Essay On Sandra Day O Connor

912 Words2 Pages

Alyssa Terry

Freshman Year Experience

Professor Allen

Final Paper

12/16/2013

Sandra Day O’Connor

There are many people who have contributed to society as a whole, men and women both. Some have contributed much more than others. One of them being Sandra Day O’Connor. I did not know too much about Sandra Day O’Connor until I read her background history. She was a very significant role in history; she was the first woman to be appointed as a justice in Supreme Court. She proved to the country that it does not matter what your gender is, she showed everyone that she had what it took to make it in the world. She was a very successful woman and a great inspiration to women at this time in the world. Obviously women had a hard time getting to that status with women being looked at as inferior to men. Her dedication, determination, and the fact she changed history drastically is a reason I chose to write my final over her.
“Sandra Day O’Connor was born August 26th, 1930 in El Paso, Texas. Sandra lived the life of the average kid in Texas. She grew up on a farm, working with cattle and working on the ranch day in and day out. Her parents Harry and Ida Mae Day were very proud of their daughter, but wanted her to get a better education. This was sort of impossible because of the area they lived in, which was very remote. Her parents began noticing that she was a very bright daughter; they saw her reading very well by the age of four. Sandra’s parents began researching and found a school in El Paso. The bad part about the school in El Paso was that Sandra would have to go move in with her grandmother to get the education she needed. She was so brilliant she graduated Austin High School at the age of sixteen years old. O’Connor feared...

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... to be very moderately conservative(http://www.biography.com). One of her biggest cases she had to decide on was Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan in 1982(http://www.notablebiographies.com). This case was about Mississippi University denying people into the nursing programmed offered there because of gender(http://www.casebriefs.com). This discrimination was said to go against the Fourteenth Amendment that protects all equal rights for a person(http://www.law.cornell.edu). The court ruled in favor of the school instead of Hogan. They ruled this because “The Petitioner provides no basis for gender-based classifications in its admissions policy”(http://www.casebriefs.com). This was an example that even though Sandra was a woman, she did not make her decision because of gender. She was being very fair when she made the decision to rule in favor of the school.

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