THIS WOMAN MADE THE WORLD BETTER FOR THE REST OF US

Hadley Freeman on why America needs Ruth Bader Ginsburg

With the exceptions of Dredd and Judy, judges don’t tend to become internationally revered pop culture icons (and – spoiler alert – Dredd and Judy aren’t actual judges. Sorry about that). Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the glorious 85-year-old exception. Only the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and the first Jewish woman, she is a regular character on Saturday Night Live, played by Kate Mckinnon (Ghostbusters) as a cheeky, indefatigable badass with awesome dance moves. When Ginsburg’s personal trainer, Bryant Johnson, published a book earlier this year describing her exercise regime, one newspaper suggested it should be called The Workout That’s Keeping America Safe, and that did not feel like hyperbole (Johnson opted for the slightly more commercial The RBG Workout: How She Stays Strong… And You Can Too!) She even has her own rap nickname: Notorious RBG, of course.

Her appeal is bipartisan, even in the notoriously partisan world of American politics. Whereas the extremely controversial Brett Kavanaugh was elected to the court with 50 votes for his appointment and 48 against from the US senate, Ginsburg got 96-3. She is the kind of

woman who, once you start looking into her achievements, you want to run through the streets, grab people by the collar and shout, ‘Do you know about her? Do you know what she’s done?! Because you must!’ Someone in Hollywood must have finally felt similarly, because now a movie is coming out, called On The Basis Of Sex, in which Felicity Jones portrays Ginsburg’s fight in the 1970s for gender equality, a fight she took all the way to the Supreme Court. ‘Why did the framers of the 14th Amendment regard racial discrimination as odious? Because a person’s skin colour bears no necessary relationship to ability. Similarly, a person’s sex bears no relationship to ability,’ Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court in 1973.

Born in 1933 in Brooklyn to poor, Jewish parents, Ginsburg came of age in an era when it was normal for a college professor to say to the female students, ‘How do you justify taking a spot from a qualified man?’ In a 2015 interview with her old friend, Gloria Steinem, Ginsburg said: ‘The only thing that really bothered me is they had given me a generous scholarship. When I reapplied for re-admission, they said, “Submit your father-in-law’s financial statement”. You can be sure they never asked a guy to submit his father-in-law’s statement.’

Yet even though women were generally expected to be housewives and nothing more back then, Ginsburg was fortunate to have a mother who wanted more for her daughter and pushed her to strive at school. After she met her husband at Cornell, she enrolled at Harvard Law School and was one of only nine women in a class of 500 men, and almost certainly the only one with a one-year-old baby. Ginsburg more than justified ‘taking’ a spot at law school from a man: after then transferring to Columbia she graduated first in her class.

Repeatedly, sexism tried to stop Ginsburg, and repeatedly she bulldozed right over it simply by being better than everyone else. Initially, she struggled to get a job: ‘I had three strikes against me. First I was Jewish, and the Wall Street firms were just beginning to accept Jews. Then I was a woman. But the killer was my daughter Jane, who was four by then.’ But she got a job at Rutgers School of Law in the early 1960s. She increasingly focused on women’s rights, and this was another strike against her because, she later recalled, ‘The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.’ Needless to say, Ginsburg made tenure.

And then there was no stopping her. She co-wrote the first law school casebook on sexual discrimination; she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and she argued six sex discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and won five of them. She, more than any other litigator in America, changed the way women were seen by law, insisting on gender equality and fighting against laws that treated women as inferior or the property of a man. Since being appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by Bill Clinton, she has been a consistent voice for liberal values and women’s rights, staunchly pro-choice and passionately against gender discrimination.

Ginsburg is rational, self-confident, calm and defiant – all things any woman would want to be. So is it any wonder, with America the way it is now, that liberals and feminists look at her personal trainer like he was the guardian of the royal jewels?

Ginsburg is now 85. Her beloved husband, Martin, died in 2010 and she has suffered various health issues, including two bouts of cancer and, more recently, some broken ribs. But she has insisted she will stay on the Supreme Court until she can no longer function. After all, as she told Elle magazine in 2014, ‘Who do you think President Obama could appoint at this very day, given the boundaries that we have? If I resign any time this year… he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court. Anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided.’

To be fair, there is no one like Ginsburg anywhere, but she knows how much America needs women like her, and how hard it is for them to get their voices heard now. She knows America’s liberal hopes rest on her tiny shoulders, and she is right.

On The Basis Of Sex is in cinemas from 4th January 2019