Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

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’s old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice’s image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem’s own long-standing observation: “Women lose power with age, and men gain it.”

“She’s conventional socially and politically and in every way, except for her intellect,” Wulf said, a tad dismissively. Peratis cut in, “Yeah, but Mel, you have to admit it was pretty unconventional in those days for a woman to raise a family, hold a job, go to law school.” Wulf, a man of the 1960s, shrugged. “I’ll say this, she is by no means a bomb thrower,” he insisted. “But,” said Peratis, “the things she achieved were bombshells.”

“I think had she not had this persona as this very soft-spoken, neat, and tidy person, with a conventional life, she would have been considered a flaming radical.”

1959: RBG graduates from Columbia Law at the top of her class but can barely get a job.

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

“To my sorrow, I am now what [O’Connor] was her first twelve years on the court—the lone woman.” —RBG

April 18, 2007: RBG launches her era of furious dissent with the abortion case Gonzales v. Carhart. “The Court . . . pretends that its decision protects women.” —RBG, summarizing her dissent from the bench

November 4, 2008: Barack Obama is elected the first black president. “I don’t know. I hear that Justice Ginsburg has been working on her jump shot.” —Barack Obama, after being invited to play basketball at the nation’s highest court

February 24, 2009: RBG attends President Obama’s first speech to Congress. “I wanted people to see that the Supreme Court isn’t all male.” —RBG

“I like the idea that we’re all over the bench. It says women are here to stay.” —RBG

August 2013: RBG becomes the first Supreme Court justice to officiate a same-sex wedding. “I think it will be one more statement that people who love each other and want to live together should be able to enjoy the blessings and the strife in the marriage relationship.” —RBG on performing same-sex weddings

Evelyn had often comforted her, but this time it was Morris’s words that shook her out of her panic. “Ruth, if you don’t want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one would think less of you,” Morris said. “But if you really want to go to law school, you will stop feeling sorry for yourself. You will find a way.” Ruth really wanted to go to law school.

RBG made the Law Review, a distinction Marty hadn’t managed. She was one of two women—“roses amid the thorns,” as a photographer put it while positioning them on either side of the men of the Law Review.

One night, near midnight, she found herself frantic inside Lamont Library, barred from checking a citation because no women were allowed in that reading room.

As Mr. Ginsburg told us, the Ruth in the letter is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, professor of law at Columbia and general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. Just think what else she might have accomplished had she enjoyed the benefits of a Harvard degree.

Gerald Gunther, a constitutional law professor at Columbia, was determined to find his brilliant student a spot—even if it involved blackmail.

Her time was almost up. RBG looked the justices in the eye and quoted Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and advocate for women’s suffrage. “She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity,” RBG said. “She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.’”

In her first year, Rutgers offered RBG an annual contract to teach civil procedure. The salary was low. After all, Dean Willard Heckel reminded her, it was a state school, and she was a woman. “They told me, ‘We can’t pay you as much as A., who has five children; you have a husband who earns a good salary,” RBG remembered, discreetly withholding names. “I asked if B., a bachelor, was also paid more, and was told, ‘yes.’”

(Representative Emanuel Celler joked that he usually had the last word in his house: “Yes, dear.”)

Teachers complained that they were forced off the job the moment they started showing pregnancy, and sometimes before. The schools called it maternity leave, but it wasn’t voluntary or paid, and the teachers couldn’t get their jobs back unless the school felt like it.

Thinking it over years later, Wulf told Strebeigh, “Damn, maybe I didn’t pluck her from obscurity. Maybe she plucked herself from obscurity.” He was right. Wulf told RBG he could use her help building Sally Reed’s case to the Supreme Court.

They challenged the all-white and all-male jury in Alabama that acquitted the murderers of two voting rights activists. They won, but Alabama never appealed to the Supreme Court, so the story ended there.

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

RBG learned a lesson that would stay with her for the rest of her life. She had been trying to teach the justices, and she wouldn’t give up. But as she later acknowledged, “one doesn’t learn that lesson in a day. Generally, change in our society is incremental, I think. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” She would have to be patient. She would have to be strategic. And maybe a little deaf.

Decisions of this Court that span a century have contributed to this anomaly: presumably well-meaning exaltation of woman’s unique role in bearing children has, in effect, restrained women from developing their individual talents and capacities and has impelled them to accept a dependent, subordinate status in society.

Astonishingly, on December 7, 1976, a majority of the Supreme Court agreed. Rehnquist wrote for the majority that pregnancy was special, because unlike race or gender itself, it was often “voluntarily undertaken and desired.” The message was clear: Once you did the deed, you had to pay the price—that is, if you were a woman. Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall protested in their dissent that GE hadn’t left out any “so-called ‘voluntary’ disabilities including sport injuries, attempted suicides, venereal disease, disabilities incurred in the commission of a crime or during a fight, and elective cosmetic surgery.”

“Wiesenfeld is part of an evolution toward a policy of neutrality—a policy that will accommodate traditional patterns, but at the same time, one that requires removal of artificial constraints so that men and women willing to explore their full potential as humans may create new traditions by their actions.”

She had perplexed and even angered some of her allies by bringing so many cases with male plaintiffs. After all, it was the Women’s Rights Project, not the men’s rights project. Much later, people would say RBG was a genius for presenting the male-dominated court with their brethren. The truth was more complicated.

RBG firmly believed that for women to be equal, men had to be free.

Decades later, an unnamed guest at a dinner party told the New York Times that RBG had fiercely interrupted another guest who mentioned she’d worked on behalf of “women’s liberation.” “She turned on him and said, ‘It is not women’s liberation; it is women’s and men’s liberation.’ I’d never seen her exercise such strength and vehemence.”

“Men need the experience of working with women who demonstrate a wide range of personality characteristics, they need to become working friends with women.”

She wrote that she was pretty sure more women and people of color could enroll “without denying to white men of merit a fair chance to compete for places.”

CASE Forced sterilization of black women: Cox v. Stanton (1973). WHAT WAS AT STAKE As a teen mom in North Carolina, Nial Ruth Cox had been forcibly sterilized through the state eugenics program, a widespread practice that particularly targeted black women. She walked into the ACLU WRP and asked for help.

CASE The near-beer case: Craig v. Boren (1976). WHAT WAS AT STAKE Oklahoma frat boys protested the constitutionality of the fact that in their state, women were allowed to buy low-alcohol beer at age eighteen when men had to wait until they were twenty-one. RBG’S ROLE RBG thought the “thirsty boys” case was “something of an embarrassment,” but gamely took it to the Supreme Court. RESULT The beer guzzlers’ case turned out to be a legal landmark. The court finally applied “intermediate scrutiny” to laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.

“I think that men and women, shoulder to shoulder, will work together to make this a better world. Just as I don’t think that men are the superior sex, neither do I think women are. I think that it is great that we are beginning to use the talents of all of the people, in all walks of life, and that we no longer have the closed doors that we once had.” —RBG “I am fearful, or suspicious, of generalizations about the way women or men are. . . . They cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals.” —RBG

“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.”

But in the end, only legendary segregationist senator Strom Thurmond voted against her in the Judiciary Committee. 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. Her former Columbia Law mentee Diane Zimmerman remembers the exuberant party thrown by students and faculty. RBG sat on the floor giggling, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken out of a bucket.

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade.

But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains.

RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental.

For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.”

“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.”

neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with the equal protection principle when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature—equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.

“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

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.”

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.’”

On each clerk’s birthday, Marty would bake a cake—almond or chocolate, sometimes ginger, lemon, or carrot. The justice would leave a to-the-point note: “It’s your birthday, so Marty baked a cake.” Sometimes the clerks would mull the day’s work over Marty’s biscotti.

“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.”

And so she sat there, very still, with a dark ribbon in her hair. As Chief Justice Roberts read a brief tribute to Marty, Scalia wept.