Ruth Bader Ginsburg Was A Feminist Rock Star: Here’s Why

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court died Friday at her home in Washington. Unlike most Supreme Court justices, bobbleheads, action figures and dolls made in her likeness are sold on Amazon, and her personal trainer penned a book about her fitness regime (The RBG Workout: How She Stays Strong and You Can Too!). A documentary film of her life was a box office hit and a film about her first sex discrimination court case debuted in 2018. How did Ruth Bader Ginsburg become such a feminist rock star?

Ginsburg learned about gender discrimination firsthand at school and in the workplace. At Harvard Law School, Ginsburg and other female students were questioned by the dean as to why they felt they were entitled to take the spot of an aspiring male lawyer. Ginsburg realized that women could never achieve equality with men if outdated stereotypes were holding them back. Prior to her tenure on the Supreme Court, she challenged law after law where women and men were provided different rights due to gender stereotypes.

One such law gave men preference in being chosen to administer estates (men were more familiar with money and business), another was a Social Security law that deprived men of receiving benefits from a deceased wife (wives were typically only secondary breadwinners) and an Oklahoma law allowed girls to buy beer at age 18 but required boys to wait until they were 21 (proper young ladies could handle beer at 18, but young men drinking might create a hazard on the roads).

Ginsburg’s strategy of pointing out situations where gender stereotyping and differential treatment negatively impacted men was clever and unique.  The plaintiff in the beer case was a male college student under 21 years of age who was unable to purchase beer, yet his female peers could buy beer. Gender stereotypes about how beer-drinking young men typically behave kept him from attaining the same rights as women. Ginsburg thought the nine men on the Supreme Court would be able to understand and relate to this type of discrimination that negatively impacted men.  They did. The Court ruled 7-2 that the Oklahoma beer law was unconstitutional, and, more importantly, that future cases of classification by sex would face more scrutiny. In other words, it helped women gain equality too.

Later, while serving on the Supreme Court Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in a case that found that the all-male admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was unconstitutional. The VMI claimed that women wouldn’t be up to the physical challenges of the VMI curriculum, and they agreed to set up a separate, less rigorous military college for women. Ginsburg wrote that, “Neither the goal of producing citizen-soldiers nor V.M.I.'s implementing methodology is inherently unsuitable to women… ‘Inherent differences’ between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity.”

Ginsburg’s appreciation for gender equality extended to her home life, and she and husband, Martin Ginsburg had an equality in their marriage that was almost unheard of in the 1950s. Martin, who she met on a blind date while an undergraduate at Cornell and married in 1954 was committed to sharing the child-rearing and housework, and is rumored to have taken on the majority of the household’s cooking. He left a lucrative law career in New York to move with her to Washington, when President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Without the support of an equal marriage, it’s unlikely Ginsburg could have achieved all that she did.

We all owe Ruth Bader Ginsburg a debt of gratitude for moving the bar forward on equal rights. As much as for what she accomplished, Ginsburg will be remembered for how she accomplished it. She saw inequities and chipped away at them for more than half a century. She never gave up. She just kept fighting. The combination of her tenacity and her intellectual acuity made her a force to be reckoned with. Her selfless dying wish was that she would not be replaced until a new president is installed —hopefully, this wish will be granted.