Open Threads

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has a wonderful tribute describing how “Ruth Bader Ginsburg shows how feminism is done. Again.”

… Palin and the Mama Grizzlies also owe a debt of thanks directly to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who almost single-handedly convinced the courts and legislatures to do away with gender classifications in matters ranging from a woman’s right to be executor of her son’s estate (Reed v. Reed, 1970), to a female Air Force lieutenant’s right to secure housing allowances and medical benefits for her husband (Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973), and the right of Oklahoma’s “thirsty boys” (her words) to buy beer at the Honk n’ Holler at the same age as young women (Craig v. Boren, 1976)…
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You can draw a straight line between Ginsburg’s fight against these seemingly harmless gender classifications that were rooted in seemingly harmless gender stereotypes and the Mama Grizzlies who roam our political landscape today.
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Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn’t even have boots were it not for the women who came before. Listening to Palin, it’s almost impossible to believe that, as recently as 50 years ago, a woman at Harvard Law School could be asked by Dean Erwin Griswold to justify taking a spot that belonged to a man. In Ginsburg’s lifetime, a woman could be denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter just because she was a woman. Only a few decades ago, Ginsburg had to hide her second pregnancy for fear of losing tenure. I don’t have an easy answer to the question of whether real feminists are about prominent lipsticky displays of “girl-power,” but I do know that Ginsburg’s lifetime dedication to achieving quiet, dignified equality made such displays possible.
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After she finished reading her husband’s charmingly funny speech, and while folks in the audience were still wiping away tears, Ginsburg sat down for a “fireside chat” with the chief justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, NPR’s Nina Totenberg, and Robert Henry, the president of Oklahoma City University… In response to a question about work-life balance, Ginsburg explained that in the early ’70s, her son, “what I called a lively child but school psychologists called hyperactive,” was forever in trouble and that she was constantly called in to his school, even though she and her husband both had full-time jobs.
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“One day, I was particularly weary,” she explained, and so when the school called, she said, “This child has two parents. I suggest you alternate calls, and it’s his father’s turn.” She said calls from the school came much less frequently after that, because the school was “much less inclined to take a man away from his job.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn’t growl and doesn’t issue threats, and she rarely eats small forest dwellers. But she is still the mother of all grizzlies to me.

Go read the whole thing, and tell me if you don’t agree that Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas put together aren’t qualified to iron Ginsburg’s frilly judicial ascots.

“The Mother of All Grizzlies”Post + Comments (49)