by Karen Karbo
Like many women (me), she could easily have complained under her breath but otherwise kept her objections to being patronized to herself.
Because so often, that’s what we do. We stay silent, rather than cuss out someone and chase him down the moving walkway. Even difficult women who are stubborn, brave, outspoken, and won’t take no for an answer tend to let this kind of thing go. Men, however, do not let this sort of thing go. That’s why there are bar fights and the situation in the Middle East.
There are complex biological and sociological reasons why we ladies prefer to go along to get along (I’m guessing). But the one reliable woman-taming weapon that never loses its effectiveness is slinging the b-word. For some reason we think we will melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if someone calls us a bitch. The only time it’s okay to be called a bitch is if you’re about to get busy with a hot guy who growls “you’re one sexy bitch.”
Ugh. Even then. I totally take that back.
In 2008, Tina Fey hosted SNL and did a guest spot behind the “Weekend Update” desk, doing her best to take the sting out of the word and make it a rallying cry. It will come as no surprise that the bit was attached to Hillary Clinton.
“Some people say that Hillary is a bitch. I’m a bitch, so is this one [nodding at Amy]. Bitches get stuff done. Bitch is the new black.”
Not that this did any good at all. The morning I wrote this, I was in line at Starbucks behind two girls who were maybe 19. One was tormented about whether she should tell her lousy boyfriend that it was uncool when he flirted with someone else while she was standing right there: “I don’t want him to think I’m a bitch,” she sighed. Amy would totally have told that girl to cuss him out and chase him down the street.
BORN IN NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 1971, Amy Poehler was always a funny girl. After graduating from Boston College, she earned her comedy chops in Upright Citizens Brigade, the improv group she co-founded in Chicago in the 1990s. Improv is all about reading a situation, staying in the moment, and doing what feels right. “She was like a surreal anarchist punk comic…a total maverick,” said Natasha Lyonne, a friend and fellow actor.
Amy appeared on Saturday Night Live a week after 9/11—not the best time for sketch comedy—and still managed to find a way to make people shoot beer out of their noses. She was rapidly promoted from featured player to full-time cast member, and was tapped for co-anchor of “Weekend Update”—first with SNL head writer and “comedy wife” Tina Fey, then with Seth Meyers. After the birth of her first son in 2008, she left SNL to star in Parks and Recreation as Leslie Knope, the nation’s most upbeat, yet uncompromising, mid-level city bureaucrat. (Every feminist could take a lesson from Leslie: “You know my code. Hoes before bros. Uteruses before duderuses. Ovaries before brovaries!”) No one was much surprised when Amy won a Golden Globe for her portrayal—the same year she co-hosted the awards with Tina Fey.
The woman is everywhere these days: producing, directing, writing, and starring in shows on all the TVs (network, cable, digital) as well as feature films. In 2008 she co-founded, with producer Meredith Walker, the online community Smart Girls at the Party, where the focus is on intelligence and imagination, rather than slavishly trying to fit in with a bunch of girls who, let’s face it, are never worth it. Tagline: Change the World by Being Yourself. Pretty much the difficult woman credo.
That same year, Amy did something that should probably be in Guinness World Records: Most Epic Rap Song Performed by a Woman Hours Away from Giving Birth. It occurred on SNL in October 2008, when she was so pregnant that it’s a true reproductive miracle that her water didn’t break on air. Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin guest starred, taking a seat at the “Weekend Update” desk with co-anchors Amy and Seth Meyers. There was some back-and-forth between Palin (in full hot teacher mode with glossy updo and shiny teeth) and Meyers about a bit Palin chose not to participate in, as it wouldn’t be good for the campaign. Amy graciously agreed to step in and dove into an epic rap. A pair of Eskimos appeared as her backup chorus.
Amy was so pregnant that her belly was no longer round, but more oblong and bargelike—something that happens at the very end when the baby, rather than floating sweetly in its amniotic bath, is wedged in there like a sumo wrestler stuck in economy. She looked pretty exhausted, but completely owned it—as if this wasn’t simply one of a hundred bits she’d done over the years, but as if this performance would be the ticket out of her small town.
If there exists more convincing evidence that pregnant ladies aren’t the delicate flowers our culture would have them be, I’d like to see it. All those comely pregnant celebrities on the cover of the glossy mags—boldly displaying their very round bellies and outie belly buttons, a Mona Lisa smile on their moistened lips—think they’re showing the world what it’s like to be a mom-to-be? Wrong. It’s Amy Poehler, rapping My name is Sarah Palin /you all know me / vice prezzy nominee / of the GOP.
When asked by People whether it was bizarre to be sending up Palin, who was sitting right there, Amy said she felt no shame or embarrassment. “I was just trying not to give birth—that was my goal.”
Amy’s style of difficulty is inspiring because however winning or funny she may be, she takes herself and her life very seriously. Once, when she was in Cannes to promote a film, a reporter asked whether she ever dreamed she would one day be there. Clearly, this was her cue to confess that yes, she was thrilled and shocked and full of Hollywood guru-inspired gratitude with a twist of lemon. Instead, she gave him a look—I’m betting with an arched eyebrow—and said, “Sure I did.”
It doesn’t get any more difficult than that.
CHAPTER 5
RUTH BADER GINSBURG
Indefatigable
EIGHTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not do girl push-ups. During her twice-a-week workouts in the Supreme Court gym, she busts out two sets of 10 standard push-ups without stopping for a break. She leg presses 70 pounds. She easily nails one-arm side planks, one-legged squats, and a medicine ball toss. Since the death of her husband, Martin, in 2010, and best friend on the bench, Antonin Scalia, in 2016, Ruth jokes that the most important person in her life is her personal trainer, Bryant Johnson. Justice Ginsburg is not much of a wisecracker; I’d wager that she thought this probably sounded amusing, but she was actually serious.
Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of five hundred and the first female member of the Harvard Law Review. After transferring and graduating at the top of her class from Columbia Law School in 1959, she made a name for herself as a quiet yet stalwart courtroom advocate for gender equality. In 1972, she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union women’s rights project and became the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School. Between 1973 and 1975, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, and won five of them. In 1980 President Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and in 1993 President Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court. She was the second woman to serve, joining Sandra Day O’Connor.
If you were born after 1970, and have thus benefited from changes in the law Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped effect, you might be forgiven for viewing her ascent as a smooth escalator ride to the top—the obvious outcome for a woman who is clearly brilliant. (In the early 1960s, when Ruth went to Sweden to study civil procedure—something in which she holds a passionate interest—she learned Swedish.) But let’s not forget that her Depression-era generation of women breathed sexism as if it were air. Most fell in line with societal norms, accepting the fallacy that female biology transcends individual intelligence, aptitude, ambition, or the understandable human desire to escape a lifetime of picking up the dirty socks of others. The kind of blatant, dispiriting discrimination Ruth experienced as she advanced in her career wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
But whereas many women were thwarted, Ruth persevered. Misogyny was simply one more hill to climb. Ruth was difficult because she refused to be discouraged. She really persisted, one tiny foot in front of the other.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Joan Ruth Bader was born during the worst year of the Great Depression. Her father, Nathan, was a furrier, when the last thing a person could afford was a fur coat. Her mother, Celia, denied a college education because of her gender, especially valued education for her daughter. She hoped that if Ruth studied hard, she might become a teacher. But Celia was stricken with cancer while Ruth was in high school, and died the day before her daughter graduated.
At Cornell, Ruth met Martin Ginsburg, whom she would marry a few days after she graduated in 1954. Together they went to Harvard Law, where the dean berated Ruth at a dinner party for taking a man’s spot. Even though there were 491 men in her class of 500, she was made to feel guilty for displacing a presumably now despondent male applicant whose life she’d made more difficult. During her second year at Harvard, Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. They also had a toddler, Jane. Ruth took care of her husband as he underwent surgery and chemotherapy, went to class for him, and typed up his papers from dictation, while also caring for their daughter. She managed, amid all this, to keep her own grades up and made the Harvard Law Review.
Marty recovered and graduated. He accepted a position at a firm in New York. Ruth dutifully transferred to Columbia Law School, graduating in 1959. She leaned in before it was a thing, had it all before women knew they could want it all. She made it work because her husband was a partner, and her views on motherhood—like pretty much everything else about RBG, as she’s come to be known of late—were ahead of her time. “When I started law school, my daughter Jane was 14 months, and I attribute my success in law school largely to Jane. I went to class about 8:30 a.m., and I came home at 4:00 p.m.; that was children’s hour. It was a total break in my day, and children’s hour continued until Jane went to sleep. Then I was happy to go back to the books. So I felt each part of my life gave me respite from the other.”
Despite being first in her class at Columbia Law, Ruth couldn’t get a job. Think about it: First in her class, and not one offer. It was a discriminatory trifecta: Jewish, woman, mother. Gerald Gunther, a forward-thinking professor who believed in her, finally strong-armed Manhattan federal judge Edmund Palmieri into hiring her to clerk for him. “Gunther told the judge he’d never recommend another Columbia student to him unless he gave me a chance,” Ruth said in a 2013 New Yorker interview.
But the challenges continued. In 1963, Ruth was the first woman to teach at Rutgers Law School, where the dean helpfully explained that because her husband made a good living, it was unnecessary to pay her what her male colleagues were making. When she became pregnant with her son, James, in 1964, she hid her condition.
If Ruth ever struggled with insomnia, tossing and turning while brooding over the heinous injustices she was being forced to endure, it never manifested itself in her approach to the law. She’s a believer in baby steps. Goethe said about writing, “Do not hurry, do not rest”—a description that also describes Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s jurisprudence. One day, her secretary was typing up a brief and suggested that Justice Ginsburg change the phrase sex discrimination to gender discrimination. The problem was the word “sex.” Her secretary pointed out that like a dog distracted by a squirrel, the male justices were no doubt distracted from Ruth’s argument by the constant repetition of the word. From then on Ruth used the term “gender discrimination,” which stuck and is now used in court.
Ruth’s radicalism flies under the flag of 1950s-era good manners; it’s hard to believe a woman so genteel and soft-spoken is such a mighty litigator. Her mother-in-law once advised her that the key to a happy marriage was sometimes pretending to be a little deaf; Ruth has said the same applies to being a female Supreme Court justice. “When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best to tune it out,” she observed. “Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.”
Dahlia Lithwick, in her Slate story tracing the rise of the Internet meme “Notorious RBG,” wrote, “Ginsburg was so institution-minded and retiring in her first decade at the high court that it was often difficult to reconcile her presence with the monster Supreme Court litigator whose work…would reshape U.S. gender law forever. Yet, on and off the bench, Ginsburg always looked and sounded like the most dangerous weapon she could possibly be carrying would be a potato kugel.” Proving, in case there was any doubt, that you don’t need to possess the strapping badass countenance of Xena Warrior Princess to be a truly, deeply difficult woman.
Of everything Ruth Bader Ginsburg must have imagined when she was appointed to the Supreme Court, I’m confident that being a pop culture sensation was not on the list. Shana Knizhnik, a law student at New York University in 2013, was inspired by Ruth’s recent dissenting opinions. In 2006, when Sandra Day O’Connor retired, Ruth didn’t like being the only woman on the court.* She began to see that a lot of the work she had done for gender equality was starting to erode. Over the years, her dissenting opinions became positively scathing. She would read them to the court in her soft little voice. To some, I imagine this seemed out of character. Tiny, unassuming Justice Ginsburg! I don’t think writing and delivering these historic opinions required the summoning of untapped reserves of strength and chutzpah. By this time Ruth had spent her entire life battling for her own right to excel. Without knowing it, she’d been in training for just this moment.
Knizhnik followed Ruth’s dissents, became inspired, and started a blog on Tumblr called Notorious R.B.G. (with apologies to the late rapper Biggie Smalls, also known as the Notorious B.I.G.) and subtitled Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in all her glory. The blog went viral (with a name like that how could it not?), Knizhnik whipped up some cool T-shirts, and an Internet sensation was born. The tattoos, Halloween costumes, coloring books, greeting cards, mugs, and tarot cards were not far behind. In 2015, Knizhnik and MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon published a saucy biography, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It became a New York Times best seller.
The media also become interested in RBG’s fashion choices. Ruth is known for sprucing up her somber black judge’s robe with a collection of fancy jabots (lace collars). The website Bustle has respectfully suggested the justice might be termed an accessory hoarder. Her day-to-day jabot appears to be a white beaded collar from Cape Town, South Africa: very chic. She sports a black velvet-and-gold jeweled collar on the days she reads the dissenting opinion. It would not be out of place around the neck of Cleopatra, and looks as though it might conceal a tiny dagger. For majority opinions, she busts out a woven gold collar with dangly beads, given to her by her law clerks. The style is a little Harmless Grandma, but it’s probably better, tactically, to come off as a tiny old lady with a crocheted doily around your neck when you’re handing the losing justices their asses.
Now that she’s captured our cultural imagination, we know things about Ruth Bader Ginsburg that we might not otherwise. She loves opera. She hates to cook (her late husband Marty was the chef in the house). In her 70s she developed a hankering for white-water rafting. She is also digging the attention and keeps a supply of Notorious R.B.G. T-shirts in stock. (She especially loves one that says “You can’t spell truth without Ruth.”) She’s been blunt about her dislike of President Trump. During the election she called him “a faker”—a crazy outburst by her normally low-key standards. She later apologized, but barely. She is notorious, after all.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg—always determined, disciplined, and polite—has become in her great old age, difficult. And the world is loving it.
*She would be the lone woman for three years, until the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009.
CHAPTER 6
JOSEPHINE BAKER
Gutsy
ON OCTOBER 2, 1925,
moments after she appeared on stage at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Josephine Baker became the red-hot toast of Paris. She made her entrance splayed across the back of her partner, Joe Alex. The number was called “Danse Sauvage,” and their identical “savage” costumes included matching feather skirts accompanied by a collection of bracelets and necklaces made from shells and seedpods. Joe wore a feather headdress. Josephine already sported her trademark slick cap of black hair, a silver dollar–size spit curl plastered to her forehead. Also, for some reason, black flats (as people are known to wear in darkest Africa).
Josephine rolled off Joe’s back and launched into a frenzied dance the likes of which no one had ever seen—even in sophisticated 1920s Paris. She shook body parts no one knew you could shake. She was a proto–hip-hop artist, popping and locking, isolating different joints, hips doing one thing, belly another, ribs yet another. Her arms flailed, and her head rotated on that long, elegant neck. All that bumping, grinding, and groove thang shaking that goes on during music videos, televised award programs, rock concerts, Super Bowl halftime shows, and fraternity mixers? It all can be traced back to Josephine Baker, the celebrated American-French singer-dancer who would go on to spy for France during World War II, agitate for civil rights in the States during the 1950s and ’60s, and mesmerize audiences until four days before her death, at 68, in 1975.
In 1926, she followed up the “Danse Sauvage” at the renowned Folies Bergère cabaret with her most unforgettable act: Un Vent de Folie, also known as the banana skirt dance.*1 The performance made her the biggest African-American star in the world. “I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on,” she explained. It was untrue, even metaphorically. Josephine was completely naked before her audiences, which was part of her stupendous charisma.
