Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Passes The Torch
Posted by Nicole Moran on September 23, 2020 at 4:15 pm
On Friday, September 18th, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Brooklyn-born champion of women’s rights and gender equality – and second woman in history to sit on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court – passed her torch to the next generation, leaving behind a legacy unparalleled.
Born March 15, 1933, Joan Ruth Bader grew up in a first- and second-generation immigrant household. Ruth was the second child of Nathan and Celia, but at only 14 months old, she lost her 6-year-old sister Marilyn to meningitis. Ruth’s parents pushed her to excel in school. Celia, herself, graduated high school at age 15 but had to step aside, while her brother went on to attend college. A common sacrifice at the time, this only further motivated Celia to ensure her daughter’s education would not be sidetracked. Sadly, Celia died shortly before Ruth graduated from high school, but she instilled in Ruth a tenacity for overcoming obstacles that would carry her through to the highest court in the land.
In 1954, Ruth Bader married Martin D. Ginsburg days after graduating from Cornell University. Her tenacity was soon tested. Following the birth of her first child in 1955, Ginsburg was promptly demoted from her role at the Social Security Administration. The following year, she was one of only nine women enrolled at Harvard Law School, in a class size of about 500.
As a woman and a mother, Ginsburg faced and bore witness to the very same discrimination she would later challenge in the courtroom time and again. Following her graduation from Columbia Law School in 1959 – where she tied for first in her class – Ginsburg did everything she could to land a job to launch her law career. Despite her exemplary marks at Columbia, she was overlooked time and again because of her gender. In fact, then Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter sloughed off a strong recommendation, saying of Ginsburg that he “just wasn’t ready to hire a woman.” Being refused clerkships like this and denied jobs at law firms, Ginsburg turned her attention to academia.
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