The ACLU Years

“It was that 10 years of my life that I devoted to litigating cases about—I don’t say women’s rights—I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.”

—RBG, 2010

RBG DIDN’T EAT ON THE MORNING OF JAN. 17, 1973. She was afraid she would vomit. Wearing her mother’s pin and earrings, like a soldier suiting up for battle RBG stood alone in front of nine stone-faced men and asked them to do something they had until then refused to do: recognize that the Constitution banned sex discrimination.

She began her oral argument the same way all attorneys appearing in front of the Supreme Court do: “Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.” You can listen to the recording of RBG speaking, how at first the words came out a little shakily. She told the Justices about Sharron Frontiero, an Air Force lieutenant whose husband, Joseph, had been denied the same housing, medical and dental benefits as other military spouses simply because Sharron was a woman and Joseph was a man.

WHEN RUTGERS TOLD RBG HER SALARY WOULD BE LOW BECAUSE SHE WAS A WOMAN, SHE ACCEPTED THE RATIONALE.

Treating men and women differently under the law, RBG continued, implied a “judgment of inferiority.” It told women their work and their families were less valuable. Were laws that classified what men and women could do blatantly unconstitutional the way laws classifying by race were? RBG urged the court to say they were, and when she was finally done, she quoted Sarah Grimké, an abolitionist and advocate of women’s suffrage. “She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity,” RBG said. “She said, ‘I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.’”

From high school through college and law school, RBG had always excelled, but her conversion to legal firebrand, when Rutgers Law School offered RBG an annual contract to teach civil procedure, she was told the salary was low because it was a state school and because she was a woman—and she accepted the explanation. But two years later, when RBG learned she was pregnant with her son, James, and she worried Rutgers would not renew her contract, she was cagier. She dressed in loose clothing through the spring term and waited until the last day of classes, with the next year’s contract in her hand, to break the news to her fellow professors.