#Microblog Monday 317: Remembering Rights
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There is a meme going around saying something like if you (a woman) has a credit card in your name or your own credit history or rented an apartment, etc, thank Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And all these things are true—her work during her career (before and during the Supreme Court) greatly impacted our lives.
But the point is… the woman who worked to get us these rights just died. Meaning, this is super recent history. 1974. As in, when my mother was single, she couldn’t get her own credit card. Older rights feel stable—if they haven’t changed in 100+ years, why would they change now? Younger rights feel tenuous, like they could be snatched away at any point.
I was trying to put into words why the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels so much larger than the loss of a single person. Anne Helen Peterson said it well: “If someone has only been granted rights in recent memory, it’s easy and understandable that a lot of us are imagining just how readily those rights could be taken away.”
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6 comments
I didn’t realize until just a few years ago what a critical role she played in some of these cases. I’m old enough to remember those days, and I I do think a lot of younger women take these things for granted. The company I joined in 1986 had only granted pensions to its women employees 10 years earlier in 1976… and during my first week of work, one of the older women took me aside and told me, “We don’t wear pants here, dear. What if the chairman saw you?” (!) This was 1986, not 1956!
I hadn’t written my #MM post year but I think you’ve just given me some inspiration. 😉
I know, right? She was born 35 years before me. And couldn’t hired by a law firm despite being at the top of her class at Columbia.
I didn’t learn until law school how instrumental she was in the gender equal protection cases.
Yep. We live in perilous times for women and anyone who isn’t a white, cisgendered male.
Yes, those of us who don’t yet think we are old can remember when we didn’t have certain rights. I have similar memories of the late 1980s as Loribeth. It is indeed why these rights feel so tenuous. And why I feel so frustrated when I see young women taking them for granted, or worse, squandering them.
Her influence went well beyond the shores of the US, although we had our own sheroes too. What happens in the US affects the entire world. It is why we all share your fear.
I’m one of those who took these rights for granted, not really thinking that at one point within my lifetime, women didn’t have these rights independently. I’m so grateful to RBG and her keen mind for the way she made progress for women like me. May I never take my freedoms for granted again.
To me, she was simply everything anyone should aspire to be: Someone who is determined to fulfill every true purpose they were born with and lives every moment of life to the best of their mental, physical and emotional capacity with class, dignity and integrity. I think her loss hits us especially hard right now in the U.S. because we fear she is one of the last of a rapidly dying breed.