by liberal japonicus
This seems a bit too detailed for a comment. I'll start off with what a facebook friend wrote about RGB, which was observing something to the effect that RGB wasn't perfect, she only had one black clerk her entire tenure on the court. I don't know if this is true or not and I didn't really have the energy to check it out and the person didn't say it to dismiss RGB, just made the observation as a little resistance to her beatification.
This has had me thinking about attitudes and growth. Some very interesting quotes from this Dahlia Lithwick piece from 2019 that popped up in the comments
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/ruth-bader-ginsburg-jurist-evolution.html
But also, I think that in that period it seemed she was much less anxious because she wasn’t the only one. And she was very aware that the trailblazing had been done by Justice O’Connor. And then, when O’Connor left in 2005 to take care of her ailing husband—which is, by the way, a whole other feminist story because it was really a thing that the male justices would not have done, she felt—suddenly Justice Ginsburg is the only one, which is a long way of saying that in 2009, when the court argues a case about a little girl in middle school who’s been strip-searched for contraband ibuprofen, I remember sitting in the room for the oral argument, and everybody was making jokes. Justice Antonin Scalia was joking about whether they searched from the outside in or the inside out. And Chief Justice John Roberts was making jokes. And then poor Justice Stephen Breyer starts saying things about, “When I was in high school changing for gym, people would stick things in my underwear.” And of course everybody at this point is doubled over laughing.
And Justice Ginsburg, who never loses her cool, actually gets very angry. And she sort of tunes up her colleagues from the bench and says, “This is nothing like changing for gym class.” And she describes how this child was humiliated while the strip search was going on. And then, she gives an interview, while the case is pending, where she says to Joan Biskupic: I can’t believe that I’m the only woman on the bench who thought that was appalling. And if there were more women on the bench, it would not have been like that. And then she said, which is fighting words for RBG, I don’t think the men share my sensitivities on this. And by the time the case comes down, all the judges, with two exceptions, mostly have conformed entirely to her vision of this as an inappropriate search. But it was her wielding a kind of soft power, and I had never seen her do it until then. That, to me, is when I carbon-date how she started to change.
So how do we go from RGB to Arthur Ashe? Via this
[With guest Arthur Ashe], Cavett instigated the equal prize money debate and Ashe explained his position. “We’ve come to realize, like other sports, our appeal (as tennis players) is about 70% entertainment and 30% sport,” said Ashe on the 1980 telecast in a New York City studio. “And as such, the amount of money that we make or we can command in prize money, is directly related to our box office appeal. What I said was that women don’t deserve the same amount of prize money as men. They don’t. We are not out there making car doors for Ford Motor Company. One example that I like to use is let’s suppose that Caesars Palace (in Las Vegas) was going to have The Carpenters (perform a concert) one week and Frank Sinatra the next week. Now would you pay Frank Sinatra the same that you would pay The Carpenters? Obviously not. You’d pay Frank quite a bit more than you’d pay The Carpenters. For the exact same number of hours.”
“All I was saying was that the caliber or quality of matches put on by a draw of 128 women, in no way, right now in the Fall of 1980, equals the appeal of a draw of the best 128 men. One day the women might command more. But right now it’s not the same. But at the top, there’s no question that Chrissie or Tracy Austin, they are just as powerful as a Borg or a McEnroe. But, unfortunately, in the first round of 64 matches, the top women usually win those matches very easily. Chrissie Evert seldom loses more than two games a set before she gets to the quarterfinal. But it’s almost assuredly one of the sixteen seeds in the men’s will lose in the first or second round.”
The Guardian article on the Original 9 has this
“We’re talking about a different era,” says Julie Heldman, “We’re talking little housewife at home. We’re talking even the men tennis players at the time, who were really, genuinely good people, had this institutionalised misogyny. Arthur Ashe, who later said: ‘Oh boy was I wrong,’ his view was that there should not be any money for women players. Men get married and men should be supporting their wives.”
Everyone is wrong from time to time. It gets to be a problem when you can never be able to admit it.
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