The life of an introverted 85-year-old woman is not usually a subject that excites film producers – or audiences, for that matter. And yet, next month, not one but two movies are coming out about the extraordinary life and work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pioneering feminist, supreme court justice and now pop culture icon. On the Basis of Sex is a fictionalised take on the early part of her career as a law professor and then with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), starring Felicity Jones as Ginsburg and Armie Hammer as her devoted husband. She is also the subject of the documentary RBG, a far more satisfying look at Ginsburg’s entire life, from her childhood as a studious Jewish tomboy in Brooklyn, to her role today as one of the most revered figures in US public life. Gloria Steinem describes her in the film as “the closest thing to a superhero I know”.
Mimi Leder, the director of On the Basis of Sex, and Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the directors of RBG, happen to be in London at the same time, so I meet them to talk about the films. All three are smart, pleasingly straight-talking women who were involved with or certainly followed the women’s movement in the 1970s. Back then, Ginsburg was starting to fight the thousands of federal and state laws that discriminated against women, just as the civil rights movement had already started to take on the laws that discriminated on the basis of race. So, in their age and demographic, Leder, West and Cohen appear to be, and are, classic Ginsburg fans. But in the past few years, Ginsburg has – to her enormous surprise – accrued a huge celebrity among a new generation of young feminists, spurred on by her increasing role as a dissenter, fighting against the court’s lean towards the right, and encouraged by the blog-turned-book Notorious RBG, which inspired mugs and tote bags with Ginsburg’s image on them.
When RBG premiered at the Sundance film festival in January, a six-year-old girl turned up dressed as Ginsburg, because she liked the stories she heard about her “standing up to the boys”.
“A documentary about the constitutional underpinning of women’s rights isn’t the easiest sell,” says Julie Cohen. “So, this sudden interest in an 85-year-old woman, turning her into pretty much a rock star, was terrific for us.”
And yet Ginsburg’s newfound popularity has at least as much to do with what she accomplished decades ago as it does with what she is still doing now. “As much as I thought I knew about her, I really didn’t know all that she had done, especially as a lawyer, and I think that’s what people are discovering now,” says Leder.
Ginsburg was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, the daughter of a first-generation Jewish immigrant father. When she was 14 months old, her six-year-old sister died of meningitis, and Ginsburg’s mother, Celia, pressed the importance of education on her remaining child. But Celia never got to see her daughter finish high school, because she died from cancer the day before her daughter’s graduation.
Ginsburg went to Cornell University, where there were about four boys to every girl. One of those boys was Martin Ginsburg. “Marty was the first boy I’d ever met who cared that I had a brain,” Ginsburg recalls in RBG, in which she describes meeting him as the greatest fortune of her life. On the Basis of Sex begins with her and Marty studying at Harvard law school, where Ginsburg was one of nine women in a class of 500 men. (“How do you justify taking a spot from a qualified man?” the dean infamously asked her at the time.) As well as doing her own studies, she was looking after her baby daughter, Jane, and Marty’s work, too – while still a student, he was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive cancer. And so, every day, Ginsburg would do her work, then look after her daughter and put her to bed, then visit Marty in hospital, and then, at midnight, spend several hours typing up the notes from his classes for him. She got, she estimates, two hours of sleep a night.
Miraculously, Marty recovered and, after transferring to Columbia University to be near him when he got a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg became the first woman to be on the Law Review of two top schools, Harvard and Columbia, meaning she was a top student at both. And yet, on graduation, no law firm would hire her because she was a woman. Eventually, she got a job as a professor at Rutgers law school in 1963, where she focused on gender discrimination, considered then to be barely a subject. Then, at the ACLU, she started going to the supreme court to argue against cases based on gender discrimination, slowly, methodically dismantling legally sanctioned sexism. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg completely changed the lives of American women,” says West.
By this point, the Ginsburgs had two children and Marty was essential to Ginsburg being able to work, doing all the cooking and, as Julie Cohen puts it, being the “warmer and fuzzier parent”.
This relationship is very much the focus of On the Basis of Sex, which was written by Ginsburg’s nephew Daniel Stiepleman, and yet their dynamic is oddly off in it: Ginsburg is depicted as a gauche, occasionally strident striver and Marty is relegated to making bland “I believe in you, Ruth” encouragements from the sidelines. In fact, as the couple’s children and friends make very clear in the documentary, Marty was a funny, outgoing character, extremely smart in his own right but happy to play second fiddle to her. When asked once what advice they give each other, Marty grinned and said: “She doesn’t give me advice about cooking and I don’t give her advice about law.” Ginsburg, by contrast, was and remains a quiet introvert who loved the differences between her and her husband. But they appreciated one another’s differences and he pushed her to push herself, while also coming to her office in the evenings to tell her she needed to come home to eat and sleep. Ginsburg’s children recall in the movie that one of their childhood memories is of their mother working at home until 5am, getting maybe an hour’s sleep, then going to work, only to catch up on her sleep at weekends.
Marty’s support, however, went deeper than mere practicalities. When a supreme court seat became vacant in the early 90s, it was Marty who actively championed her to get it. “I can’t think of anyone less likely to toot their own horn than Ruth. So Marty had to play the New York Philharmonic,” one of his friends recalls in RBG. He called everyone he knew in the legal, political and business worlds to rally support for Ruth, because the thought of her being overlooked for this position outraged him. The story of the Ginsburgs’ marriage is very much the emotional heart of both films, and quite right, too. Marty died in 2010 of cancer, and the moment in RBG when Ginsburg reads Marty’s last letter to her and this very controlled woman suddenly starts to cry is the most moving moment I’ve seen on screen in a long time.
But Bill Clinton, who makes a cameo in RBG, is quick to correct any ideas that Marty got Ginsburg her seat on the supreme court: “It was her interview that did it. Within 15 minutes, I decided.” Clinton points out what is probably the most astonishing thing about Ginsburg: how bipartisan her appeal is. She was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 96-3; by point of comparison, the rather more controversial supreme court judge Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed this year with a vote of 50-48.
“You could argue it was not as partisan a time as it is now, but it was pretty partisan,” says Clinton, who knows a thing or two about those partisan times. One of the most surprising, and surprisingly delightful, interviewees in RBG is the staunchly rightwing senator Orrin Hatch. We first see him at Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings, where she talked passionately about the importance of legalised abortion, a subject of which Hatch is – to put it mildly – not a fan. Nonetheless, he says to her then: “Frankly, I admire you and you earned the right to be on the supreme court.”
The interviews he gave for the documentary were so enthusiastic, West says, that they had to tone them down: “At one point, he looked into the camera and said: ‘I love Justice Ginsburg!’” When he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom a few weeks ago, Hatch tweeted a photo of him hugging Ginsburg at the ceremony.
But how, in these rabidly partisan times, could someone like Hatch appreciate Ginsburg? “She is very canny with how she presents herself to different audiences. If you look at her confirmation hearings you see that she was dressed conservatively, she kept her cool and she just kind of charmed them,” Cohen says. “It’s really a vindication of her approach: how do you get people to come to your side? Well, it’s not by getting angry and screaming at them,” adds West.
Ginsburg is clearly tickled by her late-life celebrity – she makes appearances in both films and, in RBG, we see her giggling delightedly at Kate McKinnon’s impression of her on Saturday Night Live. On the Basis of Sex and RBG were both begun long before Trump was in office, so the directors insist it is a coincidence that the films came out at precisely the time when Ginsburg feels most necessary. And although liberals anxiously follow reports of her health and daily workouts, Ginsburg seems veritably full of beans, more determined than ever to keep fighting.
“Because On the Basis of Sex is about her early years, it has been described as a superhero’s origin story, but it’s not,” says Leder. “It’s a woman’s origin story, one who changed the country for the better. And America and the world need her now more than ever.”
• RBG is in cinemas and on demand on 4 January in the UK; On the Basis of Sex is out on 22 February.
