Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

“Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” RBG had written in her opinion. Killing the Voting Rights Act because it had worked too well, she had added, was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law’s counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” she said. But then she added her own words: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”

“Women lose power with age, and men gain it.”

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.

“Mrs. Ruth Ginsburg” read the Supreme Court bar admissions card she had been handed in the court that day. RBG had gone by Ms. since there had been a Ms.

“She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.’”

RBG’s joy at the news of her pregnancy was tangled up in anxiety about her job. Rutgers would decide on her contract renewal at the end of the spring semester, and RBG wasn’t about to repeat the mistake she had made at the Social Security office in Oklahoma. She ran to her mother-in-law’s closet. Evelyn Ginsburg wore one size larger, and with a due date in September, RBG might only begin showing during the summer vacation. It worked.

The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.

‘It is not women’s liberation; it is women’s and men’s liberation.’

“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.”

“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.”

“The model was of equality, where they both were crazy superstars, in their own realms.”

Five Republican-appointed male justices decided that not only did corporations have religious consciences, those consciences allowed them to opt out of covering birth control on their insurance plans. No big deal, said the majority in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Just ladies’ stuff.

Eleanor Roosevelt, said, ‘Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy,”