Until this week I didn't know that the Court had no real provision for a woman behind the bench — the robing room off the courtroom was built for men, with the nearest facilities for a woman some distance away, and a certain amount of quiet carpentry followed her arrival. Small plumbing, in the end, is what an institution notices first.
The Senate vote was 99 to 0; one senator was absent, so the record shows ninety-nine in favour and nobody against. As it happens, she came to it from Arizona, where she'd sat as a state judge and before that led the Republicans in the state senate — the first woman to be majority leader of any state senate in the country. That was 1981, and she was fifty-one.
And then the oath, twice, because there are two of them: the constitutional one that every federal officer says, and the judicial one about doing equal right to poor and rich alike. Chief Justice Burger administered them in the robing room, white-haired and in black; in the photograph she's got her right hand up and her left on the Bible, pink collar at the neck of the robe, and a man in a dark suit is holding the book steady along with a little card with the words printed on it, in case anybody lost their place.
Marguerite, that's the bit no architect ever drafts. A courthouse can take a constitutional amendment in its stride and then need a carpenter and about twenty feet of pipe to cope with one new judge.
There was a printing job in it too — the Court's stationery and the door plates had read "Mr. Justice" for the better part of a century, and after 1981 they went to plain "Justice." Engravers before carpenters, or thereabouts.