Celebrating Civics Learning Week 2026
On February 12, 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stood outside a brand-new high school in Glendale, Arizona, and saw her own name engraved across the front of the building. She called it "quite a thrill." But she also used the moment to say something worth carrying into Women's History Month.
"In those days," she told the students gathered that morning, "women did not hold public office, and no self-respecting high school would have been named for a woman."
She was talking about her own childhood—growing up on the Lazy B Ranch in southeastern Arizona, leaving home for school in El Paso, attending Austin High School. The world she described to those students was one where, as she put it, women were expected to influence public affairs indirectly, not as officeholders, not as judges, not as justices. That world was gone in her lifetime. And she had watched it change, and helped change it.
A Generation of Transformation
By the time she graduated from Stanford Law School in 1952, the transformation was just beginning. The only private sector job offer she received on graduation was as a legal secretary—not because of her record, but because of her gender. She went on to serve as a deputy county attorney, then as an Arizona state senator, then as a judge, then as the first woman on the United States Supreme Court.
And in January 1999, she had a moment she clearly treasured. She described it simply at the Glendale dedication: she had recently had the privilege of administering the oath of office to the five top elected officials in the state of Arizona. They were all women: Governor Jane Hull, Secretary of State Betsey Bayless, Attorney General Janet Napolitano, Treasurer Carol Springer, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Graham Keegan. The first time in American history that women had simultaneously held all five top elected offices in any state.
She wasn't just an observer of that history. She swore them in.
Direct Participation
The shift Justice O'Connor described—from indirect influence to direct participation—didn't happen on its own. It happened because women showed up, ran for office, filed lawsuits, argued cases, and refused to accept the roles they had been assigned. And it happened, O'Connor believed, in part because of education: because young people, women especially, came to understand that the levers of civic life were available to them too.
That belief is at the core of what the O'Connor Institute does. Civic participation for everyone, regardless of gender, background, or circumstance, depends on people knowing they belong in it.
Her Voice, Still Available
The speech Justice O'Connor gave that morning in Glendale is part of the O'Connor Institute Digital Library, the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute's ongoing effort to preserve and make publicly accessible her full body of work. Speeches, opinions, legislative writings, interviews: decades of her voice, thinking, and advocacy, searchable and free to anyone who wants to engage with them.
That kind of access is not incidental to the Institute's mission. It is part of it. Her story, and the civic vision she spent her career advancing, belongs to every generation that comes after.
