Sandra Day O’Connor and Women’s Rights

Sandra Day O’Connor and Women’s Rights

NADINE TAUB*

The contribution of Sandra Day O’Connor’s jurisprudence to women’s rights is plainly mixed. She has been an important figure in this area even apart from her role in redefining the reach of civil rights legislation and in the abortion controversy. Given the Court’s increasingly conservative bent, she is likely to stand out more and more.

A forward and back “two-step” seems to characterize Justice O’Connor’s efforts in matters touching on gender equality. The steps forward appear in her clear pronouncements that reject, in various contexts, blatant sexual inequalities that typify our past. However, Justice O’Connor’s all too-frequent failure to recognize inequality in more subtle forms – with its roots in old gender roles and stereotypes – leads to a back-step that often seems to cancel out the forward movement. A look at three areas – the legitimacy of stereo types, the burden necessary to justify sex-based classifications, and the ways to interpret the Due Process Clause – will illustrate this duality.

Perhaps the clearest and best known of Jus tice O’Connor’s stances in support of gender equality came out of her strong stand against the single-sex admissions policy adopted by Missis sippi University for Women, which, as of 1982, was the oldest state-supported all female college in the United States.1 The case, Mississippi Uni versity for Women v. Hogan,2 arose in 1979 when Joe Hogan, an otherwise qualified male nurse,

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