Sisters in Law Read Online Free Page B

windows. There were a thousand children in this intimidating, enormous school, grades K–8, and classes often had thirty students in them.
    Before she could read on her own, Ruth would sit in her mother’s lap while Celia Bader read to her. Her mother, who had been raised Orthodox, taught her more about the tradition of justice than the more rigid rules of the Jewish faith. When Ruth was older, she and her mother had a ritual of weekly outings, Ruth to the children’s section of the library, which was above a Chinese restaurant, and her mother to get her hair “done.”
    Even in grammar school, the future Harvard student was already distinguishing herself. When she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993, P.S. 238 invited her to a celebratory breakfast. The principal gave Ruth her record card from the 1930s showing practically all A’s. The new justice reported very happy memories of her time there.
    When she got to James Madison High School nine years later, she took up baton twirling and became a cheerleader. No mere bookish nerd, the honor society member and secretary to the English Department chair joined the orchestra, the school newspaper, and the pep squad.
    It all sounds quite idyllic, except that her mother was dying. Celia Bader had her first treatment for cervical cancer just as the fourteen-year-old began her freshman year, and she died the day before graduation. Ruth used to sit in the sickroom, doing her homework. More than forty years later, Ginsburg stood in the White House Rose Garden with President Bill Clinton to accepther nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States. After the future justice thanked all the people who had made her nomination possible, she concluded, “I have a last thank-you. It’s to my mother. My mother was the bravest and strongest person I have known,” she recalled, “who was taken from me much too soon. I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons.”
    Ruth graduated sixth in her class in 1950 and went to Cornell, one of two Ivy League schools that admitted men and women to classes together, and where smart girls abounded. Although her mother had managed to squirrel some money away for her daughter, who knew she was valued as much as a son, Ruth got lots of scholarship help. Ginsburg was participating in one of the greatest transformations in American history: the college education of the female children of immigrants and the working class. Ginsburg’s mother, “the strongest and bravest person” Ginsburg knew, had gone to work at age fifteen to send her brother to college. But like millions of girls in the postwar prosperity, her daughter, Ruth, went to college herself.
    Ruth (“Kiki”) Bader was, to all appearances, a conventional college coed. She appeared in her sorority (AEPhi) house picture dressed in a buttoned-up cardigan over a straight skirt topped off with a trendy little knotted scarf. A pretty, popular sorority girl in the outfit du jour, Ruth already understood very well what it took to get along.
    ROLE MODELS FOR A MEANINGFUL LIFE
    One otherwise unremarkable night at Stanford, Sandra’s dorm mate, Mary Beth Growdon, invited her to a discussion at the home of her uncle, a professor at the university. When they arrived at Harry and Emilia Rathbuns’, Uncle Harry, a nonpracticing lawyer and engineer, was conducting a seminar on the meaning of human life. “What am I? Who am I? Where am I bound? What is my destination?” Sandra was mesmerized. Growing up as she had ona remote ranch and educated at a small-town boarding school, the new ideas she met at Stanford were a revelation for the bright and curious youngster.
    And inspiration was Rathbun’s strong suit. He had read an undergraduate letter to the Stanford paper, expressing apprehension about venturing into an unknown