??I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ——Sara Grimke, ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? noted abolitionist and advocate of equal rights for men and women

brethren:（used as a form of address to members of an organization or religious group）brothers

?（From?opponents?who hold grudge against Ginsburg）

? This witch. This evildoer. This monster.?

? She has no respect for the traditions of our Constitution, none.

? An absolute disgrace to the Supreme Court.

disgrace: to be a source of shame to

??She's one of the most vile human beings.

??She's very wicked, yeah.

??She's a anti-American.

??She's a zombie. The woman's a zombie, Ruth Bader Ginsburg .

??I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

? -How's your health?

? -Uh, I'm feeling just fine.

? Here now to comment is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

??It's an amazing thing to see somebody in her 80s become such an icon.

?icon: a person or thing widely admired especially for having great influence or significance in a particular sphere

??-Do you mind signing this copy?

??I am 84 years old and everyone wants to take a picture with me.

??She is really when you come right down to it, the closest thing to a superhero, I know.

??They call her Notorious RBG, that's her rap name.

??-Notorious R... -RBG.

??Yeah, no, no, RGB... RBG right.

??Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg getting a lot of attention after she delivered a scathing dissent.

?scathing: bitterly severe

??Whether you agree with it or not, you got to acknowledge she's been a force on that Court.

??Liberal hero, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

??As much as people admire her, they don't even know the half of it.

??She was the queen.

??Ruth knew what she was doing in laying the foundation to put women on exactly the same plane as men.

??Ruth Bader Ginsburg quite literally changed the way the world is for American women.

??Today the Senate Judiciary Committee welcomes Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the president's nominee to be associate justice of the 'United States Supreme Court'.

SUPREME COURT CONFIRMATION HEARING：1993

（最高法院聽證會）

??-Judge do you swear the testimony you are about to give will be the whole truth and nothing but truth so help you God?

??-I do, Mr. Chairman.

??-Thank you.

??I am a Brooklynite, born and bred... a first-generation American on my father's side... barely second-generation on my mother's. What has become of me could happen only in America.

??Neither of my parents had the means to attend college, but both taught me to love learning, to care about people and to work hard for whatever I wanted or believed in.

??My father was from Odessa and during his growing up years, Jews were no longer admitted to the Russian schools.?Education was terribly important.

??My mother was loving but also very strict, making sure that I did my homework, practice the piano, didn't stay out jumping rope too long.

loving:?showing?a lot of?love?towards someone

??I loved to do the things that boys did when I was growing up. One of my favorite things was climbing garage roofs, from one roof to another, leaping... leaping over.

? (From childhood friends)

? -Justice Ginsberg, we cannot call Ruth.

??-Right.

??-We call her Kiki.

??She was beautiful. Big beautiful blue eyes, which you really can't see very well behind her glasses, very soft brown hair.?She had this kind of quiet magnetism even though she was not effusive. You always thought that she wasn't listening and that she didn't know what was going on but she knew what was going on.

?effusive: strongly expressed, or expressed with a lot of emotion

??-She didn't do small talk.

??-No, no small talk.

??-And she didn't do girl chat and she didn't get on the phone and talk with us about what happened on the weekend.

? -She's a deep thinker.

??-She's an only child.

??-No. She had a sister, I didn't know her sister.

??-Her sister passed away.

??-Right.

??-But she and her mom were very close, very very close.

?

??My mother died when I was 17. I wish I could've?had her... longer.

??Well, her mother must have been a very steely person because she had cancer a long time and… and lived trying to get her child through high school.

steely: (of a person's behaviour or character) hard and strong as steel

??We were supposed to be at graduation. And then the night before we got a message that she would not be able to be part of this. We knew then that her mother had passed away.

??She had two... lessons that she repeated over and over. Be a lady… and be independent. 'Be a lady' meant don't allow yourself to be overcome by useless emotions like anger. And by 'independent,' she meant… it would be fine if you met prince charming and lived happily ever after. But… be able to fend for yourself.

prince charming: 女子理想中的求婚者

fend for yourself: to take care of and provide for yourself without depending on anyone else.

? In my lifetime, I expect to see three, four, perhaps even more women on the High Court bench, women not shaped from the same mold, but of different complexions. I surely would not be in this room today without the determined efforts of men and women who kept dreams of equal citizenship alive. I have had the great good fortune to share life with a partner, truly extraordinary for his generation, a man who believed at age 18, when we met,?

? that a woman's work, whether at home or on the job is as important as a man's.

? I became a lawyer in days when women were not wanted by most members of the legal profession. I became a lawyer because Marty supported that choice unreservedly.

complexion: the natural apprearance of the skin on a person's face, especially its colour or quality 這里應(yīng)該引申為各式各樣

citizenship: the state of being a member of? particular country and having rights because of it

?keep sth. alive:? eg. Keep the principles of liberty alive.使自由的原則永存

??So what was it about Marty?

??Marty and I met when I was 17, he was 18. I was in college. Cornell was a preferred school for daughters. In those days, there was a strict quota for women. There were four men to every woman… so for parents, Cornell was the ideal place to send a girl. If she couldn't find her man there, she was hopeless.

quota: a fixed, limited amount or number that is officially allowed

? My first semester at Cornell, I never did a repeat date.?

? But then I met Marty, and there was something amazingly wonderful about this man. He was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain. Most guys in the '50s didn't. One of the sadnesses is that the brilliant girls who attended Cornell is that they kind of suppressed how smart they were. But Marty was so confident of his own ability, so comfortable with himself that he never regarded me as any kind of a threat.

(Professor Arthur Miller: Longtime Friend)

??We all were struck by the tremendous difference between Marty and Ruth. Marty was the most gregarious, outgoing, Life-of-the-party. Ruth was a really quite recessive in a way, shy, quiet, soft voice but they worked, they worked.

gregarious:(of people) liking to be with other people

life-of-the-party: 派對靈魂

recessive（此處）: tending to recede

??Oh, he's so young.

??Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. Marty was a man blessed with a wonderful sense of humor. I tend to be rather sober.

sober: serious and calm

??And then I got the idea that you could do something that would make your society a little better. My family had some reservations about this but then when I married at the end of college, my family said, if she wants to be a lawyer let her try. If she can't succeed, she will have a husband to support her.

(Ginsburg's granddaughter:)

? - That's me waiting to get my diploma, very happy.

??- Yeah,see??That's a nice one.

??-That's cute. Yeah.

??- So, we have a whole slew of pictures. They took them from every possible angle. You know who that is?

a slew of: 大量的

??- No.

??- It's Dean Minow.

??- Oh. Dean Minow is so small.

??- We're the same height! She's not that small, she's probably taller than you.

??- There's somebody in there.

??My brother and cousins and I call her bubble. It's the Yiddish word for grandmother. It's what we've always called bubbe.

??-Bubbe!

??-Yes?

??-Do you know if you have fake sugar like Splenda（三氯聚糖） or sweet and low?

??-Yes, it should be someplace.

??-That's helpful.

? ?I feel like I have my grandmotherly relationship with her but also somewhat of a student scholarly relationship to her as well now. She taught me that the way to win an argument is not to yell. Because often that will turn people away more so, than bringing them to your table.

??- I don't know what they says… I can't tell if…

??- for extraordinary dedication to the Harvard Law School and efforts on its behalf.

? - You know, this was the 200th year of Harvard. So, it took 200 years for us… We were the first class that was 50/50 women. So 50 percent men… we were the first class. It takes 200… no. Yeah.

??Women did not come into the Harvard Law School until the very early '50s. Two percent was about what it was back then.

??How did it feel to be one of the nine women in a class of over 500 men?

??You felt you were constantly on display. So if you were called on in class, you felt that, if you didn't perform well, that you were failing not just for yourself but for all women. You also had the uncomfortable feeling that you were being watched.

?

??Harvard was a Socratic method. So the professor would ask a question and then you would be called on to answer. The way it worked with women was they didn't call on us. I think they were afraid, we would sort of wither if we were subjected to that kind of questioning.

wither（此處）: to slowly disappear, lose importance or become weaker

subject: to defeat people or a country and then control them against their wishes and limit their freedom

??When I was sent to check a periodical, in Lamont Library in the old periodical room. There was a man at the door and he said, "you can't come in." "Well, why can't I come in?" ?"Because you're a female." There was nothing I could say, this was a university employee, you can't come into that room.

periodical: a magazine or newspaper, especially on a serious subject, that is published regularly.

??And then there was the Dean's famous dinner for the women in the first year class. He asked each of us to stand up and tell him what we were doing taking a seat… that could be occupied by a man.

??There were many indignities that one took as just part of the scenery the way it was.

indignity: something that causes a loss of respect for someone or for yourself

??When I got to Harvard Law School and I'm really intimidated the first year, and Marty said. Oh my wife. She's going to be on the 'Law Review'. There was a women in the class ahead of mine and she said, "this husband of yours is boasting that you're going to be on the 'Law Review', you look like a little twerp!"

??To make the 'Law Reviwe', in those days you had to be in the top 25 academically, of 530, 540. Her second year she makes the 'Law Review'. So the mere fact marked her as something special.

? It turned out, that I did very well the first year and I attributed to having something very important in my life that wasn't the law books. I came to Harvard as the mother of a 14-month-old child. I'd go to school… study as hard as I can, in a very concentrated way, I didn't waste any time. Four o'clock in the afternoon our babysitter left and that was my child's hours till she went to sleep. Playing with my daughter gave me a respite from the kind of work I was doing at law school and I think made me more sane.

respite: a pause or rest from something difficult or unpleasant?

??We knew that Marty was ill. We just knew he had his own battle and Ruth is now caring for both Marty and Janey.

? Marty is in his third year of law school, had a virulent cancer（惡性癌癥）?in days when there was no chemotherapy（化療）, there was only massive radiation. He'd go for the radiation, wake up about midnight when the only food that he ate for the day he could manage. And then I started typing the notes that his classmates had given me from his classes, reading whatever cases I would read for the next day and maybe I got two hours sleep.

??She did her own work, helped her husband with his work, organized his friends so they could help him with his work and took care of her two-year-old child.

??Fortunately Marty lived but it's when she learned how to?burn the candle at both?ends.

burn the candle at both ends: it means you're working really,?really hard and you're working really, really fast.

(Ginsburg's son and daughter)

??One of the memories of my childhood would be waking up in the middle of the night and there mom would be spread out over the dining room table with her legal pads, uh, and, uh, the coffee at?one hand, and the box of prunes at the other.

pad: a number of pieces of paper that have been fastened together along one side, used for writing or drawing on

??She will work until two, three, five in the morning sometimes even, uh, later, then she will get up, she has a sitting she would have to be at the Court before nine and then she sleeps the entire weekend. So she catches up.

?(Ginsburg's former clerk)

??The sweet thing about working for a justice who works extremely hard is that we saw Marty come to chambers often to lure her home. He would say, "Ruth, it's time to come home for dinner. She sometimes had to be physically brought home.

??Marty graduated from the Harvard Law School and was going to a firm in New York. That was when Ruth finished her second year. Given Marty, given his recent illness, they had to remain together, and the logical place was New York and the best option was Columbia.

logical（此處）: using reason?

? When I graduated from Columbia Law school in 1959, not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me.

??Four of us from my class, Marty's class, went to the same law firm and two of us went to the hiring partner and said we had somebody on the Harvard Law Review that we think is the?cat's meow, we think this firm should hire her. As soon as I used the "she" pronoun… the senior partner looked at me and says,"young man… you don't seem to understand. This firm doesn't hire women."

cat's meow：棒極了

??-She hadn't quite figured out, why it was that there were these barriers…

??-It wasn't until later that this all and became her life's work in,

??-Yes.

??-In fighting these injustices.

? ?Being a woman was an impediment. We did not have equal rights and equal recognition in the law at all. There were not hundreds but thousands of state and federal laws all over this country that discriminated on the basis of gender.

impediment: something that makes progress, movement, or achieving something difficult or impossible

?Typical laws of the time like, the husband is the master of the community. He shall choose where the family will live and the women follow him.

Oblige: to force someone to do something, or to make it necessary for someone to do something?

Obligate: to make someone feel morally or legally forced to do something

Laws In Effect in 1970:

• Employers in most states can legally fire a woman of being pregnant

• Banks can require a woman applying for credit to have her husband co-sign.

• Marital rape is generally not prosecuted.

??There's no aspect of American life in which you were not treated differently.

? The idea was that men were the breadwinners that counted and women were pin money earners. So women woke up and complained.

? There came to be such a mass and a majority of women really who understood that they were not crazy, the system was crazy.

??Now, thanks to the spirit of equality in the air, I no longer accept society's judgment that my group is second class.

??But marching and demonstrating just wasn't Ruth's thing. Her thing was to use the skills she had and put them to work and those were her legal skills.

??In 1963, she started at Rutgers as a law professor. And really inspired by her students, she agreed to teach a course in this new subject of gender and law in the late '60s. Some of the students wanted a course in women and the law.

??That's also when…she began dealing with sex discrimination cases. And that was her entree?into becoming a litigator（訴訟律師）.

entree: the right to join a group of people or enter a place

(Former Director, American Civil Liberaties Union)

??The emergence of a women's rights movement had the possibility of playing the role in the 1970s that the black civil rights movement had played in the 1960s. And so I was particularly eager to create a special project dealing with women's rights.

??I got a call from the WALLS asking me if I would consider running the women's rights?project with professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg whom I had heard of but I did not know. I met Ruth the first day I was there. She seemed very polite and quiet and reserved. Not a firebrand.

firebrand: a person who causes political or social trouble by opposing authority and encouraging others to do so

??She wouldn't speak up a great deal during meetings. She always addressed whatever point there was. There wasn't any peripheral element of it.

peripheral: something that is peripheral is not as important as something else

??-No small talk.

??-No small talk. None that I can recall.

?

??At that point in time, Ruth was developing her philosophy to take cases that would make good law. If the case is going to be on its way to the Supreme Court, we wanted to be involved and we wanted to, frankly, take over the case.

??She was following in the footsteps of the great civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who was the architect of the battle for racial equality basing it on the clause of the Constitution that guarantees equal protection of the law. She wanted it to apply to equal protection for women.

Clause: a particular part of a written legal document, for example a law passed by Parliament or a contract(=an agreement)

? My first argument before the U.S. Supreme Court was in Frontier v. Richardson.

? (Sharron Frontiero, Plantiff)

? I?was, way back in the 1970, a second lieutenant in the air force. I went in the military because I needed the money.

? I was newly out of college, this was a new job, I had just married, so it was the start of new everything.

??It became clear pretty quickly that the men I was working with who were married got a housing allowance and I wasn't getting paid a housing allowance 'cause I was a woman.

??I assumed it was a mistake so I went off to the pay office to correct the mistake.

??"You're lucky we let you in here at all. You're lucky that the air force allows you to serve." was what I heard right off the bat.

Right off the bat:開門見山，立刻

??It ?took me aback?and then I figured, well you know, here's one bigot, so I'll just keep asking around and it became very clear very quickly that there was no different story . So we went to see a lawyer and I still thought it was a matter of getting a lawyer to write a letter for me. Just write a letter, have the right information. I'm clearly in the same category as these other men. The lawyer said to me, this isn't an administrative error. This is the law and it's going to have to be rectified with a lawsuit and if you're willing, we'll take you on.

rectify: to correct something or make something right.

bigot: a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a diferent way of life.

??Ruth and I heard about it and immediately let the lawyer for Sharron Frontiero know we were interested. It was very important to us to have a part in that case.

??Nice girls didn't file lawsuits. Particularly after they had been let into the service at all. You know, what more did I want? Well, I just wanted to be treated like everybody else did. But there was the sense and there still is the sense, that nice girls don't speak up, nice girls don't make demands.

??Ah well, too bad.

??It went to the District Court in Alabama. We lost and the next Court to go to was the Supreme Court. Ruth and I set to work to write the brief. I would write a section and Ruth would take it and it would come back in a wonderfully brilliant fashion. Every word of it was carefully… I mean Ruth went over every single word.

??What we wanted was a review of cases that the Court would say, sex discrimination doesn't work. And it would be a broad command basically to legislatures to get rid of statutes that discriminate on the basis of gender.

Legislature: the group of people in a country or part of a country who have the power to make and change laws.

statute: a law that has been formally approved and written down

??But she also added to make the point much more poignant, the history of women and the way we were treated throughout America and its beginnings.

poignant: causing or having a very sharp feeling of sadness

branded inferior

surbodinate

waste of human resources

dependent

too weak to vote

??She captured for the male members of the Court what it was like to be a second class citizen.

??Frontiero went to the Court. Ruth Ginsburg, for the first time, made an oral argument. She split her time with the lawyer, the man who had begun the case in Alabama.

? It was an afternoon argument. So I was first up in the afternoon and I didn't dare have lunch that day.

??She seemed nervous. Her eyes were wide with sort of anticipation. It's very intense and austere and important and very male and it's the whole thing feels like.

austere（此處）: very severe and unfriendly in manner

??I was… I was really kind of scared. We sat down at the counsel table and had all these huge casebooks for me to help her with cites. And the Court began with the "Oyez! Oyez!" and the "here we are."

? Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Supreme Court of the United States are admonished to draw near and give their attention for the Court is now sitting（開庭）.

admonish: to tell someone that they have done something wrong

? ?I was terribly, terribly nervous but then I looked up at the justices and I thought, "I have a captive audience." I knew that I was speaking to men, who didn't think there was any such thing as gender-based discrimination. And my job was to tell them it really exists.

captive audience: 受制走不開的聽眾或觀眾

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court. Women today face discrimination in employment, as pervasive and more subtle, than discrimination encountered by minority groups. Sex classifications imply a judgement of inferiority. The sex criterion stigmatizes?when it is used to protect women from competing for higher paying jobs, promotions. It assumes that all women are preoccupied with home and children. These distinctions have a common effect: They help keep woman in her place, a place inferior to that occupied by men in our society.

pervasive: existing in or spreading through every part of something

stigmatize:?to make someone feel that he or she is not respected

? There was not a single question. I just went on speaking and I, at the time wondered, "are they just indulging me and not listening" or am I telling them something they haven't heard before and "are they paying attention?"

??The justices were just glued to her. I don't think they were expecting to have to deal with something as powerful as a sheer force of her argument that was just all-encompassing and they were there to talk about a little statute in the government code. I mean, it was just… we seized the moment to change American Society.

sheer: used to emphasize how very great,?important, or powerful a quality or feeling is; nothing except

??In asking the Court to declare sex a suspect criterion, we urge a position forcibly stated in 1837 by Sara Grimke, noted abolitionist and advocate of equal rights for men and women. She said, "I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."