“It’s a hell of a thing.” Then Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a similar huff, told Nixon that, if he were to nominate a woman, he’d resign. “Thank God we don’t have any in the Cabinet.” He didn’t think women should be educated, or “ever be allowed to vote, even.” But, given the momentum of the women’s-rights movement, he conceded the political necessity of naming a woman to the bench: it might gain him a small but crucial number of votes in the upcoming election. “I’m not for women, frankly, in any job,” he told his aides, in a little fit of hysterics. Yet another Southerner he’d tapped had been nixed for an opposition to desegregation, so Nixon decided to look for someone who was, preferably, not a racist. In 1971, as Richard Nixon prepared to make two appointments to the Supreme Court, he faced a dilemma. At the time, only three in a hundred legal professionals and fewer than two hundred of the nation’s ten thousand judges were women. The change Ginsburg ushered into American politics began a half century ago, and reckoning with its magnitude requires measuring the distance between now and then.

Aside from Thurgood Marshall, no single American has so wholly advanced the cause of equality under the law.

Born the year Eleanor Roosevelt became First Lady, Ginsburg bore witness to, argued for, and helped to constitutionalize the most hard-fought and least-appreciated revolution in modern American history: the emancipation of women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, scholar, lawyer, judge, and Justice, died on Friday at the age of eighty-seven.

Ruth bader ginsburg photos