Ruth Bader Ginsburg made history being the second woman to serve on the U.S Supreme Court. While on the bench, Ginsburg authored some 200 opinions—and broke new ground for gender equality in the United States. From Friday 18th of September, the day that Ginsburg passed away from cancer, mourners have gathered at the U.S Supreme Court to honour her legacy and life, as a judge and liberal icon.
Just before starting Harvard Law School, Ginsburg became a mother, already unknowingly breaking social norms and defying sexist attitudes that mothers can not be working women, or that women have to press the brakes on their career for the sake of having a child. By far, Ginsburg’s most renowned achievement is her Supreme Court nomination by President Bill Clinton, making her the second woman to serve in the highest court in America’s federal judiciary. When President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, he made the comparison between Ginsburg’s legal pioneering of women’s rights with the work of Thurgood Marshall, who oversaw the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, that outlawed segregated public schools in the U.S. In the same way that Thurgood Marshall’s ruling was a huge (for the time) step towards racial equality, Ginsburg’s noteworthy efforts against the discrimination against women on the basis of sex changed the legal world for women, forever.
Today, Ginsburg is remembered as a tireless advocate for not only women’s rights, but human rights of all Americans. She was outspoken on the equality for same-sex couples and same-sex marriage, as she spoke about the feelings of ‘unfamiliarity’ towards same-sex couples for residents of Alabama, which, in 2015, initially ruled against the legalisation of same-sex marriage in some parts of the state, and compared the straight majorities feeling of ‘unfamiliarity’ as the same feeling the white majority experienced as segregation was abolished. To me, there was a feeling of relief when I heard Ginsburg, a straight white woman, advocate for human rights (for not just women, but ‘people of colour’, queer and non-binary people, etc.) as her candour and sincerity to the subject did give myself, and many other people, mainly women, a sense of confidence in the legal system she pioneered in.
White I am sure all the mourners of Ruth Bader Ginsburg feel like her death is a national and global loss, Ginsburg's fighting spirit, her fiery dissents and her gripping
passion for change lives on, which Ginsburg even said it would herself. In a recording dictated by her granddaughter, as Ginsburg was approaching her final moments, she said “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed”. This calling is to us women, who wish for change, talk of change and need change for our own livelihood, to continue fighting to be equal. To be equal in legal status, social status and in thought. To eradicate any unconscious biases that Ruth spoke of, to be truly free from the shackles that patriarchy places us in.
In an interview discussing the general opinion of society is that working women can only provide for herself and not her family, as that was the role of the blue collar husband, Ginsburg said that...
“the pedestal you put women on is a cage”.
Yes, in terms of the law, in the UK men and women are deemed as equal. Yes, women can work and make a living. Yes, we are no longer the legal property of men. But, there are so many miniature loopholes of inequality that are swept under the rug. Most of us may conform, accept that fact that we are ‘equal’ on paper. But what would R.B.G do? Dissent.
The effort that she contributed to was to change all the laws that differentiated arbitrarily on the basis of gender, so that women had the equal opportunity to pursue her talents. Women consistently face artificial barriers, which Ruth fought to pull down. Today, women are in the high courts in many U.S states following President Bill Clinton’s nomination of Ginsburg as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, in 1993.
To add to the extensive list of cases that Ginsburg dissented, oversaw and ruled, one notable one is Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc. where she wrote a concurring opinion in this 1993 sexual harassment case, that conduct are illegal if it “unreasonably interfered with the plaintiff’s work performance…”. Perhaps Justice Ginsburg was ahead of her time, as she spoke against sexual harassment in the workplace, arguing that men were not merely being boisterous, but criminal. This #METOO-like accord was a step forward for women’s rights in the corporate world, a topic that is still gravely controversial today.
Once she was on the bench, Ginsburg’s epochal opinions continued to show her fight for gender equality, as she oversaw the opening of all male schools for women. Her status as a ‘champion for gender equality’ of course led Ginsburg to adopt the epithet of ‘The Notorious R.B.G’ after the American rapper ‘The Notorious B.I.G’, a title commemorating her fiery and impassioned nature. Most women would be, and are, denounced and reprimanded for being fierce and relentless in the courtroom and in any workplace. The ‘bossy women’ label is so often generalised to any woman who is passionate and outspoken, but for men this same attitude is desirable. Women are made to feel the need to bite their tongue, silence their voice and let the men speak.
This is why Ruth’s legacy of ‘fiery dissents’ is so important for the representation of working women, women in the legal sphere, or just women. Period.
This is just one of the challenges that women in the legal world face, although this sector is roughly split 50/50 in terms of sex today, it was not always that way.
Before R.B.G began her work in the 1960s, the androcentric Supreme Court not only failed to invalidate any sex-based rule, but treated men and women differently in terms of their ability to work within the legal sphere. Taking a prehistoric, evolutionary approach, in 1873 the court allowed Illinois authorities to ban Myra Bradwell from becoming a lawyer, on the basis that she was a woman. Her anatomical structure (which is different but not in any way inferior to that of a man’s) was the ruling factor to why she, and many other women at the time, could not be a lawyer. Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who shockingly at the time was the epitome of a “progressive jurist”, made the decision that women’s “paramount destiny and mission is to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of creation”. Merely the shape of women’s genitalia makes them unfit for certain careers, certain attitudes and ways of life.
You might be thinking, the Bradwell v. Illinois case was in the 1870s and women are allowed to be lawyers now, so what’s the issue?
Well, in 2020 women in the U.S only make up 23.7% of the government representatives in congress, and only 26 women serve as senators, despite the fact that 51% of Americans are women. In the UK, even though the number of women in parliament is the highest it has ever been, that number pertains mostly to the opposition. Labour became the first party in UK history to elect more female candidates (53%) than men (47%) and the Liberal Democrats increased the proposition of women by 29% (so 31% are women). BUT, the Tories only increased the number of female candidates by 1% (according to 2019 reports)
Women are consistently put down, trodden on and held back. Even if they are high in their social status, they have corporate jobs and can provide for themselves, opportunities remain hindered to us. These same opportunities that place men on top. A quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg that strikes me as remarkable, today more than ever, is “I ask no favour for my sex, all I ask of my breathen is that they take their feet off our necks”
The progress of women’s rights is slow, but it is progress nonetheless, right? In a Bloomberg interview, Ruth talked about what is stopping this social change from
being rapid as it should be. She said the reason is unconscious bias.
Ginsburg gave the anecdote of a symphony orchestra, as when she was growing up, “you would never see a woman in the orchestra”. The only reasoning behind this is, ‘well women can’t play as well as men’. With some questioning this, a simple device, a curtain, was used to test if women and men are different in their musical ability. The judges who selected the auditionees for the orchestra were unable to decipher whether the player was a man or a woman. Ginsburg used this anecdotal analogy to reflect how in the legal system there are unconscious biases that hold women back. Women are not ‘made’ to be lawyers, judges, justices, etcetera. It is ‘the law of Creation’ as Joseph P. Bradley remarked. These attitudes, as old as the Bible itself, are still youthful in the minds of men.
But, not in the minds of those mourners who stand outside the
Supreme Court, honouring Ginsburg’s right for women’s rights. I will remind you of her dying dissent: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed”. This loss is not fleeting hope but an exhortation to fight from the fiercest defender of women’s rights of her generation. A fight that is long lived, but one that I intend to win.
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