Ginsburg began arguing equal rights cases before the Supreme Court in 1971, relying on and citing Pauli Murray’s strategy for using the Fourteenth Amendment to defeat discrimination by sex. Weren’t women, after all, “persons”? The next year, Ginsburg launched the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. “I ask no favor for my sex,” she told the nine male justices in 1973, quoting the eloquent abolitionist Sarah Grimké. “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
