In the 1980s, however, Ginsburg’s vision of gender equality came under bitter attack by a new generation of feminist legal scholars who argued that the law should emphasize women’s differences from men, rather than their similarities. The new feminists called Ginsburg “phallocentric” and “assimilationist” for challenging classifications that burdened men as well as women and for mostly representing male plaintiffs. “As applied, the sameness standard has mostly gotten men the benefit of those few things women have historically had—for all the good they did us,”4 wrote the legal scholar
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