Sandra Day O'Connor

A mild-mannered jurist who thinks carefully before she speaks or makes decisions, Sandra Day O'Connor does not project the figure of a trailblazer. But she became exactly that. She was the daughter of cattle ranchers Henry Day and Ada Wilkey. She was a true child of the frontier, learning how to brand cattle and run a household on her parents' 155,000 acre ranch. She later wrote about her childhood in the autobiography "Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest." But when she became of school age, her parents sent her to El Paso to live with her maternal grandmother, Mamie Scott Wilkey, who she said had the greatest influence on her life. In school, she was a high achiever and graduated from high school at the age of 16, then she graduated from Stanford Law School third in a class of 102. Ironically, the valedictorian was future fellow Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, whom she briefly dated. She married in 1952 and sought work in major law firms. But women