Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't solve sexism in America But she died trying

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on Friday was gutting, especially for American feminists. Even before her death, Ginsburg was not just a supreme court justice; she was a feminist icon, the Notorious RBG. She represented the kind of path to influence and power that today’s young women can imagine emulating, succeeding because of her own hard work, her meticulousness, and her intelligence (and, it should be said, to her excellent decision to marry a man who saw her as his intellectual and professional equal). She wasn’t on a soapbox with a megaphone; she was a quieter sort of dissident, always cool and collected even when she was clearly enraged, a kind of sharp fury that occasionally came across in her dissents – ice so cold it burns. Ginsburg is celebrated, first and foremost, for what she accomplished. As a law professor, lawyer, and judge, she practically created the legal concept of gender discrimination, and then set about challenging that discrimination wherever it lived. Sometimes, the beneficiaries of her work were men; more broadly, though, her work and her own barrier-breaking (she was often the only or one of few women in any given room) meant that generations of women after her had an easier time getting into law school, getting legal jobs, arguing cases in court, and asserting their rights in the workplace and outside of it. As a lawyer she argued, and later as a judge she decided, some of the most important gender discrimination cases in American history, including one that held that the Virginia Military Academy’s male-only admissions policy was unconstitutional. In that opinion, she gave readers an accessible, compelling lesson in the history of discrimination on the basis of sex in America. Without Ginsburg, and certainly without the other feminist lawyers who proceeded her and whose work carries on, American women would not have the rights and opportunities we do today.