Daily Inspiration Quote by Sandra Day O'Connor

A neat paradox sits at the center of O'Connor's line: she disavows gender as a judicial method while insisting gender matters as a historical fact. That's not hedging; it's strategy. As the first woman on the Supreme Court, she’s preempting the two traps waiting for her in 1981: the patronizing celebration of a "woman’s perspective" that reduces her to symbolism, and the hostile suspicion that she’ll smuggle ideology in under the robe. By saying she won’t "decide cases as a woman", she nods to the court’s civic myth of neutral reasoning. By immediately adding "but that I am a woman who will get to decide cases", she punctures that myth just enough to expose what’s been hiding in plain sight: for most of American history, the supposed "universal" judge has been a man, and that contingency has been treated as invisible.

The intent is institutional reassurance with a quiet act of reframing. O'Connor isn’t claiming that women bring an essential, biologically wired jurisprudence; she’s claiming access. Representation here isn’t about mystical empathy. It’s about who gets to sit at the lever of power, whose life experience stops being an outlier in deliberations, whose credibility no longer needs a footnote. The subtext is almost daringly plain: if you think gender doesn’t matter to judging, ask why it mattered so much to keep the bench male.

Context sharpens the line’s force. O'Connor arrived amid culture-war anxieties about feminism, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Her formulation offers legitimacy without surrender, making the historical breakthrough sound like common sense while still insisting it is a breakthrough.