A generation of women who admire the Notorious RBG work, in ways large and small, to emulate her.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on Friday was gutting, especially for American feminists. Even before her death, Ginsburg was not just a supreme court justice; she was a feminist icon, the Notorious RBG. She represented the kind of path to influence and power that today’s young women can imagine emulating, succeeding because of her own hard work, her meticulousness, and her intelligence (and, it should be said, to her excellent decision to marry a man who saw her as his intellectual and professional equal). She wasn’t on a soapbox with a megaphone; she was a quieter sort of dissident, always cool and collected even when she was clearly enraged, a kind of sharp fury that occasionally came across in her dissents – ice so cold it burns.
Ginsburg is celebrated, first and foremost, for what she accomplished. As a law professor, lawyer, and judge, she practically created the legal concept of gender discrimination, and then set about challenging that discrimination wherever it lived. Sometimes, the beneficiaries of her work were men; more broadly, though, her work and her own barrier-breaking (she was often the only or one of few women in any given room) meant that generations of women after her had an easier time getting into law school, getting legal jobs, arguing cases in court, and asserting their rights in the workplace and outside of it.
As a lawyer she argued, and later as a judge she decided, some of the most important gender discrimination cases in American history, including one that held that the Virginia Military Academy’s male-only admissions policy was unconstitutional. In that opinion, she gave readers an accessible, compelling lesson in the history of discrimination on the basis of sex in America. Without Ginsburg, and certainly without the other feminist lawyers who proceeded her and whose work carries on, American women would not have the rights and opportunities we do today.
She also appeals to a particular kind of American feminist: one who appreciates and understands that the work of change is done on many levels. We need the activists like Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta, the theorists like bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir, the creatives like Kathleen Hanna and Audre Lorde, and the women who work within the system to change it, including elected officials, lawyers, and judges. Ginsburg was very much a system-worker, using the analytical, rational conceit of the law to change it.
For a lot of women, especially those who are more bookworm than rabble-rouser, Ginsburg embodied a kind of quiet power that felt both thrilling and accessible. No, most of us are not going to be supreme court justices. But for today’s young women, who were raised in an era where being a “good girl” meant being a smart girl, Ginsburg’s success represented the pinnacle of what we were promised: that hard work pays off; that if you’re meticulous enough in all you do, you don’t need to be the loudest or the most intimidating or even the most charismatic to make change happen. You just have to be excellent. And a lot of American women spent their girlhoods and young adulthoods cultivating excellence.
Of course, the sad reality is that the promise that excellence means success isn’t always true; you can be excellent at something, as many women are, and still run into the many barriers women face: extreme inequality that makes what should be basic only on offer to a privileged few; the difficulty in working and having a family in a nation that puts the burden of childcare on individuals, and mostly on women; deep biases that still favor men and afford them a higher presumption of competence, authority, and importance. But Ginsburg fought these barriers, too, in her personal and professional life. Her marriage was a model for what gender egalitarianism could look like.
It wasn’t perfect, but by all accounts her husband, Marty, did his fair share at home so both he and his wife could do their best at work. They didn’t just flip the genders of the traditional caregiver / breadwinner roles, they were two ambitious, brilliant people, and so they both took on caregiving and breadwinning with equal commitment. So often, the biographies of even the most brilliant and admired women include men as cautionary tales: men who are unsupportive, who undermine, who hold back, who sap energy, or, perhaps, no men at all – the implication being that accomplished and ambitious women are often too much for male partners. The Ginsburgs offered a model that was as desirable as it was possible. Marty wasn’t just a mensch, he showed it was possible for women to expect more. And Ruth was a shining example of what women could achieve when they didn’t settle and their husbands stepped up.