Ginsburgmade her mark without male privilege
I don’t understand women. But every now and then, it doesn’t hurt for me to get a reminder that neither do I understand what it’s like to be a woman.
Especially a professional woman making her way in what is still — for the most part, in 2020 — a man’s world.
The reality checks might come from my wife or sister, and they are like sharp elbows into my ribs.
I recently got a similar jab from listening to tales about the extraordinary life of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
First, I’m not blind to the idea that some people have advantages. It’s just that I’m not used to thinking of myself as advantaged.
As a Mexican American, I’m sure that my life would have been easier — and after 30 years in journalism, I’d be further along and more successful — if I’d had been born a white male.
I’ve had some breaks, and I’ve made my mark. I’ve been to
The Show, and I’m truly blessed.
But I’ve had to scratch and claw for every achievement, without the starter fuel of white privilege. In my business, it’s not just that white men don’t have to put up with bosses thinking they have an agenda on issues such as immigration or readers who think anyone with a Spanish surname wants an open border. It’s also that a lot of white men in journalism today got a head start because their mother or father was in this business 50 years ago — when journalism and media were even whiter than they are now.
I never had that hook. My dad was a police officer, and my mom was an office clerk. My grandparents were farmworkers.
Still, as Ginsburg’s life story reminds me, I’ve always had one edge going for me: male privilege.
Through no effort on his part, my son will also have that secret sauce working in his favor.
My daughters won’t be so lucky; throughout their lives, they’ll compete with boys and men who — as the saying goes — were born on third base but act
like they hit a triple. My girls will have to stomach it when — after striving to be better than the opposite sex — they lose a job or a promotion that goes instead to a man who is mediocre at best.
Ginsburg knew that feeling. As she often shared with audiences, despite graduating No. 1 in her law school class in 1959, she couldn’t get a job at any law firm in New York City. The fact that she was the mother of a 4-year-old convinced the men who ran the legal profession that she wouldn’t take seriously her professional duties.
As a man, albeit one of a different generation, let me just say: What a bunch of morons! You can bet they never said anything like that to the men they hired who happened to be fathers.
Ginsburg learned this lesson about women stepping aside in favor of mediocre men early in life. That very thing happened within her own family, she was told. Ginsburg’s mother had to defer her dreams for her brother.
“Her mother was the brains in the family,” Ginsburg’s daughter, Jane Ginsburg, told CBS News’ Erin Moriarty recently. “But her parents wanted her to go out and work, even before finishing high school, because there was a boy in the family and money had to be made so that he could go to college.”
The story stuck with the future Supreme Court justice. “Seeing a less-qualified male preferred to a deserving woman was something that marked her from a very early age,” Jane Ginsburg said of her mom.
Even when Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to Cornell University, in the early 1950s, it was understood that the main reason most young women went to college was to earn a “Mrs.” degree. Ginsburg did meet her husband in college, but she also continued her education. She attended Harvard Law School, transferring to earn her law degree at Columbia University when her husband got a job in New York.
Today, despite all the lecherous behavior by men brought to light by the #Metoo movement, I’d like to think that women face less overt sexism than their mothers did. There are many more opportunities. Women can do anything men can do, and they often do it better.
All without the protective cloak of male privilege. It’s because they constantly put in the effort that, so often, they’re better, smarter and stronger than men. When it comes to women, that much I do understand.