Life with Marty
THE NEWLYWEDS SPENT THEIR FIRST TWO YEARS living in Army housing on an Oklahoma military base. Lt. Martin D. Ginsburg taught artillery, while his bride worked as a clerk-typist. During the Korean War era, this was a not-uncommon life for young couples.
But in the evenings, Ruth and Marty read Tolstoy and Dickens to each other. They listened to opera on records borrowed from the base library. They signed up for a correspondence course in accounting. Marty took up French cooking, eventually becoming the chef of the family, while Ruth pursued her career. The two shared parenting and household responsibilities, admired each other as intellectual equals and were very much in love. To outsiders, the relationship may have seemed too good to be true, but by all accounts, it was truly idyllic. In fact, had Ruth married a different man, she might never have become a Supreme Court Justice.
“I have had more than a little bit of luck in life, but nothing equals in magnitude my marriage to Martin D. Ginsburg,” RBG wrote in the introduction to My Own Words, published six years after Marty’s death. “I do not have words adequate to describe my super-smart, exuberant, ever‐loving spouse.”
In an era when there were still laws declaring husbands the masters of their wives, the marriage of Martin Ginsburg and Ruth Bader was ahead of its time and would remain so for decades. Martin, who first wangled a night out with Ruth in 1950 while they were undergraduates at Cornell University, “was the only guy I ever dated who cared whether I had a
