Women of Influence
(7 votes, average: 4.71 out of 5)April 15, 2009 by Erin Casey
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: All People Created Equal
After graduating at the top of her class from a prestigious law school, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless passed over for jobs with New York law firms and refused even an interview for a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship. Being “a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot” was a little more than many prospective employers could handle in the early 1960s, Ginsburg has said.
Today a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg is hailed as the person most responsible for successfully challenging laws that encouraged gender discrimination. As director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1970s, she helped bring about constitutional protections against sex discrimination for women and men through a series of cases she brought before the high court.
Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, Ruth Bader was strongly influenced by her mother, who taught her always to be a lady and to be independent. Her mother died of stomach cancer the day before Ruth graduated high school.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Cornell, she enrolled at Harvard Law School. That same year, she married fellow law student Martin Ginsburg. After he graduated and took a job in New York, she transferred to Columbia Law School where she tied for first in her graduating class. The transition gave her the opportunity to be the first woman on both the Harvard and Columbia law reviews. Despite an excellent academic reputation, Ginsburg received no job offers. And even with a recommendation from the dean of Harvard Law School, she was denied an interview for a Supreme Court clerkship.
So Ginsburg went the academic route, becoming the second woman on the law faculty at Rutgers, where she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter in 1970, the first journal in the United States to focus exclusively on women’s rights. As a nontenured professor, she reportedly hid her second pregnancy by wearing oversized clothes to retain her position.
From 1972 to 1980, Ginsburg taught at Columbia, becoming the school’s first tenured female professor. She also lectured on gender discrimination and wrote the first textbook on the subject in 1974. During that time, she argued cases for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. One case attacked a Social Security Act provision that discriminated against men, denying widowers the same monetary benefits awarded to widows. Another case centered on a nursing school’s admissions policy barring male students. Ginsburg won five of the six cases she argued and effectively changed the court’s treatment of gender-based complaints.
In 1980, she was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and in 1993, to the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the second woman named to the high court. At her confirmation hearing, she recalled challenges she faced early in her career. “Race discrimination was immediately perceived as evil, odious and intolerable. But the response I got when I talked about sex-based discrimination was ‘What are you talking about? Women are treated ever so much better than men.’ ”
Treated for colon cancer in 1999, Ginsburg didn’t miss a day on the bench. Recently treated for early-stage pancreatic cancer, she was back hearing oral arguments within three weeks. Ginsburg, 76, has often been the swing vote during her time on the bench, but when the matter is discrimination, her mission and message of equality are consistent and clear.
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I am really inspired and impressed by these women. When I think of my own accomplishments, they pale in comparison. They are very strong and talented women and I am glad they are being recognized for their achievements.