--- Few figures in the Supreme Court have inspired the respect, admiration and impact as Ruth Bader Ginsburg who passed away yesterday evening as I was out eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant with Mom. Likely her death will leave open the very real possibility that the Republicans will push for a conservative supreme court nomination before the end of the year. Theoretically, this kind of hydraulic pressure from within the right will push the moment to its crisis. Pasted below is an excerpt from RBG’s “Some Thoughts on the 1980s: Debate over special Versus Equal treatment of women:
“ Were I Queen, my principal action plan would have three legs. First, it would promote equal educational opportunity and effective educational opportunity and effective job training for women, so that they would not be reduced to dependency on a man or the state. Second, my plan would give men encouragement and incentives to share more evenly with women the joys, responsibilities, worries, upsets, and sometimes tedium of raising children from infancy to adulthood. ( This, I admit, is the most challenging part of the plan to make concrete and implement). Third, the plan would make quality day care available for from infancy on. Children in my ideal world would not be women’s priorities, they would be human priorities.”
Here one could see that R.B.G was inspired by the visionary Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme who believed and wrote about open channels of work force as women entered the work force. R.B.G was to model her own thinking about equity in the workplace on Palme’s visionary thinking esp. in the Reed vs. Reed case for which she rewrote the law on how women were to be treated both economically and socially. In 1970 Olof Palme one the leaders of the sex equality movement and later Prime minister of Sweden delivered his manifesto “The Emancipation of Men” in which he wrote “ In order that women shall be emancipated from their antiquated roles the men must also be emancipated”. The goal in Sweden was to effect structural changes in the organization of market work and family work and in the ideology of what men and women are “really like” to enable both mean and women to live up to their full human potential freed from the straight jacket of conventional gender roles. Swedish advocates argued that “ The imprisonment in the masculine role is at least as great a problem to men as conformity to feminine ideal is to women” and that “ a debate on liberation and equality must be about men as well as women are forced to act out socially determined stereotypes.
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