03/10/2026
https://www.facebook.com/elise.balgley/posts/pfbid0YsEoNH83nT9nSFCDqJE9n6fEViDC4VK7hPo1XnMBKya27iZdTimdfpJH2hmTwoiTl
She was one of nine women in a class of 500 men. Her husband got cancer. She cared for him, raised a toddler, and graduated first in her class. No law firm would hire her.
In 1956, Ruth Bader arrived at Harvard Law School as one of only nine women in a class of nearly 500 students.
The dean of Harvard Law School held a dinner for the female students and asked each woman to justify taking a spot that could have gone to a man.
Ruth was 23 years old, the mother of a 14-month-old daughter, and she had to explain why she deserved to study law.
She told the dean she wanted to understand her husband's work. It was a diplomatic answer designed not to threaten male egos. The truth—that she was intellectually brilliant and passionate about the law—would have been considered inappropriate, even threatening.
From day one, Ruth faced an environment designed to make women feel unwelcome.
Professors would call on the women in class specifically to humiliate them, asking them to explain "ladies' cases" involving domestic issues. The library didn't allow women to study in the main reading room. Male students made it clear they resented the women's presence.
Ruth's classmates were presumed to belong. She had to prove herself every single day.
She sat in the front row. She studied relentlessly. She spoke up in class despite the hostile stares. She refused to be intimidated.
Then, during her first year, her husband Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
Marty was also a law student at Harvard, one year ahead of Ruth. The diagnosis was devastating—cancer treatment in the 1950s was brutal, and survival rates were low.
Ruth suddenly had to manage an impossible load: her own demanding law school classes, caring for a toddler, and taking care of her gravely ill husband.
Marty underwent surgery and radiation treatment. He was often too sick to attend class or study. Ruth attended her own classes during the day, then went to Marty's classes at night to take notes for him.
She would come home, care for their daughter Jane, cook meals, help Marty study using the notes she'd taken from his classes, and then stay up late into the night doing her own schoolwork.
She slept maybe four or five hours a night for months.
Most people would have taken a leave of absence. Most people would have cracked under that pressure.
Ruth didn't just survive—she excelled.
She maintained top grades in her own classes while essentially completing two law school educations simultaneously. She managed a household, cared for a sick husband and a young child, and never complained.
Marty recovered. Against the odds, the cancer went into remission. He graduated from Harvard in 1958 and accepted a job at a law firm in New York City.
Ruth faced a choice: stay at Harvard for her final year, or transfer to Columbia Law School to be with her husband in New York.
She chose her family. She transferred to Columbia for her third and final year of law school.
At Columbia, Ruth continued to excel. When she graduated in 1959, she tied for first place in her class—the top graduate from one of the most prestigious law schools in the country.
She had proven herself academically beyond any doubt. She had sterling credentials from two Ivy League law schools. She had glowing recommendations. She spoke multiple languages. She was an editor of the Columbia Law Review.
By any objective measure, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the most qualified law school graduates in the country.
And she couldn't get hired.
Law firm after law firm rejected her. The reasons were always the same: she was a woman. She was a mother. She would be a "distraction" to the male lawyers. Clients wouldn't take her seriously.
One Supreme Court justice for whom she applied for a clerkship rejected her specifically because he "wasn't ready to hire a woman."
Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice and Harvard Law professor, refused to consider her despite a personal recommendation from her professors. He simply didn't hire women.
This was the reality for even the most brilliant women in the 1950s and 60s: excellence didn't matter if you were female.
Ruth finally got her first legal job through a Columbia professor who threatened to stop sending the law firm any Columbia students if they didn't give Ruth a chance.
She worked as a law clerk, then struggled to find permanent positions. Eventually, she became a professor at Rutgers Law School—at a significantly lower salary than her male colleagues, because she "had a husband who earned a good living."
But Ruth didn't let the discrimination break her. She channeled it into action.
In the 1970s, Ruth became a pioneering attorney for the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. She argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and won five of them.
Her strategy was brilliant: she often chose cases involving discrimination against men to show that gender stereotypes hurt everyone. She argued that laws treating women and men differently were unconstitutional.
Case by case, she dismantled the legal framework that had kept women as second-class citizens.
She challenged laws that said women couldn't serve on juries. Laws that gave husbands control over their wives' property. Laws that denied women equal benefits. Laws that defined women primarily as wives and mothers rather than full citizens.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed American law more profoundly than almost anyone in the 20th century—not as a judge, but as a litigator systematically destroying discriminatory laws.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ruth to the Supreme Court. She became only the second woman ever to serve on the nation's highest court.
For 27 years, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served on the Supreme Court, becoming a cultural icon—"The Notorious RBG"—and a champion of equality, women's rights, and justice.
She wrote groundbreaking opinions. She dissented fiercely when she disagreed with the majority. She worked into her eighties with the same discipline she'd shown as a law student.
Even when she was battling cancer—five different bouts over twenty years—she rarely missed work. She exercised with a personal trainer. She maintained her rigorous schedule.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, at age 87, the outpouring of grief was immense. People laid flowers on the Supreme Court steps. Mourners gathered to honor her legacy.
But her real legacy isn't just her judicial opinions or her cultural impact.
It's the doors she opened.
Every woman who attends law school without being asked to justify taking a man's spot—Ruth opened that door.
Every woman who gets hired by a law firm based on merit—Ruth opened that door.
Every woman who serves on a jury, controls her own property, makes her own medical decisions, or expects equal treatment under the law—Ruth helped open those doors.
She didn't do it by being loud or aggressive. She did it with meticulous preparation, brilliant legal arguments, and a quiet, relentless determination to dismantle injustice one case at a time.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of nine women in a class of 500. She was told to justify why she deserved to be there. She was rejected by firm after firm despite graduating first in her class.
And she responded by changing the law so that no woman after her would face those same barriers.
She walked through doors that were barely cracked open. And she wedged them wide open for everyone who came after./
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