MONTAGE
The
Serving the St. Louis Community College - Meramec community since 1964 • ACP Award Recipient VOLUME 56, ISSUE 2
OCTOBER 1, 2020
WWW.MERAMECMONTAGE.COM
‘She was a hero’
Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life Mary wilson opinions editor
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ssociate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Sept. 18 from complications of metastatic cancer of the pancreas, the Supreme Court reported. It was the fourth time she had battled cancer. She was 87. Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, and managed to achieve a rockstar following in recent years. Eventually she reached first-name status, allowing everyday people to refer to her simply as ‘RBG.’ In the past few years there have been several movies and documentaries about her life. She traveled cross country on speaking tours. She was so famous that she even had a StubHub page where people could track where her next speaking engagement was. However, her rise to fame was slow. “She was a hero and a warrior for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights,” said Meramec English Professor Maxine Beach. “She was a warrior and went to law school when women did not do that.” The life of RBG In an interview, Ginsburg once said that “for most girls growing up in the ‘40s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S.” “Ginsburg was brilliant, as we all know, and was not going to be satisfied with being a housewife,” Beach said. “She wanted to use that brilliant mind of hers and put it to good work.”
GRAPHIC BY Lily Helmer Ginsburg met her husband, Martin (Marty) Ginsburg at college, and got married after she graduated. Even though Ginsburg would eventually be known as a ‘champion of gender rights,’ she didn’t start out to be a lawyer for women’s rights. She is quoted as saying that she attended law school “for personal, selfish reasons. I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other. I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyze problems clearly.” As a law student at Harvard— one of only nine female students in the school—she made the law review in 1957, according to the American Civil Liberties Union website. When Mr. Ginsburg was diagnosed with testicular cancer, Ginsburg went to all his classes for law school, took notes, took care of their three-year-old daughter, wrote down his senior class paper as Mr. Ginsburg dictated it to her, and then, when the rest of her family was asleep, would read the textbooks necessary for the next day of classes. Later on, in a 1993 interview with NPR, Mr. Ginsburg said of his time battling cancer: “So that left Ruth with a
3 year old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me.” Ginsburg graduated from the Columbia Law School, where she tied for first in her class. She was recommended by a Harvard Law professor for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. However, Frankfurter said that he wasn’t ready to hire a woman. After graduation from law school, according to the ACLU website, she did not get a job offer from any of the 12 firms she interviewed with. Just two firms gave her a follow up interview. F r o m 1959 to 1961 Ginsburg worked as a clerk for Judge Palmieri, the ACLU reports. She only got the job because her mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, promised Judge Palmieri that “if she couldn’t do the work, he would provide someone who could.” NPR reported that Gunther “regularly fed his best students to Palmieri” and said that if Palmieri didn’t hire Ginsburg, Gunther would quit sending him students. Palmieri kept Ginsburg on for two years. Most of his clerks only stayed for one.
She was a hero and a warrior for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, Maxine Beach
After she finished, she received offers from law firms. Instead, Ginsburg worked with Columbia Law School’s International Procedure Project instead. She co-authored a book on Sweden’s legal system and she translated Sweden’s Judicial Code into English. When, as a faculty member at Rutgers, she learned she was being paid less than her male colleagues, she joined an “equal pay campaign,” according to the ACLU. The campaign resulted in “substantial increases for all the complainants.” She hid her second pregnancy at Rutgers by wearing her mother in law’s clothes, NPR reported. Because of this, her contract was renewed before she gave birth. Ginsburg, moved by her own experiences with discrimination, began to handle sex discrimination complaints referred to her by the New Jersey affiliate of the ACLU. Ginsburg thought that men and women would “create new traditions by their actions, if artificial barriers are removed, and avenues of opportunity held open to them.” In 1972, Ginsburg helped start the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. Also in 1972, she was the first woman to ever be granted tenure at Columbia Law School. She wrote her first Supreme Court brief in 1971. Ginsburg represented Sally Reed in the case Reed v. Reed. Sally Reed thought she “should be the executor of her son’s estate, instead of her ex husband,” NPR reported.
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