For me this book was a big old sobfest. I'm not an emotional persona or an emotional reader, fyi, but something about RBG's feminist accomplishments and the loving way they're documented really got me. I don't know what to say about it, so I'm going to pull out some tidbits and quotations to annotate.
RBG was known as Kiki in her youth!
On affirmative action quotas at Cornell, "Thanks to the competition for the spots reserved for women, RGB remembered, 'The women were a heck of a lot smarter than the men.' But they hid their smarts."
Wulf told Strebeigh, "Damn, maybe I didn't pluck her from obscurity. Maybe she plucked herself from obscurity."
Can you believe he even thought/said that to begin with? As if!
On becoming a law professor at Columbia
After all, according to the dean of the law school, "Mrs. Ginsburg" was actually qualified, apparently unlike all the other women they had refused to hire in 114 years of existence.
RBG was pissed they called her "Mrs." instead of "Ms." Hired with tenure, RBG got to Columbia and immediately started calling them on their shit, filing a class action suit for women staff and faculty calling out inequities in pay and benefits. She also made sure the university didn't lay off a ton of female housekeeping staff. Years later when she was back at Columbia for something or other she walked past a room labeled "lactation" and plotzed.
Did you know that women in the military were pressured to quit or have abortions, even before abortion was legal across the US?!? RBG was all about helping military women have a choice in the matter. "She couldn't help but notice the hypocrisy of a country that banned abortion except when it was convenient for the military."
GE's position was that pregnancy didn't qualify as disability because it was a voluntary condition, unlike an injury. Rehnquist agreed. Sports injuries, and VD, totes covered, though, pointed out William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall. "Aargh!" said RBG as she went to work fighting for repro rights. She was also big on fighting for issues of gender equality that affect men, which bolstered her cases fought for women's rights. "RBG firmly believed that for women to be equal, men had to be free." and "She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women..."
Did you know RBG is BFFs with Antonin Scalia? Apparently that's a thing, but I had no idea! "No wonder their unlikely friendship is now the subject of an opera, Scalia/Ginsburg." There is a Slash. Opera. about them!
There's a section that talks about how RBG won't tolerate anyone dissing her secretaries. "They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, 'if push came to shove, I could do your work--but I can't do without my secretaries.'" Amen, sister!
RBG talks about how "women of means" will always have access to abortions in the US and that abortion bans really fuck over poor women.
All right, that's all my bookmarks. Read this book!