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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Women's rights |
|---|---|
| located: | USA |
| editor: | Yair Oded |
The passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman nominated to the Supreme Court, has sent millions of Americans into a state of mourning, and sparked a bitter partisan fight to fill her seat on the bench. But as the nation’s attention steadily drifts to the political drama surrounding Justice Ginsburg’s death, it is important to take a moment and reflect on the legacy of the women’s rights pioneer who changed America’s legal landscape forever and made equality between the sexes a reality for millions across the country.
Ginsburg’s crusade for women’s rights began during her years as an attorney. Despite graduating at the top of her class at Columbia Law School, Ginsburg found herself without job prospects, as law firms and judges’ chambers in the U.S. at the time overwhelmingly excluded women. Later on, when Ginsburg spent time in Sweden working on a law project through Columbia University, she was exposed to a more egalitarian dynamic between the sexes, which drastically changed her views and instilled in her the resolve to help transform the misogynistic culture that was prevalent in the United States.
When Ginsburg finally got a teaching position at Rutgers University, she began litigating against sex discrimination, representing both men and women who were denied equal treatment under the law on account of their gender. At the time, a plethora of U.S. laws, both on the state and federal levels, heavily discriminated against women and endorsed different standards for men and women - something Ginsburg was determined to eradicate.
In Reed v. Reed (1971) - the first case filed by Ginsburg in the Supreme Court - she successfully convinced the court that states had no authority to designate men over women as executors of wills. This was a landmark victory, seeing as it was the first case in history in which the court had nullified a state law on the basis of gender discrimination.
After becoming the first female tenured professor at the Columbia University School of Law, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, through which she persisted in her fight for equality between the sexes. Ginsburg’s ultimate goal was to get the court to widen its interpretation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to include women as well. In order to achieve that, Ginsburg forged a strategy of representing male plaintiffs, hoping that by getting the justices to understand that sex discrimination harmed men as well, they would gradually espouse a more egalitarian reading of the law.
“She was arguing before nine men. They never had a woman on the Supreme Court. If they were going to buy what she was selling, they could not be faced with being parties to a social revolution, even though [...] that’s what she was asking them to become - parties to a social revolution,” said Linda Greenhouse, a Supreme Court writer for the New York Times, on The Daily podcast. “But she was dolling it out in such little, inoffensive doses that by the time they were finished swallowing everything that she had served them, they had in fact become a partner in that revolution.”
Out of six Supreme Court cases filed by Ginsburg, she had won five, building a jurisprudence that set women on an equal footing with men under the law and leading the court to broaden its reading of the 14th Amendment.
Ginsburg was appointed as a federal judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by President Jimmy Carter. As a judge, Ginsburg proved to lean more to the centre, much to the dismay of feminist activists who criticised the late justice for upholding conservative views on some issues. This was the case, for instance, after Ginsburg had expressed criticism over the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalising abortion across the United Sates. But it seems that, rather than indicating conservative leanings, Ginsburg's conduct as a judge reflected her creed that a true democracy must be guided by its legislative bodies as opposed to edicts of the judiciary.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Ginsburg as a Supreme Court justice, and in 1996 she penned the majority opinion in a landmark case in which the court had struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s policy of male-only admissions.
In 2006, however, when the court shifted further to the right, Ginsburg’s role on the bench had begun to change, and over the next decade and a half she became widely known for her powerful dissents.
In her dissents, Ginsburg had called out the court, in plain yet piercing language, for its failings to uphold the law in an equal, just, and fair manner. Ginsburg realised that her dissents will not affect the court’s conduct in her lifetime, but was unwavering in her optimism that they will guide the actions of future courts.
Throughout her decades-long career in law, Ginsburg had gradually altered the United States' legal system, causing it to reflect a greater degree of equality between men and women. What stands out about Ginsburg’s enterprise, even under the spotlight of her late-life stardom, is that it did not revolve around herself, but rather was aimed at a broad-gauge project of advancing American society closer towards true and complete equality between the sexes.
“Whatever you choose to do, leave tracks,” said the late justice. “And that means - don’t do just for yourself, because in the end it’s not going to be fully satisfying. I think you would want to leave the world a little better for you having lived. And there’s no satisfaction that a person can gain from just, what people call, 'turning over a buck', that’s equal to the satisfaction that you get from knowing that you have made another's life, your community, a little better for your effort.”
Image by U.S. National Archives
