A legacy of breaking barriers for gender equality
There is no giving up. Rest in power and in peace, RBG.
Welcome to The Breaking Point, a weekly newsletter that explores the historical legacies of injustice based on the news cycle and culture trends to understand what in the world is going on.
Photo by Ted Eytan, Flickr. Ruth Bader Ginsburg mural on U Street NW, Washington, DC USA; Artist: Rose Jaffe
Hard to believe that it was only about 50 years ago that women in the United States were excluded from juries or were discriminated against from buying houses or getting a credit card in her own name or that she was ineligible for unemployment benefits due to pregnancy. At the time, the rule of the land catered only to the patriarchal society. But the reversal of such gender discriminatory laws coincided with the rise of an extraordinary force who soon became a champion for gender equality.
I hadn’t been on my phone when I heard the news. I was grabbing a load of laundry when my partner yelled from the living room, and said “Uh, babe, are you at an okay spot to stop?” One second, I said, as I loaded the rest of the clothes to the hamper thinking he was going to say something Animal Crossing related. “Well, this can’t wait. RBG passed away,” he said. Silence. He walked over to check on me, and I forgot what happened after but I felt like I was going through the five stages of grief. At that moment, I was definitely in the denial stage. But it’s true. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist icon and the second woman to serve on America’s highest court, died on Friday. She was 87.
Then I logged on to Twitter. Bad move, because the first thing I saw was a big simultaneous tweeting of the F-word from people on my timeline. I later thought about her successor and how divided the government is, and how quickly I went from anger to bargaining. I did cry. I cried some more as I re-watched the RBG movie. I was unaware of the colossal effect the passing of a leader who I never met had on me. I reached the final stage of acceptance the next day. The notorious RBG — who was still strong enough to perform planks at age 80 — had been fighting and breaking barriers for nearly a century now. In this week’s newsletter, we look back at the historical legacy of RBG, women’s rights issues, and how much society has transformed in the last century.
Figure of the week: 4
The number of Republican senators needed to join the Democrats to block a confirmation vote if Trump moves ahead to nominate a new Supreme Court Justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
While women were out on the streets protesting and marching for women’s rights, RBG took a different course of action. Quiet and reserved, Ruth Bader Ginsburg chose to fight the only way she knew how: practicing the law. When she directed the Women’s Rights Project with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1972, she was already making history for gender equality.
Ginsburg was notorious in her strategy of how she envisioned and handled the law. During her time with ACLU, she led six landmark cases on gender equality before the Supreme Court. She won five out of six of those cases. However, one of those cases didn’t just focus on women’s rights. In the case, Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, Ginsburg defended a man named Stephen Wiesenfeld who, after his wife’s passing, was denied Social Security benefits to support their son, since the law states that payments should only be provided to widowed mothers. The move was strategic in making the point that “gender discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg highlighted during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing nearly two decades later.
Despite a rough ride navigating a male-dominated field such as being rejected for jobs at the top New York law firms on the basis of her gender, Ginsburg managed to make her way to the federal bench. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Then in 1993, President Bill Clinton selected her to fill a vacant seat in the highest court in the U.S. Ginsburg became the second woman to ever be appointed to the Supreme Court, paving the way for gender equality and for women’s rights issues to finally be taken seriously at the federal level. One of her early wins was United States v. Virginia, which challenged the Virginia Military Institute’s policy of being an all-male institution and refusing to admit women.
Though Ginsburg’s passing last week couldn’t have been more ill-timed as it happened weeks away from a crucial presidential election, her historical legacy will live on forever. At a time in which unity is critical due to the COVID-19 pandemic and back-to-back climate disasters, our country is somehow more politically divided than ever. Sadly, one that will be part of the notorious RBG’s legacy is the battle to find her replacement, which already has been tainted with hunger for power and a great deal of hypocrisy. As the nation mourns the loss of a great icon, Republicans are charging fast ahead to fill Ginsburg’s seat.
Although Ginsburg made major changes in the women’s rights movement, the historical legacies of injustice when it comes to women’s rights are still alive today. The only difference is that it is women of color that are struggling the most. It is women of color that are suffering the most from severe COVID-19 outcomes. It is women of color that are working in “essential services” at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. It is women of color that are being exposed to extreme work and environmental health hazards.
During the same week of Ginsburg’s passing, a former employee at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Georgia blew the whistle alleging a high rate of hysterectomies and medical neglect within the agency. Dawn Wooten, the whistle-blower and a licensed practical nurse, said in a complaint that “while some women have heavy menstruation or other severe issues that would require hysterectomy, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.” She explained:
Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody. He’s even taken out the wrong ovary on a young lady [detained immigrant woman]. She was supposed to get her left ovary removed because it had a cyst on the left ovary; he took out the right one. She was upset. She had to go back to take out the left and she wound up with a total hysterectomy. She still wanted children—so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids… she said she was not all the way out under anesthesia and heard him [doctor] tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.
Read more: In a horrifying history of forced sterilizations, some fear the US is beginning a new chapter by Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
This year, American women also celebrated the 100th year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which was ratified on August 18, 1920. Yet Black women would still wait five decades later to exercise the same constitutional right. With another monumental election coming in November, there is still proof of voter suppression against women of color across the country. “We have missed an opportunity over the last 100 years to forge an alliance with all women to eradicate misogyny and end the white supremacy that we created from the get-go of this nation,” Jennifer Butler, a pastor based in Washington, told The 19th News Editor-at-large Errin Haines. “We have to reverse all that. Until we do, all women will suffer.”
If there’s anything we should take away from the work of the notorious RBG, it is her tenacity and strategy. How can we use the constitution and the law to expose the cracks in our society and inform present-day debates over how to pave a path toward justice and equity in the future?
ps* yesterday was National Voter Registration Day, so please don’t forget to register to vote. Be sure and triple check that you are registered to vote!
Story breakers 📖
Balancing higher health risks and spotty internet, reopening college in the Rio Grande Valley is a challenge by Karen Brooks Harper, The Texas Tribune
A police shooting ignited unrest in Kenosha. Current and former officers say the department’s problems with race go much deeper by Robert Klemko, The Washington Post
Perfect Storm: When is it time to abandon a place to climate change? by Sierra Crane Murdoch, Harper’s Magazine
Trump’s WeChat Ban Could Cut Off Chinese Americans From Their Families by Trone Dowd, Vice News
Housekeepers Face a Disaster Generations in the Making by David Segal, The New York Times
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