Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

Charles E. Moritz was a traveling salesman who lived with his eighty-nine-year-old mother in Denver. Moritz paid someone to care for her when he was on the road, but his troubles began when he tried to take a tax deduction. The IRS only granted such deductions to women, widowers, or the husbands of incapacitated women, and Moritz was a never-married man. The idea that a man on his own might be responsible somehow for caregiving apparently never crossed the government’s mind. With a wide grin, RBG said, “Let’s take it.”

On the surface, the Moritz case was more small ball. He had been denied no more than six hundred dollars in expenses. There was no apparent glaring injustice to women. Marty and RBG could see beyond that. The government was senselessly denying a benefit to someone purely on the basis of gender.

RBG also understood that how pregnant women were treated had to do with sex. Only a woman’s body showed proof of having sex, and only women were punished for having it. She wrote to advise the lawyer of a pregnant servicewoman who had gotten a general discharge instead of an honorable one. “Surely the less than honorable aspect is not ‘getting pregnant’ but the conduct,” RBG wrote. “As for that, it takes two, and no man (or no woman, probably) is discharged for having sexual relations.” The Supreme Court stubbornly refused to listen to any of this.