Episode 103: The Notorious R.B.G. - Ruth Bader Ginsberg!

Profiles in Positivity!

This Week’s Profile- Ruth Bader Ginsberg

A physically tiny lady who managed a huge impact to our world!

Briefly touching on a few points in this amazing woman's life, we are reminded of the importance of continuing in the face of opposition with grace, dignity and knowing your own power.

Rest in peace, Ruth! And, thank you!

#WomenEmpowerment, #WomenSupportingWomen,#WomenOver40, #FemaleEntrepreneur, #PerimenopausalWomen

Thanks for joining me!

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See You Next Week!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Welcome to the broadcast. We've talked about the suffragettes, we've talked about women and men who have pioneered and opened doors to help those who have been underserved and have been marginalized and given them opportunity to be all that they can be. Well, you cannot talk about these champions, these pioneers, without mentioning Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And if you don't know who she is, I cannot, there's not enough time. This podcast would take days to cover her amazing life, the person that she was, and her professional career. I am taking my information again today from Wikipedia. I do not get any kind of commission. It's a great source for me to pull up this information. And they do have some great pictures that I will share with you about whoever we're discussing. And today it's Ruth. Ruth ended up, I'm going to start backwards. I'll tell you some of the things that she got to enjoy towards the end of her career. She became a Supreme Court Justice. And at the time there was only one other one, Sandra Day O'Connor. And Sandra Day uh O'Connor retired in 2006. So for a short time, Ruth was the only female Supreme Court judge. And that's when she became a pop culture icon. And you can see it on YouTube where she is spoofed on Saturday Night Live. And they, I don't remember who, I'm reading this quickly, but they're they turned her into the notorious RBG instead of the notorious rapper Big B-I-G. And she became a phenomenon. There were t-shirts, mugs, tattoos, bobblehead dolls, Halloween costumes, nail art, coloring books, and also a comic opera and a workout book with her image on it. So, and that's when she was in her early 70s, she became this phenomenon. Now she lived an amazing life. If you have not seen the movie, which was released in 2018 on the basis of sex, uh it's an excellent movie, and it it chronicles her life and struggles in uh the world of law. So who was Ruth? She was born in 1933 in New York, Brooklyn, New York. Her dad was uh from the Ukraine, her mom was Polish, and uh her brother went to college when she really wanted to. Fortunately, she was ended up to go, she was able to go to college herself, and she began making waves very early. And when you turn the clock back, this would have been in the 40s and 50s, early 50s correct it correction. Um, she went to Cornell University. Let me go back a little bit on when she graduated from high school, the day before her graduation, her mother passed away from cancer. So her mom uh was not able to see all the amazing things that Ruth was going to accomplish. So at a young age, she had to be brave and strong and realize that life happened and it didn't always go the way that you wanted. At 17, she was at the Cornell University in New York, where she met her future husband and lifelong partner, and they were married for over five decades. Um she graduated as the highest-ranking female student in her class. They ended up as a married, newly married couple going to Oklahoma, where he had a job as a reserve officer training corps uh personnel, and she got a job at the Social Security Administration office where she was demoted when she became pregnant. Yeah, good times, huh? She gave birth to her daughter in 1955. In 1956, she enrolled in Harvard. She was one of only nine women in the class, about 500 men. And of course, I'm not saying anything bad about men, but that ratio is um pretty unnerving. There's a famous story, uh, you may or may not be aware of it, but the dean of Harvard Law, uh Erwin Griswold, reportedly invited all female law students to dinner. And they thought this would be kind of like a recognition thing, ha ha. Not really, uh, at his family home. And he actually asked the female law students, why are you at Harvard Law School taking the place of a man? Yeah. So uh one of the things that has impressed me over and over and over again when you hear about Ruth Bader-Ginsburg is that even though she time and time and time again endured slights, derogatory remarks, and insulting comments, she always was dignified, she was never militant, and she didn't knife anybody, which I salute her because that would be really tempting to do. She ended up graduating in 1959, and she was tied first in her class. And yet, as you follow the story, she had difficulty even after graduating at the begin first of her class from Harvard Law School, listen to the words first. She had trouble being hired, why? You guessed it, she was female. So she ended up being a law clerk, and something I thought was interesting is that from 1961 to 1963, she was a research associate with the Columbia Law School project on international procedure. She learned Swedish, of course she did, even though she was married with children and working full-time, and she worked on a book with a gentleman, I'm not going to try to pronounce his name, uh, about civil procedure in Sweden. And Ruth conducted extensive research for her book in Sweden, and she was very encouraged to see that women represented 20 to 25 percent of all law students. And you remember she was one of nine out of 500 men. So uh she was very excited to see that other countries were more advanced in their thinking about who could practice law. And she said that uh it was said that