what do you mean by that? do your homework, clean your room, don t disappoint us. our dear daughter jane, all smile, volunteered to the press she had grown up in a home in which responsibility was equally divided. her father did the cooking, she explained, and her mother did the thinking. [ laughter ] so is she really such a horrible cook? yes. oh, yeah. to this day i still can t eat swordfish after what she did to it. ruth is no longer permitted in the kitchen. this by the demand of our children, who have taste.
it s an amazing thing to see somebody in her 80s become such an icon. do you mind signing this copy? i am 84 years old and everyone wants to take a picture with me. she is really, when you come right down to it, the closest thing to a superhero i know. i love this job but good god sometimes i hate this business they call her notorious rbg. that s her rap name, notorious rbg. supreme court justice ruth bader ginsburg getting a lot of attention after she delivered a scathing dissent. whether you agree with her or not, you have to acknowledge she s been a force on that court. liberal hero ruth bader ginsburg. as much as people admire her, they don t even know the half of it. she was the queen. ruth knew what she was doing in laying the foundation. to put women on exactly the same plane as men.
and it wasn t where ruth ginsburg was suggesting that it ought to be. men and women are persons of equal dignity, and they should count equally before the law. you won t settle for putting susan b. anthony on the new dollar? when they would say things like this, how would you respond? well, never in anger. as my mother told me, that would have been self-defeating. always as an opportunity to teach. i did see myself as kind of a kindergarten teacher in those days because the judges didn t think sex discrimination existed. well, one of the things i tried to plant in their minds was think about how you would like the world to be for your daughters and granddaughters. the gender line helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in
pronouncements and ruth has ignored almost every one. [ laughter ] well, i think part of the time when he was sick she was in denial. he just became weaker and weaker, the way people get sick when they re close to dying. but she somehow knew how to turn off those tear ducts in public. she steeled herself for it. i found this letter next to marty s bed in the hospital. my dearest ruth, you are the only person i have loved in my life, setting aside a bit parents and kids and their kids. what a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world.
the emergence of a women s rights movement had a possibility of playing the role in the 1970s that the black civil rights movement had played in the 1960s. and so i was particularly eager to create a special project dealing with women s rights. i got a call from the aclu asking me if i would consider running women s rights project with professor ruth bader ginsburg, whom i had heard of but i did not know. i met ruth the first day i was there. she seemed very polite and quiet and reserved. not a fire brand. she wouldn t speak up a great deal during meetings. she always addressed whatever point there was. there wasn t any peripheral element of it. no small talk. no small talk. none that i can recall. at that point in time ruth was developing her philosophy to take cases that would make good