From the bottom of our hearts, thank you, R.B.G.

Icon, Legend, Hero.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Her life was so much bigger and so much more important than politics. After all, as a Supreme Court Judge, she held, arguably, a position more powerful than even the United States President. It’s the Supreme Court that makes the Constitution a living, evolving edict by interpreting and applying the law to cases lower courts can’t resolve. Whatever the Supreme Court says goes, and those rulings matter. Aside from the case at hand, the rulings set precedents for all future cases long after the Justices themselves have passed on. Presidents come and go; the law, however, lives on.

As a thirty-three year old unmarried and childless woman, Ginsberg’s life story resonates on a deeply personal level. It’s 2020, and at this point in my life, thanks to biology, the question comes up over and over: do I relentlessly pursue my utmost individual ambitions the way I’ve seen my past male Wall St. bosses do, or cultivate a fulfilling domestic life and explore the possibility that family really is everything? I’m fortunate enough to live in a time and place where women have so many choices available to them (thanks, of course, to women like R.G.B.) but with that freedom comes impossibly high, self-inflicted expectations. As a determined New Yorker who put myself through school and elbowed my way through a male-dominated industry, “settling down” starts to sound more and more like a surrender.

Then came the R.B.G. story. Her later years are impressive for obvious reasons, but for me, it’s beginning of her career that really packs a punch. She became a wife, then mother, then Harvard law student, then joint-first Columbia Law School graduate…in that order. Who do you know today that “settles down” right before starting to “climb the ladder”? In one of her interviews, she remarked, “You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.” Her greatest ally? Her husband, Martin D. Ginsberg, a fellow attorney and, much to her delight, a gifted home chef (she graciously allowed him to take over cooking duties - who says romance is dead?!).

She was a woman who embraced her femininity by expanding the definition to encompass her convictions, her career, her marriage, and motherhood; she defined it not in the way so many of us are apt to do, by the way I am apt to do, through frustration, through an us-versus-them mentality, but through action based on a clear conscience. Thank you, R.B.G., for not just saying that we can have it all, but showing us how to actually obtain and then relish it.

[Lead Photo: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1978. (Lynn Gilbert); The New York Times Quote from the article “What Is the Equal Rights Amendment, and Why Are We Talking About It Now?” February 2019; Thank you to Molly Coyne for sharing this podcast with me!]