On September 18 of this year, we lost a very important and successful woman. Ruth Bader Ginsburg led a long life serving on the Supreme Court, fighting for issues she believed in and focusing on areas in need of reform. It’s important to remember her and all the amazing accomplishments she made, as well as the adversities she faced while still managing to be one of the most successful and prominent women in recent United States history. Ginsburg worked her entire career to eliminate gender-based stereotyping in legislation and regulations.
Life In Her Earlier Years
In her previous years, Ruth grew up in a low-pay, working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. All throughout school Ruth had excelled her studies and worked hard. She attended Cornell University and graduated in 1954 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. At Cornell, she met her husband Martin D. Ginsburg and they had their first child, Jane. The couple then enrolled at Harvard, where Ginsburg learned to navigate motherhood.
During Ginsburg’s time at Harvard, she struggled in a male-dominated environment where she was one of eight women out of her class of 500. She was discriminated against and admonished for taking the place of more qualified males. She managed to overcome the gender discrimination she faced and graduated first in her class at Colombia law school in 1959.
After college, Ginsburg taught at Rutgers University Law School and Colombia, where she became the school's first female professor. Despite all the discrimination she faced in her career, Ginsburg continued to fight for gender equality. Before serving on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg served as a director for the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She argued six different cases on gender equality, winning five of them.
Serving On The Supreme Court
In 1980, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She served there until she was appointed to the U.S Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. Ginsburg became the court's second female justice along with being the first Jewish female justice.
In 1974, Ginsburg paved the way for the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. This law permitted women to apply for credit cards and mortgages without a male co-signer. This work, encompassing women's budgetary freedom, established a base for further issues of uniformity and autonomy.
In 2007, Ginsburg dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision on the pay discrimination case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Regardless of the five justices who ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, Ginsburg's source of inspiration rather propelled general society to change the law and fortify equivalent compensation assurances.
Ginsburg pushed to secure pregnant women in the workplace. In 1972, she argued that excluding pregnant women from the Air Force was sex discrimination in the Struck v. Secretary of Defense case. Women would be fired from their jobs simply for the fact that they were pregnant. Ginsburg herself shrouded her pregnancy while educating at graduate school so she wouldn't get terminated.
In a “1979” case, Duren v. Missouri, Ginsburg decided against the fact that jury obligation was discretionary for women in a few states since it was seen to be a weight for ladies whose job was viewed as the "focal point of home and family life." Ginsburg argued that women should serve on juries on the basis that they are valued the same as men.
Ginsburg was the key vote in granting same-sex marriages. In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, which allowed queer women and the rest of the LGBTQ community the right to same-sex marriages in all 50 states, ended in a 5-4 ruling. If not for Ginsburg, that might not have been the result. Imani Rupert-Gordon, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told USA TODAY in an interview that Ginsburg's impact on queer women spans far beyond just the issue of gay marriage. "She really was responsible for helping us expand the concept of gender discrimination," Rupert-Gordon said.
Lastly, Ginsburg made it cool to be a confident and hard-working female leader. Not only did she leave her mark on the legal world, but she had an enduring impact on women by being a role model in her composition, talking, and generally speaking work as an adjudicator. Ginsburg's inspirational influence on strengthening didn't simply stop there, as her rise as a pop culture icon has inspired movies, books, and even Halloween costumes for young girls.
Written by Lindsey Hicks
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