Free When Everything Changed by Gail Collins

EPILOGUE

    S upreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor moved into the new century at the peak of her power and influence. At 75, she was healthy and energetic, and in love with her work, which she pursued with a vigor that continued to exhaust her youthful clerks. When the nation’s highest court took up a critical constitutional issue, the outcome depended, more often than not, on her opinion. But her husband, John, was failing. A victim of Alzheimer’s disease, he had been stable for a number of years, continuing to accompany his wife on their nightly rounds of the Washington social scene and spending his days in her office, chatting with the staff and visitors. Then in 2005 he began to decline. Determined not to turn his care over to outsiders, Justice O’Connor resigned at the end of the court term in June, going overnight from the most influential woman in the nation to a retiree, alone with a husband who was slipping away. “ In those first days after her announcement she didn’t answer the phone too often,” reported Jeffrey Toobin. “She sat in her office and cried.”
    Her sacrifice could not save John from the curtain that was falling on his mind. In 2007 she was no longer able to care for him. He was moved into an assisted-living center, where he was miserable and talked of suicide—until he met another Alzheimer’s patient and fell in love. It was not unusual, doctors said, for people whose memories of their former life had vanished to suddenly find romance with someone new, and it was often a terrible trauma for the loved ones they had forgotten. But O’Connor regarded it as a blessing. Her son told a Phoenix television station that his mother was “thrilled” that his father was happy, and would visit with John while he sat on the porch swing, holding hands with his new love, blissfully unaware that the stranger he was chatting with was his wife of fifty-five years, and the woman who had given up a Supreme Court seat for him.

    No social movement, no matter how liberating, can bring permanent happiness to the people it touches. We grow old; we lose loved ones. We fall short of our greatest goals and fail to live up to our most optimistic visions of our own character. When history opened up to American women in the late twentieth century, it did not offer them perfect bliss. It gave them the opportunity to face the dark moments on their own terms and to exalt in the spaces between. Here is an update on what it brought to some of the women in this story.

    When the women’s liberation movement was beginning to erupt in New York and Los Angeles, Louise Meyer Warpness was living in a different world, pursuing a Wyoming farm life that was closer to the patterns of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. But in America, change always arrives eventually. Louise’s daughters worked outside the home, and the youngest lived with her future husband before they married. One of her granddaughters is married to an African-American, and another passed through a period of problems with drugs and men before she settled down to marry the father of her baby.
    Warpness still lives in the valley where she raised her family. “As I’ve watched her grow older, I just appreciate her more,” says her daughter Jo. “She does her craft work, her needlework. She is such an artist with that. And still such a wise, wise woman. I still admire my mom to the utmost…. I can call her, and if I’m down, she’ll say, ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ after I’ve said hello. She just knows us inside. She’ll do anything for anybody. And still so intelligent. She has a brain.”

    In 2002 Sujay Cook became the first woman elected president of the Hampton Ministers’ Conference, the largest gathering of black ministers in the world and the place where she had been once snubbed by the powerful minister who refused to shake her hand. (He, in fact, was the one who nominated her.) Coretta Scott King came to the installation. So did