Ruth Bader Ginsburg is most well known as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, but before being appointed to the Supreme Court she had built a very strong legal career that centered around advocating and fighting for women’s rights. As the anniversary of her passing approaches, it is important to reflect on her impact in women’s history and how she became one of the most influential women’s rights advocates of the 20th and 21th century.
As a child she always excelled in school and from an early age it was clear how smart she was. After high school, she received an acceptance to Cornell University with a full scholarship. During her time at Cornell she was a member of the Women’s Self Governance Association, which aimed to fight for equal rules for women in the dorms at Cornell. Something that was a big problem for the women at Cornell at the time was that they had very strict curfews, whereas their male classmates had no curfew and could go wherever they wanted at all times of the day. Unfortunately, women did not get these equalities until the late sixties. During her time at Cornell she met her husband, Martin Ginsburg, who always supported her and her career aspirations. After graduating at the top of her class, she and her husband Martin moved to Oklahoma where he was stationed in the Army. They had their first kid soon after, and following his service they moved to Massachusetts where she enrolled in Harvard Law School. At Harvard she became the first woman to work on the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review. She and Martin moved to New York City and she ended up finishing her legal degree at Columbia Law School. She tied for first in her graduating class in 1959.
At the beginning of her legal career she had a very difficult time finding a job due to the fact that she was a woman and at the time there were very few law jobs that hired women. She worked a couple short legal jobs for a couple years before being hired by Rutgers Law School as an associate professor where she was paid a low salary due to her husband’s job; they did not think she needed the money. 1970 was when her work in women’s inequality really started when she moderated a panel about “women’s liberation”. After this she published two legal reviews on this topic and taught a course on gender discrimination. During this course was the first time she worked with the ACLU, partnering with them to brief two federal gender discrimination cases. In the late sixties the ACLU wanted to expand their mission and create the Women’s Rights Project. They interviewed Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the director position, but at the same time she was offered the first ever tenure position for a woman at Columbia University Law School. In the end, she was able to take both positions. During this time, with the ACLU, she was able to publish law reviews and fight for women’s rights pertaining to sex discrimination in front of the Supreme Court where she argued six federal cases and won five of them.
In 1980 President Jimmy Carter elected her onto the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. She and her husband moved their family to Washington D.C. for her to advance in her career. For the time I think that was really rare, and honestly still is, that a husband would move for his wife’s career. I feel like most of the time women are expected to change their lives for their husbands, but not vice versa. Within the Court of Appeals she gained a strong reputation for being fair within the legal system. When Roe v. Wade (1973) was passed, she gave a lecture at New York University Law School critiquing the decision for being too broad. She said they should have made a “more limited decision”, arguing it would have left the more specific details up to the states.
In 1993 she was nominated to the Supreme Court by then President Bill Clinton. She had a quick confirmation and was approved by the Senate with a vote of 96-3, which is a very high approval rating. To give context, the current Chief Justice John Roberts was approved with a vote of 78-22 in 2005, so only receiving 3 votes opposing her makes her one of the highest approved justices ever. While on the Supreme Court her biggest majority opinion was known to be United States v. Virginia where a military academy, Virginia Military Institute, had male only admissions policy. The case argued that the admissions policy went against the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause; the Supreme Court voted 7-1 that they did violate the Fourteenth Amendment and was deemed unconstitutional. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion for the case. In the opinion she wrote about our country’s history with sex discrimination on women and it’s effect on how we think about women in this country, specifically when it comes to opportunities pertaining to education and careers.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a woman who fought for what she believed in. She was born in a time where women were not taken seriously in the professional world; they generally stayed at home or took jobs that were very low paying and it was very rare to go to college. She defied those barriers by becoming one of the highest ranking women in law, the first women to receive tenure at Columbia Law School, being the first director of the Women’s Rights Project, and the second woman to become a justice on the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a perfect example of what women can do and achieve when they do not allow others opinions or societal norms to hold them back, because she never let anyone hold her back from her aspirations.