Book Review: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's "My Own Words"

{The following is the second of two pieces dedicated to telling the stories of women past and present during Women's National History Month.}

In this week's piece, I will take a look at an American icon, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (known by many as the "Notorious R.B.G.") through the lens of a 2016 collection of her professional and personal writings titled My Own Words. Put together by her biographers, Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, both accomplished legal professors themselves, My Own Words is not a typical biography in any sense. Bracketed by contextualizing introductory pieces by Hartnett and Williams and one piece by her now deceased husband Marty Ginsburg, My Own Words showcases to readers the varied writings of a sharp legal mind whose long career as a women's rights advocate, law professor, and then judge and justice, colors the pages and legal arguments contained within.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933 and grew up in a Jewish household, learning from her mother early on to be independent and studious. After her mother's death due to cancer upon Ruth's 1950 graduation from high school, she would go on study law at Harvard and Columbia University, rededicating herself to the scholarly pursuits her stay-at-home mother was determined Ruth have.

Ginsburg's first foray into the national spotlight would come when, as one of the first women professors at Columbia University in the 1970s and an early beneficiary of the burgeoning women's rights movement at the time, would partner with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to found the Women's Rights Project. As her role with the ACLU required arguing cases before the courts as part of a litigious, piecemeal achievement strategy on behalf of American women inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, her national profile would rise with each of the six cases she would argue before the Supreme Court. All in all, her inspiring work with the ACLU would attract the attention of two presidential administrations: President Carter would appoint her to the D.C. Circuit's U.S. Court of Appeals in 1980 and President Clinton would elevate her into her current position of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993.

My Own Words is dedicated primarily to Ginsburg's legal lectures, opinions, and speeches given throughout her long career. Taken as a whole, these works compose a detailed picture of her liberal-leaning constitutional philosophy, reveal the inner-workings of a busy Supreme Court, and serve to contextualize American jurisprudence in a larger international context centered largely around expanding the reach of human rights and the rule of law in democratic (and on a more hopeful note, non-democratic) societies. This includes encouraging the development of legal regimes dedicated to eliminating discrimination based on race, gender, and socioeconomic circumstance.

Even as the book's biographical narrative turns on the highlights of her legal career, her story is fleshed out further in the tributes she gives recognizing the women trailblazers that came before her as well as close contemporaries she sees in a similar light, like justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and former justice Sandra Day O'Connor. She gives stirring remarks about her friendships within the court, especially the unlikely one that developed between her and the late conservative-leaning justice Antonin Scalia around their mutual love of the opera. (In fact, they both performed as special guests in operatic showings on two separate occasions.) Overall, it was very rewarding to get a glimpse at both the formal and informal ceremonies of the Supreme Court and the dynamic bonds of collegiality the court depends on to function effectively as last-resort arbiters in cases of constitutional import, interpersonal bonds that serve an equal importance in the other co-equal branches of government.

While being extremely gracious about her colleagues on and off the bench, she pulls no punches in describing the ideological differences that exist even in as politically-insulated a branch as the judicial one, even as the Supreme Court tends to be unanimous or close to unanimous in a good majority of its decisions. In the end, the key to keeping it together, Ginsburg notes, is to attack the ideas in an argument rather than resort to ad-hominum attacks on another justice's character or personal beliefs. The behind-the-scenes legal battles fought in majority and dissenting opinions is just another ongoing dialogue, one of many spirited discussions necessary in a democratic system. After all, democracy turns on reaching a consensus among groups of people with vastly different beliefs, finding the places of common ground and moving together from there.

While not necessarily a biographical work, My Own Words is a strong showing nevertheless in terms of granting readers a better perspective on the professional and personal life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite some repetitiveness and overlap between certain passages, as Ginsburg often cites her legal opinions frequently in her many off-the-court appearances at legal conferences, schools, memorials, and other public venues. Some readers will feel dissatisfied at the heavier focus on Ginsburg's legal philosophies and insights at the expense of getting a more personal sense of the motivations driving her long career, such as the struggles and self-doubt she no doubt experienced at some point in her life, perhaps during her early days as an ACLU advocate fighting the good fight against gender-based discrimination. However, in my opinion, My Own Words gives just enough glimpses into both Ginsburg's personal and professional lives to sate readers for now, while building anticipation for the full-fledged official Hartnett and Williams biography of Ginsburg expected to be published after Ginsburg completes her term on the Supreme Court. Stay tuned!

Works Cited:

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, Hartnett, Mary, & Williams, Wendy W. (2016). My Own Words. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Book Review: Kara Cooney's "When Women Ruled the World"

{March is the official start to Women's History Month! Here is one of two pieces about women's lives both past and present to celebrate.}

I happened recently upon an intriguing book chronicling the (often short) reigns of six ancient Egyptian queens. Partly out of curiosity to learn about an ancient culture I hardly knew anything about outside of the dramatized stories surrounding Cleopatra taught in schools and outside of them, and drawn to the the title's promise to shed more light on historical figures almost completely left out of the record, I gave Egyptologist Kara Cooney's 2018 publication, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, a chance. And I was not disappointed.

There were only six women leaders or pharaohs on record in the tombs, temples, statuary, stone tablets and other artifacts left behind in ancient Egypt's roughly 4,000 years of existence: Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra. Upon the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC by the first pharaoh and warlord King Narmer, the ancient Egyptian lands of Northern Africa were uniquely positioned to flourish as they were protected from the constant instability of other societies of the time--namely, invasion and drastic population shifts--by the Nile delta, perilous seas, and surrounding deserts. Moreover, the Nile's annual floods and fertile silt left behind, made Egypt into the Mediterranean breadbasket. All of these blessings bestowed by its natural geography and unique agricultural situation allowed its societal institutions and culture to remain largely unchanged over its long history, passing down a patriarchal and authoritarian system of centralized rule underneath an Egyptian god-king. How then did these six women find the space to rule in such a society, however briefly their reigns may have been?

Not unique among hereditary dynasties, Egypt sought to stave off crippling internal power struggles partly by utilizing a system of incestuous marriage, and partly with the unique Egyptian tradition of ritualized killings of the competition (mostly male members of the elite and royal family) in the event of the previous monarch's death and burial, to consolidate power in one line of continuous descent. This included the children of the monarch begotten by the many women in the royal harem and his wife, respectively. While brutal, realpolitik ritualized killings of the competition eventually tapered off after the stabilization of dynastic rule, there were situations in which there was no fit male ruler to continue the dynasty: he was too young, crippled, sterile, or died young as a consequence of incest. To stave off a succession crisis and make the smooth transition between dynasty, Egypt relied on its women, usually the widowed Royal Wife, to serve as a stop-gap or regent where the male heir was too young or wasn't there, counting on the assumption that women wouldn't act against their children's or larger familial interests by ruling pragmatically (why buck the system that gave you your power and station?). This usually meant violence of any kind was out and consensus in, and that the women inherited their station at the end of a dynasty and in times of crisis, whether they were the frequent incest-driven succession kind or the more rare cases of infighting, religious feuds, or climatological shifts. (Funny isn't it how women tend to come to power in more unequal societies and during times of crisis to clean up the mess left behind?)

Merneith was the first queen to witness the brutalities of court life--notwithstanding the ritualized killings claiming up to hundreds of victims at a time or the fact of her gender being largely regarded as mercurial, passive, and easy to control by the men in her life. Merneith would not be the first or last woman to largely be used in leadership positions in order to shore up their support of a patriarchal system that had elevated them to those same positions of power. She was the pioneer of the six, ruling as (unofficial) regent while her young son, King Den, matured, with those same ritualized killings helping to shore up her unofficial reign along with an emphasis on her status as descendant of a god-king or kings. Using the template Merneith set down of achieving power as the feminine protector of the god-king's realm, Neferusobek followed up by managing to rule for four years alone after the untimely death of her sterile husband. She would become the first female king, with Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra VII following using the time-honored strategy of propaganda and other positive PR emphasizing her god-king lineage and willingness to do anything in service of the realm (this PR included grafting on traditional masculine-aspects of power onto their female figures in stone reliefs carved in their image in a sort of ancient-world pant-suit).

However, these women couldn't rely solely on their religious and political status and had to also use their educated minds to get Egypt out of a tight spots. For example, Cleopatra made powerful Roman alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and other Mediterranean powers to shore up Egypt against imperial rule and Nefertiti made peace with ostracized and powerful priests in a diplomatic tight-rope act after her husband Akhenaten tried disastrously to forcibly convert Egyptians to a monotheistic sun cult religion away from their traditional polytheistic one in a bid for even more power. In other words, instead of the proverbial two-sided coin of power being both male and female (stereotypical brash and bold versus cautious leadership styles), this pharaoh was of the view that a man need not share influence at all and sought to redefine power as only legitimate when exercised by a male.

Often, the thanks these women got for coming to the rescue was backlash from the society that temporarily granted them power, evidenced by the removal or attempted obliteration of their names from the kingly lineages recorded on tablets, statuary, or tombs. If they remained in the historical record at all, they would be remembered as leadership failures or as overreaching by showing naked ambition for power, rather than cloaking it as merely assuming the mantle of leadership in protection of her dynasty (sounds familiar). Akhenaten's cult-episode and Nefertiti's perceived blatant power-grab foreshadowed a trend in following dynasties that mostly barred royal women from positions of power, opening up marriage to non-royal females (the power disparities much greater here) and allowing Game of Thrones-style infighting among elite families to worsen.

While I disagreed with Cooney's broad generalizations about female leadership biologically trending towards the cautious, consensual, and prudent rather than the bold or aggressive unilateral style of a man's (society's social constraints rather than biology seems to explain better why a woman takes a more cautious approach to power in a patriarchal society that would crucify her for expressing herself any other way than the "proper" protector-of-the-family or supportive-nurturer role), I agreed with her concluding appeal that society needs to utilize all styles of leadership (whether perceived to be more feminine or masculine) in order to prosper. This makes the equality of the sexes culturally, economically, politically, religiously and otherwise even more imperative if we can redefine and re-balance the idea of power itself. However, as When Women Ruled the World shows, as a species, humans, whether in monarchical or democratic systems of governance, are both so close and yet so far from that elusive goal of parity.


Works Cited:

Cooney, Kara. (2018). When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt. Washington, D. C.: National Geographic.