Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 1933-2020
ON MARCH 15, 2019, LEGIONS OF RUTH BADER GINSburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by testing their core strength, doing plank poses on the steps of courthouses around the country. The gritty determination that had shaped Ginsburg’s legal career had also made her workout regimen famous, but neither could go on forever. Ginsburg died on Sept. 18 at the age of 87 of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer.
The workout tribute to a Supreme Court Justice was one of the many ways members of a new generation demonstrated their love for the 5-ft.-tall legal giant who had made the lives they live possible. In the early ’70s—after Gloria Steinem went underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism and Betty Friedan wrote a feminist manifesto about “the problem with no name”—Ginsburg named the problem, briefed it and argued it before the Supreme Court of the United States.
She was 39 when, after years of being on the receiving end of outright discrimination, she began her campaign to end it, in her first job as a litigator. As co-director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in her “very precise” way, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, she studied title, (so as not to distract male jurists with the word ) and representing harmed male plaintiffs when she could find them (to show that discrimination hurts everyone). And she never raised her voice.
