Ruth Bader Ginsburg is my hero.
Yes, she was crucial to the fight for gender equality. Yes, she was the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, won five cases before the Supreme Court, and was the second woman to be nominated to the highest court.
But it wasn’t just her professional achievements that make her my hero.
Discussing feminism, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, ‘Free To Be You and Me.’ Free to be, if you were a girl—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be.”
For Ginsburg, these words weren’t lofty ideals; they were how she conducted her life.
The same year she graduated first in her class from Cornell, she became a wife.
While she served as the first woman on the Harvard Law Review, she was also a mother.
That was Ginsburg’s greatness. Throughout her life, she refused to compromise. She insisted that women, like men, could have their cake and eat it too.
It is because of female pioneers like Ginsburg, that I was able to realize my dream of founding my own law firm without compromising my dreams of having a family. She led the way for women like me to follow.
I owe an enormous debt to the attorney, the mother, the justice, the woman-Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
