“I don’t say women’s rights – I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.”
“In my lifetime I expect to see more women on the High Court bench, women not shaped from the same mould but of different complexions.” These were the powerful words of the legend, Late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in 1993 overlooking a bench filled with white men. The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made history in death as she did in life when she was honoured on Friday as the first woman to lie in state at the US Capitol. The service ended with bipartisan female members of the House and Senate paying tribute to Ginsburg, who was known for her devotion to advancing the rights of women.
She was the Supreme Court’s feminist icon. Small, soft-spoken, yet fiercely determined, she was an unstoppable force who transformed the law and defied social conventions. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg moved slowly. When court was in session, she often had her head down, sometimes leading everybody to think she was asleep. She once confessed to dozing off during State of the Union. But it was a mistake to equate her gait and gaze with frailty, for Ginsburg showed over and over a steely resilience in the face of personal loss and serious health problems that made the diminutive New Yorker a towering women’s rights champion and forceful presence at the court over 27 years.
During her legal career, Ginsburg established the reputation of a towering champion of gender equality and women’s rights. She was hailed as a crusader for women’s rights. She was the second woman in history, to serve as a justice in the Supreme Court but her legal legacy was even more sweeping.
She had a radical project aiming at erasing the functional difference between men and women in society. She wanted to make it clear that there should be no such thing as ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, she took onto a mission to contribute to bringing change by taking a legal study in Sweden where feminism was on the rise.
Swedish women weren’t choosing between careers and family, and they inspired the young lawyer.
When she returned to the U.S., she launched her radical project. She happened to have various male clients because they were making claims such as leaves for childcare etc. and faced rejections from the court that were traditionally considered ‘women’s claims’. She wanted to shake up the preconceived notions when it came to raising families and providing for them and working in the economy. Everybody should be on the equal footing.
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books”, President Bill Clinton said in 1993 when he announced her appointment. “She has already done that. Her time as a justice was marked by triumphs for equality for women, as in her opinion for the court ordering the Virginia Military Institute to accept women or give up its State funding.”
There were setbacks, too. She dissented forcefully from the court’s decision in 2007 to uphold a nationwide ban on an abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion.
The alarming ruling, Ginsburg said, cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court - and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives. Ginsburg once said that she had not entered the law as a champion of equal rights.
“I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other,” she wrote. “I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyse problems clearly.”
Criticizing the court’s conservative majority for getting rid of a key part of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 2013, Ginsburg wrote that it was like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.
In 2015, Ginsburg joined the 5-4 majority in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, overturning a ban on same-sex marriages across all 50 US states.
“We have changed our idea about marriage. Marriage today is not what it was under the common law tradition, under the civil law tradition,” she said during the oral arguments. “Marriage was a relationship of a dominant male to a subordinate female that ended as a result of this court’s decision in 1982 when Louisiana’s Head and Master Rule was struck down. Would that be a choice that state should [still] be allowed to have? To cling to marriage the way it once was?”
But in her later years as the court moved to the right Ginsburg grew bolder in her dissents. She became a social media icon, the Notorious RBG, a name coined by a law student who admired Ginsburg’s dissent in a case cutting back on a key civil rights law.
The justice was, at first, taken aback. There was nothing notorious about this woman of rectitude who wore a variety of lace collars on the bench and often appeared in public in elegant gloves.
But when her law clerks and grandchildren explained the connection to another Brooklynite, the rapper - The Notorious B.I.G., her scepticism turned to delight. In the word the current generation uses, it’s awesome, Ginsburg said in 2016, shortly before she turned 83.
After all the spills, surgeries and bouts with cancer, what was it that kept her going? Ginsburg said it was her job on the bench, which she still found exhilarating. But perhaps most of all it was her radical project which she said was still far from complete.
In her final years on the court, Ginsburg was the unquestioned leader of the liberal justices, as outspoken in dissent as she was cautious in earlier years.
After the unfortunate news surfaced, condolences poured in from far and wide, especially given that she passed away just before the upcoming presidential elections. Many have viewed her life and work as the last threads holding American democracy together. In New York, the 50th Street subway station has been unofficially renamed ‘Ruth St’ in her honour by the artist, Adrian Wilson.
Piece By-
Ishta Kaushal
Ishta is currently pursuing her Bachelors in Commerce (Honors) with Minors in English Literature from DRC, DU. She comes from the hills of Shimla, which is where she took to reading really early on molding her into this ardent reader today.
So, as she explores her writing stature, here’s a take on Intersectional Feminism. Hope you like it and get to learn something new.
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