My Own Words

In 2003, two former coworkers of Ginsburg approached her with the suggestion that she tell her story in her own words. By that time, many articles had already been written about her. These two women, Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, expressed the idea that the justice should create a select sampling of her writings along with an accurate description of her life with the assistance of chosen biographers. Ginsburg remembers that the women said to her, “People will write about you, like it or not. We suggest that you name as your official biographers authors you trust. The two of us volunteer for that assignment” (xv).

Hartnett was then an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she directed the Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship program. In addition, Hartnett served on the Civil Pro Bono panel for the DC District Court, where she counseled domestic violence victims. Williams, founder of Equal Rights Advocates, based in San Francisco, was a colleague of Ginsburg’s in the 1970s, when she and Ginsburg advised one another on their efforts toward gender equality. Her specialty focused on gender issues in the family.

In her writings, Ginsburg frequently praises her husband, late tax attorney Martin “Marty” Ginsburg, whom she met at Cornell when she was 17. They wed in 1954, remaining married until his death in 2010. The author dedicates the book to him, noting, that he was “the first guy ever interested in me because of what was in my head” (25). The author points out that Marty and his family supported her ambitions and legal career from the beginning of their marriage. A prominent tax attorney, Marty’s well-documented sense of humor and skill as a chef helped empower Ginsburg, particularly during challenging periods such as the vetting process after her nomination to the Supreme Court. Ginsburg anecdotally mentions her daughter and son occasionally in the text, relating how during her Supreme Court confirmation her children kept a notebook about her: “My children decided at an early age that mother’s sense of humor needed improvement […] and kept a book to record their successes. The book was called ‘Mommy Laughed’” (181).

While Ginsburg mentions her cousin Seymour “Si” Bessen, her childhood playmate, and her father, Nathan, she gives greater focus to her mother, Celia, who died when Ginsburg was 17. She writes that Celia was “the bravest, strongest person I have known, who was taken from me much too soon” (177), adding, “I pray that I may be all that she would have been, had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve, and daughters are cherished as much as sons” (177).