Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her official Supreme Court photo
Friday night I glanced at my phone and recoiled in horror, a response quickly replaced by a tsunami of sorrow. It’s not as if I didn’t know this was coming, but, in a fit of magical thinking, I had wished the inevitability of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death away, as if banishing the thought would keep it from coming true—just proving that someone as focused on logic as I can still fall prey to irrational, wishful thinking.
What was it about this frail, diminutive Jewish grandmother and jurist that prompted such profound emotions? Why did RBG become a cultural icon and rock star, inspire a Saturday Night Live character (not to mention a new American opera and a Hollywood biopic), have her visage emblazoned on thousands of T-shirts and tattoos, and engender the slogan “You can’t spell truth without Ruth”—all attentions that she never sought and were inimical to her shy personality? How did such a tiny, demure, studious woman acquire the moniker the Notorious RBG in parody of the Notorious B.I.G., a nearly 400-pound American rapper who died at the age of twenty-four in a hail of bullets in downtown Los Angeles? The answer must lie in the appeal of the incongruous.
RBG was born in Brooklyn in 1933 to Celia and Nathan Bader. Celia’s family had emigrated from Poland; Nathan was an immigrant from Odessa, Russia. Ruth’s childhood was scarred by tragedy: Her older sister died of meningitis when Ruth was nearly two, and her mother, a brilliant woman whose potential was stymied by hard circumstance and the sexist societal mores of the time, died of cervical cancer the day before Ruth graduated from high school. Celia Bader transferred her blunted ambitions to her daughter, encouraging her to always do her best and to remember that getting angry was just a waste of time. Ruth took the lessons to heart, excelling at everything she did, determined to make her mother proud.
She majored in government at Cornell University, decided to go to law school, and fell in love with a young man one year ahead of her at Cornell, who was, she famously said, the first boy she ever met who cared that she had a brain. In 1954 she graduated from Cornell and, a few days later, married Marty Ginsburg, launching a loving, mutually supportive marriage that ended only with his death in 2010.
By 1956, Ruth and Marty were Harvard law students and parents of their first child when Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Ruth cared for the toddler and her husband, excelled in law school, and managed to keep Marty studying through his chemotherapy even though he missed all but two weeks of the semester. Her famous lifelong night-owl habits emerged as she regularly worked until the wee hours, helping Marty and keeping up with her own law studies.
In 1958, Marty graduated and Ruth transferred to Columbia Law School because Marty had been hired as a tax attorney by a New York law firm. Ruth graduated first in her class at Columbia in 1959, having made the Law Review, but had difficulty finding a job because she was a woman. This circumstance, her mother’s experiences, and the many sexist slights she had already endured informed the rest of her professional life as she vowed to use her intellect and legal expertise in seeking equal rights for women.
Any woman who has ever used her own credit card, bought property, taken out a mortgage, not been refused a job or paid less because she was a woman, or not lost a job because she was pregnant owes her good fortune to RBG. She believed that women were people too in the eyes of the Constitution (“We the People …”) and that women, along with men, deserved equal citizenship stature.
In 1971, RBG argued her first brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to extend the rights of women more broadly in Reed v. Reed. The case became the first argued before the Supreme Court to hold that discrimination based on gender was unconstitutional because it denied equal protection under the law (the Fourteenth Amendment). This decision resulted in hundreds of discriminatory laws being changed. In 1972, RBG co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. While at the ACLU, she played a role in thirty-four Supreme Court cases and argued six gender discrimination cases between 1973 and 1976, winning all but one. In arguing Frontiero v. Richardson before the Supreme Court in 1973, she opined that treating men and women differently under the law implied “a judgement of inferiority” and went on to quote the woman’s suffragist Sarah Moore Grimké, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our neck.”
President Clinton appointed Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993, where she continued to champion women’s rights. In 1996 she wrote the majority opinion in US v. Virginia, which required the Virginia Military Institute, a public military college founded in 1839, to finally admit women.
Despite her mother’s admonition about anger being a waste of time or perhaps because of it, Ginsburg increasingly channeled her passion for civil rights on the Supreme Court. The frustrating number of 5–4 Supreme Court decisions brought RBG to yet more groundbreaking accomplishments. During the 2012–2013 term, she broke a half-century record among all justices by reading dissents in five cases. These dissents were always heralded by the wearing of her iconic dissent collar, the jabot with scalloped glass beads, which signaled to the world that Justice Ginsburg was not pleased.
Her most blistering dissent, reflecting her commitment to civil rights for all persons, occurred in 2013. She castigated her fellow justices for their decision in Shelby County v. Holder, a decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “The noble purpose of the Voting Rights Act was to fight voter suppression that has continued to this day,” said RBG. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” she wrote, and killing the Voting Rights Act because it worked too well is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
RBG acknowledged that the fight against voter suppression was not yet won, and, invoking the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice” only, in her words, “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”
The pioneering light of RBG has gone out. She worked tirelessly all her life for civil rights for all and women’s rights in particular. We who haven’t yet shuffled off this mortal coil must assure no backsliding and must work equally tirelessly to move these worthy projects even further forward for the sake of future generations of “We the People.”
—Margan Zajdowicz, LWV-PA Board Member
