This post is part of a series about my new book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, co-authored with Hannah Brenner Johnson. The first post offered an overview of the book. Today’s sheds some light on how we found the women profiled in the book.
More than a decade ago, when President Obama announced the nominations of Sonya Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010, Hannah and I noticed media’s fixation on their single status and appearance. Headlines like “Then Comes the Marriage Question” and “Elena Kagan v. Sonia Sotomayor: Who Wore it Better”? were common. We didn’t recall reading much about the appearance or marital status of John Roberts or Samuel Alito when President Bush nominated them just a few years earlier. This led us to conduct an empirical media study. We read and coded for dozens of variables every newspaper article written about a Supreme Court nominee in the New York Times and Washington Post from the early 1970s through 2010. The study revealed, unsurprisingly, that women are portrayed and judged in explicitly gendered and often unfavorable ways, specifically in the context of motherhood, marital status, sexuality, and appearance.
From the thousands of articles we read for our media study one, in particular, stood out. The New York Times ran a short piece about President Nixon’s shortlist in 1971, when he faced two vacancies. Two women’s names appeared among six possible candidates—Sylvia Bacon and Mildred Lillie who, according to the article, fortunately had no children and “maintained a bathing beauty figure” even in her 50s. Of course this commentary fit the thesis of our media study, but that wasn’t what captured our attention. We wondered…who were these women? Why had we never heard of them before? How many other women were shortlisted by presidents before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice?
To answer these questions, I spent a lot of time in archives. Some of this material is available online, but mostly it meant traveling across the country to comb through stacks of files housed in presidential libraries. (I could write another book about that experience alone!) We did have work from other scholars, like Christine Nemacheck’s Strategic Selection, to build on. Sometimes the shortlists were relatively easy to identify mixed among paperwork on judicial appointments. For example, I found Gerald Ford’s list in his papers housed on the University of Michigan campus and you can see it for yourself now on his Wikipedia page—at the bottom of a typed list you’ll find two women’s names handwritten, “Judge Kennedy” as in Cornelia Kennedy and “Carla Hills.” Sometimes we had to rely on a combination of oral histories, news stories, and personal accounts. (Only one president has publicly posted his shortlist, even when not faced with a vacancy—Trump’s shortlist is available on the White House website.)
We found nine women who appeared on presidential shortlists going back to the 1930s.
Learning about the shortlisting process for the Supreme Court exposed broader themes about how shortlists are used (or misused) when vetting for leadership roles generally. To be sure, one has to be on the shortlist to be selected. But sometimes shortlists create the appearance of diversity while preserving the status quo. That’s how Nixon’s functioned. He didn’t even believe women should vote, but he wanted their votes which is why he included Bacon and Lillie. More on that in a future post.
Comments