We thought that Nancy Drew was just good old entertainment, loved for decades by preteen girls. But it seems that her influence has been much greater - successful women such as former first lady Laura Bush, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Oprah Winfrey, all proclaim a fondness for the girl detective. In an interview with ABC News, Juan Sotomayor, the brother of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, reveals that Nancy Drew also influenced his sister.
The character appealed to his sister, he said, because of her industry and the fact that she was always persistent, a skill Sotomayor clearly made her own.
When you stop and think about it, Nancy Drew was pretty progressive. She appeared on the literary scene in 1930 and showed remarkable intelligence, practicality, reasoning and logic at a time when entertainment often portrayed women in a polar opposite fashion. Nancy favored brains over beauty. She was independent and fought back rather than quivering in terror in a corner. Take that, Hannah Montana!
