Notorious

I’ve been waiting for something to inspire me to share with you and Notorious RBG just did. It’s time to run, not walk, to see it. Hopefully, it’s in a theater near you or perhaps soon to be available from your favorite source – Netflix, Amazon Prime or iTunes, if you please. Ruth.Bader.Ginsberg. I consider myself pretty informed, but honestly, I had no idea she was so instrumental in combating sex discrimination in the 70s. If she’s not your favorite Supreme, she soon will be. That’s all I can say.

And the film is more masterful in the telling because it makes heroes of the twenty-something women who transformed this small, quiet, thoughtful Justice into the superheroine of social media. Seriously. RBG. She was cool, way, way before nerdy was cool for girls. Maybe it’s not even really cool yet. But RBG does it.

Here are just a few things I didn’t know about her that just make me love her even more:

1. She earned her way onto the Harvard Law Review by being among the top 25 in class rank after her first year. She managed classes and law review (“Second year they work you to death” — for those of you who haven’t been to law school), nursed her husband who was seriously ill during law school (and helped him stay current with his law classwork), AND had a fourteen-month-old child when she started law school. Serious multi-tasking.
2. She’s 84 and works out with a trainer twice a week in a sweatshirt that reads, “Super Diva!”
3. In the 1970s, she conceptualized the strategy for ending sex discrimination in law and won 5/6 cases on that issue that she argued before the Supreme Court. Remember ladies, not long ago pregnancy was legally grounds for termination of employment, equal pay for equal work was not required, and even as recently as 1975, husbands in twelve states could not be charged for raping their wives. We’ve come a long way, thanks in no small part to this tiny lady.
4. She suggests that there will be enough women on the Court when there are nine female Supreme Court Justices. After all, no one thought anything of nine men for the better part of two centuries of the Court.
5. Her favorite quote is from a famous abolitionist and women’s suffrage leader Sarah Grimke:

But I ask no favors for my sex…All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks!

(6) And finally, there’s awesome merch!

Go RBG. We need you to stick around for a while!