The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Fandom Was Never Frivolous

Read: The irony of modern feminism’s obsession with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

One of the themes of On the Basis of Sex, the Ginsburg biopic, is the question of cultural evolution. Is progress best made patiently, incrementally? Or is patience a form of complacency? An early scene finds Ginsburg, played by Felicity Jones, and her husband, Marty (played by Armie Hammer), at law school: He’s in his second year; she’s in her first. A professor quotes the legal scholar Paul Freund’s observation about the Supreme Court: Its justices, Freund once said, “should never be influenced by the weather of the day but inevitably they will be influenced by the climate of the era.”

That insight informs the film, which focuses on the work Ginsburg did—long before President Bill Clinton, in 1993, appointed her to the Court—to end gender-based discrimination in American case law. Weather versus climate: Ginsburg, as a jurist, is typically associated with the style of change that is slow and systemic and therefore, the argument goes, sustainable. The film makes a notably different claim. It celebrates Ginsburg, in the end, as a revolutionary. It finds her working with Marty—who was a brilliant tax attorney—to challenge one of the gendered assumptions embedded in the American tax code. The effort was at once pragmatic and radical. It was a means of taking on a widespread system that discriminated on, yes, the basis of sex.

“The film is part fact, part imaginative,” Ginsburg said. “But what’s wonderful about it is that the imaginative parts fit in with the story so well.” Its screenplay was written by Ginsburg’s nephew, Daniel Stiepleman. And it focuses on Ginsburg as a wife and mother as well as a jurist. It tells the story of Marty’s diagnosis of testicular cancer, when both he and his wife were in law school. It details how Ruth cared for him through radiation therapy and helped him graduate. It emphasizes Ruth’s relationship with her daughter, Jane, who admired Gloria Steinem and didn’t realize that she was living with another feminist icon. Like many biopics, the film has the glossy veneer of hagiography—down to one of its final scenes, which finds Jones’s version of Ginsburg walking up the steps of the Supreme Court Building, only to morph into the real Ginsburg doing the same. But On the Basis of Sex earns its accolades, in part because it echoes Ginsburg’s own legal argument: It insists that you can’t understand Ginsburg as a jurist if you don’t understand her as a person. It challenges the notion that legal wisdom can somehow be separated from justices’ humanity.

Ginsburg herself saw her life experience—the discrimination she faced, as a woman and a mother—as essential to her interpretation of the Constitution. She knew in her bones what it is to be seen, by other people and by the law, as less than. (“If you want to understand how an underestimated woman changed the world and is still out there doing the work,” the introduction to the book Notorious RBG reads, “we got you.”) She took for granted that wisdom is not a matter of separation from the facts of everyday life; wisdom comes from a deep acquaintance with those facts. “As we live, we can learn,” she noted. She added: “It’s important to listen.”