17 Reasons Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Goals AF
Never in my life have I described someone as "goals as fuck," but I suppose if I were to start now, human goddess and unicorn whisperer Ruth Bader Ginsburg would fit the bill. The outspoken feminist and Supreme Court justice is making headlines this week for joking that she'd flee to New Zealand if Donald Trump became president and openly criticizing the candidate in a series of interviews. "I can't imagine what this place would be - I can't imagine what the country would be - with Donald Trump as our president," she told the New York Times. "For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be - I don't even want to contemplate that." She's been called out for not remaining impartial on politics, including by Trump, who said, "I think it's highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly." Ginsburg now regrets the "ill-advised" comments. However, the justice has never been one to shy away from strong opinions. In fact, it's part of what makes her so badass and even a role model. Here are 17 things RBG is doing right:
1. She ignores all the haters. Ginsburg pursued a law degree at a time when, "For most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S," she once told students at Duke Law. She was only one of nine women in her Harvard Law School class of 500, some of whom were once asked by the dean why they were there, taking up spots for men. She transferred to Columbia Law for her last year, where she graduated in 1959 at the top of her class. However, she was rejected by at least 12 law firms based on her identity. Recalling the discrimination, she later wrote, "The traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews. But to be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot - that combination was a bit too much."
2. She fights for what she believes in. Ginsburg later became a law professor at Rutgers and then at Columbia, where she became the Ivy League school's first female tenured professor. In 1972, she went on to co-found the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU and argued six major gender-equality cases in front of the Supreme Court. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court, making her the second woman to have a seat at the bench. She has become well-known for her blistering dissents (in her 35-page dissent against Hobby Lobby, a ruling that exempted employers from providing contraception access on religious grounds, she remarked, "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.") and commitment to civil rights and women's rights issues like fighting against discriminatory voter ID laws and unequal treatment of pregnant women in the workplace.
3. Basically, she is a feminist superhero. She has talked openly about gender-based discrimination she experienced in her career and has spent most of her life championing causes like reproductive rights and equal pay. She is a proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment and has become the loudest feminist voice on the bench. In an interview with Bloomberg in 2015, she said she viewed her role in a conservative, male-skewing bench as one to advocate for women. "I was a law school teacher," she said, "And that's how I regard my role here with my colleagues, who haven't had the experience of growing up female and don't fully appreciate the arbitrary barriers that have been put in women's way."
4. This quote: "People ask me sometimes when - when do you think it will be enough? When will there be enough women on the Court? And my answer is when there are nine."
5. She's empowered AF. In 1973, when Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court as a young lawyer, this is how she amped herself up: "I'm talking to the most important court in the land, and they have to listen to me and that's my captive audience. I felt a sense of empowerment because I knew so much more about the case, the issue, than they did. So I relied on myself as kind of a teacher to get them to think about gender. Because most men of that age, they could understand race discrimination, but sex discrimination? They thought of themselves as good fathers and as good husbands."
6. She goes by "Notorious RBG." Not many petite, white, Jewish octogenarians can pull off a nickname that pays homage to rapper Biggie Smalls. But RBG's pithy dissents and sharp wit inspired the Tumblr and meme that Ginsburg now embraces. "Most of it I think is very funny. There is a rap song, and there is one using the words from the Hobby Lobby dissent. I haven't seen anything that isn't either pleasing or funny on the Web site," she told Katie Couric in 2014. "I will admit I had to be told by my law clerks, what's this Notorious, and they explained that to me, but the Web site is something I enjoy, all of my family do."
7. Secretly, though, she just wants to be a ~diva~. In 2015, she told a room full of law students: "If I had any talent in the world, any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva." You and me both, lady.
8. No one can accessorize the way she can. No one. I mean ... look at that lace jabot!
Vogue notes that RBG also "wears a designated dissent necklace from Banana Republic" and has a penchant for "Ferragamo heels and MZ Wallace bags."
9. Nothing can mess with her. According to Ginsburg biography Notorious RBG, when she was starting law school with a toddler in tow, her father-in-law told her, "If you really want to study the law, you will find a way. You will do it." Things got harder for Ginsburg - her husband, Marty, was struggling with testicular cancer during law school - but she didn't sacrifice her studies. Reflecting on her father-in-law's advice, she remarked to biographers Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, "I've approached everything since then that way. Do I want this or not? And if I do, I'll do it."
10. She's TAN. That stands for "tough as nails," according to her personal trainer. Ginsburg can do 20 push-ups, works out regularly, and waterskied well into her 70s. In 1999, when battling cancer, she never missed a day of work. She's 83 going on 22.
11. She's officiates same-sex weddings. Ginsburg officiated the marriage of Shakespeare Theatre Company artistic director Michael Kahn and architect Charles Mitchem weeks before gay marriage became a constitutionally protected right in America.
12. There's a species of praying mantis named after her. Researchers Sydney Brannoch and Gavin Svenson named a new species of praying mantis after Ginsburg - I. ginsburgae - partly because of the creature's neck plate looks like Ginsburg's fancy jabots, but mostly because of Ginsburg's fight for gender equality. Insects are usually classified into species by male genitalia, NPR explained, but Brannoch - a feminist - found the new species by focusing on looking at female genitalia.
13. She knows that nothing gets in the way of good wine and sleep - not even the president. Ginsburg may be a hard worker but she knows how to indulge in simple pleasures too. She has nodded off during President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech more than once, and in 2015 admitted, "I wasn't 100 percent sober." The justices had convened for dinner before the 2015 speech and, according to her, "the dinner was so delicious, it needed wine."
14. Her husband was also goals AF. She found an equal partner in Marty Ginsburg, a prominent tax attorney, whom she was married to for 56 years. Ginsburg has said that he was "the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain." He joked that their marriage worked because "My wife doesn't give me any advice about cooking and I don't give her any advice about the law." Marty was responsible for their infant children's 2 a.m. feedings and cooking family dinners. Before his passing in 2010, he reportedly told a friend, "I think the most important thing I have done is enable Ruth to do what she has done."
15. She knows your bestie doesn't have to be just like you. Ginsburg was very close friends with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, one the most conservative justices on the bench. While their friendship puzzled outsiders, they often had dinner together, went to the opera together, and even vacationed together. "Call us the odd couple," Scalia once said at a 2015 event with Ginsburg at George Washington University. "She likes opera, and she's a very nice person. What's not to like? Except her views on the law." Their friendship is so legendary that there's even an opera about it.
16. She doesn't sweat about "having it all." "You can't have it all, all at once. Who - man or woman - has it all, all at once?" she told Katie Couric in 2014. "Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it."
17. She knows that as a woman, you are a magical, powerful agent of change. After her famous dissent against the majority opinion of Hobby Lobby, Ginsburg told Couric that she works to expose the "blind spot" that many of her male colleagues have regarding women's lives and the need for contraception. "Justices continue to think and can change, so I am every hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow," she said. "They have wives, they have daughters. By the way, I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers." In a lecture at the University of Michigan in 2015, she told the audience that "women shouldn't submit to the way things are. They should play a part in making things the way they should be."
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