My Own Words

Ginsburg’s biographers note that on May 1, 1970, Law Day at Rutgers law school, Ginsburg’s journey began a new phase. After hosting a panel on women’s liberation, she participated in the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in Chicago, at which she recommended that law schools start teaching courses on sex discrimination and also that the law school’s academic community should eliminate “from law school texts and classroom presentation […] attempts at comic relief via stereotyped characterizations of women” (113). Following this, Ginsburg sought to read every federal decision involving the legal status of women and found a wealth of material. Over the following decade, Ginsburg created a great deal of literature regarding the legal rights of women and gender discrimination.

Here, Ginsburg presents her revised comments from the initial Law Day activities of 1970, as published in the 1971 Rutgers Law Review. She discusses the changes she investigated in the domestic law of Sweden, where the end goal was “independence and equality for women, a goal toward which Sweden had already made significant progress through reform of marriage law” (120).

Ginsburg next discusses the particular areas of American society requiring change for the empowerment of women. She asserts that many believe women are rightly protected by laws and customs of society that actually disempower them.