Equal Protection for Women: “Frontiero v. Richardson”
Frontiero v. Richardson, decided on this day, was a landmark Supreme Court decision on sex discrimination. Sharron Frontiero was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force who applied for housing benefits for her husband, whom she claimed as a dependent. Under then-existing military policy, wives — but not husbands — were entitled to benefits as dependents. A majority of the Court declared the policy unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court had ruled that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment gave equal protection to women. Frontiero took another step forward, holding that “classifications based on sex, like classifications based on race, alienage, or national origin, are inherently suspect, and must therefore be subjected to strict judicial scrutiny.” The “strict scrutiny” standard gave sex discrimination cases a higher standard of constitutional protection.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued Frontiero before the Supreme Court for the ACLU. It was her first oral argument before the Court.As Co-Founder and Director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project at the time, Ginsburg was involved in almost all of the early women’s rights cases before the Court, including Reed v. Reed (November 22, 1971).
As head of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s, modeled her litigation program after Thurgood Marshall’s program that lead to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. Marshall’s strategy involved not immediately challenging segregated public schools because he believed that neither the Supreme Court nor the public was ready for dramatic change. Instead, he challenged smaller segregation issues such as segregation in state law schools, for the purpose of building a body of case law that would later support a challenge to segregated public schools. As we know, the strategy worked. And it worked for Ginsburg in the area of women’s rights.
On June 14, 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. She assumed the role on August 10, 1993, becoming only the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
The Court: “We therefore conclude that, by according differential treatment to male and female members of the uniformed services for the sole purpose of achieving administrative convenience, the challenged statutes violate the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment insofar as they require a female member to prove the dependency of her husband.”
Hear Ruth Bader Ginsburg argue the case before the Supreme Court: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1970-1979/1972/1972_71_1694
Read the great biography of RBG: Jane Sherron De Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (2018)
Don’t miss: Linda Hirshman, Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (2015)
Learn more about the ACLU and women’s rights: https://www.aclu.org/human-rights/womens-rights
Read: Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (2009)