1990siT’s hard To believe now ThaT There was ever a Time
when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not known for her dissents. But
for a stretch of 1996, the second woman appointed to the Su-
preme Court could imagine a triumphant future building on her
work as visionary advocate in the 1970s—not just for women’s
liberation, as she often said, but for women’s and men’s liberation.
The prestigious Virginia Military Institute (VMI) still
barred women, but when the case went to the Supreme
Court, Ginsburg argued that everyone was harmed, and
all stood to benefit. “If women are to be leaders in life
and in the military, then men have got to become accus-
tomed to taking commands from women,” she said at
oral argument, “and men will not become accustomed if
women are not let in.” Back in her ACLU days, on a quest
to prove that gender discrimination violated the Consti-
tution, she had represented not only women who broke
glass ceilings but also men who were caregivers, each lim-
ited by the law as it stood. She had rarely convinced Justice
William Rehnquist. In 1996, though, the conservative Jus-
tice joined a 7-1 decision requiring that women be admit-
ted to VMI, helping Justice Ginsburg finish what attorney
Ginsburg had started and establishing a major precedent.
The paradox of Ginsburg—reserved institutionalist argu-
ing for radical constitutional change—seemed to resolve it-
self in the VMI victory. But as politics left her outnumbered
on much that mattered to her, the Justice stiffened the re-
solve she had from the days she was blocked for being, as she
put it, a “woman, a Jew and a mother.” By age 80, in 2013,
her righteous dissents would earn her fans around the world.
Today, Ginsburg is surprisingly optimistic. Her work has
been at the pinnacle of the law, but she recognizes that, as she
puts it, “change comes from a groundswell of ordinary people...
And men have to be part of the effort.”Carmon is the co-author of Notorious RBG: The Life and
Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg1996 | CHANGEMAKER
RUTH BADER GINSBURG
BY IRIN CARMON
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