What the government owed to one sex, it owed to the other. Full stop.
So said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, summarizing her dedicated struggle for female (and male) equality that began early in her life. As a young married mother and top-of-the-class law student at Harvard, she could only land secretarial jobs. She would put an end to this.
When she applied for positions, she told her interlocutors three things: “I was Jewish, a woman and a mother. The first raised one eyebrow; the second, two; and the third made me indubitably inadmissible.”
Fueled by her innate zealousness and the uncompromising support of her husband Martin “Marty” Ginsburg, whom she married in 1954, Ginsburg continued fighting for, and legally securing, her goal.
For the layperson, constitutional law can be obscure. Ginsburg viewed its complexities as related threads that coalesced into an encompassing, ethical whole.
That viewpoint was on display as she first argued before the Supreme Court in the 1970s. She focused on inequalities experienced by men in order to drive home the inequalities of women — that aforementioned “full stop” equation.
This diminutive (under 5 feet), 100-pound force of constitutional acumen with a soft-spoken voice argued six cases before the Supreme Court, 1973-1978, and won five of them — one by a majority of 7-1!
Ginsburg, the first tenured woman on the Columbia University Law faculty, argued cases for the ACLU for 20 years and headed the agency’s first Women’s Rights Project.
In 1993 President Bill Clinton announced his choice of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the Supreme Court. As the second female justice on America’s highest court, she would now bring her strong arguments into the deliberations of the Court itself.
A liberal (and often dissenting) voice, she had one of her greatest legal victories in 1996 when she wrote the majority opinion declaring that a state-supported military academy’s all-male admissions policy was unconstitutional.
The public associates Ginsburg with the protection of women’s reproductive rights and other gender-related issues. People love her or dispute her mainly on these grounds. But no one can argue the resolute march of her convictions. Ask her family, her doctors and G-d.
Her mother died of cancer in 1950, the day before 17-year-old Ruth graduated Thomas Jefferson High School. Marty Ginsburg was diagnosed with an aggressive form of testicular cancer in the first years of their marriage. Ruth stayed in law school while raising their daughter and typed notes for his law classes. Marty survived, and lived a wonderful life until he died of cancer in 2010.
In 2009, Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Despite arduous treatment, she never missed an oral argument. She beat this particularly recalcitrant cancer until 2018, when two small tumors showed up on her lungs. Her pancreatic cancer had metastasized.
Always diminutive, her body disappeared into itself — but never her spirit, that dazzling smile or uncontrollable giggle.
Ginsburg died less than an hour before the start of Rosh Hashanah on Sept. 18, surely a sign of completion.
As she stood on the White House Lawn with Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg offered a tribute to her mother: “I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve, and daughters are cherished as much as sons.”
One woman standing with the flower-bearing mourners outside the Supreme Court building this week said it best. “I never knew her personally. But she knew me.”
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