In the last decade of the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she saw herself crowned a feminist icon. The memefication of the precedent-setting women’s rights attorney and judge first took root in 2013, with a post quoting from her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court case which helped undermine the Voting Rights Act. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes,” she wrote at the time, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The character of The Notorious RBG, then, emerged not just in her legal victories, but also, for some women, as a figure of solace in loss—in dissent.
It would be an era that ushered in a lot of such losses. As state after state passed new restrictions on abortion, Roe vs. Wade felt more and more on the verge of meaninglessness. All this coalesced into the towering figure of Ginsburg—literally, she was made into an action figure which raised more than $600,000 on Kickstarter, or, enough money to generously run several abortion funds—as women’s shield from those who would repeal Roe, which itself was held up as the paramount women’s rights concern.
For some time, though, reproductive justice advocates and those working on abortion funds had been sounding the alarm, urging abortion rights defenders to turn their attentions to the states, and to better resourcing the grassroots work of women of color in the places where a slate of new laws had made the right to an abortion, long the purview of privileged white women, little more than an abstraction for poor women. The disconnect between large, national reproductive rights organizations and their (now publicly documented) institutional racism was interconnected with the online media feminist shakeup that produced the RBG meme. This image of Ginsburg was a triumph of branded feminism, and a bid—for some who drove it—to turn away from a feminist reckoning over race and class and entrust their freedom in one of the only women in the United States with a job for life.
What conception of women’s rights, and what kind of feminist movement, might have died with Ginsburg? Fear of the end of legal abortion rightly fuels many women’s mourning, a pre-wake for an idea of Roe as the most significant indicator of the status of women’s freedom. But we still have Roe, now, and yet we are faced with the continued neglect and abuse of women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, with the police who kill Black women like Breonna Taylor with apparent impunity.
As tightly as Ginsburg has been intertwined with Roe, it’s as if she ruled on it, or argued it. In the early 1970s, Ginsburg had hoped to bring a reproductive rights case before the Supreme Court herself, and had one: it didn’t involve the right to have an abortion, but the right to have a child. She thought this would sidestep controversy and sexist biases, as she had in the past by successfully arguing sex discrimination cases on behalf of men. The strategy would allow her to make the constitutional argument for women’s rights she had been advancing bit by bit: “The words of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause—’nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.’ Well, that word, ‘any person,’ covers women as well as men.”