"Equal" Begins with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I've just finished "Equal -- Women Reshape American Law" by Fred Strebeigh. It is a terrific read about the changes in law through the Violence Against Women Act, scholarly yet full of humanity. I'll be publishing little book reports over the coming days.

The book is dedicated to all of us: "women shaping law."

Prologue: “This book, drawing on interviews with and documents from participants in those cases, tells the stories behind the cases that propelled American law toward equality. And it tells tales of resistance from on high.”

Part One: SCRUTINY (1970-1975)

1.The Story of Paula Wiesenfeld.
In 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg (shown here in her ACLU days) found the story of Paula and Stephen Wiesenfeld and immediately knew it offered the case she needed. “Ginsburg in the early 1970s was making the most profound attack on sexist law in the history of the American legal system.”

Paula Wiesenfeld died in childbirth and Stephen was denied the same social security benefits he would have received if he had been a widow instead of a widower. Ginsburg was an ACLU lawyer and a professor at Rutgers, where a group of women students had asked her to teach a course on women and the law.

Prior to Wiesenfeld, Ginsburg had also worked on the case of Charles Moritz, who was denied a tax deduction for household help to care for his 89-year-old mother because he was a man, and sought a role in the case of Sally Reed, who could not serve as administrator of her son's estate because she was a woman. Ginsburg suggested to her friend Mel Wulf,who was the legal director of the ACLU, that a woman co-counsel would be appropriate in Reed. Wulf agreed, perhaps because Ginsburg had supplied her brief in Moritz not only to Wulf but also to other New York lawyers. One of those lawyers, well connected to the ACLU, wrote Ginsburg that her Moritz brief was terrific, with a copy of his letter to Wulf. Wulf then invited Ginsburg to join on Reed. He had been known to say that he “plucked Ruth Bader Ginsburg from obscurity,” but also remarked, “Maybe she plucked herself from obscurity.”

We return to Wiesenfeld in Chapter 4.