Nancy Drew a Big Draw for Supreme Court’s Female Justices
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor was a big fan of Nancy Drew when she was a child, but she later switched allegiance to Perry Mason and decided she wanted to be a lawyer rather than a detective.
If Sotomayor is confirmed to the Supreme Court, she will have some company. A few years ago, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg confessed that she was a fan, the New York Times reports. Ginsburg said she admired the fictional sleuth because “she was adventuresome, daring, and her boyfriend was a much more passive type than she was.”
Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in her memoir Lazy B, recalled how her father pulled her away from a Nancy Drew mystery to ask her to attend to more pressing business on the ranch: the mercy shooting of a newborn calf being eaten alive by vultures.
“It doesn’t take a big clue to deduce that there’s something between Supreme Court women and Nancy Drew of River Heights, Somewhere, U.S.A., the teenage star of a wholesome series of detective novels that have been in print in some version—dated and updated—since their inception in 1930,” the Times says. “What stuck with these judicial women might be a harder case to crack.”
The article says the Nancy Drew mysteries were often solved with the help of “tidy clues” and coincidence, and “comically smooth sailing” by the heroine, told in less-than-sterling prose. (The words “she said, smiling” accompany a lot of Drew’s dialogue, for example.)
Some have suggested the allure of the tales was that Nancy Drew found fulfillment, not in a man, but in adventurous work. Caroline Reitz of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York says one of the attractions of the novels is that Nancy Drew pursues justice without the real-world complications. “At the end of the day she is her own boss,” Reitz tells the Times. “She can powder her nose and drive off.”
