For women of my generation, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's fights were our fights
No one is coming to save us, except ourselves.
The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels like the death of everything we have fought for over so many years. We are women of a certain age and privilege. We are the women who pored over "Our Bodies, Ourselves" in discovery of our own physical selves. We are the women who formed consciousness-raising groups and urged each other on to be ambitious and powerful. We are the women who devoured Ms. Magazine, hoping to feel less crazy and more affirmed. We are the women who met and marched, organized and mobilized to protect our rights and to determine our own future. We are the women who broke glass ceilings but remain just on the verge of breaking the last one.
Ginsburg’s mother told her to be a lady, but an independent one; that she might find Prince Charming but she should always be able to fend for herself. Femininity became feminism, the ability to enjoy dressing up, but to choose what to wear. To claim the right to be your authentic self and to be able to choose your destiny. Of course, her choices were challenged. Our choices were challenged.
Men who helped — or held us back
Men, who held power, worried they would somehow be emasculated by the rise of women. They worried we would take their jobs, diminish their clout, rewrite the rules and claim our place in the world.
But men with more confidence wanted their daughters to be educated, to be able to rise, to be all that they could be. We were lucky to have fathers who urged us on even while our mothers struggled with their own identities, urging us to find what they hoped for themselves. We could establish credit in our own names. And, indeed many of us didn’t change our last names when we were married, even knowing that we retained our father’s, not our mother’s name.
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We found the doctor who would provide us birth control before it became commonplace and the clinics where we would make decisions about bearing children after the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, putting a end to illicit backroom deaths. Progress seemed to know fewer limits — Harvard Law School, where Ginsburg attended as one of only nine women, boasted more women students than men in its 2019 class.
For all of us who fought so hard decades ago, 2016 had us confronting our fears — again. The electoral college election of Donald Trump, and the dystopian words of his inaugural speech did not bode well for equality for women — or for men, for that matter, and certainly not for people of color, for immigrants or for marginalized people.
But my lawyer daughter came to Washington with friends to march yet again, joining millions across the globe. The young women urged me to make my exasperation my sign — "I Can’t Believe I Am Protesting This BS Again." And off we went to fight again filling the streets of Washington and towns everywhere.
Change doesn't come easily
I teach graduate students now at the Harvard Kennedy School, this semester running a course in policy design and delivery. I tell my students that policy is almost by necessity iterative, that change in the world is not linear, and rare is the occasion that a policy decision achieves permanent or final success.
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To wit, World War I was to be the war that ended all wars, and yet 21 short historical years later, we had World War II. So it is true in the fight for the rights of women, the rights of all people to live equitably with their human and civil rights intact and respected. Indeed, the disparities of race seemingly re-acknowledged in this time of coronavirus and justice reform, have been thus since the beginning of what became the United States of America.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death came on Rosh Hashana, one of the High Holy days of the Jewish calendar. As others have noted, it is thought to be a mark of the righteous to die at this time and Ginsburg was indeed righteous.
It made me think as well of the story of Ruth in the Bible, of those haunting words to her mother-in-law Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Justice Ginsburg brought so many of us justice. Devastatingly hard as it is, we must go where she did and stay with the fight, winning for however long it takes.
Wendy R. Sherman, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and director of its Center for Public Leadership, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of “Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power and Persistence." She was undersecretary of State for political affairs from 2011-15 and led U.S. negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal. Follow her on Twitter: @WendyRSherman
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: To women, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death is the death of our victories
