Rest in Power, RBG + a Playlist
By: Maggie Laubscher
We lost a legend yesterday. Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- Supreme Court justice, icon, crusader, mother -- died at the age of 87 from pancreatic cancer. A warrior walking among us, she spent her long career fighting for us. She fought for voting rights, abortion rights, women’s rights, and affirmative action. Her work for gender equality is unparalleled. She was a beacon of feminism and the foremost lawyer for women’s rights in the 1970s.
‘If you want to be a true professional, you will do something outside yourself,’ Ginsburg once said. ‘Something to repair tears in your community. Something to make life a little better for people less fortunate than you.’ The Brooklyn native did just that throughout her life and career.
When Ginsburg entered law school in 1956, women accounted for less than 3 percent of the U.S. legal profession. She attended Harvard Law School as one of only nine women in a class of more than 500. She was already a mother at that point, and during her time in school, her husband Marty fell sick. ‘So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me,’ Marty said in a 1993 interview with NPR. At one point, the dean asked her why she was taking up a place that ‘should go to a man.’
And yet, Ginsburg went on to graduate at the top of her law school class and eventually serve 27 years on the Supreme Court. She was also the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School.
As a lawyer, she took on countless gender inequality cases. When she reached the Supreme Court, she wrote her first brief on the topic and won. It was the first time the court had struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender. That was the first of many Supreme Court wins for Ginsburg.
‘In my long life, I have seen great changes,’ Ginsburg observed. We will see more changes to come, and more fights for justice. Her death, in fact, has already ignited a fight over her replacement. We will carry on her torch and keep fighting, keep resisting. And we will vote. No matter what, we vote. As Ginsburg so wisely said, ‘Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.’ Rest in Power, RBG. May her memory be a blessing.
