Last May I saw the documentary RBG based on the life of Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The movie showed that before she became a justice she won several cases overturning gender ineqality. Today I saw the movie On the Basis of Sex which is mostly about the first of those cases. This was a docudrama – some of the scenes were altered for dramatic effect. RBG was played by Felicity Jones and her husband Marty was played by Armie Hammer.
The movie starts with her first day at Harvard Law School where she is one of maybe 10 women in a large classroom of men. As the class is assembling the soundtrack is the Harvard Glee Club singing, 10,000 Men of Harvard. The women are invited to the Dean’s home for dinner and each woman is asked to introduce herself and explain why she is worthy of taking a man’s place in the class. Yeah, sexist, but this was the 1950s.
We see her trying to get a job as a lawyer and is turned down. She ends up teaching at a law school in Newark. Then the first case, mentioned to her by Marty, gets her involved in the ACLU and she takes it.
At the time federal law said that if a woman is a primary caretaker for a child or parent and needs to hire someone to help the cost of that hired help could be deducted from taxes (the movie doesn’t get into the details of when this deduction can be taken). The point was a woman could take this deduction. A bachelor man could not. She tackled sex discrimination by using a case in which the man was discriminated against.
Of course, there are a lot of parallels between the sexism in her life and the cases she took.
I recommend this one.
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