You’ve seen the lace collars. You’ve seen the "Notorious RBG" tote bags and the workout videos of an eighty-year-old woman doing planks. But honestly, if you only know Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a pop-culture icon, you’re missing the most interesting parts of her life. She wasn't just a tiny lady who liked opera and pushed for women's rights in a general, fuzzy way. She was a tactical genius who spent decades playing a very long, very patient game of legal chess.
Before she was a Supreme Court Justice, she was a mother, a caregiver, and a job-seeker who couldn't get a foot in the door because of her "triple whammy." That’s what she called it: being a woman, being Jewish, and having a four-year-old daughter. In the late 1950s, that combination was basically a "do not hire" sign for every major law firm in New York. Even though she graduated at the very top of her class at Columbia Law School, the doors stayed shut.
Who is Ruth Bader Ginsburg and why does she still matter?
To understand the core of her legacy, you have to look at the 1970s. This is where the real work happened. Ginsburg didn't just shout for equality; she co-founded the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and went to the Supreme Court with a plan. Her strategy was brilliant because it was counter-intuitive.
She often represented men.
Think about that for a second. To win rights for women, she found cases where laws based on gender stereotypes actually hurt men. Take the case of Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld in 1975. Stephen Wiesenfeld was a widower whose wife, a teacher, had died in childbirth. She had been the primary breadwinner. Stephen wanted to stay home and raise their son, but Social Security benefits for surviving parents were only available to widows (women), not widowers (men).
💡 You might also like: Why the 2013 Moore Oklahoma Tornado Changed Everything We Knew About Survival
Ginsburg argued that this was unfair to everyone involved. It was unfair to the deceased wife because her Social Security taxes bought less protection for her family than a man’s did. It was unfair to the husband because he couldn't afford to be a stay-at-home dad. And it was unfair to the baby. By showing a room full of male judges that "gender discrimination" wasn't just a "women’s issue," she fundamentally shifted how the law viewed sex-based roles.
The "Brick by Brick" Strategy
She didn't try to topple the whole system at once. She was way too smart for that. Instead, she brought one specific, narrow case after another, building a wall of precedent.
- Frontiero v. Richardson (1973): Challenged the military for making female service members prove their husbands were "dependents" to get housing benefits, while men got them automatically.
- Craig v. Boren (1976): Involved an Oklahoma law that let women buy 3.2% beer at 18, while men had to wait until 21.
- Duren v. Missouri (1979): Attacked a law that made jury duty optional for women, arguing that it treated women’s service as less valuable.
By the time she was done, she had convinced the Supreme Court to apply "heightened scrutiny" to laws that treated people differently based on sex. She basically wrote the playbook for modern gender equality law.
From the Classroom to the High Court
Ginsburg spent years in the "ivory tower," but her life was anything but academic. When she was teaching at Rutgers, she actually hid her second pregnancy. She wore baggy clothes and didn't tell her colleagues because she was terrified she wouldn't get her contract renewed. This wasn't paranoia; it was the reality of the 1960s.
📖 Related: Ethics in the News: What Most People Get Wrong
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She served there for thirteen years, gaining a reputation not as a firebrand, but as a "moderate consensus-builder." People forget that. When Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993, she was confirmed by the Senate with a staggering 96-3 vote. In today's political climate, that kind of lopsided support feels like science fiction.
Life on the Supreme Court
Once she got to the big bench, she didn't slow down. Her most famous majority opinion came early, in United States v. Virginia (1996). The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was male-only, and they wanted to stay that way. They argued that their "adversative" training method wouldn't work if women were around. Ginsburg wasn't having it. She wrote that the state could not exclude women from a unique educational opportunity based on "overbroad generalizations" about what women can or cannot do.
As the Court shifted to the right over the years, Ginsburg transitioned into a new role: The Great Dissenter.
When the majority ruled against Lilly Ledbetter in a fair-pay case (Ledbetter v. Goodyear, 2007), Ginsburg didn't just write a quiet disagreement. She read her dissent from the bench, which is the judicial equivalent of throwing a chair. She told Congress they needed to fix the law. And they did. Two years later, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first piece of legislation Barack Obama signed into law.
👉 See also: When is the Next Hurricane Coming 2024: What Most People Get Wrong
The Myth vs. The Reality
There’s a lot of noise about her choice not to retire during the Obama administration. Some people are still pretty salty about it, arguing that if she had stepped down when the Democrats held the Senate, the Court would look very different today. Ginsburg, for her part, always pushed back on this. She famously asked, "Who do you think the President could nominate and get through the Senate that you would rather see on the Court than me?"
She believed in her work. She believed she was the best person for the job until the very end.
A Few Things People Get Wrong
- She wasn't a radical liberal from day one. In the 80s and early 90s, she was often seen as a centrist. Her "leftward" shift was partly due to the rest of the Court moving further right.
- She didn't hate her conservative colleagues. Her friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia is legendary. They disagreed on almost everything legally, but they bonded over a shared love of opera and travel. They even appeared as extras in an opera together.
- The "Notorious RBG" nickname was a joke she loved. A law student started a Tumblr with that name after Ginsburg’s fierce dissent in the Shelby County voting rights case. Ginsburg reportedly kept a stash of the t-shirts to give as gifts.
Practical Takeaways from RBG’s Life
If you’re looking to apply some "Ginsburg energy" to your own life or career, here’s what the record actually shows:
- Play the long game. She didn't win gender equality in a week. She spent decades on tiny, incremental victories that eventually added up to a revolution.
- Find an ally. Her husband, Marty Ginsburg, was her biggest champion. In an era when most men expected a "helpmate," he was a top-tier tax attorney who did all the cooking and lobbied relentlessly for her Supreme Court nomination.
- Know your audience. She didn't talk down to the male judges she was trying to convince. She spoke their language, using logic and precedent rather than just emotion.
- Precision matters. She was famous for her editing. Every word in her opinions had to be exactly right. If you want to be heard, be clear.
To truly understand who Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, you have to look past the memes. She was a scholar who lived through the discrimination she eventually dismantled. She was a person who took the "scraps" she was given—the cases no one else wanted—and turned them into a new constitutional reality.
If you want to dive deeper into her legal reasoning, you can read her majority opinion in United States v. Virginia or her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder. Both are available through the Supreme Court’s official archives or legal databases like Oyez. For a more personal look, her own book My Own Words offers a collection of her speeches and writings spanning her entire career.