Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Last week I went to a lunch with my dad where Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke. Of course, everything she had to say seemed to carry a tangible weight of importance. What she has accomplished, and how she has done so, has made her a living example of the maxim she opened her remarks with; “the differences between men and women are something to celebrate, not denigrate”. She talked about how she had three strikes against her from the outset of her career – she was a women, she was a mother, and she was Jewish. Even though she graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School, no law firms would grant her an interview, and Felix Frankfurter refused to select her for a clerkship, saying that he was not ready to hire a woman. As a professor, she had to fight to receive a salary comparable to her male colleagues’, and struggled to be given a maternity leave. When she later started to handle gender equality cases, she encountered criticism from other women saying that she was not feminist “enough”. These roadblocks only motivated her to work harder.