Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are the two most powerful women in American history (so far). When they graduated from law school in the 1950s, the firms felt free to tell the future Justices that they would never hire a woman to practice law. By 1993, the two women had the best jobs in the legal profession. For life. The pair -- one Republican, one Democrat, one an Arizona rancher's daughter, one from Brooklyn -- figured out almost identical rules for succeeding. The times are a little better now, but things are still far from perfect. We can learn a lot from how these two heroines made their way. Here are real-life rules for making it in a hostile public world.
1. Never internalize your own oppression.
O'Connor and Ginsburg always believed they were entitled to everything a man with similar credentials could expect. In 1952, the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher interviewed a young Stanford Law School graduate, Sandra Day. She thought they were going to offer her a job practicing law, but instead they said they could take her on as a legal secretary. "No," she said, refusing to become a secretary despite having no other prospect of any employment at all. She looked around until she found a district attorney, who had once hired a woman, and offered to work for free until he got a new appropriation to pay her. "Once I got in the door," she said years later, "there was never any further problem."
2. Be offended.
When Ginsburg arrived at Harvard Law School in 1956, she had to attend a dinner at Dean Erwin Griswold's house, where the Dean asked each of the eight women in the entering class how they justified taking the place of a man. Ruth's response was humble and polite, but she took offense. Starting right about the time of the women's movement in 1970, she began telling that story about the good Dean. She told it so many times in the ensuing years that he sent a letter to the law school paper, asserting he had only been kidding.
3. If you can get even, get even.
Many years after O'Connor declined the invitation to become a legal secretary, Gibson Dunn asked her to give a speech at the celebration of their 100th anniversary. She regaled them with the story of their bigoted and discouraging introduction all those years ago. Later, she told David Letterman it was the most fun speech she ever gave. In 1984, the law firm of King and Spalding turned a woman away, telling the Supreme Court that they were a partnership and did not have to take women, regardless of what the Civil Rights Act seemed to say. O'Connor cast the crucial vote to take the case, and the court ruled overwhelmingly that law firms could not discriminate against women.
4. If you can't get even, hold your ground.
Early in O'Connor's tenure on the Court, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. delivered an over-the-top scathing and personal dissent to one of her opinions. She never said anything. Brennan's political skills in the Supreme Court were legendary, but he was never able to sweet-talk O'Connor into making a majority for him when he needed one. He called his dissent against her "the worst mistake I ever made."
5. If you can't get even no matter how long you wait, heed the advice Ginsburg got from her mother-in-law on her wedding day. "Sometimes," she said, handing Ginsburg a pair of earplugs, "it pays to be a little deaf."
When O'Connor was working on the Equal Rights Amendment, her political godfather, Barry Goldwater, opposed it fiercely. She made herself a little deaf and never said a word to him about it. When she was nominated for the Supreme Court, conservatives from Arizona opposed her. The still influential Arizona conservative Goldwater took them out in one line: Anyone who was against O'Connor, he announced, "should be spanked."
6. Living well is the best revenge.
When Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993, someone sent her a fax saying that the guys in her law school class used to call her by the nickname "Bitch." "Better bitch than mouse," Ginsburg responded, looking back on her journey from the derisive Harvard Law School scene to the highest court in the land.
Linda Hirshman is the author of the new book Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.
Image of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor courtesy of HarperCollins.
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