Early Life and Education
She was born in El Paso, Texas, to Harry Alfred Day, a rancher, and Ada Mae (Wilkey). She grew up on a cattle ranch near Duncan, Arizona. She later wrote a book with her brother, H. Alan Day, Lazy B : Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American West, about her childhood experiences on the ranch. For most of her early schooling, O'Connor lived in El Paso with her maternal grandmother, and attended public schools and the Radford School for Girls, a private school. She graduated sixth in her class at Austin High School in El Paso in 1946. She attended Stanford University, where she received her B.A. in economics in 1950. She continued at the Stanford Law School for her LL.B.. There, she served on the Stanford Law Review with its presiding editor in chief, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was the class valedictorian, and whom she briefly dated during law school.
On December 20, 1952 she married John Jay O'Connor III. They had three sons: Scott, Brian, and Jay. Her husband suffered from Alzheimer's disease for nearly twenty years until his death in 2009, and she has become involved in raising awareness of the disease.
O'Connor served as Assistant Attorney General of Arizona 1965–69 until she was appointed to fill a vacancy in the Arizona State Senate. She was re-elected to the State Senate in 1973 and became the first women to serve as its Majority Leader. In 1975 she was elected to the Maricopa County Superior Court and in 1979 was elevated to the Arizona State Court of Appeals. She served on the Court of Appeals until 1981 when she was appointed to the Supreme Court.
Read more about this topic: Sandra Day O'Connor
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 6:25.26.
Jesus.
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)