JUDY WOODRUFF: As we're hearing tonight, many have described Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a trailblazer.
Amna Nawaz focuses on where that began, the work she did before she joined the Supreme
Court.
AMNA NAWAZ: Let's look now at some of the key ideas, the arguments and decisions Ginsburg
took on early in her career that helped shape history and our legal protections today.
Attorney Brenda Feigen co-founded the ACLU Women's Rights Project with Ruth Bader Ginsburg
in 1972. That's where Ginsburg first worked on cases targeting discrimination on the basis
of sex. And ACLU attorney Ria Tabacco Mar now heads the project.
Thanks to both of you for joining us today.
Brenda, I want to begin with you, because it was during that time when you were with
her there at the ACLU Women's Rights Project that she argued her very first case before
the Supreme Court. It was for Air Force Lieutenant Sharron Frontiero, arguing that federal benefits,
the laws there treated married female members of the armed forces differently than males.
It was 1973. You were there in Washington with her. Tell us what it was like to watch
her argue that case.
BRENDA FEIGEN, Co-Founder, ACLU Women's Rights Project: I had all these big, huge casebooks
with me that I was prepared to use to give her the cites to the cases that she was relying
on in her oral argument.
I didn't need a single one of them. When we start -- it was the usual oyez, oyez. And
then the justices proceeded into the courtroom. And I could tell that she was nervous, but
I was, too.
I was looking at the justices, and they were sitting there looking sort of dazed and amazed.
And I wasn't sure, but I thought they were really paying attention. The problem was that
no one, not a single one of them asked a question or made a comment, which was very unusual
in the Supreme Court.
So, she carried forth. She used citations of -- to authors and people like Blackburn
and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson said that women should never be seen nor heard.
It was just an amazing culmination of history that was defying the notion that women were
not allowed in Illinois to be lawyers or, in Florida, women couldn't -- didn't have
to serve on juries because we needed the protection of being able to stay home.
And I just thought, she nailed it. And I leaned over to her after her remarks were finished,
and I said: "You're going to be the next Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court. I'm just sure
of it."
I was right.
AMNA NAWAZ: Well, Ria, let me ask you.
Here was a woman who knew, as Brenda mentioned, what it was to be discriminated against, what
it was to have your place at law school questioned, to have to hide a pregnancy to save your job.
And yet it became part of her litigation strategy to pick up the cases of men to challenge gender-based
assumptions in the law.
Why do you think she did that?
RIA TABACCO MAR, ACLU Women's Rights Project: Well, that was one of her favorite strategies.
And one of Justice Ginsburg's favorite cases to talk about was a case on behalf of a man
named Stephen Wiesenfeld. His wife had passed away in childbirth, and he wanted to stay
home with their young son for the first several months or years in order to raise him, when
he learned that he was not entitled to Social Security survivor benefits simply because
he was a man, and had his wife been the one who was left alone to raise their son, you
know, she would have been entitled to benefits on their child's behalf.
And what Justice Ginsburg understood is that, by representing men, she helped male judges
understand that sex discrimination affects all of us. It's not only women who are harmed
by the stereotype that women should be caregivers and that men should be breadwinners.
But it's men, too, who are deprived of that opportunity to really experience fully the
joys of family life.
AMNA NAWAZ: It sounds like she knew that employing empathy, getting the judges to care about
the person that she was representing, would help her to make her case.
Is that fair to say?
RIA TABACCO MAR: Absolutely.
And she knew that because she lived it herself. She had been turned away from jobs simply
because she was a woman. And you saw that in her advocacy. And you saw that also once
she was on the bench, that she knew what it was like to stand in the shoes of some of
the litigants that came before the court, to be the underdog, to be told, your kind
isn't good enough, to be turned away simply because of who she was.
And she carried that experience with her.
AMNA NAWAZ: Brenda, as Ria just mentioned, it wasn't just about fighting for equal protection
for women. It was equal protection for all.
When it comes to cases for LGBTQ, how did she approach those? What can you tell us about
why she felt it was -- those were important and how she viewed those?
BRENDA FEIGEN: I was sitting in the courtroom when she made her famous remark that basically
said, skim milk marriages, when the DOMA case was being argued, and that was defending the
notion of marriage between a man and woman, and not anybody else.
She really cared about equal protection. And anything that denies a group of people, particularly
ones with an immutable characteristic, she is in there trying to establish the equal
rights of all of us.
AMNA NAWAZ: Ria, it is fair to say she became a much more vocal critic later in her career.
She was very critical of the court's conservative majority and their handling of voting rights
and reproductive rights issues, and dissented quite frequently.
Now, you have said that her dissents in many ways were even more important or just as important
as her majority opinions. What did you mean by that? Why?
RIA TABACCO MAR: Justice Ginsburg wrote in dissent to be the moral authority for the
court, because she understood the human stakes that really mattered in each case.
She'd been there herself. She'd been the person who was turned away. I think the meme Notorious
RBG came about because of her famous dissent in Shelby County vs. Holder. This was a voting
rights case where the majority really gutted what's called pre-clearance, an important
tool that the government uses to block states and other jurisdictions from adopting discriminatory
voting rules.
And she said, that's like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you aren't
getting wet. And making that accessible to real people and helping us to understand what
she already saw, which was the Voting Rights Act, the pre-clearance provision, was the
umbrella that was saving us from discriminatory voting practices. And that's what we needed.
AMNA NAWAZ: Brenda, she was known for being so meticulous in her work, for being so civil
in it as well, but really for being a legal tactician.
But when you look at the body of her work, there had to be a very deep passion within
to work so tirelessly and in such a dedicated way towards that goal of equal protection
for all.
Did you see that in your time with her?
BRENDA FEIGEN: Absolutely.
When we were working on the brief in the Frontiero case, she cited Elizabeth Cady Stanton from
the "Declaration of Sentiments," who was -- and many steps of ways that women were unequal
in society, needed to be, and then, of course, the right to vote, which we only got 100 years
ago.
On a personal note, I just want to say that I was asked to direct the project with her
in large part because I had been so active in the women's movement itself before that.
And, for example, the march down Fifth Avenue was a big deal and in the women's movement
and in our history.
And this didn't all spring out of the air. It came from the atmosphere of the time of
women in the '60s and early 70s realizing that we needed to demand our rights and our
power. It's not just equal rights. It's equal power in the society.
AMNA NAWAZ: Ria, it's fair to say that legacies can take generations to form.
But in what ways do you already see the legacy of Justice Ginsburg in action? And what work
remains to be done?
RIA TABACCO MAR: Well, it's impossible to overstate the impact that Justice Ginsburg
had on constitutional law.
In 1971, the Supreme Court had never seen a law that discriminated on the basis of sex
that it didn't like. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed all that. She brought us into this
reality where it becomes unthinkable to have these policies that expressly favor men over
women.
Of course, what we're seeing today is that those -- state-sanctioned discrimination has
largely been struck down. Those same stereotypes, the notion that women ought to be caregivers
over workers, and the reverse for men, we see employers, housing providers, other private
actors carrying out those stereotypes, which are so entrenched.
But we know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, if she could participate in oral argument from her
hospital bed, then we can certainly strive to do better with every day that we have.
AMNA NAWAZ: An extraordinary life and legacy she leaves behind.
And thank you to both of you, Brenda Feigen and Ria Tabacco Mar, for joining us to remember
it.