Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

THIS IS WHAT you should look for on this 90-degree June morning: The broadcast news interns pairing running shoes with their summer business casual, hovering by the Supreme Court’s public information office.

1.

RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark.

She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real.

1963: RBG becomes the second woman to teach full-time at Rutgers School of Law. “[The dean explained] it was only fair to pay me modestly, because my husband had a very good job.” —RBG

July 2, 1964: President Lyndon Johnson signs into law the Civil Rights Act, which contains a last-minute ban on sex discrimination in employment. “Unless [sex discrimination is banned], the white women of this country would be drastically discriminated against in favor of a Negro woman.” —Representative Glenn Andrews of Alabama

January 22, 1973: In Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court makes abortion legal throughout the United States. RBG is uneasy about how the court got there, and how fast. “This right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” —Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe v. Wade

Triggered

Marty moved through the world with an easy confidence, tempered by an impish sense of humor. “Ruth was a wonderful student and a beautiful young woman. Most of the men were in awe of her, but Marty was not,” Carr Ferguson, a Cornell classmate and one of Marty’s closest friends, remembered. “He’s never been in awe of anybody. He wooed and won her by convincing her how much he respected her.”

In her dissent, which she summarized from the bench, RBG reminded Kennedy that his own decisions on abortion and gay rights had claimed that “our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”

The Court’s defense of the statute provides no saving explanation. In candor, the Act, and the Court’s defense of it, cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court—and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives.

“It can happen even in the conferences in the court,” RBG continued. “When I will say something—and I don’t think I’m a confused speaker—and it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point.”

Legacy is a topic RBG won’t linger on, because it has a note of finality. But she will take stock. “In my life, what I find most satisfying is that I was a part of a movement that made life better, not just for women,” RBG says. “I think gender discrimination is bad for everyone, it’s bad for men, it’s bad for children. Having the opportunity to be part of that change is tremendously satisfying. Think of how the Constitution begins. ‘We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union.’ But we’re still striving for that more perfect union. And one of the perfections is for the ‘we the people’ to include an ever enlarged group.” This expansion has been RBG’s life’s work. And it’s not over yet.

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