The Notorious RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsburg learned at a young age, before her age could be counted in double digits, that she could change the world if she tried, and sometimes using only her words. Not many children grow up feeling so empowered. She became editor of her middle school newspaper and wrote about prejudice and its role in shredding human dignity, echoing the words of Hannah Arendt, who wrote about prejudice in the 1940s, “the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed.” Young Ruth knew she wanted to battle the inequities found in society and to look to the future with idealism rather than cynicism. She had a role model, someone who lit a fire in her soul – Eleanor Roosevelt.
I felt tremendous sadness at the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18th. I wanted her to live forever and it didn’t seem a lot to ask, considering what she had accomplished in her life and what she meant to people around the world. She represented such a positive force, a voice demanding change, backing up her words with conviction and wisdom. She was a light to a generation of girls, creating a path for them to follow through the wilderness. She didn’t do this alone. She had a husband who supported her as an equal, who admired her brilliant mind and together they created a home in which they could both pursue what drove them. That wasn’t a common circumstance, certainly in those days, but even now.
RBG, as she is affectionately referred, was twelve when the Charter of the United Nations was signed on June 26, 1945 to uphold international peace, founded on “universal respect for and observance of human rights.” The driving force behind the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the mandate of the UN Charter, was Eleanor Roosevelt. Fifty member states of the United Nations participated in the final draft, displaying “genuine solidarity among men and women from all latitudes”, wrote the member from Chile. It was a coming together of the world’s nations like never before, a collaboration of those who were witness to the horrors of the Second World War, with the international community’s vow of “never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again” and Ruth wrote about it.
RBG graduated at the top of her class from Cornell University. She enrolled in Law at Harvard where she was one of nine females in a class of five hundred. She helped her husband complete his Law Degree while he battled testicular cancer and while she was raising a young daughter. She transferred to Columbia upon her husband finishing his Law Degree and accepting a position in New York, and at Columbia, she again finished at the top of her class, and yet, encountered substantial difficulty in securing employment due to her gender. How can that be?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent her life using her voice and her position to affect positive change in gender equality and the separation of church and state. She became a professor in the School of Law in Rutger’s, earning tenure in 1969 and went on to be the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law in 1972. She was appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980 and later appointed to the Supreme court in 1993. During all this, RBG worked tirelessly to achieve the vision she had as a child – for all people to be equal, regardless of their differences. She said, of her reason for becoming a lawyer, it gave her licence to “make life a little better for someone else.” It seems such a simple notion, that can be done at the street level, without any credentials or witness or acclaims. Oh, if we could all but strive for such.
wendistewart@live.ca