Fort Worth, Texas -- YOU COULD ALMOST HEAR the "Huh?"s reverberating from behind newspapers nationwide at the news that Sandra Day O'Connor was inducted Friday into the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. But it's true.

The 72-year-old Supreme Court justice attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the museum's fantastic new $21 million facility. In her acceptance speech, she reminisced about her childhood on an Arizona ranch -- wanting to be a cattle rancher, riding on roundups and working. Indeed, she pointed out, ranch work was her first experience with all-male colleagues. In the end, she became "the first cowgirl to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court . . . riding herd on lower-court judges." But at heart, she concluded, "I will always be a cowgirl."

Justice O'Connor joins 157 others who've been inducted since the museum's humble beginnings, in 1975, in Hereford, Texas. The 33,000-square-foot museum, designed by David M. Schwarz, was the result of some fancy fund raising by a small group of Fort Worth residents, including members of the Bass family.

The two-story, sand-colored brick structure could not be more perfectly situated, straddling as it does Cowtown's mutually exclusive worlds of livestock and high culture. On one side stand the livestock exhibition halls; on the other, the Kimbell and Amon Carter museums.

By any measure, the women whose names are etched in glass around the colonnaded rotunda seem an incongruous lot. The better known ones range from the predictable