ABSTRACT
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Florence Allen to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934, it took feminists in the United States nearly fifty years of campaigning to persuade a president to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court—Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981. In 2009, after President Obama appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the US returned to its high-water mark of two women out of nine justices on the US Supreme Court, and exceeded that in 2010 with the appointment of Justice Elena Kagan. 2 Still, just over a quarter of all state and federal judges in the United States are women—a far cry from half. The record since the Carter Administration demonstrates that without organized pressure, women lose ground; their progress can be reversed. Despite evidence of judicial reversals, new groups seeking to increase the number of women in politics ignore the judiciary, and groups who once championed this cause have moved on to other issues. If we want to progress and to move from minority to parity, feminists need to mobilize again, organize, and make our strongest argument.
