Virginia Military Institute to admit women. O’Connor was asked by the senior justice of the majority to write the opinion for the ruling but she passed it on to Ginsburg, “This should be Ruth’s.”
The women have completely different approaches to women’s rights but in the end have the same goal.
Source: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/09/01/npr-books-thread-sisters-in-law
Photo: jewishbookcouncil.org