Ruth Bader Ginsburg reveals ‘secret’ to an equal marriage

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed the “secret” to her long and equitable marriage, telling an audience at Georgetown University about her partnership with the late Martin Ginsburg.

“It’s no secret,” she said, according to CNN. “It was luck that I met Marty at a time when the best degree that a girl could have was not her B.A. or her J.D., it was her M-R-S.”

{mosads}Ginsburg said that she and her husband shared housework and raising their children based on each other’s goals. While she held most of those responsibilities as Martin Ginsburg was working to make partner at his law firm, she said “it switched when the women’s movement came alive at the end of the ’60s, and Marty realized that what I was doing was very important.”

The 86-year-old also revealed the advice she received from her mother-in-law on their wedding day: That in a happy marriage, “sometimes, it helps to be a little deaf.”

Ginsburg joked that the advice has also been relevant to her long career in law. 

“It was excellent advice for the two law faculties on which I served, the D.C. circuit, and even today at the Supreme Court.”

Ginsburg, an accomplished advocate for gender equality in the law, also touched on women’s advances in politics, saying that while there have been “impressive numbers” of women being elected to office, there has been “not enough” progress yet.

She gave credit to past progress, saying that “almost all of those explicit barriers” that women faced in the 1970s are no longer around, but noted that women still have to combat “unconscious bias” based on gender.

Ginsburg echoed her past praise of fellow Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has an all-female staff. 

“There is a very important first on the Supreme Court this term, and it’s thanks to our new justice, Justice Kavanaugh, whose entire staff is all women. All of his law clerks are women,” she said. “And with his four women as law clerks, it’s the first time in the history of the United States that there have been more women clerking at the court than men.”