Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

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.

RBG did not apologize for the ACLU, for being a feminist, or for supporting abortion rights. “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 thought, ‘This is my dream of the way the world should be.’ When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will truly be liberated,” RBG explained

“We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country,” RBG told me. An abortion ban, she said, only “hurts women who lack the means to go someplace else.”

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.

RBG survived the indignities of pre-feminist life mostly by deciding that anger was counterproductive. “This wonderful woman whose statue I have in my chambers, Eleanor Roosevelt, said, ‘Anger, resentment, envy. These are emotions that just sap your energy,” RBG says. “They’re not productive and don’t get you anyplace, so get over it.’”