Things you didn't know about the 'Notorious RBG'
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AS A NON-OBSERVANT JEW, RBG WAS A GOLEM
In the last decade of the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she saw herself crowned a feminist icon.
The meme-fication first took root in 2013, with her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder.
As tightly as Ginsburg has been intertwined with Roe, it’s as if she ruled on it, or argued it.
She did not.
Ginsburg said about Roe, “The Court ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action.”
This led groups like the National Women’s Law Center, the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, and the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund to urge President Bill Clinton to look elsewhere for his first Supreme Court nomination.
How, then, did Ginsburg—who was seen as having taken a view on abortion rights heretical to the establishment women’s rights groups of the time—get anointed as the “feminist icon” she has now been eulogized as?
The meme of RBG carried on through Generation Pussyhat, but has lately shown signs of wear.
Slate’s Supreme Court writer Mark Joseph Stern revoked the title after Ginsburg dismissed the protests of Colin Kaepernick and other black athletes. Still her champions hung on.
When Ginsburg broke several ribs in 2018, it again opened up criticism of Ginsburg for not retiring when it was safe for her to do so under a DEMOCRAT.
But her defenders, those most invested in the story of Ginsburg as a singular figure, reassured others to stay calm.
The meme was never the big problem with the false idea of Ginsburg as liberal or feminist savior, but it pointed to one—the brand-driven, girl-bossed, leaned-in conception of women’s freedom in which it incubated.
Can the meme outlive the woman?
Or will it become a relic of a time when we were less free, and one not worth mourning? We should know better after the last decade, too: The movement for women’s rights is poorly served by rallying around the life chances of one of the only women in the United States with a job for life.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159431/ruth-bader-ginsburg-end-one-great-woman-myth
Right now, there’s a debate among those on the Left. Was ‘Notorious RBG’ a real feminist or not? These leftists are insane.
The internet had learned to love Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so it was not surprising that when the news of her death broke on Friday evening, social media lit up with outpourings of love and admiration for this diminutive octogenarian who had been cast as an iron-pumping, dissent-slinging legal ninja.
But those who celebrated her as a one-woman bulwark against the collapse of democracy might have been surprised by something else that bubbled up.
Within hours of her death, there also appeared more than a little snarking about the pop-hagiography around her, edged with insinuating questions about just how far-ranging her vision of equality was.
Some noted her poor record of hiring Black law clerks and her comments in 2016 (which she later apologized for) calling Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests “dumb” and “disrespectful.”
Others re-upped longstanding critiques of R.B.G.-mania, and perhaps even of the judge herself, as reflecting a myopic “white feminism.”
On Twitter, there were calls to remember those “left behind” by the brand of feminism Justice Ginsburg supposedly advanced, along with mocking references to the public grief over her death as a “white women’s 9/11.”
“What conception of women’s rights, and what kind of feminist movement, might have died with Ginsburg?,” Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The New Republic, questioning what she called “the false idea of Ginsburg as liberal or feminist savior.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/arts/ginsburg-feminist-backlash.html
The internet had learned to love Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so it was not surprising that when the news of her death broke on Friday evening, social media lit up with outpourings of love and admiration for this diminutive octogenarian who had been cast as an iron-pumping, dissent-slinging legal ninja.
But those who celebrated her as a one-woman bulwark against the collapse of democracy might have been surprised by something else that bubbled up.
Within hours of her death, there also appeared more than a little snarking about the pop-hagiography around her, edged with insinuating questions about just how far-ranging her vision of equality was.
Some noted her poor record of hiring Black law clerks and her comments in 2016 (which she later apologized for) calling Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests “dumb” and “disrespectful.”
Others re-upped longstanding critiques of R.B.G.-mania, and perhaps even of the judge herself, as reflecting a myopic “white feminism.”
On Twitter, there were calls to remember those “left behind” by the brand of feminism Justice Ginsburg supposedly advanced, along with mocking references to the public grief over her death as a “white women’s 9/11.”
“What conception of women’s rights, and what kind of feminist movement, might have died with Ginsburg?,” Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The New Republic, questioning what she called “the false idea of Ginsburg as liberal or feminist savior.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/arts/ginsburg-feminist-backlash.html
