Ruth Bader Ginsberg, affectionately known as RBG, was six years older than me when she died this past week. During the tumult of COVID, forest fires, racial tensions, hurricanes and floods, a deeply partisan American election, a snap election in British Columbia, and perhaps a Canadian federal election, there was barely a moment to pause and reflect on gender issues. Then RBG died, forty-five days before the American election, and now we are concerned about abortion rights being overturned! Women’s rights are less secure right now than they were a few days ago, and worldwide, those rights remain small and precarious. Like many of you, we are contemporaries of RBG composing a life in parallel circumstances. I am compelled to share my story from the early 1960s when I was fighting for women’s rights to work in an area occupied almost exclusively by men. It is critical that the work of RBG, and so many of us of her era, not be overturned. Our position as women in the world is still fragile. I hope my story serves as a reminder of this.
The CNN documentary The Notorious RBG takes us back to the fifties and what it was like for smart women who also wanted to marry and have children. RBG married in 1954 and I married in 1962. It was a period when women were beginning to rock the known world. She was at the head of the line. Betty Friedan was yet to write The Feminine Mystique in 1963.
When I married in 1962 and became Ann Bartram, my future husband asked me to promise never to work outside the home. I had a graduate degree but still I promised. I had studied theology, but functioning as a working pastor in my circumstances had not yet been done. Yes, the very liberal United Church of Canada (of which I was a member) had ordained several single women and one married woman who was past child-bearing years. I had really thought about this, and could not see a way to work in my chosen field. My mother, my sister and all the generations of women before me had been homemakers.
As I walked to Emmanuel College where I studied, I passed a University of Toronto building that had an inscription in stone above its portals reading, “Household Science.” That is where I ought to have gone to university, I thought, or to the Secretarial Science programme.
As RBG did, I married and had a child in 1964. But RBG had a very forward-thinking husband, Martin Ginsberg, who had studied with her at Cornell and knew that the scope of her brilliant mind outshone his own. He was having none of her staying home, and encouraged her to study law as he had. He was clearly ahead of his time. RBG always remembered that they had been a team from the beginning. This was reflected in many of her rulings. To her, human beings, men and women, were equal before the law always.
At that time my husband was determined to become a concert pianist and was practising eight hours a day. A patron of the arts had given us his gentleman’s farm outside of Toronto as a place to live. We were also responsible for lambs. We had zero farming experience.
Our son was born and we brought him home to that farm. It did not have a washing machine and the laundromat was about a mile away. This was before Pampers! Going to the laundromat brought relief from the hours of scales.
About six months after my son was born, I began to lose it. We also discovered that lambs born precipitously in the middle of the night in the winter, because the ram got out too early, froze to death. Frozen baby lambs are heartbreaking. The flaws in this idyllic plan were fast collapsing. I had to work outside the home somehow somewhere.
I had to get my husband onside. I wish I had known Martin Ginsberg. I might have called him up. My mother-in-law had gone to university and was a graduate in Household Science from the University of Guelph. However, she longed to be an opera singer and had serious talent. She gave it all up to become an M.R.S, raise her sons and see that her church purchased the largest organ in South Western Ontario. Her husband, a little like RBG’s husband, sensed that something was very wrong with this plan, though he saw no way to change it. But he became my ally, telling his son not to make the same mistake that he had. This support allowed my husband to stand with me in my pursuit to seek ordination so that I could practice what I had studied to become. As RBG had, I benefitted from this support.
This struggle now seems so archaic as to be not true. But it was, and still is in many parts of the world. The fight for gender equality is not over. Many of my dearest friends were never able to work in the area they had studied. Their gold medals grew dusty. Their husbands did not grow. Frequently those women began to feel they were crazy for wishing to pursue their professional dreams. One of my friends now understands that she was gaslighted. The Feminine Mystique is all about the depressed and angry housewives that followed. That book inspired me. I had to focus on a way out and forward.
Battle one which got my husband onside was won. The next one was to get the church onside. One battle at a time. I was becoming an activist on behalf of myself and, of course, all the women who desired to become ministers/pastors/priests.
I knew I needed a powerful support team to crack open the courts of the church. In order to ordain me, the church would have to allow sexually-active and possibly pregnant women into the pulpit. This was very different than a celibate woman or a woman with adult children.
For the year, preceding the annual 1965 Toronto Conference of the United Church of Canada, in many committee meetings I was examined on every front. I was even asked by one of these committees if I would take a vow of celibacy. It seemed that having me in the pulpit might incite men in the pews to unholy fantasies. My young support colleagues argued vociferously that these committees had no room in the bedrooms of the church. The older support team asked me to shut them up.
The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that I was called “a frustrated housewife who might flunk the job.”
Globe and Mail, May 1965
It was also argued that my theology was not sound. My high marks at university were questioned. The transcripts of my marks were examined and found to be accurate. Still my theology could be questioned and was. I must be too liberal in my thinking. It was further argued that if they ordained me then they had to follow their rules and find a church willing to accept me and they could not find one.
In the weeklong Conference that made the decision, the tension was very high. My name had been forwarded to the Conference from all the lower court committees with no recommendation for or against ordination. They had passed the buck after a year of consultations and examinations of me. As the Globe and Mail reported years later when they followed me in my career, “charges and counter charges were hurled across the floor at that annual Toronto Conference Session.” The conference got tied up in whether a secret ballot was necessary. At some point, my idealistic husband and I realized this was a completely political fight between conservatives and liberals. Sound familiar? At the very desperate end, hours before ordination, the conservatives argued that I could not be ordained because it was too late to have my name printed in the programme for ordination! At that point I knew we had moved the church.
The battle had been drawn out over the months preceding the conference. My husband and I often considered quitting. One media article quotes me as saying to my husband, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Maybe I said that. The press followed the story, publishing both sides of the argument. Then the biggest name in Canadian broadcasting journalism, Gordon Sinclair, an avowed atheist, took up my cause, chastising the church frequently and often. My elder support team debated at length whether this would help or hinder the cause, but there was no stopping Gordon Sinclair.
In the final minutes, the last order of the day voted to ordain me by a show of hands that did not need to be counted, and was said to be about a two thirds majority. I was declared fit for ordination and that night I was ordained.
The Rev. Ann in the Star Weekly
RBG graduated tied for first in her class at Columbia Law School but this did not open the doors of any law firm to hire her. She was a woman, a Jew and a mother of young children. She persevered, and has become the icon, RBG. Now in death, she is fighting to have her last wishes to have the next president appoint her replacement be respected. It would be no surprise to her that they will not be honoured.
For me also, ordination was but a step. It was difficult for the church to know what to do with me and me with it. However, I did find a way to contribute to its development for most of my working life. RBG, while life changing in her majority opinions, was powerful in her dissents. This has inspired me as I found myself often trying to move a resistant church. I have always challenged it to be more and have often found myself on the side of the dissenters, as RBG did. I have no regrets that I pushed the church to open its tent wider. In theological language, I was more prophet than priest.
In all likelihood, RBG will be replaced on the Supreme Court by Amy Coney Barrett. Her politics are in line with the present administration’s needs. She has impeccable credentials and no one in power will question her conservative position. In her previous work she was respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. She and her husband are members of People of Praise, a group endorsed by the Pope, that takes very seriously being Christians in this world. There is real fear that in her extreme Roman Catholic conservatism she will act to overturn Roe v. Wade, cast her vote to end Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) and, if necessary, vote to extend Trump’s term in office if he contends the election result. We must hope that she will be more than a spokesperson for Trump. I am encouraged by our own retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLaughlin who, this past weekend on CBC’s Cross Country Checkup, declared that, optimist though she may be, the work of Ruth Bader Ginsberg will stand the test of time and will not be erased.
I want to encourage all of you to remember RBG and all of her dissenting opinions, as well as her wins. You know women of her era, myself included. Our energy is there for inspiration. We want to pass our liberal position forward. So many causes compete for attention. Gender equality has changed our world and needs to continue to be on your mind when you speak and when you vote. It is anything but a done deal.