SUPREME COURT JUSTICE UNITED STATESWomen belong in all places where decisions are being made.
—RUTH BADER GINSBURG
Ruth and her parents were heading home to Brooklyn after a long weekend in the Pennsylvania countryside. Young Ruth kept her mind busy by staring out the window; she saw forests and towns, stores and gas stations flash by. But one bed-and-breakfast caught her eye. Out front, it had a sign that read, “No dogs or Jews allowed!”1
Ruth was horrified.
Ruth and her family were Jewish, and although she was young, she had enough experience to know there were people in the world who didn’t like Jews. Ruth was well aware that in Europe, millions of Jewish people had recently been murdered in concentration camps. Everyone in America knew. And still there were people who would put up a sign like that.
But what really bothered Ruth about the sign was that it was unfair. She was an American, born and raised in this country just like the owners of that bed-and-breakfast. But this sign made it seem like she was worth less than other Americans.
Ruth would spend the rest of her life battling discrimination of all kinds. In fact, she would help create some of America’s antidiscrimination laws, along with many others.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her older sister, Marilyn, died when Ruth was just two, so she was raised as an only child.
When her parents married, her mother, Celia, gave up her job as a bookkeeper to stay home. She instilled a strong work ethic in Ruth, insisting she do well in school and taking her to the library nearly every day.
“One of my greatest pleasures as a child was sitting on my mother’s lap when she would read to me,” remembered Ruth.2 She wanted to make her mother proud—and she did. She was an excellent student, always number one in her class. In sixth grade, she published her first legal article in the school newspaper, the Highway Herald, entitled “Landmarks of Constitutional Freedom.”3 By eighth grade, she was editor of the paper. In high school, she was in the honor society but also twirled the baton for the pep squad, called the Go-Getters.
Nowadays, Ruth is known as “the Notorious R.B.G.,” a takeoff on rapper Notorious B.I.G. There are websites, Tumblr accounts, T-shirts, tote bags—all dedicated to the Notorious R.B.G.
Sadly, while Ruth was in high school, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She died the day before Ruth’s graduation but lived long enough to see Ruth get accepted to Cornell University, one of the top colleges in the country, and on a prestigious scholarship to boot. It was all Celia had ever wanted for her daughter.
At Cornell, Ruth was once again top of her class. She also took a first step in her fight against discrimination when she helped a professor do research on blacklists. In the 1950s, a blacklist named people who were suspected of being Communists—anyone from movie stars to college professors. Whether they actually were communists or not, people on the blacklists lost their jobs, and their reputations and lives were ruined. Ruth watched lawyers risk their careers defending people on the blacklists, in court and in front of Congress.
At Cornell, Ruth also met and fell in love with her future husband, Martin Ginsburg. “Of all the boys I dated,” she said, “he was the only one who really cared that I had a brain.”4 Marty was incredibly supportive of her career, which wasn’t common at the time. He was the only person who thought Ruth should become a lawyer instead of a teacher (a more common career for smart women back then), and he convinced her to stick with it. Marty even lobbied behind the scenes in Washington for her Supreme Court nomination. He once told a friend, “I think the most important thing I’ve done is to enable Ruth to do what she has done.”5
When Ruth and Marty had kids, Ruth couldn’t cook, so Marty became a master chef. Ruth hasn’t cooked a meal since 1980!”
The month Ruth graduated, they married. Both of them wanted to be lawyers, but that would have to wait. Martin got drafted into the army reserves and the new couple moved to Oklahoma, where Ruth got a job at a Social Security office. There, she experienced sex discrimination firsthand when her boss found out she was pregnant and demoted her.
When Martin’s army service ended, he returned to Harvard Law School, and Ruth applied and got in as well. At that time, Harvard Law School only had nine women (including Ruth) out of five hundred first-year law students!6 Female students didn’t get much respect there—in fact, the dean of the law school once asked the nine women in Ruth’s class how they felt taking spots that should’ve gone to men!
Sexism wasn’t Ruth’s only struggle at Harvard; Martin got cancer. The doctors said his chances of survival were almost zero. As he underwent surgery and treatment, Ruth cared for him and baby Jane, and took notes in all his classes, and typed his papers. And she still managed to become one of Harvard’s top law students. She was even the first female member of the Harvard Law Review, a famous legal journal.
When Martin graduated from Harvard and got a job at a law firm in New York City, Ruth was happy to transfer to Columbia Law School, where they were more accepting of female students. She quickly earned a spot on the Columbia Law Review. When she graduated a year later, this working mom tied for the highest grades in her class.
As the top law graduate from two Ivy League universities, Ruth fully expected to have jobs and clerkships thrown at her. After all, that’s what would’ve happened to a man. But that’s not what happened to Ruth. About looking for her first job, she said:
It was such a rude shock. Employers were saying, “Please don’t send us any women. We don’t want women in this law firm.” My case was particularly difficult, despite my high grades. There I was with three strikes against me: Jewish, woman, and mother.7
Lucky for Ruth, one of her Columbia professors stuck his neck out for her. He arranged an interview with US District Judge Edmund Palmieri. He told the judge, “If you take a chance on her and she doesn’t work out, I’ll replace her with a man from the same class. But if you don’t give her a chance, I will never send you another Columbia applicant.”8 Ruth got the job and did not need to be replaced.
Years after she left, Harvard tried to give Ruth a belated degree. She turned them down!
Ruth has a positive view of her early struggles to find a job in a male-dominated field and of the discrimination she faced:
Suppose I had gotten a job as a permanent associate. Probably I would have climbed up the ladder, and today, I would be a retired partner. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.9
Instead, she clerked for Palmieri for two years and then joined Columbia’s Project on International Civil Procedure. In 1963, she got a job as a law professor at Rutgers University and a few years later had her second child, James. At Rutgers, Ruth wore baggy clothing to disguise her pregnancy—she didn’t want to give anyone a reason to demote her again.
When Ruth found out female faculty salaries at Rutgers were less than their male colleagues, she took it up with the dean. And when he told her that she shouldn’t worry about it because her husband had a good job, Ruth joined a lawsuit against the college. They won the suit and enormous pay raises for female professors.
Soon after James’s birth, Ruth began working with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), prosecuting cases of discrimination against women. In 1972, she became codirector of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. That same year, she was also offered a job as professor at Columbia Law School, making her the first woman to get a tenured position there (meaning she couldn’t be fired). Throughout the ’70s, Ruth battled for equal treatment of women, arguing six women’s rights cases before the Supreme Court. She won five of them.10
Once she got her foot in the door of America’s legal institutions, there was no stopping Ruth. In 1980, President Carter nominated her to the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC. The thirteen federal appeals courts in America are one step below the Supreme Court. During her thirteen years on the Appeals Court, Ruth wrote more than three hundred opinions on all kinds of cases.11
For 200 years, there were no female justices on the Supreme Court bench. Ruth was the second ever, and by fall of 2010, there were three (out of nine spots): RBG, Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.12
Ruth finally got her big break in 1993, when President Clinton got his chance to nominate a Supreme Court justice. Once Ruth met and talked with the president, he was so impressed with her that he knew his search was over. Ruth became the second female Supreme Court justice and the first Jewish female justice.
After the Supreme Court ruled to make gay marriage legal in all 50 states, Ruth was the first sitting Supreme Court justice to officiate a same-sex marriage ceremony.
As part of the Supreme Court, Ruth has been a part of deciding our nation’s laws for decades now. Though assertive and vocal in her opinions, she is known as a consensus builder. One of her best friends on the court was the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, whom she disagreed with much of the time.
Ruth has always been a trailblazer. And through her legal work and decisions on the bench, she has changed the world for women. For most of her life, she has been fighting against the kind of discrimination she saw on that Pennsylvania sign. “I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, [the] color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.”13 This has always been—and remains—her goal.
When I’m sometimes asked, “When will there be enough [women on the supreme court]?” and I say, “When there are nine,” people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.
—RUTH BADER GINSBURG