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October 18 - October 19, 2020
From her days as an advocate to her days as a justice, Ginsburg insisted that men and women would be truly equal only when they took equal responsibility for child rearing.
I was married in my husband’s home, and just before the ceremony, my mother-in-law took me aside and said, “I’d like to tell you the secret of a happy marriage.” “I’ll be glad to know what it is.” She said, “Dear, in every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.”
Marty was most unusual. He was the first boy I ever met who cared that I had a brain. And he always thought I was better than I thought I really was.
Progress comes slowly, and one must be patient.
The idea was there from the beginning: equality. And yet you can read every page of your pocket Constitution and you will not find, in the original Constitution, the word equal, or equality, even though equality was a main theme of the Declaration of Independence. The word equal becomes a part of the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment. So I see as the genius of our Constitution and of our society—how much more embracive we have become than we were at the start.
What her feminist critics in the 1990s failed to appreciate was that Ginsburg was laying the groundwork for a firmer constitutional foundation for reproductive choice, one rooted in women’s equality rather than the right to privacy.
Ginsburg maintained that restrictions on abortion are best understood not as a private matter between women and their male doctors; instead, the restrictions violate women’s constitutional right to equality by limiting their ability to define their own life choices, imposing burdens that are not imposed on men.
Ginsburg’s central premise is that antiabortion laws, like employment discrimination against pregnant women, are based on “stereotypical assumptions” about women as caregivers. Today, pro-choice scholars, advocates, and citizens, including millions of young women, have embraced her emphasis on equality, rather than privacy, as the soundest constitutional foundation for the right to choose.
The irony and tragedy is any woman of means can have a safe abortion somewhere in the United States. But women lacking the wherewithal to travel or to miss workdays can’t. There is no big constituency out there concerned about access restrictions on poor women.
The Court usually doesn’t take giant steps. It moves incrementally. Roe v. Wade was a dramatic exception to that cautious way of operating.
My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.
Adult women are able to make decisions about their own lives’ course no less than men are.
But adults make mistakes. They are adults. They’re entitled to make judgments for themselves.
She didn’t believe that all female judges view cases the same way but insisted that, in the aggregate, a diverse federal bench will be richer “in appreciation [of] what is at stake and the impact of its judgments if all of its members are [not] cast from the same mold.”
I think a collegial body is much better off to have diverse people of different backgrounds and experience that can make our discussions more informed.
A woman who served on the Supreme Court of Minnesota, Jeanne Coyne, said at the end of the day a wise old man and a wise old woman will reach the same judgment. But nevertheless, she said, we bring something to the table that was absent when the judiciary was all male.
We know that even though we have sharp disagreements on what the Constitution means, we have a trust. We revere the Constitution and the Court, and we want to make sure that when we leave it, it will be in as good shape as it was when we joined the Court.
As long as one lives, one can learn.
Ginsburg is now convinced, however, of the value of dissenting opinions in persuading future generations to correct perceived injustice. “Dissents speak to a future age,” she told the NPR journalist Nina Totenberg in 2002. “The greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.”
I think it’s good when we look back to see that there were people who thought the Court’s judgment was wrong and wrote the judgment that was right—it starts out as a dissent and then, in the next generations, becomes the opinion of the Court.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was known as a judge’s judge, a judicial minimalist who believed that social change comes slowly and from the ground up, fired by political activism, ratified by Congress and state legislatures, and, only after that, carried forward by courts.
In her view, legal change follows social and political change, not the other way around.
Ginsburg was prophetic in recognizing that even with formally equal opportunities, women could be held back by what she called as early as the 1970s “unconscious bias.”
One thing that concerns me is that some young women today don’t seem to care that we have a fundamental instrument of government that makes no express statement about the equal citizenship stature of men and women. They know there are no closed doors anymore, and they may take for granted the rights they have.
Young people should appreciate the values on which our nation is based and how precious they are, and if they don’t become part of the crowd that seeks to uphold them—recall something Judge Learned Hand said: if the spirit of liberty dies in the hearts of the people, no court is capable of restoring it.
Equal citizenship stature for men and women belongs in any fundamental instrument of government. It should be as basic to society as free speech and freedom of religion.
I think we’re constantly forming a more perfect Union, which is what the Founders intended.
