I care very much about women and their progress. I didn’t go march in the streets, but when I was in the Arizona Legislature, one of the things that I did was to examine every single statute in the state of Arizona to pick out the ones that discriminated against women and get them changed.

Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don't know how much history young women today know about those battles.

Historically, it took a long time before the court took any women law clerks. Finally, it did, but the numbers have never matched very effectively the percentages of law graduates out of graduating classes. We have far more than we ever did before and it's continued to grow, but it isn't a nice match yet.

If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.

The abortion cases produced an enormous amount of mail to my chambers, vastly more than to the other chambers, I am sure. I sometimes thought there wasn't a woman in the United States who didn't write me a letter on one side or the other of that issue.

Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances.

I suspect that over time we will rely increasingly, or take notice at least increasingly, on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues. [Doing so] may not only enrich our own country's decisions, I think it may create that all important good impression.