“I’ll look for another book about Amelia Earhart. Oh, and Nancy Drew books.”
This graphic novel opens with a series of panels showing Ruth as a young girl learning from her mother about famous and empowered women. Eleanor Roosevelt quickly becomes one of her heroes from whom she learns the value of an open mind and the necessity to work hard at freeing oneself from the ravages of prejudice and being cruel to one’s opposition. Every Friday her mother takes her to the library and there she becomes obsessed with discovering stories of fascinating women in history faced down discrimination to become part of the tapestry of American heroism. This even applies to fictional characters who broke the rules, defined convention, and overcame prejudicial views about their capabilities and capacities for doing jobs considered only appropriate for men.
“He’s the only boy I have ever met who cared that I had a brain. And I don’t have to pretend that he’s brainier.”
This quote is not actually spoke out loud as dialogue, but is rather expressed as internal thoughts in a panel showing Ruth having coffee with her future husband, Marty Ginsburg. The love story of Ruth and Marty is never extraneous in the biography of her life. They met and fell in love at a time in history when the future course of Ruth Bader’s life could very well have turned out significantly different. Had she fallen in love with a more traditional man of the era—a man not as self-assured and more susceptible to the social temper of the times which expected women to stay home, get pregnant, raise kids and subjugate their intellect to what were very often substantially less intelligent husbands—there might never have been a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, much less a Supreme Court bearing that name. Implicit in the part of biographies that focus on the importance of Ruth finding a man like Marty is the unknown quantity of equally impressive young women over the decades who sacrificed lives influence and power on the altar of marriage to far less secure romantic partners.
“Seek the right word and the word order. Make word pictures.”
The author of what is arguably the most controversial American novel in history—Lolita—also just happened to be Ruth Bader’s instructor in her college class Modern European Literature. She credits Vladimir Nabokov with having a profound influence upon her life by teaching the power of the written word. In one panel she expresses this admiration: “Professor Nabokov is in love with the sound of words. He is magnetic.” His lessons in the writing of fiction was soaked up by the future Supreme Court justice as a way to also composed not just non-fiction, but the specific language requirements of written legal documents, especially her infamous dissenting opinions while the high court. Perhaps the most instrumental guidance she received from Nabokov was to read her writing aloud so that recitation could foster editing in a way that created “word pictures” which made the text more vivid and narrative-like. In recognizing that even dry court papers work more effectively if they tell a story, Justice Ginsburg’s voice of dissent would become legendary.
