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Degree in hand, O'Connor collided head-on with the legal profession's prejudice against women: "I interviewed with law firms in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but none had ever hired a woman before as a lawyer, and they were not prepared to do so." Among the firms to which she applied was Los Angeles' Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. One of its partners was William French Smith. The firm offered to hire her—as a legal secretary.
O'Connor took a job as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, Calif., while John, whom she had married in 1952, finished law school. When he joined the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps, the two lived in Frankfurt, West Germany, for three years, where she worked as a civilian lawyer for the Quartermaster Corps. They returned to the U.S., moving to Phoenix in 1957, when the first of their three sons was born. All the children attended a Jesuit-run high school in Phoenix (Sandra O'Connor is an Episcopalian, her husband a former Roman Catholic). Scott, 23, graduated from Stanford last year; Brian, 21, attends Colorado College; and Jay, 19, is a sophomore at Stanford. After a brief fling at running her own law firm in a Phoenix suburb, where she handled everything from leases to drunken driving cases, she spent five years as a full-time housewife. She was a typical joiner: president of the Junior League, adviser to the Salvation Army, auxiliary volunteer at a school for blacks and Hispanics, member of both town and country private clubs. "Finally," she recalled, "I decided I needed a paid job so that my life would be more orderly."
That was in 1965. She spent four years as an assistant attorney general in Arizona. Appointed by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to fill a vacancy as a state senator in 1969, she ran successfully for the senate in 1970 and 1972. Her 17 admiring Republican colleagues (all but two were men) elected her majority leader in 1972.
O'Connor's devotion to detail soon became legendary. She once offered an amendment to a bill merely to insert a missing, but important, comma. As majority leader, she learned to use both tact and toughness to cajole colleagues into achieving consensus on divisive issues. When the usual flurry of eleventh-hour legislation delayed adjournment of the Arizona legislature in 1974, one committee chairman was furious at what he considered O'Connor's failure to finish up the senate's business. Said he to O'Connor: "If you were a man, I'd punch you in the mouth." Snapped the lady right back: "If you were a man, you could."
While critics focus on her ERA and abortion votes, O'Connor notes that her legislative achievements ranged from tax relief to flood-control funding to restoring the death penalty. "She worked interminable hours and read everything there was," says Democratic State Senator Alfredo Gutierrez. "It was impossible to win a debate with her. We'd go on the floor with a few facts and let rhetoric do the rest. Not Sandy. She would overwhelm you with her knowledge."