When I was a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the 1970s — during a seminal wave of feminism — I took a course in the Women’s Studies department on gender and the law. Our textbook, “Sex-Based Discrimination,” was filled with absurd, horrifying stories of stewardesses — as they were called in those days — and the like, who were fired for being five pounds overweight, for not being “attractive” enough, for having babies — in other words, for being women. Two decades later as President Bill Clinton announced an appointee to the United States Supreme Court, I recalled the chief editor of that textbook — Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Her death on Sept. 18 — the beginning of Rosh Hashanah this year — from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, drew bipartisan mourning and glowing remembrances. But it was particularly women who mourned the loss of a champion who broke through the glass ceiling — and worked to take all of us with her.
“She was small but mighty,” Margaret Brennan, the moderator of CBS’ “Face the Nation,” said Sept. 18 on PBS’ ”Washington Week” as the story of Ginsburg’s death broke. And that combination of a tiny, seemingly fragile body — albeit one that worked out vigorously and survived several bouts of cancer — and a tall moral stature made the crusading lawyer/fiery jurist a natural cultural icon, “the Notorious RBG,” after the rapper the Notorious BIG, on everything from magnets to T-shirts and in everything from her beloved opera to features and documentaries. (I particularly love the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dress for Dissent magnetic kit, the 21st century’s answer to paper dolls, available at The Paper Source.)
Ginsburg understood that you cannot appreciate the sanctity of life if you cannot allow women their integrity, including control of their own bodies. I write this as someone who is opposed to abortion personally though I am thoroughly in favor of birth control. Her legacy is one of example and fearlessness in pursuit of an equality for women that also benefited men. But she leaves us at a deeply partisan moment in which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will try to ram through a conservative replacement appointed by President Donald J. Trump, even as McConnell denied Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s worthy pick, so much as a hearing in the election year of 2016. (Hypocrisy, thy name is Mitchie.)
Ginsburg — defiant in her many dissents, the chief caretaker of her adored and adoring husband Martin, who had cancer early in their marriage and succumbed to it at the end of his life — would say, Press on. Keep fighting for human rights and what you most want to achieve, even if you have to wait for your moment. In this the former “Kiki” Bader of Brooklyn showed the New York moxie that took her all the way to the Supreme Court, where she won five out of six cases before becoming an associate justice.
There are those who in praising her, criticized her for not retiring during the Obama years, so he could’ve selected a justice who would live longer. But none of us are promised tomorrow. Who’s to say Ginsburg’s replacement would’ve outlived her? We are but strands in the universe, with much of our destinies beyond our control. What we can always control is our attitude to the life before us.
In staying, Ginsburg gave us the greater example of persistence in the face of adversity. She went on. Amid all our current crises, it’s the best we can do.