Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg 1933-2020

By now, we have seen the TV tributes and read the many thoughts on the Internet regarding Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who died today at age 87. My favorite is from the ACLU at https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/in-memory-of-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-1933-2020/?initms_aff=nat&initms_chan=soc&utm_medium=soc&initms=200919_rbg_obit_tw&utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=rbg&utm_content=200919_obit&ms_aff=nat&ms_chan=soc&ms=200919_rbg_obit_tw

The quotable quotes are provided here so as to instruct the younger generations who have benefited from her good fight for gender equality so that it is now common for women to be lawyers and judges, doctors, scientists, athletes, and many other occupations explicitly reserved for men in the newspaper Help Wanted sections as late as 1970.

"Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, where women were barred from living in the dorms and from using certain campus facilities. When the dean hosted a dinner for the first-year women, Ginsburg recalled, “He asked each of us to stand up and tell him what we were doing taking a seat that could be occupied by a man.”"

"Discrimination dogged her early career. After transferring to Columbia Law School, she graduated first in her class, but she had trouble getting a job. She later accepted a position teaching civil procedure at Rutgers Law School, where her employers informed her that she would be paid less than her male colleagues because she had a husband who earned a good income. She and other female professors filed a federal class-action discrimination case against the university, and won. For fear of demotion, she hid her pregnancy with her son, James, until after her contract renewal. Simply living her personal and professional life at a time of openly discriminatory policies for women had positioned her to fight."

"In 1972, Ginsburg joined the ACLU as the founding director of the new Women’s Rights Project. That same year, she also accepted a job as the first female tenured law professor at Columbia."

While women are 51% of the population, we are still only 25% of the US Senate, 23% of the House of Representatives, 38% of the lawyers, 36% of the medical doctors and so forth. Women are now only 2 of the 9 Supreme Court justices and there has never been a female president or vice president. It was a mass movement that made all of these changes possible and it is instructive that the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, Roe v Wade, with Justice Blackmun, a Nixon appointee, writing the majority opinion, and Justice White, a Kennedy appointee dissenting,was made possible by our mass movement for peace in Vietnam that was the umbrella for all other movements of the time.