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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Female justice opened doors for a generation

Jamie Tobias Neely The Spokesman-Review

Brigitte Lacombe’s photograph of Sandra Day O’Connor transformed America’s first woman Supreme Court justice into an icon.

This black and white picture, reprinted over and over in recent days, glows with authenticity. Lacombe captured O’Connor in a moment both soft and shrewd, both smart and serene. Framed by white curls, her face looks as recognizable as George Washington’s on a dollar bill.

To women in the law profession, says Gonzaga professor Mary Pat Treuthart, she was a foremother. To the rest of us, she loomed as the nation’s wise older woman, the archetypical grandmother that earlier generations too often relegated to the shadows of public life, finally invited into the hallowed chambers during our own time.

In 1981 in Spokane, when O’Connor was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, no woman had ever served as judge in Spokane County’s Superior Court.

Spokane’s own O’Connor, Kathleen, was elected in 1988. Tari Eitzen became the second woman Superior Court judge in 1994. Today, five of the 12 Superior Court judges are women. Four of the five, like Sandra Day O’Connor, now are mothers.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Eitzen says. “When you think of how it’s changed, it was a whole different ballgame when I started.”

In Superior Court, as in the U.S. Supreme Court, and in workplaces throughout the country, the presence of female energy transformed the culture.

Treuthart, who teaches and writes on constitutional law and women’s rights, describes Sandra Day O’Connor’s uniquely feminine writing style. She wrote, Treuthart says, like many women speak.

Her decisions displayed not the straightforward, linear decisions of her male predecessors, but the richer, more circular and somewhat circuitous reasoning of women. She employed metaphors of home, not sports.

She appeared to follow the law and her own conscience over her political loyalties, and it’s telling that now that she’s retiring, it’s women on the left who will miss her most.

America’s professional grandmother, she twinkles sagely in her photographs, and like other silver-haired conservative female icons – former first lady Barbara Bush comes to mind – she’s a sharp, independent thinker, open-minded on abortion and women’s rights, and occasionally tart tongued.

She grew up as a cowgirl on an Arizona ranch, a background that may have forged her pragmatic, commonsensical approach to the law. She believed in self-reliance. She seemed always to be self-possessed.

My own grandmother grew up on a Western ranch. She emerged with an indomitable sense of energy and discipline and ran her own business for 40 years. In the ‘70s it became fashionable for a time for women and men to venture away from their commitments, to go off in search of self-discovery. I remember her scoffing in her kitchen at one such psychological pilgrim. “Find herself!” she’d exclaim. “Why on earth would a body need to do that?”

My former cowgirl grandma simply never felt that need. She was always right where she left herself, full of opinions and in vivid color. Red hair, shocking pink nails, rose-colored Buick.

O’Connor’s style was steelier, more restrained. But she too learned early about rain that couldn’t be counted on and hard work that could.

Like many professional women pioneers, she believed in quietly doing her best. She likely never dreamed of becoming a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Even for the women of the baby boom who followed her, it was receiving the education and landing a first job that consumed their dreams — not plotting the course of a 40-year career.

Eitzen recalls her own career path to a judge’s position. She simply never imagined the possibility. “I just felt so darned lucky to get to go to law school,” Eitzen says.

These women often arrived in their careers with a sense of doubt lurking in the background. They knew few women who had attempted their jobs; always loomed the possibility the world lacked a public space for their talents.

Today, the young women Eitzen and Treuthart teach in their law classes at GU arrive unencumbered by these memories of the past.

“They don’t have that imposter feeling,” Eitzen says. “They don’t doubt they can do it all. They’re just really bold and smart.”

They carry this conviction because of women like America’s Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and for that matter, Eitzen and Treuthart and their own mothers, too. The world opened up a public place for the older women in their lives. Why should they ever doubt it would do the same for them?