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Imagine this. Someone tells you that you can’t do something because you have big feet. Or because your legs are too long. Or your voice is too high.
These are not things you can change. So you would have two choices. You could give up and try to do something different. Or you could make doing that “something” your life’s work. Ruth Bader Ginsburg chose the latter.
▲ Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933. When Joan Ruth first attended school, several other girls named Joan were in her class. The teacher wanted to avoid confusion. So she called her Ruth. And it stuck. Ruth’s mother was Celia Amster Bader. She was a first-generation American. Her Jewish parents were from Poland. (“First-generation American” means she was the first generation in her family born in the United States.) Her father was Nathan Bader. He was born to Jewish parents in Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine was part of Russia. Nathan Bader moved to Brooklyn with his family when he was 13.
▲ Ruth Bader was the first in her family to go to college. She attended Cornell University on a full scholarship. There, she met Martin Ginsburg. She observed, “He was the only boy I ever met who cared that I had a brain.” Years later, they married and together moved to Lawton, Oklahoma. There, Martin Ginsburg would fulfill his obligation for military service. In Lawton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was offered a mid-level government job. When it was learned she was pregnant, the offer was withdrawn. So she had to accept a much lower-ranking job.
▲ Ruth Bader Ginsburg was admitted to Harvard Law School in 1956. There, she was one of nine women in a class that included 500-plus men. For the seven years since women had been admitted, the dean of the law school invited the women in the first-year class to his home for dinner. After dinner, he asked each of them in turn to justify why they were in law school taking up a seat that could have been occupied by a man. Ginsburg responded that her husband was studying to be a lawyer. She wanted to understand his work.
Think Piece!
Reflect on Ginsburg’s response to the dean of Harvard Law School.
Do you think she meant what she said?
What does her response say about her ideas and the kind of person she was?
Without an offer from a law firm, Ginsburg looked for work as a law clerk. (A law clerk is someone who works for a judge. A clerk does research and helps to write opinions.) Even that wasn’t easy. One of her law school professors recommended Ginsburg to Felix Frankfurter (right), a justice of the Supreme Court. (“Justice” is the title for a judge of the highest state court and the Supreme Court.) Justice Frankfurter had never hired a woman. He refused to even give her an interview. ▶
◀ Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an outstanding student at Harvard Law School and, later, at Columbia Law School. She graduated from Columbia tied for first in her class. You might think it would be easy for her to find a job after she graduated. But it wasn’t. She interviewed with 12 law firms in New York City. None of them offered her a job. Later, Ginsburg recalled the experience. “I had three strikes against me: One, I was Jewish; two, I was a woman. But the killer was that I was the mother of a four-year-old child.”
◀ Finally, federal judge Edmund L. Palmieri offered Ruth Bader Ginsburg a job as a law clerk. But not without a push. Ginsburg’s law professor threatened never to refer another clerk to Judge Palmieri if he didn’t hire her. In the end, the judge was very impressed with Ginsburg. She worked for him from 1959–1961. This was unusual since most clerks stay only one year.
In the early 1960s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg began work on a Columbia University project. The project involved studying law in several European countries. For the project, Ginsburg learned Swedish. Then she traveled to Sweden. Ginsburg’s work resulted in a book, Civil Procedure in Sweden. The project had a far-reaching impact on her. Below is how Ginsburg described the experience. ▶
My eyes were opened up in Sweden. . . . Women were about a quarter of the law students there, perhaps 3 percent in the United States. It was already well accepted that a family should have two wage-earners. . . . I saw what was wrong and what needed to change in the USA.
▲ The top law schools in New York City refused to offer Ginsburg a faculty position. These schools included Columbia, which she had attended. But Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey, did not refuse. While teaching there, Ginsburg learned that her salary was lower than that of male professors. To remedy the situation, she joined other women faculty members. Together, they created an equal pay campaign. They brought a case against the university. And they won. Rutgers was made to address the inequality.
Think Piece!
How do you think these life experiences may have influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
Discuss your ideas with others.
