"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Perception of women in the law has taken centuries to evolve. Thetis, (personification of divine justice), was sculpted by Rhamnous in 300 BC.
Justice, again was represented as a woman in Raphael’s fresco in 1520. It took another 2,300 years for a real woman, Sandra Day O’Connor to be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1981, since its’ inception in 1790, followed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993, Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, and Elena Kagan in 2010.
Read a brief chapter of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in "Particular Passions: Talks with Women who Shaped our Times," whose contributions to civil and women’s rights continue today in the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, Amazon or Apple for only $.99.
Ginsburg looked back on women and the law in Particular Passions and said, “ I started law school in 1956, one of nine women in an entering class of over five hundred. We wondered why there were only nine, and asked a faculty member. “Is it discrimination?” we inquired. “Certainly not,” he said. “From the large gray middle of the applicant pile we try to take people who have something unusual, something different about them. If you are a bull fiddle player, for example, you would get a plus, and if you’re a woman you would get a plus.”
As one reviewer said of Particular Passions, “One of those rare, rare books that pick your life up, turn it around and point it in the right direction." — K.T. Maclay.
Available on Amazon and Apple.
In his auspicious inaugural address today, Obama said "When times change, so must we." Real action, and the opportunity for equality for all, will follow these inspired words... hopefully.