4 October 2016 I DISSENT: RUTH BADER GINSBURG MAKES HER MARK by Debbie Levy and Elizabeth Badderley, ill., Simon and Schuster BFYR, September 2016, 40p., ISBN: 978-1-4814-6559-5

“Boys were expected to grow up, go out in the world, and do big things.

Girls? Girls were expected to find husbands.”

“For all the mothers fighting

For better days to come

And all my women, all my women sitting here trying

To come home before the sun

And all my sisters

Coming together

Say yes I will

Yes I can”

-- Alicia Keys, “Superwoman”

“RBG is about more than simply breaking glass ceilings to join a man’s world. As the cofounder of the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, and often called the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s rights movement, RBG devised careful, incremental plans for revolutionary goals. She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equity, and then she worked to make it real. Many of her ideals, from the liberation of men to the valuing of caregivers, remain unrealized. RBG’s longtime friend Cynthia Fuchs Epstein says, ‘I think had she not had this persona as this very soft-spoken, neat, and tidy person, with a conventional life, she would have been considered a flaming radical.’”

-- from the 2015 adult bio NOTORIOUS RBG: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RUTH BADER GINSBURG

The Supreme Court is where it’s at. This is what I explained last week to a group of three dozen Danish college students visiting California. One of their stops was at the San Francisco campaign headquarters of the female presidential candidate for whom I’ve been volunteering.

Many of those Danish students gasped audibly when I recalled how, back in the Sixties, women couldn’t even get credit cards in their own names, no less have an equal shot at getting into grad school, or get paid the same as men. This gender inequity is one of the things that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has fought against throughout her career.

“Sometimes Ruth and her parents took car trips out of the crowded city. As they drove past a hotel in Pennsylvania, Ruth saw a sign: NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED! This is how it was in those days: hotels, restaurants, even entire neighborhoods announcing, ‘No Jews;’ ‘No Colored;’ ‘No Mexicans;’ ‘Whites Only.’”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up a Jewish girl in Brooklyn, often coming face to face with rampant prejudice. Thanks to the encouragement of her mother who believed in education, Ruth was one of the relatively few women of her generation who attended college and then law school.

As we learn in I DISSENT, it was tough: Ruth was one of only nine women in a law school class of 500. She tied for first in her class, but as a woman, she had a terrible time trying to land a job after graduating. Seeking to advance in her career, she had to be truly outstanding in order to obtain a position as one of the few female law professors in the country.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg brought her understanding of inequity and intolerance in America to her work as a lawyer, professor, judge, and U.S. Supreme Court justice, advocating for those who were denied equal opportunity. Throughout her life, as we learn in this excellent picture book biography, she hasn’t hesitated to disagree with the status quo, whether it was asserting her right to write left-handed when her school forced students to use their right hands, letting her lawyer husband do all the family cooking, or standing up for immigrants and minorities.

Over the course of our national history, Supreme Court decisions have impacted women in a multitude of ways, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Author Debbie Levy provides examples of some notably sexist quotations from past Supreme Court opinions such as, “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for man of the occupations of civil life.” It’s interesting to think about young people coming across such a backward notion in the very months that the ultimate glass ceiling might finally be shattered.

Twenty-three years ago, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as the 107th U.S. Supreme Court justice, she was only the second woman to sit on the High Court. Since then, two more women have attained positions on the Court. That’s an important step in the right direction, but gender equity in America is still a work in progress.

As we see in I DISSENT, the fact that things have gotten better for women in recent decades is thanks, in good measure, to the tenacious, hard-working (and notorious) Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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