As part of an article highlighting Ruth Bader Ginsburg's accomplishments as a litigator -- and exploring the extent to which they enabled the rise of female public figures like Sarah Palin who claim the mantle of feminism while rejecting virtually all of its substantive commitments -- Dahlia Lithwick reminds us of the social context in which Ginsburg was bringing her landmark lawsuits:
Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn't even have boots were it not for the women who came before. Listening to Palin, it's almost impossible to believe that, as recently as 50 years ago, a woman at Harvard Law School could be asked by Dean Erwin Griswold to justify taking a spot that belonged to a man. In Ginsburg's lifetime, a woman could be denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter just because she was a woman. Only a few decades ago, Ginsburg had to hide her second pregnancy for fear of losing tenure.
One could add other examples from the world of the Supreme Court here. For example, Sandra Day O'Connor, after graduating third in a Stanford Law School class led by William Rehnquist, was offered only secretarial work by a single law firm. And the reluctance to hire women as law clerks went on long after Felix Frankfurter retired in 1962. In a major stain on an otherwise admirable career, William Brennan was notoriously unwilling to hire women as law clerks for much of his tenure on the Court.
It is implausible to think that the effects of this kind of systematic discrimination have completely vanished -- even if they have attenuated. Today, no Supreme Court justice would refuse to consider hiring a woman as a law clerk, but women continue to remain underrepresented among Supreme Court clerks -- and on the federal courts as well. Even in private practice, they continue to face discrimination. Child-rearing is often blamed for this underrepresentation -- even though nobody seems to wonder how Antonin Scalia managed to have a successful career as an academic and judge while having nine children. These kinds of disparities remain prevalent not just in the legal profession but throughout society.
The feminist achievements of the 1970s and 1980s were a beginning, not an end. And with the Republicans about to take over at least one house of Congress, it's worth remembering that progress is hardly set in stone. We need feminists who don't eschew feminism. That's to say, we need Sarah Palin's brand of "feminism" like a fish needs a bicycle.
-- Scott Lemieux
