Notorious RBG

by Irin Carmon

  “I feel like a very lucky girl who grew up in Brooklyn.”

  —RBG, 1996

  THE YEARBOOK for James Madison High School’s class of 1950 predicted that one senior would be a Supreme Court justice. As of this writing, Joel Sheinbaum is still practicing dentistry on Long Island. There was no particular prediction for Ruth Bader, nicknamed Kiki by her older sister. Having made it to the relative idyll of Brooklyn, the Jewish parents of Flatbush longed to say “my son the doctor, the lawyer,” as Richard Salzman, Kiki’s classmate, remembered. “The girls were supposed to marry doctors or lawyers.”

  The yearbook entry for Ruth Bader shows a photo of a sweet-faced girl with bobbed hair. It notes that she was a cellist, that she twirled the baton (but not that she chipped her tooth once doing so), that she was in the honor society and treasurer of the Go-Getters club. People remembered her as popular but quiet. “She ran with a group of girls who were not very tall and chatted and seemed to have a good time,” recalls another classmate, Hesh Kaplan. In summers at Camp Che-Na-Wah in the Adirondacks, Kiki acquired the title of camp rabbi and met a nice boy who was bound for law school.

  In those days, some of the Irish, Italian, and Polish parents still thought there was a chance Jewish kids would make matzohs of their children’s blood. Fights broke out in alleyways over Jews killing Christ. Kiki remembered a sign at a bed-and-breakfast in Pennsylvania: NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED. But Brooklyn was a nice place to grow up. When Kiki got too old to be read to, her mother would drop her off at the library once a week and go get her hair done while Kiki picked her five books of the week. For a while, her favorites were books about Greek and Norse mythology, and then she graduated to Nancy Drew. “This was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend,” RBG remembered happily. Because the library was one floor above a Chinese restaurant, “I learned to love the smell of Chinese food in those days.”

  James Madison High 1950 yearbook pageJames Madison High School

  The Catholics went to parochial school, the Jews to Madison. There wasn’t much about Kiki that seemed different from the other kids. They rode their bikes to and from school. Their parents tried to forget what had happened in Europe. They listened to the radio show and then watched the television version of The Goldbergs, with a Jewish mother who shouted out of windows like theirs sometimes did. They talked uneasily about Judy Coplon, the Madison graduate who was arrested for spying for the Soviets in Kiki’s junior year, and wondered if this time the government was going after the Jews.

  What was different about Kiki was that she lived in a house that had the smell of death, as she later called it. She told no one her mother had been slowly dying of cervical cancer since Kiki was thirteen, or that her sister, Marilyn, had died of meningitis when Kiki was two. But it was her secret to keep. She didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her. That same year, she turned thirteen, and Kiki’s friends gathered over tobacco smoke and teased her that she wouldn’t take a puff because she was scared of choking. Cigarettes were disgusting, she thought, but she would have no one thinking she was afraid. (Her smoking habit lasted about forty years.)

  When her mother got very sick, Kiki tried to think about what would make her mother happy and settled on doing her homework by her mother’s bed. She would not forget the time she had brought to her mother a less-than-perfect report card. That was the end of imperfect report cards.

  Celia Amster was born in New York four months after her family fled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was the fourth of seven children, and at fifteen, she easily graduated from high school with top grades. Celia’s parents had big dreams—for her eldest brother. Each week, a chunk of Celia’s earnings from working as a bookkeeper in Manhattan’s garment district went to her brother’s tuition at Cornell. When Celia married Nathan Bader, whose family had left a shtetl near pogrom-ravaged Odessa, and who had learned English in night school, that was the end of Celia working for money. It wouldn’t do for a woman to keep working. People would think her husband couldn’t support her, even if that was almost true when her husband’s trade was fur during the Depression and he’d never had much of a knack for business. Celia did help out a bit with the bookkeeping. Even as a young girl, Kiki could feel the sharpness of her mother’s disappointment. Celia Amster Bader, her daughter would often say as an adult, was perhaps the most intelligent person she ever knew.

  Fifteen-year-old RBG as camp rabbi at Che-Na-Wah in the AdirondacksCollection of the Supreme Court of the United States

  By the end of high school, Kiki had not disappointed her mother. She’d gotten into Cornell, and her name was all over the high school graduation roster. Ruth Bader, English Scholarship Medal. Ruth Bader, New York State scholarship. Ruth Bader, slated to speak as part of the Round Table Forum of Honor. But Kiki never made it to graduation. On the day before the ceremony, her mother died.

  As the house on East Ninth Street filled with mourning women, Kiki watched dully, because no woman counted for the minyan, the quorum of adults needed for a prayer under Jewish law. Kiki herself did not count. At Passover seder, Kiki loved to ask the most questions, but no girls were allowed to join the boys studying for their bar mitzvahs. When Celia’s mourners left and Nathan’s business suffered without her disciplined eye, Nathan had to cut his donations to Temple Beth El. The family was banished to the annex. Jewish law taught Kiki about a commitment to justice, but after her mother died, it took her a long time to see herself in the faith.

  Celia’s instructions would remain carved in her daughter’s memory. Ruth was to always be a lady. “That meant always conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way,” RBG later explained. “Hold fast to your convictions and your self-respect, be a good teacher, but don’t snap back in anger. Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.” Few mothers of that time gave their daughters Celia’s second piece of advice: Always be independent.

  This was a practical as well as philosophical admonition. After her mother’s death, Kiki learned Celia had quietly scraped together eight thousand dollars for her daughter’s education. Haunted by the Depression, when she had learned to never buy anything on credit, Celia had spread her savings across five banks with no more than two thousand dollars in each account. “It was one of the most trying times in my life, but I knew that she wanted me to study hard and get good grades and succeed in life,” RBG said later. “So that’s what I did.”

  YOU COULD DROP A BOMB OVER HER HEAD

  * * *

  Not long after she had arrived in Ithaca, New York, in the fall of 1950, Kiki created a mental map of every women’s bathroom on the Cornell campus. The one in the architecture school was best. That’s where she would smuggle books, going into a stall until her coursework was done. There were four men to every woman, and parents and daughters said aloud what a good place it was to find a man. Thanks to the competition for the spots reserved for women, RBG remembered, “The women were a heck of a lot smarter than the men.” But they hid their smarts.

  Kiki was hiding too. Mostly from the parties. No one, male or female, wanted to look serious, but she couldn’t hide her intensity. “You could drop a bomb over her head and she wouldn’t know it,” says Anita Fial, a high school classmate and her Cornell suitemate. Seven Jewish girls who had come from big cities lived along a corridor in Clara Dickson Hall and called themselves KLABHIJ, for each of their initials. Kiki came first. After dinner on weeknights, the girls had to be indoors for the 10 P.M. curfew, ready for check-in. Girls had to live on campus, but boys were allowed to live in apartments in Ithaca, coming and going as they pleased. After curfew, the other girls of KLABHIJ played bridge on the floor but Kiki would just keep working.

  The Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority at Cornell in 1953Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections

  Celia had wanted her daughter to be a teacher, a solid job for a wo
man. Kiki tried, and then dropped, student teaching. She preferred her European literature class with Vladimir Nabokov, then an unknown émigré who taught her to think carefully where each word should go. She chose government as her major and took an undergraduate class in constitutional law from the legendary professor Robert E. Cushman. Kiki had begun to notice things about the country in which she had felt lucky to have been born. World War II, which she later called “a war against racism,” had ended only five years before. “I came to understand that our troops in that war were separated by race, until the end. So there was something wrong about that,” she said.

  There was something wrong with what happened her senior year too. Marcus Singer, a professor of zoology at Cornell, was hauled before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and indicted for refusing to name fellow members of a Marxist study group. When Cornell stripped Singer of his teaching duties, the campus was in an uproar. Kiki was aghast. She’d begun working as a research assistant to Professor Cushman, helping him put together an exhibition on book burning, and here was censorship unfolding before her eyes. Cushman pointed out that lawyers had come to Singer’s rescue. “I got the idea that being a lawyer was a pretty good thing,” RBG recalled, “because in addition to practicing a profession, you could do something good for your society.”

  Her father, Nathan, worried about Kiki wanting to be a lawyer. So few women had made it. How would she support herself? He had reason to relent by the time she was a senior. His Kiki had, by then, found a good man to support her. She herself did not see it that way. Kiki was just happy that Marty Ginsburg, one year ahead of her at Cornell, was the first boy she ever met who cared that she had a brain.

  They had started out as good friends. Irma, the I in KLAVHIJ, had a boyfriend who knew the famously wisecracking Marty. Marty had a girlfriend at Smith, and Kiki’s boyfriend from Camp Che-Na-Wah went to Columbia Law School, so she saw him on weekends at best. Irma and her boyfriend thought introducing the two might mean the foursome could head to town in Marty’s gray Chevy. Freed of the pressures of courting, Marty told Kiki everything on his mind. It was a good way to start a romantic relationship, which is what it became. “There was a long, cold week at Cornell,” RBG recalled. “So that’s how we started. It occurred to me that Martin D. Ginsburg was ever so much smarter than my boyfriend at Columbia Law School.” Marty made up his mind much faster. “I have no doubt that in our case I liked her more first,” he recalled.

  Marty moved through the world with an easy confidence, tempered by an impish sense of humor. “Ruth was a wonderful student and a beautiful young woman. Most of the men were in awe of her, but Marty was not,” Carr Ferguson, a Cornell classmate and one of Marty’s closest friends, remembered. “He’s never been in awe of anybody. He wooed and won her by convincing her how much he respected her.”

  Where Kiki was shy and contained, Marty was the life of the party. His father, Morris, had risen through the garment industry to become vice president of Federated Department Stores; his mother, Evelyn, was an operagoer who quickly took her son’s motherless girlfriend under her wing. Kiki became a regular at the Ginsburg home on Long Island. She worked one summer at A&S, one of Federated’s stores, and on those suburban streets, she failed her driving test five times before passing the sixth.

  Just because Evelyn didn’t work outside the home didn’t mean Marty expected the same from his future wife. He wanted them to marry and keep on working together, at Harvard. His idea was, Marty later recalled, “to be in the same discipline so there would be something you could talk about, bounce ideas off of, know what each other was doing, and we actually sat down and by process of elimination came up with the law.” Marty had dropped his chemistry major because it interfered with golf practice, so medical school was out. Harvard Business School didn’t accept women. So they settled on law. “I have thought deep in my heart,” Marty would confess forty years later, “that Ruth always intended that to be the case.”

  They both made it into Harvard Law School. Marty, a year older, enrolled immediately while Kiki stayed in Ithaca to finish at Cornell. In June 1954, they married in the Ginsburgs’ living room, just days after Kiki’s graduation from Cornell. There were eighteen people present, because in Judaism that number symbolizes life. Moments before the ceremony, as Kiki made last-minute arrangements, Evelyn asked her to come with her to the bedroom.

  “Dear,” said Evelyn, whom Kiki would soon call Mother, “I’m going to tell you the secret of a happy marriage: It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” In her outstretched hand were a pair of earplugs.

  It took some time for RBG to understand what Evelyn was trying to tell her. During the honeymoon in Europe, her first time outside of the country, it became clear. “My mother-in-law meant simply this,” RBG said. “Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.”

  The newlyweds at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in fall 1954Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

  Cambridge would have to wait a little longer for the Ginsburgs. The U.S. Army had other plans for Marty, who had been in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in college. They were headed to Oklahoma for two years to live at the Fort Sill base.

  While Marty found he liked teaching at Fort Sill’s artillery school—he had been good at golf, and was good at shooting—RBG struggled. She worked at a law firm but couldn’t type to save her life, so she took the civil service exam to work for the federal government. Workers were classified according to a “general schedule,” or GS, of earnings and responsibility; as a GS-5, RBG qualified to be a claims adjuster. Then she innocently mentioned at the Social Security office that employed her that she was three months pregnant. Well, then, she was told, she couldn’t possibly go to Baltimore for training. Her rank promptly dropped to GS-2, the lowest: less money, less responsibility. Another army wife in the office with a GS-5 rank was pregnant too, RBG learned, but told no one until she had to. That woman went to Baltimore. But she was also expected to quit before she gave birth.

  Seeing the unfairness of petty bureaucracy and how it fell harder on some people’s shoulders than others, RBG began bending the rules, just a little. Week after week, she saw the same weathered faces coming in to try to register for Social Security, only to be sent back to look for the right papers. These visitors had no birth certificates, because when Native Americans had been born, no one official thought their births were worth recording. RBG silently decided that if someone looked sixty-five, a hunting or fishing license would do.

  After two years in Oklahoma, RBG had to earn readmission to Harvard, and she got it. That was the easy part. Being a young mother on an army base had been surprisingly manageable. The officers’ nursery started taking babies at two months and was open until midnight. But how could she handle law school as the mother of a toddler?

  Evelyn had often comforted her, but this time it was Morris’s words that shook her out of her panic. “Ruth, if you don’t want to go to law school, you have the best reason in the world and no one would think less of you,” Morris said. “But if you really want to go to law school, you will stop feeling sorry for yourself. You will find a way.”

  Ruth really wanted to go to law school.

  SOMETHING STRANGE AND SINGULAR

  * * *

  On a fall evening in 1956, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was happy to have something to do with her hands. She had made it through a stiff dinner at Harvard Law School dean Erwin Griswold’s house, and now wondered how long they would make small talk in a semicircle in Griswold’s living room. Each of the nine female students—all of the female students of their Harvard Law School class—had been paired with a professor. RBG shared an ashtray with the famous professor Herbert Wechsler. Forty years later, she would use uncharacteristically florid language to describe Wechsler: “He seemed to me then, as he has ever since, to combine the power and beauty
of the Greek gods Zeus and Apollo.” Wechsler was a chain smoker.

  RBG anxiously tapped out the ash. Soon she could go home to Marty and their daughter, Jane, who had turned one in July. But Griswold wasn’t ready to end the night. He wanted to savor the fact that he had, in his own telling, gotten women into Harvard Law School only six years earlier. RBG had just been relieved to see that Harvard was a place where women didn’t hide their smarts.

  Before he let them go, Griswold had a question. How, he asked, could each of these female students justify taking the place of a man?

  As the students reddened and shifted, RBG wanted to crawl under the couch. She had none of the sass of Flora Schnall, who coolly replied that she thought Harvard Law School would be a good place to find a husband. After all, once you subtracted Marty Ginsburg’s wife, there were eight Harvard Law women and around five hundred men. Then it was RBG’s turn. As she jerked to her feet to answer, the ashtray slid from her lap to the floor, scattering ashes on the carpet. No one moved. Griswold waited.

  “I wanted to know more about what my husband does,” she mumbled. “So that I can be a sympathetic and understanding wife.”

  If Griswold knew she was lying, he didn’t let on.

  A faculty member later explained that it couldn’t be true that women were discriminated against at Harvard Law School. “We try to take people who have something unusual, something different about them,” he said. “If you’re a bull fiddle player, for example, you would get a plus, and if you’re a woman, you would get a plus.” RBG was left feeling like she and the other women were exotic animals in a menagerie. They were, as she later put it, “something strange and singular.”

  Every time she thought she could just do her work, RBG was reminded again that she didn’t belong there. “You felt in class as if all eyes were on you and that if you didn’t perform well, you would be failing not only for yourself, but for all women,” RBG remembered. Some professors held Ladies’ Day, when they would call only on women, with humiliating questions.