There’s an emptiness about the heart at the passing of people who alter your life. Such is the feeling today knowing that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer with us. She became an icon, yet so much more. She cared deeply for people and for the fairness with which she insisted they be treated. Ginsburg was, as Chief Justice Roberts described her, “a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
In 1963, Ginsburg landed a teaching job at Rutgers Law School, where she hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law’s clothes.
It was as a law professor at Rutgers that she continued her work fighting gender discrimination. Academia, after all, was not and still is not free of it. Ginsburg cut her teeth, so to speak, altering that condition. After that, she never stopped seeking gender equality.
Having walked that path inside and outside of academia, I know many of the challenges she faced and admire her all the more for taking them on. Soft spoken but tenacious, capable of picking her battles and a fighter to the end, RBG altered the lives of women for the better. The hearts of so many of us sink today. But tomorrow, as she did after losses in her own life, we will remember, smile with gratitude, and push on.
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