Protective Barriers
Ginsburg explains the systematic gender discrimination which used to be the unquestioned status quo in America as an example of ironic perception. What is seen as a positive is really a negative:
“…most men thought there really is no such thing as discrimination against women. All the barriers ere regarded as protections.”
Corrosive Irony
Ginsburg’s irony turns corrosive in discussing her own personal history. Imagine the reaction if those powerful men in positions of such patriarchal respect had realized the ironic way in which this tiny woman was viewing them:
"As an advocate in gender discrimination cases in the 1970s, I thought of myself as akin to a grade school teacher…talking to people who really didn't understand…that there was discrimination against women.”
Sweet Land of Liberty
Ginsburg quotes Judge Learned Hand from a speech he gave on the meaning on liberty in 1944. His definition is somewhat ironic in the face of a country filled with politicians who have been and still are completely convinced of their own infallible logic:
“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”
Ginsburg the Strong
In light of the image of strength and commitment to will over the devastating forces of aging and cancer with which Ginsburg went to her death, there is great irony in the manner in which her future trainer sized her up twenty years earlier. Ginsburg became as famous for being able to beat back the oppressive inevitability of death as she was for her work on the Supreme Court so this sizing up turned out to be quite ironic:
“You need to do something to build up your strength.”
The Ruth That Might Have Been
It seems almost impossible now to imagine a United States in which Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg never existed. But that world came perilously close to being in the mid-fifties when a combination of domestic events brought the single most important decision of her life into play. Pregnant with child and with a husband drafted into duty in the military, the most ironic aspect accounting for the future which did include Justice Ginsburg turns not on the unlikelihood of being one of only nine women being accepted into Harvard Law School, but on her own decision of whether it would be too much to handle to take up that acceptance.
