In De Hart’s telling, Ruth Bader was a quintessential product of the post-Holocaust era, in which new-to-America Jewish families prized education and social justice.
Instead, De Hart scrupulously renders a rule-abiding, institutionalist, cautious lawyer and then judge who has managed to remake constitutional history precisely because of those qualities, not despite them. She traces Ginsburg’s path from precocious Brooklyn schoolgirl to the most formidable women’s legal advocate in modern history, and no bras are burned, no political arrests are made, no Saint Crispin’s Day speeches are delivered along the way. A professor emerita of history at UC Santa Barbara, De Hart offers a picture of the most conservative radical in the women’s movement. In a revealing new biography, 15 years in the making, Jane Sherron De Hart helps untangle the mystery of the decorous Ginsburg as feminist gladiator. She is less a radical feminist ninja than a meticulous law tactician-and she has become what we dream of for our toddler daughters. And yet, above all, Ginsburg models the fine arts of civility and diligent case citation. Books about women and fury fill the tables in every bookstore. The women of the Trump resistance are livid. Squaring the careful public Ginsburg with the media creation of the present time can be challenging. Sometimes the combination of the genteel geriatric and the quasi-violent rap iconography affixed to the “Notorious RBG” persona seems an unholy marriage, as if we couldn’t quite love a feminist trailblazer without turning the 90-pound bubbe into a gangster. The fandom can border on condescension-Twitter can be instantly short-circuited by news of her grueling workout regimen or a tart line in a dissenting opinion. She’s become what we dream of for our toddler daughters. Today, more than ever, women starved for models of female influence, authenticity, dignity, and voice hold up an octogenarian justice as the embodiment of hope for an empowered future. Beyond the movies ( RBG, released in May, and On the Basis of Sex, out in December) and the biographies, not to mention the memes and T-shirts and mugs that proliferate like lace-collared mushrooms, Ginsburg at 85 is also the closest thing America has to the consummate anti–Donald Trump. She has rapidly become-in a time that craves heroines-the American ideal of power and authority for millions of women and girls.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not just having a “moment” in American feminist culture.
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