In our generation, girls grew up idolizing women like Beyonce, Britney Spears, and Kim Kardashian. These women entered our lives through the media and pop culture, and truly had their own lasting impact on young women. However, their efforts compared to those of another are reduced to minuscule. Who could I possibly be talking about? Well the Notorious RBG, of course.

For many girls in our generation, we go through school blindly without realizing the impacts of women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Up until I entered middle school, I too believed that the current stage of society is what the world had always been like. As we grow older and dive deeper into our history lessons, we learn about the inequality involving women and the continuous battles they fought to be recognized equal to men. 

On September 11th in 2020, the world lost one of the most influential trailblazers there ever was involving women’s rights.

The world we live in now has come so far, and women are now entitled to things they never would have been before. This movement involved the efforts of many extraordinary women, one of them being Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the nine women who went to Harvard Law School in the 1950s and became the Harvard Law Review’s first female member. However, this was only the beginning of what seemed like a long uphill battle. Despite graduating from law school, nobody would hire Ginsburg at their law firms, solely based on the fact that she was a woman.

Ginsburg became a professor and pursued her law career by taking on cases that nobody else would. She took on the cases involving discrimination based on gender, and in doing so, made quite a name for herself. In 1993, she was appointed into the Supreme Court where her opinions mattered more than they ever had before. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg accomplished what had seemed to be impossible. Just a few of the things she’s done for women include the right to sign a mortgage without a man, the right to have a bank account without a male co-signer, the right to have a job without being discriminated based on gender, and the right for women to be pregnant or have kids and still be able to work.

Ginsburg even made the spotlight in pop-culture being dubbed “The Notorious RBG” (a play on a rapper’s name, The Notorious BIG) by many young people. 

Without Ruth Bader Ginsburg, women in our generation wouldn’t even be allowed to play a sport in school, or at all. Our school has several students that are athletes, many of those athletes being girls. These girls wouldn’t have these opportunities and would be living in a very different reality if Justice Ginsburg hadn’t fought for what she believed in.

Another student at iUniversityPrep I spoke with, Haley Pounders, recognizes the impact Ruth Bader Ginsburg has had on her life. Haley has been avidly involved in cross country and running programs in her recent years and couldn’t imagine her life if she wasn’t allowed to participate in something she is currently so passionate about.  When I asked her how she would feel if she wasn’t allowed to participate based on her gender she said, “I would be pretty mad, I mean if someone came up to me without even seeing me run and reject me for just being a girl, I’d be crushed.” We went on to discuss cross country itself. “I’m aware that cross-country is a male-dominated sport, but it has grown to become so much more inclusive of girls like me,” Haley noted. Haley went on to state, “I’m so thankful that RBG had the courage to fight for what she believed in, as I couldn’t imagine my life without cross country.”

Justice Ginsburg ultimately transformed the way that the world views women, and is one of the main reasons that girls can choose to participate in any career they want to without being rejected because of their gender.

Ginsburg passed away on September 18th, 2020 from a long battle with metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was 87 years old. 

Powerful women such as Beyonce, Britney Spears, and Kim Kardashian didn’t get to where they were by blending in. RBG has paved the way for an influential movement in our modern-day society by taking a stand for what she believed in. Because of her, our world will never be the same.

Sources:

abcnews.go.com/US/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-impact-generations-women-changed-law/story?id=73107921. 

Carmon, Irin. Notorious RBG. Harper Collins USA, 2015. 

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, et al. My Own Words. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2018.