Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns 85 years old today. She will probably celebrate by doing pushups. In honor of her birthday, Mental Floss has a list of 15 things you should know about the Notorious RBG, which give an overview of her life story. It's fascinating.
1. THE INJUSTICE HER MOTHER FACED LEFT A LASTING IMPRESSION.
Celia Bader, née Amster, died the day before Ginsburg’s high school graduation. But in their short time together, Celia managed to instill in her daughter that an education was not something to be taken for granted. Celia herself—whom Ginsburg regularly, according to Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s Notorious RBG, called the most intelligent person she’d ever known—went to work at age 15 in order to help put her brother through college.
At the 1993 White House press conference announcing her nomination to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg wrapped up her remarks with an emotional tribute to the woman who was never allowed to reach her full potential. “I have a last thank-you,” she told the crowd assembled. “It’s to my mother. My mother was the bravest, strongest person I have ever known, who was taken from me much too soon. I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons.”
2. IT WASN’T EXACTLY SMOOTH SAILING FOR GINSBURG, EITHER.
As newlyweds, Ginsburg and her husband, Marty, relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Marty was expected to fulfill his Army Reserve duties for the next two years. Ruth took the civil service exam and qualified to be a claims adjustor—but then made the mistake of mentioning that she was three months pregnant with their daughter, Jane. Suddenly, RBG’s civil service ranking was reduced, and with it, her title and pay. (She learned a valuable lesson from the experience, and during her second pregnancy—which coincided with her first year as a professor at Rutgers University—she did everything she could to conceal the fact that she was expecting.)
In 1956, Ginsburg was one of just nine female students matriculating at Harvard Law School. The dean of the Law School at the time, Erwin Griswold, hosted a dinner for the women—and at the end of the meal, asked each of them to go around and share how it was they justified taking a spot that would otherwise have gone to a man. Years later—when word got back to Griswold that his former student enjoyed recounting this tale on the lecture circuit—he insisted that it had all been in good fun.
Read more of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's story, told in list form, at Mental Floss.