Musings – on the editor’s mind

My friend Sherry Chavers encouraged me to reflect on Ruth Bader Ginsberg in this column. The world has changed so much since Ginsberg graduated at the top of her class from Columbia Law School in 1959. No New York City law firm would hire her as a lawyer. Back then women were secretaries, school teachers and librarians.

If you are a grandparent, consider your adult life and that of your mother’s. If you have grandparents or were born after 1970, have you learned, and really absorbed, how different your life is from Ginsberg’s generation or her mother’s or your female elders?

In the 1960s I was too young to consider women’s place in law firms. But by 1967 my mother had returned to college for her degree to become an elementary school teacher. She had ended her schooling when she married in 1943. That is what women did back then. She later told me she received more respect from her husband – my dad – when she was a working woman.

My eldest sister married after her junior year of college, in 1972. At 17 I did not know anything, but somehow I heard she got her MRS degree. When her husband went to graduate school she became a dental hygienist. That was not her major.

My very smart middle sister went to the University of Pennsylvania, a very good school. She majored in physics. When she asked a professor why he gave her a B, he told her he did not believe women should be in the sciences. By 1980 Margaret had earned her doctorate in physics.

I remember the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in the present tense, in the 1970s. “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Pretty simple. It was defeated by corporate, conservative and status quo interests. As with women’s suffrage, an organized, vocal group of women opposed it.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg led other women lawyers in championing gender equality. She relied on the 14th Amendment, which wrote into the Constitution equal protection of the law for any person. Her argument that women are persons with the right to equal protection won.

Like Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who fought for equal rights for Blacks before the Supreme Court, Ginsberg was appointed to sit on that bench. She became an advocate for all people, writing decisions favoring widowers and husbands. An economic moderate, she became a more vocal champion for voting rights as the Court’s conservative wing grew more rigid.

In her 27 years as a Supreme Court Justice, Ginsberg’s championship of equal rights included contracts, wages, the workplace and the bedroom – that is marriage equality.

The fitting tribute honoring Ginsberg’s life is adding the Equal Rights Amendment to our Constitution.

Keeping that Court seat open through January is the first necessity, however.