by Irin Carmon
RBG is a woman who, to use another phrase that mattered a lot to her, defied stereotypes. When she was nominated to the Supreme Court, the Washington Post jointly interviewed two of her old ACLU colleagues, Peratis and former legal director Mel Wulf, and the pair struggled to explain RBG. “She’s conventional socially and politically and in every way, except for her intellect,” Wulf said, a tad dismissively. Peratis cut in, “Yeah, but Mel, you have to admit it was pretty unconventional in those days for a woman to raise a family, hold a job, go to law school.” Wulf, a man of the 1960s, shrugged. “I’ll say this, she is by no means a bomb thrower,” he insisted.
“But,” said Peratis, “the things she achieved were bombshells.”
Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark. Early in her career, RBG wanted to work at a law firm, maybe teach a little. The world as it was had no room for her. That injustice left her no choice but to achieve bombshells. It was easy to miss, maybe because it didn’t look like male bomb throwing. Or because she and her peers had transformed the world so much it was hard to remember, in retrospect and without living it, how hard it had been.
And yet as this book’s closer look at her life and work shows, RBG is about more than simply breaking glass ceilings to join a man’s world. As the cofounder of the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, and often called the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s rights movement, RBG devised careful, incremental plans for revolutionary goals. She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real. Many of her ideals, from the liberation of men to the valuing of caregivers, remain unrealized. RBG’s longtime friend Cynthia Fuchs Epstein says, “I think had she not had this persona as this very soft-spoken, neat, and tidy person, with a conventional life, she would have been considered a flaming radical.”
If very few people recognized these things about RBG, she had preferred to keep it that way. “She subordinated her own persona into this machine,” says Neuborne. “The star of every production she had was the law, not the lawyer.”
But the arrival of two Bush appointees to the court gave a narrow majority to a conservative agenda of undermining remedies for racial justice, reproductive rights, access to health care, and protections for workers, while giving corporations ever more rights and political influence. Even the current balance, tipped rightward with a chance of wobble, is precarious. The next president may appoint as many as three justices.
RBG is determined to stick around and remind her colleagues and the country what she believes is America’s unfinished promise. She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, “we the people” originally left out a lot of people. “It would not include me,” RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.
Maybe that’s why she’s keeping herself in fighting shape in the meantime. In late November 2014, RBG felt a little faint during a workout session with her regular personal trainer and had surgery so a stent could be placed in her right coronary. But she had plans to keep. RBG had invited Shana, Frank Chi, Aminatou Sow, and Ankur Mandhania to visit the court. “I would be glad to greet the clever creators of the Notorious R.B.G. in chambers,” she wrote. On December 10, the morning of a two-hour oral argument about the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946, the meme-makers arrived.
Smiting her enemiesDamon Xanthopoulos
At around noon, they filed tentatively into her chambers, as each justice’s personal domain is known. RBG stood, flanked by her clerks. Her slender wrist was slightly bruised from the heart stent procedure. Her guests asked her what message she had for all the young people who admired her.
RBG paused to think it over. “You can tell them,” she replied, “I’ll be back doing push-ups next week.”
Courtesy of the author
1820
1828: Supreme Court justices bunk together, until one lady ruins it for everyone by insisting on living with her husband.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Joseph Ferdinand Keppler
1830
1840
July 19–20, 1848
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
—Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls
1850
December 1853
“Was invited to sit in the Chief Justice’s seat. As I took the place, I involuntarily exclaimed: ‘Who knows, but this chair may one day be occupied by a woman.’ The brethren laughed heartily.”
—abolitionist feminist Sarah Grimké
Sarah Moore Grimké Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
1860
July 28, 1868: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, recognizing the citizenship rights of ex-slaves, promises equal protection under the law, but makes it clear only men’s voting rights count.
1870
April 15, 1873: The Supreme Court allows Illinois to block Myra Bradwell from practicing law just because she’s a woman. In a 2011 reenactment of the case, RBG rules for Bradwell.
“The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.”
—Justice Joseph P. Bradley, in a concurrence in Bradwell v. Illinois
“The method of communication between the Creator and the jurist is never disclosed.”
—RBG, brief to the Supreme Court, 1972
1880
1890
January 4, 1897: A woman abducted from her home at gunpoint wasn’t raped, the Supreme Court says in Mills v. United States, because for an act to be rape, “more force is necessary.”
1900
1903: Celia Amster, RBG’s mother, is born.
Celia Bader Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
1910
1920
August 18, 1920: The Nineteenth Amendment recognizes women’s right to vote, though violent barriers remain for women of color.
Suffrage paradeAmerican Press Association
1930
June 10, 1932: Martin D. Ginsburg, future husband of RBG, is born.
March 15, 1933: Joan Ruth Bader, nicknamed Kiki, is born in Brooklyn.
Ruth Bader (August 2, 1935) Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
1940
1944: Lucille Lomen becomes the first female clerk at the Supreme Court.
“When you say you have ‘no available graduates’ whom you could recommend for appointment as my clerk, do you include women? It is possible I may decide to take one, if I can find one who is absolutely first-rate.”
—Justice William O. Douglas, 1944
Lucille Lomen© Bettmann/CORBIS
1950
June 1950: Celia Bader dies one day before her daughter’s high school graduation.
Young Ruth and cousin Richard Bader Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Fall 1950: RBG enrolls at Cornell.
Ruth Bader as a Cornell senior (December 1953)Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
1953: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is published in the United States.
May 17, 1954: In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court reverses itself on “separate but equal.”
June 1954: Ruth Bader graduates from Cornell. She marries Marty at his family’s home.
July 21, 1955: Jane Ginsburg is born.
1956: RBG enrolls in Harvard Law School, one of only nine women in her class. In her second year, Marty is diagnosed with cancer.
“The study of law was unusual for women of my generation.
For most girls growing up in the 1940s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S.”
—RBG
Harvard Law School’s 1958 yearbookHistorical and Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library
1958: Marty graduates from Harvard Law School. RBG transfers to Columbia University School of Law.
Columbia Law School’s 1959 yearbookColumbia Law School
1959: RBG graduates from Columbia Law at the top of her class but can barely get a job.
1960
November 20, 1961: The Supreme Court signs off on making jury service optional because “woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life.”
Women on Juries? (1910)Harper’s Weekly
December 1962: Civil rights activist Pauli Murray proposes using the Fourteenth Amendment to argue against sexist laws.
1963: RBG becomes the second woman to teach full-time at Rutgers School of Law.
“[The dean explained] it was only fair to pay me modestly, because my husband had a very good job.”
—RBG
Rutgers School of Law–Newark 1964 yearbookRutgers School of Law–Newark
June 10, 1963: President John F. Kennedy signs the Equal Pay Act, which bans discrimination in pay on the basis of sex. It’s full of loopholes.
JFK signing the Equal Pay ActAbbie Rowe White House Photographs/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
July 2, 1964: President Lyndon Johnson signs into law the Civil Rights Act, which contains a last-minute ban on sex discrimination in employment.
“Unless [sex discrimination is banned], the white women of this country would be drastically discriminated against in favor of a Negro woman.”
—Representative Glenn Andrews of Alabama
LBJ signing Civil Rights Act with MLK, Jr.Hulton Archive Getty Images
1965: RBG publishes her first book, Civil Procedure in Sweden, with Anders Bruzelius.
“That’s why when the Supreme Court faces a tricky question of Swedish civil procedure, we always go straight to Justice Ginsburg.”
—Justice Elena Kagan
June 7, 1965: The Supreme Court finds that Connecticut’s birth control ban violates a “right to marital privacy.”
Estelle Griswold, 1963Lee Lockwood/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
September 8, 1965: RBG’s son, James Ginsburg, is born.
June 13, 1967: President Johnson nominates famed civil rights litigator Thurgood Marshall (and RBG inspiration) to be the first black justice of the Supreme Court.
LBJ and Thurgood Marshall, 1967Keystone Getty Images
1970
Spring 1970: RBG teaches her first class on women and the law.
“The Department of Justice, I am sure, doesn’t have any male secretaries. . . . They hire women secretaries because they are better.”
—Chief Justice Warren Burger at oral argument for Phillips v. Martin-Marietta,
December 9, 1970
Flo Kennedy, 1976Barbara Alper/Getty Images
June 25, 1971: RBG writes her first brief to the Supreme Court in Reed v. Reed.
January 1972: RBG becomes the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School.
Professor Ginsburg, Columbia Law SchoolCollection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Spring 1972: RBG cofounds the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images
June 23, 1972: Richard Nixon signs into law Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education.
January 22, 1973: In Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court makes abortion legal throughout the United States. RBG is uneasy about how the court got there, and how fast.
“This right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
—Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe v. Wade
Barbara Freeman Getty Images
1974: RBG publishes the first-ever casebook on sex discrimination. She insists that the authors’ names be listed alphabetically, even though doing so means the one man’s name will come first.
West Publishing Co.
1980
April 11, 1980: President Jimmy Carter nominates RBG to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg (fall 1980)Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.
Nominee Sandra Day O’Connor and Ronald ReaganKeystone/CNP/Getty Images
1990
June 14, 1993: President Bill Clinton nominates RBG to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.
In front of the Supreme Court Building, 1993Getty Images/Diana Walker
May 13, 1994: President Clinton nominates Stephen Breyer to replace Harry Blackmun as associate justice.
June 26, 1996: RBG writes the majority opinion in the landmark case United States v. Virginia, requiring the Virginia Military Institute to admit women.
Summer 1999: RBG is diagnosed with colorectal cancer. She does not miss a day on the bench.
2000
December 12, 2000: RBG is one of four dissenters in Bush v. Gore, which effectively declares George W. Bush president.
“The wisdom of the court’s decision to intervene and the wisdom of its ultimate determination await history’s judgment.”
—RBG, Bush v. Gore dissent
July 1, 2005: Sandra Day O’Connor announces her retirement. President George W. Bush nominates D.C. Circuit judge John Roberts as her replacement.
September 2005: Chief Justice Rehnquist, whom RBG would continue to call “my chief,” dies. President Bush switches Roberts’s nomination to chief justice and nominates Appeals Court Judge Samuel Alito to replace O’Connor.
“To my sorrow, I am now what [O’Connor] was her first twelve years on the court—the lone woman.”
—RBG
April 18, 2007: RBG launches her era of furious dissent with the abortion case Gonzales v. Carhart.
“The Court . . . pretends that its decision protects women.”
—RBG, summarizing her dissent from the bench
May 29, 2007: RBG reads her dissent from the bench in the sex discrimination case of Lilly Ledbetter.
November 4, 2008: Barack Obama is elected the first black president.
“I don’t know. I hear that Justice Ginsburg has been working on her jump shot.”
—Barack Obama, after being invited to play basketball at the nation’s highest court
A hug with Barack Obama at the State of the Union, 2015AP Photo/Mandel Ngan, Pool
February 5, 2009: RBG has surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.
February 23, 2009: RBG is back on the bench.
February 24, 2009: RBG attends President Obama’s first speech to Congress.
“I wanted people to see that the Supreme Court isn’t all male.”
—RBG
May 26, 2009: President Obama nominates Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. She is the first Latina justice.
2010
May 10, 2010: President Obama nominates Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
“I like the idea that we’re all over the bench. It says women are here to stay.”
—RBG
With Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, 2010Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States/Steve Petteway
June 27, 2010: Marty Ginsburg dies after complications from metastatic cancer.
Ruth and Marty dancing, 1998Getty Images/Annie Groer/Washington Post
March 27, 2013
“There’s full marriage and then there’s sort of skim milk marriage.”
—RBG at oral argument in United States v. Windsor, the succe
ssful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act
June 25, 2013: As RBG dissents in a case gutting the Voting Rights Act, Notorious R.B.G., the Tumblr, is born.
August 2013: RBG becomes the first Supreme Court justice to officiate a same-sex wedding.
“I think it will be one more statement that people who love each other and want to live together should be able to enjoy the blessings and the strife in the marriage relationship.”
—RBG on performing same-sex weddings
June 30, 2014: In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court allows corporations to refuse contraceptive coverage to women based on the employer’s religious belief.
February 12, 2015: RBG admits she was not “100 percent sober” at the State of the Union.
Asleep at the State of the Union, 2015Getty Images/Alex Wong
February 28, 2015: RBG becomes a recurring character on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, issuing “Ginsburns” between dance moves.
2020
Hallie Jay Pope
“The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”
—RBG, Hobby Lobby dissent
Ann Telnaes editorial cartoon used with the permission of Ann Telnaes and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.