My Own Words

Here, Ginsburg presents her revised comments from the initial Law Day activities of 1970, as published in the 1971 Rutgers Law Review. She discusses the changes she investigated in the domestic law of Sweden, where the end goal was “independence and equality for women, a goal toward which Sweden had already made significant progress through reform of marriage law” (120).

Ginsburg next discusses the particular areas of American society requiring change for the empowerment of women. She asserts that many believe women are rightly protected by laws and customs of society that actually disempower them. Ginsburg points to a 1970 decision from Virginia in which, under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, women gained authority for the first time to attend the University of Virginia.

In the last section of the essay, Ginsburg speculates about the potential long-term gains of the women’s movement. She tries to forecast changes that might take place by 1990, asserting that universities and the government would be the ones fostering the change.

Although written by Ginsburg’s husband, Marty, the content of this chapter was presented by Ginsburg herself at the Annual Conference of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010. Marty, after writing this introduction for his wife, passed away before giving it. The presentation talks about the one well-known case, Moritz v. Commissioner, that they worked on together. This was the case of gender discrimination in which the law favored female descendants over males. An indirect outcome of this case was the accidental discovery of hundreds of federal laws that demonstrated gender bias, making them reviewable as unconstitutional.

This particular brief, as described by the biographers, presented the first opportunity for Ginsburg to present an oral argument before the justices. She made five distinct points related to equality for women as a group of people under the Equal Protection Doctrine. While Ginsburg won the Frontiero case, the biographers note that her hope had been that the Supreme Court would designate sex as a suspect classification, meaning that any federal statute that used gender to create a category might end up as unconstitutional.

The biographers note that in the early 1970s, Ginsburg worked diligently to lay the groundwork for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). They add that though both houses of Congress passed the amendment, it was not ratified by enough states to become law even though Congress extended the ratification deadline.

The bulk of this chapter comes from an article Ginsburg wrote in 1973 for the American Bar Association Journal emphasizing the need for the passage of the ERA. Ginsburg describes the history of women’s ongoing struggle for equality in the US. She continues by lifting up several objections to the passage of the ERA, which she calls the “four horribles.” Ginsburg remarks, “The Equal Rights Amendment, in sum, would dedicate the nation to a new view of the rights and responsibilities of men and women. It firmly rejects sharp legislative lines between the sexes as constitutionally tolerable” (148).

The biographers point out that, even after she ascended to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg continued to make strides on behalf of the women’s movement through her votes and opinions. One case in particular, United States v. Virginia (VMI), was a case “she has described as one of the most personally satisfying she has delivered in all her years on the bench” (150). Ginsburg made a bench announcement in which a justice read the decision on behalf of the majority, giving an abbreviated version of its opinion. In this case, the court found that the State of Virginia did not adequately provide an alternative educational opportunity for women and therefore must allow them to attend the Virginia Military Institute (VMI).

Composing this chapter are remarks Ginsburg made to a group of law students in 2008. She begins by looking backward at the Women’s Rights Project she founded with the ACLU in the 1970s. After reflecting on the wording of the Constitution following the Civil War that promised equal protection to men, she describes the interpretation of those clauses until 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education acknowledged that segregation was a violation of equal protection, opening the door to new understandings of the Equal Protection Doctrine. In describing the women’s rights project, Ginsburg says “work progressed on three fronts: we sought to advance, simultaneously, public understanding, legislative change, and change in judicial doctrine” (155).

As Ginsburg describes the lengthy process of achieving equal protection for women, she touches on the milestone cases in which she participated: Moritz v. Commissioner, Reed v. Reed, Frontiero v. Richardson, and United States v. Virginia. She writes, “I regard the VMI case as the culmination of the 1970s endeavor to open doors so that women could aspire and achieve without artificial constraints” (163).