RBG and MOM

My mother was born in February 1932 in Oneonta, New York. Joan Ruth Bader was born in March 1933 in Brooklyn. As I said in a 2018 post after seeing the documentary RBG, when I had spent half the film in tears,

Another reason the movie touched me so deeply is that Ginsburg is only a year younger than my mother. They were both smart young women attending college in small upstate New York cities at around the same time. While life took them along different paths, that similarity made me feel even closer to Ginsburg than I would just from her achievements.

Ruth's parents and my grandparents had less in common.

Nathan Bader was a Jewish immigrant from Odessa in then-Russia, now-Ukraine, while Cecelia Amster was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Austria. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information online about how they met. Cecelia had graduated from high school at 15, but didn't go to college because her family could only send her brother. Nathan was a furrier and a haberdasher; I couldn't find anything about his education level, but it seems unlikely it was even at the high school level, given his immigration status.

My mother's father's family went back many generations in the U.S., though he also had only a high school education. He was a WWI veteran and owned a small, unsuccessful green-grocery store. My grandmother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant mother and a second-generation Bavarian father, but her family owned a successful tailoring business, including at least one commercial building, and she graduated from a state teachers college.

My grandparents had six children between 1926 and 1934; my mother was the fourth one. All but one of the surviving five kids went to college.

I try to imagine how Ruth got from James Madison High School in Brooklyn to Cornell University up in Ithaca in 1950, when not that many women went to that Ivy League school at all, let alone from working-class, first-generation families. I imagine the teachers or guidance counselors had a lot to do with it.

My mom went to college, too, but she stayed a lot closer to home. She wanted to go to Russell Sage College, which is about 90 miles away near Albany, but despite her grades, her family couldn't put together enough money to send her there. Instead, she used a local scholarship to attend a tiny private college in the small city where she grew up and lived at home for most of her college years.

Maybe that difference in access was partly because my mom came from a larger family than Ruth, who had lost her older and only sister when Ruth was a toddler? (She also lost her mother to cancer just before graduating from high school. My goodness.) Where did the money come from to send her to Cornell? I wish I knew. It was well spent, obviously.

And then during college... their paths diverged even more. I'm not saying my mom was as brilliant as RBG, but she was very sharp. And I can believe she was a shyer person, I can see that, so that's a part of it. Maybe, like me, she never quite knew what she wanted to do, while Ruth seems to have found the law as an undergrad (or maybe even in high school, given the emphasis at James Madison) and headed toward it.

Ruth also met the man who became her husband during her first year at Cornell, and I don't think it's sexist — I think it's realistic — to say the fact that Martin Ginsburg wasn't a jerk had a lot to do with her success. The documentary makes it clear he had a great sense of humor, and as former solicitor general Neal Katyal said on MSNBC Friday night, he also reveled in Ruth's success and commitment to her career.

They had two kids together, not always at convenient times. Martin did the cooking. I'm sure they used their incomes and the upper class privilege they developed to help take care of their kids and a lot of other things that made it possible for both of them to work, her as a law professor and advocate and later a judge, and him as a tax attorney and later a law professor.

But the equity of their relationship was an important part of giving us this brilliant woman's work and contributions, which surround us and made many aspects of our lives what they are today. Because she had to do it backwards and in heels, as the Ann Richards saying goes about Ginger Rogers' dancing compared to Fred Astaire's.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg opened the door of equality just a bit wider so more women could do what they wanted, even though we are still saddled with patriarchy and its intersecting forms of oppression. I thank her for that, and marvel that she began the work when she did, given what I know of another woman who was almost her exact age.


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Side note: In addition to Ruth Bader, James Madison High School also graduated Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Mad magazine founder William Gaines, and comedian Chris Rock. New York City and its public schools have given this country so much.

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Update: An interesting footnote to RBG's thoughts on the role luck (and probably Martin's supportiveness) played in her ability to do what she did.

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Another update: Another writer, this time for Vogue, comparing her own family's history to RBG's. She mentions that Ruth's mother left behind a college fund for her before she died. No mention of where that money came from, though (did her mom work, and if so, doing what? it doesn't say). She calls Martin a "proto-feminist unicorn." And she quotes writer Caitlin Moran: "All too often, women are marrying their glass ceilings."