I was probably 11 years old when I saw Inherit the Wind and realized that when I grew up I wanted to be Clarence Darrow as portrayed by Spencer Tracy. Reading Clarence Darrow for the Defense did little to discourage me. On the contrary, it presented the exciting idea that a lawyer could make a difference.
It took a few more years for me to realize that no matter the course of study or the degree, I just couldn’t be Clarence Darrow. There was this little matter of gender. And while I know that there were little girls who, using the same dream, did grow up to be lawyers fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way, I wasn’t one of them.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not need a fantasy to decide she was going to become a lawyer. She just needed to fall in love—or such is the tongue-in-cheek suggestion in one of the recent bestsellers about her life.
In 1950, when Ruth Bader began studying at Cornell University, it was one of only two Ivy League colleges that accepted both men and women and allowed them to attend the same classes. The first thing she did upon her arrival at Cornell was memorize where the women’s bathrooms were, according to the best-selling Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
There was another thing she did at Cornell that changed her life: She met a young man named Marty Ginsburg.
Who we are is often influenced by those we choose to spend our lives with, and how we arrange those lives. Martin David Ginsburg had been studying chemistry when he met Ruth Joan Bader during his last year at Cornell University in 1953. He knew that spending his life with her was more important than what his career would be, and together they started looking into post-graduate study in a field they could share before finally deciding upon the law, and Harvard.
“I have thought deep in my heart,” Marty would confess forty years later, “that Ruth always intended that to be the case.”
They married in June 1954, just after Ruth Bader graduated from Cornell, and Marty (a year older than she was) finished his first year at Harvard Law School. Marty’s two-year Army stint at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, put their attendance at Harvard on hold. While at Fort Sill, Ruth found work at the local Social Security office. When she mentioned to her supervisor that she was pregnant with her first child, a planned trip to Baltimore for additional training was cancelled and she was demoted to a lesser position—at the lowest possible pay grade. It was all legal. It was the 1950s, so lionized and fondly remembered by the tea party.
When Marty’s active duty with the Army ended, the two went to Cambridge to study law at Harvard. She was one of nine women in a class of about 500. But at least they admitted her, which is something that, at the time, Harvard Business School wouldn’t do.
It was during their second year together at Harvard that doctors found a malignant tumor on Marty Ginsburg’s testicle. After his surgery and during his radiation therapy, Ruth had his classmates make carbon copies of their notes in the classes he missed. She would type them up for him every night, and then take dictation from him so she could type his papers. She did all of this while attending her own classes, writing her own papers, and raising their daughter, Jane. It was during this period of her life that she learned that she could get by with an hour or two of sleep every night.
He recovered, received his law degree from Harvard, and found a job in New York, specializing in tax law, his passion. She switched to Columbia University where she made the Law Review, as she had also done at Harvard (the first woman to accomplish that).
Graduating at the top of her class, her name was submitted to Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter—who would not consider a woman as a law clerk. Justice Learned Hand also had a policy against hiring women, lest it inhibit his chronic use of profanity. Nor would liberal Justice William Brennan hire women as his law clerks. She spent two years clerking for Federal Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the Southern District of New York, before learning Swedish and going to Sweden to study civil procedure for a book she co-authored with Anders Bruzelius.
When she returned, she worked as a professor at Rutgers School of Law from 1963 to 1972, when she returned to Columbia Law School after being offered the opportunity to become the first woman tenured professor. It was while she was teaching at Columbia that she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. From Notorious RBG:
Getting to equality would mean attacking on every front. Even if the Supreme Court made abortion legal, as it had just been asked to do, “excessive restrictions on where abortions can be performed and medical benefits that can be applied to abortions would still have to be challenged.” Other priorities, RBG wrote, would be “the right to be voluntarily sterilized”— something white, middle-class women had been discouraged from doing by their doctors—“ and the right not to be involuntarily sterilized”— something women of color and those considered “mentally defective” had been subject to.
The project, wrote RBG, would tackle discrimination in education and training programs, as well as in the availability of mortgages, credit cards, loans, and home rentals; serve women in prison and in the military; and take on “discriminatory confinement of girls in juvenile institutions because of sexual promiscuity.” It would also go after institutions that discriminated against pregnant women.
She argued her first case at the Supreme Court in 1971. She won it. During the rest of that decade she presented several landmark cases before the court. Each one built upon the earlier one, constructing a solid legal foundation for gender equality. She argued that a bachelor who hired help to assist him in caring for his elderly mother should be able to claim the same deduction that women, widowers, and husbands of disabled women were allowed by the IRS. That the Idaho state code that mandated that it was preferable to have a man act as an estate administrator (instead of a woman) was unconstitutional. It was in that case that the Supreme Court, for the first time, extended the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to include women. That was in 1971, 50 years after women were granted the right to vote.
She fought on behalf of a widower, who, raising his son alone after his wife died, was denied any Social Security survivor benefits because he was a man, and the benefit was only awarded to widows. She won. She argued on behalf of a United States Air Force lieutenant whose husband was not eligible for medical, dental, and housing benefits as a dependent because he could not prove that she provided half of his financial support—even though wives of male service members needed no such proof in order to be deemed eligible as dependents. She won that one as well. In another case, she argued that in requiring women to opt in to jury service, the state of Missouri was discounting the value of women’s participation on juries as well as depriving defendants of their right to a representative jury.
In addition to winning cases that contributed to legal recognition of women’s rights, her arguments reinforced the concept that strict adherence to traditional gender roles was as damaging for men as it was for women.
And she and Marty were walking the walk. When he took a job at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York City, she gave up her chance at a Harvard Law degree and finished her program at Columbia Law School instead. When he realized what a hopeless cook she was, he took over the meal preparation and became a first class gourmet cook. When Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980, Marty traded in his New York law practice for a teaching position at Georgetown and joined Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in Washington.
A former law clerk, Ryan Park wrote “What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught Me About Being a Stay-at-Home Dad” for the Atlantic last January. In it, he describes his challenges—and his delights—in taking time off from his career to spend time with his 1-year-old daughter. His wife, who had taken a year off from her medical training to enjoy being a full-time mom to their little girl, returned to her residency at Georgetown. He also writes about the paid leave program that is practiced in Sweden, which allows both parents to determine who stays home with a child and for how long.
Forty years ago, when the Boss was fighting for gender equality in the Supreme Court, Sweden became the first country to institute gender-neutral parental leave policies. Today, under Swedish law, T. and his wife would have been allotted an astounding 480 total days of paid parental leave. A couple can apportion the leave in any way they want (and use it any time until the child is 8 years old). But a minimum of 60 days is reserved for each individual, man or woman. Women still take more than 75 percent of total leave time in Sweden, but that may change, as proposals are currently being pushed to encourage more so-called “daddy months.”
Would his old boss approve? From Notorious RBG:
“What is very hard for most women is what happens when children are born,” she said. “Will men become equal parents, sharing the joys as well as the burdens of bringing up the next generation? But that’s my dream for the world, for every child to have two loving parents who share in raising the child.”
By Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
Published by Dey Street Books
October 27, 2015
240 Pages
It’s clear that the two authors of Notorious RBG adore their subject and combine original research with published accounts to tell the story of the second woman on the Supreme Court. It is written in an inviting, conversational tone that manages to deftly explain the significant court cases with which Justice Ginsburg has been involved, from both sides of the bench.
Not a typical biography, it has been called a hagiography, which is probably a better description and a fitting tribute at a time when the millennials have too few idols to admire. Her popularity exploded across the web as a result of
her dissent in
Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act in June 2013.
But you don’t have to be a millennial to enjoy this celebration of one of America’s leading feminist icons. And perhaps someday, some 11-year-old little girl will find a copy of it on a library shelf and experience the wonder of how mountains can be moved by a woman determined to do the work of becoming a lawyer—and changing the world.