Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the work of justice not only unfinished but at risk of being undone. irin remembers Ginsburg's genius and warmth
Photo: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/Getty Images Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to instruct her clerks to get it right and keep it tight, so I’ll try to do the same. Only someone so stubborn and single-minded, someone so in love with the work, could have accomplished what she did — as a woman, survived discrimination and loss; as a lawyer, compelled the constitution to recognize that women were people; as a justice, inspired millions of people in dissent.
If she obsessed over process and order, it was out of a general belief, shared by the postwar liberalism that shaped her, that functioning institutions could provide a neutral bulwark to the excesses of the past. From the beginning, she hated injustice and discrimination, an instinct brought into sharp relief by World War II, but also because they offended her sense of rationality. In early life, though, her response was mostly silent endurance.
It was a neat intergenerational relay. If younger women pushed her to take less shit, the work of the women who came before her provided a blueprint. In a mere month of reading everything on women and the law at the library, she discovered that the law had for a century enshrined discrimination by treating it as a favor, the same thing she’d been told her whole life.
It was a holistic framework that was as bold as it was optimistic. And it was literally true, because throughout the 1970s, she’d brought cases on behalf of women barred from participating in public and economic life and men whose desire to be caregivers for their child or parent was similarly unrecognized. She already lived that reality she already lived at home where, her daughter Jane once said, Daddy did the cooking and Mommy did the thinking.
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