“When there are nine” and other powerful quotes about gender equality from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Issue 143 — September 28, 2020
She was tiny. She was mighty. She was a brilliant legal strategist. She was lovingly dubbed “notorious” for her groundbreaking advances for women’s equality, autonomy, and therefore our power within society.
Yet U. S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke boundaries gently. Never wavering from her revolutionary vision of gender equality, she believed in making big change in small increments.
“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”
Daughter of immigrants, her passionate belief in America’s still unfulfilled promise of liberty, equal opportunity, and justice for all shaped her vision and her jurisprudence. Yet it was her personal story that fueled her focus on gender equality.
“I am sensitive to discrimination on any basis because I have experienced that upset.”
“What’s the difference between a secretary in Brooklyn and a Supreme Court Justice?” she quipped, comparing her mother’s constrained opportunities to her own career. “One generation.”
To that we can now add the further distance to becoming the first woman and first Jewish person of either gender to lie in state in the Capitol.
“So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.”
As a double minority Jewish woman, she couldn’t get a job with a law firm after she graduated first in her class from Columbia University Law School in 1959.
Decades later, when I heard her speak at the New York Women’s Forum, she wryly observed that had she graduated today she would likely retire as a partner in such a firm. “As it happened, I had to become a Supreme Court Justice,” she said with a sweet smile.
“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.”
I met her only once in person when I attended a reception at the Supreme Court. She was notably shy. But she was anything but shy in her leadership for women’s rights. She rooted most of her arguments in the 14th amendment to establish that equal protection under the law extends to all, including women.
She certainly changed my life in tangible ways. A friend asked on Facebook what differences RBG had made for us. The outpouring ended up in this USA Today story. They ranged from my own tale of being denied a car loan without my husband’s signature though I was earning enough to pay for it, to not being able to get credit cards or bank accounts without male cosigners, to reproductive choices, not being considered for certain jobs, and being paid less than male counterparts.
“Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”
“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
The epitome of that strategy can be seen in the gender discrimination logic she constructed to argue Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, long before she ascended to the Supreme Court bench. She was a law professor at Rutgers in 1972 when a colleague called to her attention a letter to the editor written by Stephen Wiesenfeld, a young widower who was the caregiver for his son. His wife had died in childbirth; she had earned more than he did and he cut his work hours even more to care for his son Jason. Yet as a man, he was not eligible for the same Social Security survivor benefits allotted to female survivors.
Ginsburg called Wiesenfeld to ascertain whether he had the right qualifications to be a plaintiff in a gender discrimination case. She wanted to set a new precedent for women’s equality under the law in a way that illustrated how gender equality benefits both men and women.
I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Wiesenfeld at a family wedding last year and he gave me more insights to Ginsburg’s thinking. By 1975, the case had made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court docket. She realized that she would be speaking to nine men and constructed her logic with that in mind. Specifically, she knew she needed Justice Lewis Powell’s vote in order to get the majority opinion. So she even wove some of his own words into her argument.
She made two key points: that Wiesenfeld was being discriminated against on the basis of his gender, and that his late wife’s payments made into the Social Security system were devalued by not paying Wiesenfeld at the same level as a woman in the same circumstances would have been paid. She won with an 8–0 decision. (Justice Douglas who was ill didn’t take part in the case.)
Listen to this “RBG: Beyond Notorious” podcast to hear Wiesenfeld tell CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin and Poppy Harlow more of the story:
She successfully argued six cases before the Court before becoming a Justice herself in 1993, appointed by President Bill Clinton. Once on the court, she wrote a number of important majority opinions, including the landmark U.S. v. Virginia that struck down VMI’s male-only admission policy. But as the Court grew more conservative over the years, she often found herself writing dissenting opinions.
“Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘my colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way,’ but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.”
One of her most significant dissents concerning women’s pay equity was in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber. She wrote, “the Court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination” and called on Congress to act where the Court had not. Her dissent set the stage for Congress to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 that began to right the historic wrong of permitting companies to pay women less than men for the same work.
Even her collars became iconic when she began using her collection of jabots to indicate whether she was concurring, dissenting or just plain disgusted. She understood this:
“If you’re going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.”
She often said that she patterned her work to expand women’s rights after civil rights activist and late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s advancements of Civil Rights. And just as due to changing political fortunes, Marshall was replaced by his philosophical antithesis Clarence Thomas, RBG’s terrible irony may be her replacement by a woman committed to overturning many of the fundamental rights of women that Ginsburg championed, from reproductive rights to access to health care, LGBTQ rights, and immigrant’s rights.
“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, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.”
There will not be another RBG for a long time. No wonder many posted after her death, “May her memory be for a revolution.”
Among the thousands of eulogies and tributes to RGB after her passing, this one by Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt is to me the most profound — I suggest you watch the full video:
“To be born into a world that does not see you, and despite this, to be able to see beyond the world you are in, to imagine that something can be different — that is the job of a prophet.” — Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt.
Rabbi Holtzblatt had observed that the Torah’s admonition, “Justice, justice you must pursue” was intentionally present all around her. Framed in her office. On her collar. In her mind and heart and deeds always.
Personally after a few days of deeply mourning the loss of our prophet Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all she has meant to women’s equality, I found myself filled with a great wave of her courage and persistence.
I feel not Ruthless, but RUTHFULL in pursuit of gender and racial equality for all and for all time.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has left us a blueprint but it’s up to us to continue to build the lasting framework.
GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker and expert women’s leadership developer for companies that want to build gender balance, and a bestselling author of four books, most recently No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University and is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Tweet Gloria Feldt.