The Supreme Court justice who fought for gender equality

Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020

Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed the legal landscape for American women. In a career spanning six decades, she became the nation’s leading court advocate for gender equality, first as a civil rights litigator and then as the second woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court. As director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s, Ginsburg argued a series of discrimination cases before the Supreme Court that established that the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee extends to women. In 1996, three years after joining the nation’s top court, she wrote the landmark decision that struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s men-only admissions policy, a ruling she called the culmination of her efforts “to open doors so that women could aspire and achieve without artificial constraints.” As the court grew increasingly conservative, Justice Ginsburg emerged as the leading voice of its liberal minority, issuing sharply worded dissents supporting abortion access, affirmative action, and voting rights. Along the way, the quiet, bookish jurist became an unlikely pop-culture icon. Her stern image—with judicial robe and lace collar—was stamped on T-shirts and tattooed on arms, often with the nickname “Notorious RBG.” She was the subject of a documentary, a best-selling biography, a Hollywood biopic (2018’s On the Basis of Sex) and a children’s picture book. “I ask no favor for my sex,” Ginsburg said of her life’s work on gender equality. “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

She was born Joan Ruth Bader in Depression-era Brooklyn, where her father—a Jewish immigrant from Russia—worked as a furrier and haberdasher, said The Washington Post. “Both a bookworm and a baton twirler,” young Ruth was “largely molded by her mother,” Celia. Intellectually ambitious but unable to attend college, Celia was “determined that her daughter would have a different path,” and saved household money to build a college fund. Celia died of cervical cancer at age 47 in 1950, the day before her daughter graduated from high school near the top of her class. Ruth attended Cornell University on a scholarship, where on a blind date she met the man who’d become her life partner, Martin Ginsburg, “a confident, fun-loving fraternity member” as outgoing as she was reserved.

The couple wed in 1954 and headed to Fort Sill, Okla., for Martin’s Army service, and then to Cambridge, Mass., where the pair enrolled in Harvard Law School and Ginsburg was one of only nine women in a class of 500. When Martin was diagnosed with testicular cancer in his early 20s, Ginsburg “took notes for him, brought up their first child, and held down a post on the Harvard Law Review,” said The Guardian (U.K.). “She frequently worked all night.” After Martin recovered and took a job in

New York City, she finished her degree at Columbia Law School. Despite graduating at the top of her class, Ginsburg “had trouble finding a job,” said Reuters.com. “I struck out on three grounds,” she explained. “I was Jewish, a woman, and a mother.” Through a former professor’s aggressive intervention, she finally landed a clerkship for a federal district court judge, and then took a job teaching at Rutgers University.

Ginsburg became a counsel for the

ACLU while at Rutgers, “and by 1972 led its Women’s Rights Project,” said the Los Angeles Times. She used the position “to change the Supreme Court’s view of gender bias,” strategically pursuing “a series of seemingly minor cases—often on behalf of men—that demonstrated gender discrimination hurt both men and women.” She fought a Social Security policy that paid survivor benefits to widows but not to widowers, an Idaho law that gave men preference over women in the naming of estate executors, and a military regulation that gave husbands of service members fewer benefits than service wives. Ginsburg took six such cases to the Supreme Court from 1973 to 1978 and won five, largely succeeding “in establishing the principle that the Constitution prohibited nearly all gender discrimination in law.”

In 1980, she was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Jimmy Carter, said NPR.org. There, Ginsburg amassed “a record as something of a centrist liberal,” and in 1993 she was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton. The Senate confirmed her by a vote of 96-3. Ginsburg was initially a low-key presence on the court, but as her seniority grew, “so did her role.” As the Supreme Court “veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor” in 2006, she “dissented more often and more assertively.” In 2013, Ginsburg “assigned herself an angry dissent when the court struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” said CNN.com. Axing the law’s protections against voter suppression when they continue to work, she wrote, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The next year, she dissented furiously in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit firms to refuse—on religious grounds—to comply with a federal law mandating that birth control be covered in health-care plans. Where, she asked, “is the stopping point?” What happens if it offends an employer’s religious beliefs “to pay the minimum wage” or “to accord women equal pay?”

Though an outspoken liberal, Ginsburg became close friends with arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. The pair traveled abroad together, shared a love of the opera, and for decades celebrated New Year’s Eve at Ginsburg’s Washington apartment. Ginsburg’s later years were marked by a series of health crises, said The New York Times. She had colon cancer in 1999, followed by lung cancer and two rounds of pancreatic cancer. As she passed her 80th birthday, Ginsburg “shrugged off a chorus of calls for her to retire” so that President Barack Obama could name her replacement, vowing to stay “as long as I can do the job full steam.” She held out hope, she once said, that some of her dissenting opinions might sway a future court, extending her considerable influence yet further. “I will not live to see what becomes of them,” she said, “but I remain hopeful.”