"What was a problem was the excessive amount of media attention to the appointment of the first woman and everything she did. Everywhere that Sandra went, the press was sure to go. And that got tiresome; it was stressful"
About this Quote
Fame is supposed to be a perk of history, not a working condition. O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, punctures the celebratory narrative with a quieter truth: representation can come with a surveillance tax. The problem, she insists, wasn't the job or even opposition in the courtroom. It was the relentless insistence that her very presence be treated as a story that never ended.
The line turns on a telling contrast: "appointment of the first woman" versus "everything she did". The press starts with a landmark and then inflates it into a permanent lens. That shift is the subtext of tokenism: once you're the "first", you stop being allowed to be merely competent, boring, fallible, or private. The institution gets its milestone; the individual gets followed to the grocery store.
O'Connor's phrasing is notably unsentimental. "Excessive", "tiresome", "stressful" are blunt, almost procedural words, the vocabulary of someone trained to weigh evidence, not vent feelings. That restraint is part of the critique. She doesn't accuse the media of malice; she indicts the ecosystem's appetite, the way novelty crowds out substance. The irony is that a justice tasked with deliberation and distance is forced into a celebrity tempo - constant visibility, instant interpretation.
Placed in the early 1980s media landscape, when women's entry into elite institutions was still treated as spectacle, her remark reads like an early diagnosis of a phenomenon now familiar: the first breaks the barrier, then pays in attention that masquerades as progress.
The line turns on a telling contrast: "appointment of the first woman" versus "everything she did". The press starts with a landmark and then inflates it into a permanent lens. That shift is the subtext of tokenism: once you're the "first", you stop being allowed to be merely competent, boring, fallible, or private. The institution gets its milestone; the individual gets followed to the grocery store.
O'Connor's phrasing is notably unsentimental. "Excessive", "tiresome", "stressful" are blunt, almost procedural words, the vocabulary of someone trained to weigh evidence, not vent feelings. That restraint is part of the critique. She doesn't accuse the media of malice; she indicts the ecosystem's appetite, the way novelty crowds out substance. The irony is that a justice tasked with deliberation and distance is forced into a celebrity tempo - constant visibility, instant interpretation.
Placed in the early 1980s media landscape, when women's entry into elite institutions was still treated as spectacle, her remark reads like an early diagnosis of a phenomenon now familiar: the first breaks the barrier, then pays in attention that masquerades as progress.
Quote Details
| Topic | Stress |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Sandra
Add to List
