The Notorious RBG: How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Became a Feminist Icon

Ginsburg died Friday of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer at her home in Washington at 87

NBCUniversal, Inc.

After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday from metastatic pancreatic cancer, politicians from both sides of the aisle took to social media to offer their condolences.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg moved slowly.

When court was in session, she often had her head down, sometimes leading visitors to think she was asleep. She once acknowledged that she did occasionally nod off. She once confessed to dozing during a State of the Union.

But it was a mistake to equate her gait and gaze with frailty, for Ginsburg showed over and over a steely resilience in the face of personal loss and serious health problems that made the diminutive New Yorker a towering women’s rights champion and forceful presence at the court over 27 years.

She made few concessions to age and recurrent health problems, working regularly with a personal trainer. She never missed any time in court before the age of 85, and then only following surgery in December 2018 for lung cancer.

Ginsburg died Friday of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer at her home in Washington at 87, the court said.

Late in her court tenure, she became a social media icon, the Notorious RBG, a name coined by a law student who admired Ginsburg’s dissent in a case cutting back on a key civil rights law.

Getty Images
Portrait of Ruth Ginsburg, filed 1977.
JENNIFER LAW/AFP via Getty Images
US Senator Joseph Biden (L), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whispers on July 20, 1993 to judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg shortly before his committee began Ginsburg’s confirmation hearing for the position of associate justice of the US Supreme Court.
David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
The only two female Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pose for a portrait in Statuary Hall March 28, 2001 surrounded by statues of men at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The two Justices were preparing to address a meeting of the Congressional Women’s Caucus.
Annie Groer/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with husband Martin Ginsburg.
Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reads to a group of children from a story book at the 10th Anniversary of TV’s “Reading Rainbow”.
Dirck Halstead/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images
Sentimental Pres. Bill Clinton applauding Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg after Supreme Court nominee’s moving acceptance speech, in WH Rose Garden.
David Hume Kennerly/Getty Image
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits in her chambers at the Supreme Court August 7, 2002 in Washington, DC. Ginsburg is the second woman to be appointed to the high court.
AP
In this March 3, 2006, file photo, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joins the members of the Supreme Court for photos during a group portrait session at the Supreme Court Building in Washington.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Members of the US Supreme Court pose for a group photograph at the Supreme Court building on September 29, 2009 in Washington, DC. Front row (L-R): Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. Back Row (L-R), Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr., Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
U.S President Barack Obama (C) greets (L-R) Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer before the State of the Union address on Capitol Hill on January 25, 2011 in Washington, DC.
Jacquelyn Martin - Pool/Getty Images
Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, left, Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Anthony M. Kennedy react during prayers at a private ceremony in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court where late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia lies in repose on February 19, 2016 in Washington, DC.
Michael Kovac/Getty Images
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg holds a copy of her new book ‘My Own Words’ after An Historic Evening with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Temple Emanu-El Skirball Center on September 21, 2016 in New York City.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (R) waves to students as she arrives at a lecture September 26, 2018 at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. Justice Ginsburg discussed Supreme Court cases from the 2017-2018 term at the lecture.
Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Berggruen Institute
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks onstage at the Fourth Annual Berggruen Prize Gala celebrating 2019 Laureate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg In New York City on December 16, 2019 in New York City.
Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participates in a discussion at the Georgetown University Law Center on February 10, 2020 in Washington, DC. Justice Ginsburg and U.S. Appeals Court Judge McKeown discussed the 19th Amendment which guaranteed women the right to vote which was passed 100 years ago.
Photo by Allison Shelley/Getty Images
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg greets participants at an annual Women’s History Month reception hosted by Pelosi in the U.S. capitol building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

The justice was at first taken aback. There was nothing “notorious” about this woman of rectitude who wore a variety of lace collars on the bench and often appeared in public in elegant gloves.

But when her law clerks and grandchildren explained the connection to another Brooklynite, the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., her skepticism turned to delight. “In the word the current generation uses, it’s awesome,” Ginsburg said in 2016, shortly before she turned 83.

In 2018, Ginsburg was the subject of a documentary and a feature film “On the Basis of Sex,” in which the actor Felicity Jones portrayed her.

In her final years on the court, Ginsburg was the unquestioned leader of the liberal justices, as outspoken in dissent as she was cautious in earlier years.

Criticizing the court’s conservative majority for getting rid of a key part of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 2013, Ginsburg wrote that it was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Her stature on the court and the death of her husband in 2010 probably contributed to Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the bench beyond the goal she initially set for herself, to match Justice Louis Brandeis’ 22 years on the court and his retirement at the age of 82.

Ginsburg had special affection for Brandeis, the first Jew named to the high court. She was the court’s second woman and its sixth Jewish justice. In time she was joined by two other Jews, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, and two other women, Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Both developments were perhaps unthinkable when Ginsburg graduated from law school in 1959 and faced the triple bogey of looking for work as a woman, a mother and a Jew.

Forty years later, she noted that religion had become irrelevant in the selection of high-court justices and that gender was heading in the same direction, though when asked how many women would be enough for the high court, Ginsburg replied without hesitation, “Nine.”

She could take some credit for equality of the sexes in the law. In the 1970s, she argued six key cases before the court when she was an architect of the women’s rights movement. She won five.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books,” President Bill Clinton said in 1993 when he announced her appointment. “She has already done that.”

Her time as a justice was marked by triumphs for equality for women, as in her opinion for the court ordering the Virginia Military Institute to accept women or give up its state funding.

There were setbacks, too. She dissented forcefully from the court’s decision in 2007 to uphold a nationwide ban on an abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. The “alarming” ruling, Ginsburg said, “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives.”

After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday from metastatic pancreatic cancer, politicians from both sides of the aisle took to social media to offer their condolences.

Ginsburg once said that she had not entered the law as a champion of equal rights. “I thought I could do a lawyer’s job better than any other,” she wrote. “I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyze problems clearly.”

Besides civil rights, Ginsburg took an interest in capital punishment, voting repeatedly to limit its use. During her tenure, the court declared it unconstitutional for states to execute the intellectually disabled and killers younger than 18.

She voted most often with the other liberal-leaning justices, fellow Clinton appointee Breyer and two Republican appointees, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, then later with President Barack Obama’s two appointees, Sotomayor and Kagan.

In the most divisive of cases, Ginsburg was often at odds with the court’s more conservative members. Yet she was personally closest on the court to Justice Antonin Scalia, her ideological opposite.

She once explained that she took Scalia’s sometimes biting dissents as a challenge to be met. “How am I going to answer this in a way that’s a real putdown?” she said. Scalia died in 2016.

As for her own dissents, Ginsburg said that some were aimed at swaying the opinions of her fellow judges while others were “an appeal to the intelligence of another day” in the hopes that they would provide guidance to future courts.

“Hope springs eternal,” she said in 2007, “and when I am writing a dissent, I’m always hoping for that fifth or sixth vote — even though I’m disappointed more often than not.”

Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn in 1933, the second daughter in a middle-class family. Her older sister, who gave her the lifelong nickname “Kiki,” died at age 6, so Ginsburg grew up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section as an only child. Her dream, she has said, was to be an opera singer.

President Donald Trump was asked about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death after a campaign rally in Minnesota. “She just died? Wow,” he said. “She led an amazing life. What else can you say? Amazing woman whether you agreed or not.”

Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the night before Ginsburg, then 17, was to graduate from high school. Celia Bader never attended college but worked as a bookkeeper. In a public television documentary about Jewish Americans, Ginsburg said, “What’s the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s Garment District and a U.S. Supreme Court justice? One generation.”

She first gained fame as a litigator for the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She had worked on the legal team that persuaded the high court to rule for the first time ever in 1970 that a state had violated the Constitution by denying women equal treatment.

At argument sessions in the ornate courtroom, Ginsburg was known for digging deep into case records and for being a stickler for following the rules.

She was more comfortable than most with long silences, and in the several interviews Ginsburg granted this reporter in her office at the court, it was difficult, but rewarding, to resist the natural tendency to fill those silences with another question. The most interesting things she said typically followed long pauses.

Appearing at a law school forum in 2008, she noted with relief that there was no retirement age for U.S. judges. “We hold our offices during good behavior,” Ginsburg said, citing language from the Constitution. “So all of my colleagues behave very well.”

She married her husband, Martin, in 1954, the year she graduated from Cornell University. She attended Harvard University’s law school but transferred to Columbia University when her husband took a law job in New York.

Ginsburg had graduated at the top of her Columbia Law School class but could not find a law firm willing to hire her. She later said she’d had more than her share of “mazel” — the Hebrew word for luck — to help her along in life.

“Suppose there had been a Wall Street firm interested in hiring me? What would I be today?” she intoned in 2007. “A retired partner.”

Martin Ginsburg went on to become a prominent tax attorney and law professor at Georgetown University. Ginsburg was a law professor at Rutgers University and Columbia, then later a federal appeals court judge for 13 years. Theirs was an equal partnership in which Martin Ginsburg was the undisputed master of the kitchen, often baking cakes for the justices’ birthdays.

Olivier Douliery/Getty Images
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden pay their respects to the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as her casket lies in state during a memorial service in her honor in the Statuary Hall of the Capitol, Sept. 25, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Sarah Silbiger/AFP via Getty Images
The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, 2020.
Greg Nash/AFP via Getty Images
The remains of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lie in state at the US Capitol in Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, 2020.
Shawn Thew/AFP via Getty Images
The remains of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lie in state at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C, on Sept. 25, 2020.
Alex Brandon/AP
The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is carried up the steps of the U.S. Capitol before a memorial service in Washington, D.C., Sept. 25, 2020.
Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images
The remains of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrive to lie in state at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., Sept. 25, 2020.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump pay respects as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lies in repose at the Supreme Court building on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020, in Washington. Ginsburg, 87, died of cancer on Sept. 18.
Alex Brandon/AP
The flag-covered casket of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rests under the Portico at the top of the front steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building, Sept. 23, 2020, in Washington.
Alex Brandon/AP
A visitor pays respects to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Sept. 23, 2020. Ginsburg, whose 27-year tenure as the second female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court culminated a legal career dedicated to advancing the rights of women, died at the age of 87 on September 18.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The casket of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is carried at the U.S. Supreme Court where she will lie in repose, Sept. 23, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
The flag-draped casket of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrives at the US Supreme Court in Washington, D.C, Sept. 23, 2020.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Former law clerks of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg watch as her casket is carried up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court where she will lie in repose, Sept. 23, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Former law clerks walk out and stand as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s casket arrives at the Supreme Court in Washington, Sept. 23, 2020.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
A mourner stands outside of the Supreme Court where Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is lying in repose, Sept. 23, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
A mourner wears a crown honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court where she is lying in repose, Sept. 23, 2020, in Washington, D.C. Ginsburg, who was appointed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, served on the high court from 1993 until her death on Sept. 18, 2020.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
A crowd gathers at the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, D.C., after the Supreme Court announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Flowers and lit candles outside the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
People light candles outside the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Photo/Alex Brandon
A man touches the door of the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
ALEX EDELMAN / AFP) (Photo by ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images
The US flag flies at half-mast above the White House in Washington, DC, late on September 18, 2020 after the passing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
People lay flowers outside the Supreme Court Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
A man spells RBG with candles as a crowd gathers at the U.S. Supreme Court to mourn the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, Sept. 18, 2020.
Photo By Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
A crowd gathers at the U.S. Supreme Court to mourn the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, Sept. 18, 2020.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
A crowd gathers at the U.S. Supreme Court to mourn the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, Sept. 18, 2020.
Ambrose Vurnis, NBC Washington
The morning of Saturday, September 19, 2020 outside the Supreme Court following the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing.

In 1999, Ginsburg had surgery for colon cancer and received radiation and chemotherapy. She had surgery again in 2009 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and in December 2018 to remove cancerous growths on her left lung.

In 2019, doctors treated Ginsburg with radiation for a tumor on her pancreas. She maintained an active schedule even during the three weeks of radiation. When she revealed a recurrence of her cancer in July 2020, this time with lesions on her liver that were treated with chemotherapy every two weeks, Ginsburg said she remained “fully able” to continue as a justice.

She is survived by two children, Jane and James, and several grandchildren.

Her determination was perhaps most evident on the day the court met for the final time in June 2010. Her husband had died a day earlier, and her children told her their father would want her to go to work. The justices filed into the courtroom that Monday, and Ginsburg was there.

Copyright The Associated Press
Exit mobile version