Ruth Bader Ginsburg: a legal ode to gender equality

How can we describe what gender equality in the legal system means for women who still face legal discrimination in their home countries? I still can't find a way to communicate the desire for freedom and justice born in women like me every day. 

Reading about Ruth Bader Ginsburg brings us to that possibility of reinventing the concepts of equality, of what it means to be a woman in a world made for men and, above all, of the importance of opening up a path for future generations. 

Ruth was a lawyer and a judge, and although her passing is sad for gender equality defended in courts, I must stress the priceless work legacy she left, giving herself to the task of giving dignity and rights to women, and finally transforming history on both sides of the court. The young woman who began working as a professor after being rejected by all the law firms in New York, the second female student in her 500-male class at Harvard, reinvented the concepts of justice, equality and rights with regard to sexual discrimination, and all women who now enjoy their legal position in the United States owe it all to her.  

She defended the possibility of women entering military academies for which they were considered too vulnerable, the rent paid by women in the Navy who were legally discriminated because rent was considered a man's responsibility, describing women as hopeless "dependents", as well as the wage gap between men and women of up to 40%.  

Ruth reinvented the path to freedom, civil rights and non-discrimination by sex. She made every one of her cases, which would have gone unnoticed by any lawyer, a functional argument in defence of equality between men and women, and her departure leaves behind a great sentence: "I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks", alluding to the male supremacy so common in her time, the very reason why on her first day at Harvard in 1953 she was asked why she took the seat a male student should occupy.

Ruth, like all women who change the world, loved her work, was passionate about the law and always wanted to be an active part of it, being aware of the long struggle American women had left; however, she set precedents that changed the course of law in the United States, speaking out openly about support for abortion; for her, "if the state assumes power over women's bodies, it also assumes power over their professional lives". 

Although, as she explained throughout her life, being a woman was an impediment to practicing law, this was not the case in her personal life. She shared 56 years of marriage with her husband Marty, a successful New York lawyer, who not only admired and promoted her career, considering it a milestone in law, but also decided to quit his job in New York, when Ruth was appointed as a judge of the United States Supreme Court in 1993, as he considered his wife's work more important.  

Ginsburg was known for his hard work until the wee hours of the morning and for the family definition of "dad is the cooker and mum the thinker".  

Ginsburg defended cases in the 1970s in which she demonstrated, in defense and on behalf of many men as well, that sex discrimination in law negatively affected men and women equally, denying assistance pensions to "single parents", denouncing "child caretakers" to the IRS for discounting a mother's care hours, among many other cases. This was a clear example of men also being brought up in a society where they had to apologise for playing the role that "naturally" belonged to women, and were punished by law when they did not act as such. 

Ginsburg, without renouncing her femininity, her fearlessness and enormous wisdom, became a pop figure with her "dissenting opinions" in the issuing of sentences, which today young people know and admire, and which is undoubtedly the clear example of a tireless defender of civil rights, from her youngest age as a lawyer and professor of law and gender, to her last 27 years on the Supreme Court, where she was not only the liberal judge, the feminist judge, the discordant judge, but the historical judge. 

The one who changed the legal destiny of American women. The one who was not afraid to confront those who perpetuated the system of discrimination. The one who knew how to reinvent the concept of justice in pursuit of gender equality. 

Being a woman was not a blessing, but a curse that a gown eased. 

Forever Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an eternal in American jurisprudence, the history of law and feminism.