Ruth Bader Ginsburg: a life

The definitive account of an icon who shaped gender equality for all women.

In this comprehensive, revelatory biography - fifteen years of
interviews and research in the making - historian Jane Sherron De Hart
explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s
passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her
meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs
was her Jewish background, specifically the concept of tikkun olam, the
Hebrew injunction to ‘repair the world’, with its profound meaning for a
young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.

Ruth’s journey began with her mother, who died tragically young but

whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism. It stretches from
Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School
to Cornell University to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming
one of the first female law professors in the country and having to
fight for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her
job; to becoming the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and
arguing momentous anti-sex-discrimination cases before the US Supreme
Court.

All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman
on the Court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making
history. Intimately, personably told, this biography offers
unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose
profound impact will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and
beyond.