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by
Irin Carmon
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January 24 - January 30, 2022
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels,” the president said. “Having experienced discrimination,” he added, “she devoted the next twenty years of her career to fighting it and making this country a better place for our wives, our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters.” RBG would have added, “And our husbands, our fathers, our brothers, and our sons.”
I like this. The idea that equal rights for all is not a "progressive" idea, but just plain, morally right.
“I wasn’t important at all,” Marty later insisted, but his friend Carr Ferguson gave him away. “There were probably scores, maybe hundreds of us” who had been called to lobby on RBG’s behalf—anyone they knew in Congress or the White House, in either party. And when Marty heard that RBG’s longtime dislike of the Roe decision had earned her the vague reputation of not being trusted by feminists, he pressed into service all of her movement friends.
They must not have understood WHY she didn't like Roe. It was because it was declared a privacy issue and not an equal rights issue. Therefore, making abortion a "private" problem that does not need to be paid for by the public.
“I have a last thank-you,” she said. “It is to my mother, Celia Amster Bader, the bravest and strongest person I have known, who was taken from me much too soon,” she said. “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.”
Sometime in the seventies, RBG had been interviewed for a federal district court judge position. The screening committee told her she wasn’t qualified because she had no experience in financial securities. “I wonder how many gender-discrimination cases they have handled,” RBG retorted,
“I cannot exaggerate the feeling among women lawyers that all increases in numbers or victories are pyrrhic if Ruth is not appointed,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Barbara Babcock to Attorney General Griffin Bell on March 12. “It will be viewed as a slap in the face that a woman who is so well qualified, and more than any woman applicant in the country, has ‘paid her dues,’ is not chosen.”
In the full Senate, RBG was confirmed unanimously on June 18, 1980. She didn’t forget the students and feminist lawyers who had gotten her there.
If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.”
RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental.
“Time and again, she would say, ‘I would apply the law to the facts of the case to the best of my abilities,’” remembered her clerk Alisa Klein, who sat in on the hearings. “Coming from some people that might be evasive. Anyone who knew her knows that she means what she said.”
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity,” she said simply. “It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
VMI claimed that admitting women would undermine its mission, which included training cadets by an “adversative method” and which the academy argued couldn’t be used to train women. After the federal government filed a discrimination claim, VMI set up a weak imitation at a sister school, which the state named the Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership.
"separate but equal is inherently unequal" - US supreme court ruling in Brown vs. the board of education
“If women are to be leaders in life and in the military, then men have got to become accustomed to taking commands from women, and men won’t become accustomed to that if women aren’t let in,”
In 1971, for the first time in our Nation’s history, this Court ruled in favor of a woman who complained that her State had denied her the equal protection of its laws. Reed v. Reed
To summarize the Court’s current directions for cases of official classification based on gender: Focusing on the differential treatment or denial of opportunity for which relief is sought, the reviewing court must determine whether the proffered justification is “exceedingly persuasive.” The burden of justification is demanding and it rests entirely on the State. The State must show “at least that the [challenged] classification serves ‘important governmental objectives and that the discriminatory means employed’ are ‘substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.’” . . . The
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ruling of reed v. reed
remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity.
“I regard the VMI case as the culmination of the 1970s endeavor to open doors so that women could aspire and achieve without artificial constraints,”
“I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me. It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.” —Marty Ginsburg, 1993
“The model was of equality, where they both were crazy superstars, in their own realms.”
So when RBG was asked how she had managed to have such an extraordinary marriage, she often answered by saying that Marty himself was extraordinary, and he saw the same in her. “He thought that I must be pretty good,” RBG said, “because why would he decide that he wanted to spend his life with me?”
Toward the end of his life, Marty got a little more serious. According to Nina Totenberg, Marty told a friend, “I think that the most important thing I have done is enable Ruth to do what she has done.”
What Wiesenfeld meant by “alternative,” and what was hinted by RBG’s use of the phrase life partner was a marriage in which the woman didn’t lose herself and her autonomy, in which two humans shared their lives and goals on equal footing. It wasn’t so common anywhere, least of all among people who came of age in the 1950s.
“It was impossible to praise him, he wouldn’t accept it. He shrugged it off. He turned it into a joke. ‘You’re not gonna blame that one on me.’ I said, ‘Marty, this is a new era, we all need role models.’”
On the one hand, yeah men shouldn't be praised for treating women as equals. On the other hand it does need to be recognized so other men can follow his lead.
“I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time,” he said, “and she has been supportive of me. It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.”
RBG paused to look at her husband lovingly, and then went on, “The principal advice that I have gotten from Marty throughout my life is that he always made me feel like I was better than I thought myself. I started out by being very unsure. Could I do this brief? Could I make this oral argument? To now where I am. I look at my colleagues and I say, ‘It’s a hard job, but I can do it at least as well as those guys.’”
“I had seven things I could make,” RBG said, “and when we got to number seven, we went back to number one.”
RBG cooked her last meal in 1980.
Marty would consume cookbooks like they were mystery novels.
Life in New York was another story. The mother of one of Jane’s classmates at Brearley told her daughter to be extra nice to Jane, because, the woman said, pityingly, “Jane’s mommy works.”
“This child has two parents,” she declared, asking them to alternate calls with her husband, starting with this one. RBG liked to say the calls decreased after that, because the school was loath to bother an important corporate attorney at work. James believes the calls tapered off because school administrators were so aghast at Marty’s response to their description of the crime: “Your son stole the elevator!” “How far could he take it?” Marty replied.
In her high school yearbook, nearly a decade before RBG was even a judge, Jane listed her ambition “to see her mother appointed to the Supreme Court. If necessary, Jane will appoint her.”
“Marty liked being a spouse,” she wrote in Chef Supreme, a cookbook of Marty’s greatest hits put out by the Supreme Court Historical Society. “I remember being surprised when I realized his dishes weren’t catered,”
I should check this out
“I was always in awe of her,” says former clerk Kate Andrias, “but there was something disarming about seeing her with a partner who adores her but also treats her like a human being.”
6/17/10 My dearest Ruth—You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some 56 years ago. What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!! I will be in JH Medical Center until Friday, June 25, I believe, and between then and now I shall think hard on my remaining health and life, and whether on balance the time has come for me to tough it out or to take leave of life because the loss of quality now simply overwhelms. I hope
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“She’s Justice Ginsburg. I’m Justice O’Connor.” —Sandra Day O’Connor, 1997
Scalia says, “If you can’t disagree ardently with your colleagues about some issues of law and yet personally still be friends, get another job, for Pete’s sake.”
RBG has said she hopes Roberts, like Rehnquist, might be teachable on the issues that matter to her.
“Once Justice O’Connor was questioning counsel at oral argument,” RBG recalled. “I thought she was done, so I asked a question, and Sandra said: ‘Just a minute, I’m not finished.’ So I apologized to her and she said, ‘It’s OK, Ruth. The guys do it to each other all the time, they step on each other’s questions.’ And then there appeared an item in USA Today, and the headline was something like ‘Rude Ruth Interrupts Sandra.’”
RBG and O’Connor definitely didn’t have jurisprudence in common either. A study found that in the decade they served together, O’Connor’s votes diverged more from RBG’s than from any other justice except John Paul Stevens. Even their disagreements pleased RBG, in a way: They proved women had diverse views. And unlike some of her fellow Reagan appointees, O’Connor had crossed the aisle in issues that affected women.
Cancer invaded both women’s lives. When RBG had colorectal surgery in 1999, O’Connor, who had survived breast cancer, was the one who gave her advice on scheduling chemotherapy for Fridays so she could recover over the weekend and be back on the bench the following Monday.
The least true image of RBG is the early Photoshop job that circulated online after Bush v. Gore, showing her with two middle fingers pointed upward and captioned “I dissent.” Never happened, never will. No one is more committed to comity, to smiling through disagreement, than RBG. The proof is in the court’s most famous odd-couple friendship.
scalia and ruth give me hope
Although the mild-mannered liberal RBG disagreed with the blustery conservative Scalia from the start, “I was fascinated by him because he was so intelligent and so amusing,” RBG said. “You could still resist his position, but you just had to like him.” By the time they were both on the Supreme Court, Scalia called her “an intelligent woman and a nice woman and a considerate woman—all the qualities that you like in a person.”
During her confirmation hearings, some Democrats even fretted that RBG had somehow been influenced by Scalia’s views. Even their clerks have been mystified by the relationship.
Isn't this what we want from our US supreme court?! Judges who are openminded and can get talk rationally to each other?!
RBG does sometimes let a little playful impatience slip. “I love him,” she once said of Scalia, “but sometimes I’d like to strangle him.”
Only one thing trumps RBG’s commitment to keeping things civil at the court, and that is gently but firmly calling out sexism in the workplace.
Her response, she says, is to “try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.”
The first Latina to be nominated, Sotomayor was promptly raked over the coals for a speech she had given in 2001. “I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society,”
I see what she is saying here. By ignoring our differences, we are stifling growth of learning and celebrating our differences.
Republicans pounced. Conservative commentators began saying the woman who had been raised in a housing project and overcome so much adversity was the real racist.
Maybe saying they'd make a "better" decision wasn't the right word, but I understand the point she's trying to make.
“I thought it was ridiculous for them to make a big deal out of that,” she told The New York Times Sunday Magazine. RBG added, “I’m sure she meant no more than what I mean when I say: Yes, women bring a different life experience to the table. All of our differences make the conference better. That I’m a woman, that’s part of it, that I’m Jewish, that’s part of it, that I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and I went to summer camp in the Adirondacks, all these things are part of me.” As for Sotomayor’s calling herself a product of affirmative action, RBG replied crisply, “So am I.” It was an
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Exactly, this is the message I got from what she said too.
Kagan said, adding that she had RBG to thank: “More than any other person, she can take credit for making the law of this country work for women.”
For some reason, people repeatedly have asked RBG when she thought there would be enough women on the court. The question is asinine, her answer effective: “When there are nine.”
