12/24/2025
In the fall of 1956, Ruth Bader Ginsburg walked into Harvard Law School as one of only nine women among more than five hundred men. It had been just six years since Harvard started admitting women at all.
Imagine the weight of those stares. The silence that greeted her when she spoke up in class. The constant need to prove she deserved to sit in that seat.
The dean, Erwin Griswold, invited all nine women to dinner at his home. It was supposed to be a welcome. Instead, he went around the table and asked each woman the same question: Why are you at Harvard Law School, taking the place of a man?
Some of her classmates stumbled through awkward answers. Ruth, ever sharp, replied that she was there to learn more about her husband's work so she could be a supportive wife. It was a subtle blade wrapped in velvet, the kind of answer that satisfied the questioner while quietly mocking the question itself.
But the hostility didn't end at dinner parties.
Women were called on in class for what professors considered comic relief. Certain sections of the law library were off-limits to female students. Ruth recalled being turned away by a university employee who simply said she couldn't enter that room. There was nothing she could do.
While her male classmates were assumed to belong, she had to justify her presence every single day.
And still, she thrived.
Ruth studied late into the night. She raised her young daughter Jane, who had been born the year before she started law school. And then, in her second year, her husband Martin was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
Suddenly she was doing everything.
She attended her own classes and took notes for Martin in his. She typed his dictated papers. She cared for their daughter. She managed a household while her husband underwent radiation treatment. And through all of it, she excelled so greatly that she earned a position on the Harvard Law Review.
Martin recovered. He graduated and accepted a job at a law firm in New York City. Ruth asked the dean if she could complete her final year of Harvard requirements at Columbia Law School so the family could stay together.
The dean refused.
So Ruth transferred to Columbia entirely. She didn't just survive the transition—she became the first person in history to serve on both the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review. Not the first woman. The first person, period.
She graduated tied for first in her class.
And then, despite her extraordinary record, not a single law firm would hire her.
She was a woman. She was Jewish. She was a mother. As she later explained, the traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews, but to be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot—that combination was a bit much.
Even Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter rejected her for a clerkship, despite glowing recommendations from her professors. The reason was simple: she was female.
It took a Columbia professor threatening to never recommend another student unless a judge gave Ruth a chance before she finally got her first legal job. She clerked for two years instead of the usual one, because she had to prove herself twice as much to be considered half as qualified.
But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not a woman who accepted limits others tried to impose on her.
She became a law professor at Rutgers, where she discovered she was being paid less than her male colleagues. She and the other women demanded equal pay—and they got it.
She co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. She argued six landmark cases before the Supreme Court, winning five. She didn't just challenge discrimination against women; she strategically used cases involving men harmed by gender-based laws to show that rigid s*x roles hurt everyone.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court. She was confirmed 96 to 3.
The woman who had been asked to justify taking a man's seat at Harvard became only the second woman ever to sit on the highest court in the land.
For twenty-seven years, she served with fierce intellect and unwavering commitment to equality. Her dissents became legendary—so powerful that Congress sometimes responded by changing the laws she had criticized. She earned the nickname the Notorious RBG, a cultural icon who did twenty pushups well into her eighties and refused to let cancer slow her down.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, she became the first woman in American history to lie in state at the United States Capitol.
The doors we walk through today weren't always open.
They were pushed, wedged, and sometimes kicked open by women like her—women who were told their place was elsewhere and refused to listen. Women who were asked to justify their presence and answered by outlasting everyone who doubted them.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't just take a seat at the table. She changed who gets to sit there forever.