July 7th
On the morning of July 7, 1981, a 51-year-old judge from Arizona named Sandra Day O’Connor was about to receive a phone call that would rewrite American history. She was, at the time, a respected but largely unknown member of the Arizona Court of Appeals. By the end of the day, her name would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country — and the United States Supreme Court, which had been an exclusively male institution for 191 years, would never be the same.
President Ronald Reagan stepped before the cameras that day and announced his choice to fill the seat of retiring Justice Potter Stewart. He had made a campaign promise to put a woman on the nation’s highest court, and he intended to keep it. His nominee, he declared, was “a person for all seasons” — Sandra Day O’Connor. She would become, if confirmed, the first woman ever to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.
The road to that announcement had been anything but easy. O’Connor had graduated near the top of her class at Stanford Law School in 1952 — and then discovered that not a single law firm in California would hire a woman as an attorney. One offered to take her on as a legal secretary. She refused, found work in the public sector, and slowly, stubbornly, built a career that climbed from county prosecutor to state senator to judge. She had spent her whole life being told where women did and did not belong.
When her nomination reached the Senate that fall, the confirmation was historic in its own right. After decades of bruising battles over court appointments, the Senate voted to confirm Sandra Day O’Connor by a margin of 99 to 0 — unanimous. On September 25, 1981, she was sworn in, and the picture of the Supreme Court of the United States was permanently changed.
For the next quarter century, O’Connor would become one of the most influential justices in modern history — frequently the pivotal swing vote on a closely divided court, the deciding voice in some of the most consequential cases of her era. But it all traced back to that July morning, when a girl who had grown up on a remote cattle ranch in Arizona answered the phone and learned that the door which had been locked for nearly two centuries was, at last, about to open.
Also On This Day…
1937 — A Single Gunshot Plunges Asia Into War On the night of July 7, 1937, Japanese and Chinese soldiers exchanged fire near the ancient Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing, in a confused and tense standoff that began when the Japanese claimed one of their soldiers had gone missing. That soldier soon turned up unharmed — but the shooting had already started, and it would not stop. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident is widely regarded as the spark that ignited the Second Sino-Japanese War, a brutal eight-year conflict that would claim millions of lives and eventually merge into the larger inferno of World War II in the Pacific. A skirmish at a centuries-old stone bridge had set the entire world on a collision course.
1940 — A Liverpool Boy Who Would Keep the Beat for the World On July 7, 1940, a sickly child named Richard Starkey was born in a poor neighborhood of Liverpool, England. He spent much of his early childhood in and out of hospitals, missing so much school that he barely learned to read and write. But somewhere along the way the boy fell in love with drumming — and he would grow up to become Ringo Starr, the steady heartbeat behind the most famous band the world has ever known. As the drummer for The Beatles, he helped reshape popular music forever, sang beloved tunes like “Yellow Submarine,” and proved that the kid the world had counted out could end up keeping time for an entire generation.
2005 — London Endures a Morning of Terror On the morning of July 7, 2005, terrorists carried out four coordinated bombings on London’s transit system during the busy rush hour, striking three Underground trains and a double-decker bus. Fifty-two innocent commuters lost their lives, and hundreds more were wounded, in what became known simply as 7/7 — the deadliest attack on British soil in decades. Yet in the hours and days that followed, Londoners answered horror with quiet, unbreakable resolve. They returned to their trains and their buses, refusing to let fear win, and the world watched a wounded city stand back up with its head held high.
From a rancher’s daughter who shattered a 191-year-old barrier, to a bridge that lit the fuse of war, to a Liverpool boy who drummed his way into history — July 7th is a reminder that single days can turn the course of nations and the lives of millions. And that even on its darkest mornings, the human spirit has an extraordinary way of standing back up.
