The Nine [20]
After blazing through Stanford Law School and graduating in 1952, O’Connor did not receive a single job offer as a lawyer. (The major Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher said she could come to work as a legal secretary.) But O’Connor ignored the slights, as became her custom, and concentrated instead on building a life with her new husband, John. He graduated from Stanford Law a year after she did, and following his army stint in Germany, they settled in the booming but still very small city of Phoenix.
The next years passed in a blur, which was the pace of life O’Connor preferred. She had three boys in six years. She worked first at a small law firm, then as an assistant attorney general. She volunteered for local hospitals and the Salvation Army and worked her way up the hierarchy at the Junior League. She and John, who became a successful lawyer himself, hosted lively barbecues for dozens of people (often including Bill and Nan Rehnquist) at their adobe home in Paradise Valley. Once, according to her biographer Joan Biskupic, the O’Connors staged a campy dedication party for a bridge they had built over their backyard pool. Men wore top hats and tails, with white shorts and sneakers, and women sported gowns and pith helmets. Boiled beef, potatoes, and English muffins were served, and bagpipes provided accompaniment.
Much later, in her chambers at the Supreme Court, O’Connor would demand that her law clerks replicate her own headlong style of living. Marriage, children, career, exercise, culture, politics, volunteer work—she had done it all and everyone else should, too. Female clerks were required to join in her three-mornings-a-week exercise class at the Court gym. (Late in her tenure, she added salsa dancing to the workouts.) Male clerks planning weddings were ordered to get in shape. (One stuffed an ice cream cone in his desk drawer so she wouldn’t see it.) Clerks dozing from exhaustion would be instructed to join her at special private showings at the National Gallery. An annual clerks’ picnic by the cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin would (and often did) take place even in the rain. For O’Connor, even holidays were occasions for exertion. For Halloween, she demanded that her clerks decorate a pumpkin with a newsy theme. After 9/11, there was “Osama Bin Pumpkin” a year later, a Martha Stewart pumpkin—wearing prison garb.
The formative political event of O’Connor’s years in Phoenix took place in 1969, when her local state senator moved to Washington to take a job in the Nixon administration. Though she had been an assistant attorney general for only four years—and women politicians were still a novelty—she persuaded the governor, Jack Williams, to appoint her to fill the seat. O’Connor took to legislative work immediately, building coalitions, making deals, pushing bills through the process. The job suited her personality. She got along with people and liked to get things done. O’Connor came of age when Barry Goldwater dominated the Arizona Republican Party—and she supported him for president in 1964—but her work in politics never had a particularly ideological edge. Fittingly, one of the first bills she sponsored was to repeal a 1913 law that prohibited women from working more than eight hours a day. To O’Connor, this was paternalism, not protection.
O’Connor took the same pragmatic approach to the subject of abortion, displaying the kind of artful political tacking on the issue that she would show on the Court. She had taken office when a drive was on to change abortion laws in the state legislatures, and Arizona was no exception. At the time she became a senator, Arizona law prohibited abortions except to save a woman