Sandra Day O’Connor was born on August 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas, and spent much of her youth on her family’s Lazy B cattle ranch in Arizona, per People. It was an unforgiving life full of hard work, but it taught her many valuable lessons she carried with her throughout her life. “It is possible to survive and even make a living in that formidable terrain,” she recalled in her memoir “Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest.” “The Day family did it for years: but it was never easy. It takes planning, patience, skill, and endurance.”
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O’Connor entered college at 16 and Stanford Law at 19, where she was the only woman in her class. Her career after law school included serving as an assistant attorney general for Arizona and later as a state senator, where she rose to the role of majority leader — the first female to do so not just in Arizona but across the entire United States. O’Connor said her time in the legislature helped her in her later role as a Supreme Court justice. “You certainly learn to work with people because you want to have as many on board for your position as you can,” she told the Harvard Business Review. “And I think that’s a desirable quality in a judge who is writing an opinion too.”
