I am sure you have all heard the sad news about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but do you know everything she did throughout her career and life? Being a female in this world is not an easy task, but I am hopeful for people like Ginsburg who work tirelessly every day to fight for our rights. As a female in this world, I am passionate about women's equality and am definitely inspired by her life and work.

Joan Ruth Bader was born in New York in 1933 and grew up in a low-income, working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. She excelled in high school, but sadly, her mother lost her battle with cancer and died days before her graduation. She then went on to Cornell University and got her bachelor's degree in 1954, finishing first in her class. She married law student Martin D. Ginsburg a few days later and had their daughter Jane just after her husband was drafted into the military in 1954. He served for two years and after, they both went to Harvard Law School, where she faced a hostile, male-dominated environment where there were eight women among  five hundred men. Despite this, she excelled academically and became the first female member of the Harvard Law Review.

In 1956, her husband was diagnosed with cancer and she balanced motherhood, taking care of her husband, and school. She took notes for him in class while she continued her own law studies and after his recovery, he graduated and went on to work at a New York law firm, so she transferred to Columbia Law School and was elected to the school's law review. In 1959 she graduated first in her class. 

Because of her gender, her outstanding academic record did not matter and she struggled to find employment. She clerked for U.S. District Judge Edmund L. Palmieri and published Civil Procedure in Sweden in 1965. She taught at Rutgers University Law School where she was forced to accept a low salary because of her husband's well-paying job and had to hide her pregnancy with their second child, James, out of fear that her contract would not be renewed. 

In 1971 she partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union, also known as the ACLU, to write briefs in two cases. The first case was about a provision of the federal tax code which was denying single men to have a tax deduction if they were caregivers to anyone in their family. The second case, known as the Reed vs Reed case, was about an Idaho law that preferred men over women when determining who should administer the estates of those who died without a will. 

The following year she became the founding counsel of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and wrote a casebook on gender discrimination, and dozens of law review articles and Supreme Court briefs on gender discrimination. That same year, she taught at Columbia, where she became the school's first female tenured professor.

She was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980 and to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993, where she was always in favor of gender equality, the rights of workers, and the separation of church and state. Here, she started wearing jabots with her judicial robes and in 1996, she wrote the Supreme Court's landmark decision in United States v. Virginia, which stated that the Virginia Military Institute could not refuse to admit women.

In 2007, in regards to the Gonzales vs Carhart case, she argued that it “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right (the right of women to choose to have an abortion) declared again and again by this Court.” Also, in the Ledbetter vs Goodyear Tire, she argued that the decision was not consistent with the U.S. Congress by favoring that women could not bring a federal civil suit against their employer for having paid her less than it paid men.

In 2012, in regards to the Affordable Care Act cases, she criticized the decision which stated that the commerce clause did not empower Congress to require most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, she criticized and said it did not make sense to get rid of something that has worked and was continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes, that it was like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” In 2014 she also criticized the decision in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. , opposing corporations' rights to refuse paying for certain contraceptive drugs and devices in their employees’ health insurance plans based on religious grounds.

During the Obama administration years, from 2009 to 2017, she became known for her outspokenness and being a progressive and feminist hero. On the other hand, some people worried that because of her age and health that she should retire, but she wanted to work for as long as she was able to. 

In 2015, she sided with the majority in the Affordable Care Act and in making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. In 2016 she released her memoir, My Own Words, and it became a New York Times Best Seller and in January 2018 she appeared at the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of the documentary RBG. She also participated on the #MeToo movement by sharing her story of having to put up with the advances from a professor during her years at Cornell University. That same year she opposed Donald Trump's presidency in 2016 and in January 2018, she signaled she was not going anywhere by hiring a full slate of clerks through 2020.

Ginsburg was a colon, pancreatic, and lung cancer survivor and in July 2020 she received chemotherapy for liver cancer. She remained on the Court, but later that year, on September 18, 2020, she died from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. 

As sad as her death was, let us remember her for her inspiring life story, the warrior she was, and all she did for everyone's rights, especially women. Let's raise a new generation of women like her, who believe and fight for equality.

Sources:

B. (Ed.). (2020, September 25). Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://www.biography.com/law-figure/ruth-bader-ginsburg

Smentkowski, B., & Houck, A. (2020, September 22). Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ruth-Bader-Ginsburg