The Notorious RBG

      Have you ever realized how girls are perceived? Have you ever noticed how boys are thought of as sporty and athletic and girls are thought of as cute and fragile? Have you ever realized that girls aren’t in the major leagues for baseball? That only men play football in big stadiums? What about in politics? Women may be allowed to vote now, but look at how hard they had to fight to get to where they are! Girls have only been allowed to vote for about 100 years. Men have been allowed to vote for about 230 years. The USA has never had a female president, and in 2019, women hold 127, or 23.7%, of the 535 seats in the 116th U.S. Congress; 25, or 25.0%, of the 100 seats in the Senate and 102, or 23.4%, of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. The rest are taken by men. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is an example of someone who had a terrible and unfair time just because she is a woman.
      Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a United States Supreme Court Justice, and the second woman to be appointed to the position. Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) was born Ruth Joan Bader on March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York. She grew up the second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Celia Bader taught her the importance of independence and a good education in life. Celia was a very important and major influence in Ginsberg’s life. Celia did not attend college but worked in a garment factory to help pay for her brother's college education. That act of selflessness amazed Ginsberg throughout her life.
      At James Madison High School in Brooklyn, Ginsburg worked hard and excelled. Celia struggled with cancer and died the day before Ginsburg graduated. Ginsburg earned her bachelor’s in government from Cornell University in 1954, finishing first in her class. She married a law student Martin D. Ginsberg that same year. The early years of marriage were hard, as their first kid, Jane, was born shortly after Martin was drafted into the military in 1954. He served for two years before returning to Harvard with Ginsburg also enrolling.
      At Harvard, Ginsberg learned to balance family life with her education as a law student. She encountered a very male-dominated, hostile environment at Harvard. There were only eight other females in her class of more than 500 people. The women were rebuked and scolded by the law school’s dean for taking the places of qualified males. But Ginsberg pressed on and excelled academically, becoming the first female member of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.
      In 1956, Martin was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which required intensive treatment and rehabilitation. Ginsberg attended to her young daughter and sick husband, taking notes for him in classes well she continued her own law studies. Martin recovered, graduating from law school and got a position at a New York law firm.
      In order to join Martin in New York City, Ginsburg changed schools to go to Columbia Law School. She was elected to the school’s law review. Ginsburg graduated first in her class in 1959. Despite how amazing her academic record, Ginsburg continued to encounter discrimination because of her gender while searching for employment after graduation. After clerking for U.S. District Judge Edmund L. Palmieri (1959-61), Ginsburg taught at Rutgers University Law School (1963-72) and at Columbia (1972-80), where she became the school’s first female tenured professor. During the 1970s, she also served as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, where she argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the U.S. Supreme Court.
      Ginsburg believed that the law was gender blind and all groups were entitled to equal rights. One of the five cases she won before the Supreme Court involved a portion of the Social Security Act that favored women over men because it granted certain benefits to widows but not widowers. This is something that many people love about Ginsburg. She doesn’t want women to be better than men, she just wants the law to be equal. She doesn’t only fight for women she fights for men, too.
      In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, finally. In 1993, she was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton, to fill the empty seat of Byron White. President Clinton wanted a person with the intellect and political skills to deal with the more conservative members of the Court. Ginsburg stated that she tries “to teach through [her] opinions, through [her] speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, the color of their skin, whether they’re men or women”.
    As a judge, Ruth Ginsburg favors caution, moderation, and restraint. She is part of the Supreme Court’s moderate-liberal group presenting a strong voice in favor of gender equality, the rights of workers, and the separation of church and state. In 1996, Ginsburg wrote the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in United States v. Virginia, which said that the state-supported Virginia Military Institute could not refuse to admit women. She won the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award in 1999 for her contributions to gender equality and civil rights. On June 27, 2010, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s husband, Martin, died of cancer. She described Martin as her biggest booster and "the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain." Married for 56 years, the relationship between Ruth and Martin was said to differ from the norm: Martin was gregarious, loved to entertain and tell jokes while Ginsburg was serious, soft-spoken and shy. Before his death, Martin provided a reason for their successful union, “My wife doesn’t give me any alive about cooking and I don’t give her any advice about the law.” A day after her husband's death, Ginsburg was at work for the last day of the 2010 term.
      Ginsburg notably opposed the potential of a Donald Trump presidency in 2016, and at one point called him a "faker," before apologizing for publicly commenting on the campaign. Oyez.org states that “[Ruth Bader Ginsburg] led the fight against gender discrimination and successfully argued six landmark cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ginsburg took a broad look at gender discrimination, fighting not just for the women left behind, but for the men who were discriminated against as well.” This quote summarizes Ginsburg’s goal: to fight for the women who are thought of as less, as the men. She doesn’t want women to be better, she just wants them to be equal. “I ask no favor for my sex; all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks”. She does not want to be put up above the men, she just wants men to think of women as equal. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “I think that men and women, shoulder to shoulder, will work together to make this a better world. Just as I don’t think that men are the superior sex, neither do I think women are. I think that it is great that we are beginning to use the talents of all of the people, in all walks of life, and that we no longer have the closed doors that we once had.”