Book Review
Notorious RBG
By Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik
I spent maybe three and a half hours watching “Selma,” which is only a two hour movie. Because I kept pausing it and thinking. What was it like to be shaping the strategy of the Civil Rights movement? How did they deal with discussions where people shared the same goals, but disagreed on how to get there? What did they do with reluctant allies? And how did they deal with the self-doubt?
There’s a similar theme in “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” a biography that dissects Ginsburg’s decades-long legal fight for women’s rights.
I always envisioned Ginsburg as a lifelong crusader, a social justice warrior. The truth is different. From the beginning, her main drive was simply her career: to live a conventional life as a lawyer and law professor. She takes up the cause of women’s rights more because she’s shoved into it by gender rules that were pushing against her career goals.
Ginsburg directed the ACLU’s Women’s Rights project. The authors, Carmon and Knizhnik, like to go deep on specific cases, complete with Ginsburg’s original legal briefs next to annotations explaining her reasoning. Her legal strategy was to incrementally show courts how gender discrimination enshrined in law harmed men as well as women. In one case, Weinberger v Wiesenfeld, a widower tries to collect Social Security benefits for his son, only to find the laws only allow women to collect parental benefits. But for Ginsburg, it wasn’t enough to knock down gender discrimination. She specifically wanted courts to stop gender discrimination under the constitution’s equal protection clause.
One of the major twists in the book is Roe v. Wade, and how much Ginsburg hates that decision. Because the court didn’t find that abortion was protected on equal protection grounds. They found that abortion was protected by the privacy rights between “the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him,” RBG writes dismissively. Because abortion is a privacy issue, the court makes more sad decisions dismissing the rights of pregnant women.
Maybe I’ve put too much emphasis on the legal analysis leg of this book, because I’m a nerd like that. Yes, large swaths of the book are dedicated to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legal briefs and letters and opinions and dissents. But that doesn’t do the book justice. /ducks
This book is also half graphic novel, with timeline photo montages, and comic strips making fun of John Roberts, and collages of kids dressed up in Ginsburg’s Supreme Court justice robes, and an illustrated discussion of her fashion sense. One chapter is a love story, about meeting her husband in law school, and supporting each others’ careers. A couple pages describe her workout routine. One of the last pages gives her husband’s favorite pork recipe (apparently he was a great cook).
Her life looks like so much fun.
