ACLU Creates Pioneering Women’s Rights Project –With Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Director
The Board of Directors of the ACLU on this day voted to create a Women’s Rights Project, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg as its Director.
Ginsburg’s most important cases with the Women’s Rights Project included Reed v. Reed (November 22, 1971), Frontiero v. Richardson (May 14, 1973), and Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (March 19, 1975).
For her role with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, Ginburg is generally regarded as the intellectual architect of constitutional protection of women’s rights. (See below.)
President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the important Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980, and in 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court, as the second woman to serve on the Court. As the Court became more conservative on equality issues, Ginsburg began issuing a number of dissents with forceful criticisms of the majority on the Court, and also raising the same issues in major public speaking engagements.
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.
Marshall and Ginsburg hold the distinction of being the only two activist attorneys who won landmark Supreme Court cases for powerless groups and were later appointed to the Supreme Court themselves.
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
See the movie on Ginsburg: RBG (2018)
Read about the history of the ACLU: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)
And read Brenda Feigen’s essay for he ACLU’s 100th Anniversary on working with Ginsburg at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project
Read the ACLU FBI File (not the complete file): http://vault.fbi.gov/ACLU
Learn about the ACLU today: www.aclu.org