Title: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Women’s Right Project, 1971-1979: An Achievement for Women’s Rights in the Supreme Court as Noteworthy as Roe v. Wade

Abstract:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before becoming Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in 1993, worked for the American Civil Liberties Union as leader of the Women’s Rights Project during the 1970s. The Women’s Rights Project participated in the majority of the sex-discrimination cases that came before the Supreme Court during that decade. Ginsburg, through the Women’s Rights Project cases, challenged laws based on gender stereotyping that placed women in the home and men as their providers. As a result of Ginsburg’s work, the Court struck down laws based on this type of gender-stereotyping, and the Court adopted a new standard of review to evaluate whether discrimination based on sex violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Simultaneous with Ginsburg’s work for the ACLU, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. Many historians emphasize Roe as the landmark decision of the second wave of feminism because of the controversy embedded in the case and the backlash that resulted from it. This paper does not intend to diminish or overlook the significance of Roe but rather to emphasize the victories for women’s rights Ruth Bader Ginsburg achieved through the Women’s Rights Project, which have been overshadowed Roe. This paper argues that Roe and the WRP cases are of equal importance, and that the entire decade of the 1970s, therefore, witnessed a revolution in women’s rights at the Supreme Court level.