If Elena Kagan is confirmed by the Senate, there will be three women on the Supreme Court for the first time. This is a measure of how far women have come. Two will be single and childless. This may be a measure of something else entirely.

There certainly won’t be a shortage of parents on the court. Antonin Scalia alone has nine children. John G. Roberts and Samuel Alito each have two, Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy each have three and Clarence Thomas has a son from his first marriage and a grandnephew he began raising after the child’s father was sentenced to prison.

Nor is it a given that for a woman to find a seat on the highest court she must choose career over children. While Sonia Sotomayor is divorced and childless and Kagan never married and has no children, Sandra Day O’Connor has three sons and was married for 56 years before her husband died of complications from Alzheimer’s in 2009. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in turn, is the mother of two; an introvert married for 56 years to an extrovert, she has one of the most endearing marriages in Washington.

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The question, then — about the legal arena in particular and society in general — is what, if anything, has changed since the years when O’Connor and Ginsburg rose to the court. The world got better for women, right? More accepting, accommodating and flexible?