There’s a scene in a recent movie about Ruth Bader Ginsburg that stuck in my head after I saw it. It’s in the biopic On the Basis of Sex, when the future justice and some of her Harvard Law classmates are gathered at Dean Erwin Griswold’s house for dinner. The year is 1956, just six years after the law school started admitting women. In that scene, the dean asks each of the women in the class—nine of them, including Ginsburg—to stand up and explain why she’s at Harvard, taking the place of a man.
This really did happen, and it’s a story that’s been retold countless times over the years, including by Justice Ginsburg herself (On the Basis of Sex was written by Ginsburg’s nephew, whom I’ve interviewed). The story itself has thus taken on a life of its own, in part thanks to the way Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s astonishing legal career has made it seem in retrospect even more absurd. That night at Dean Griswold’s has become yet another part of the hagiography that surrounds the Supreme Court justice. In the movie, of course, the spotlight is on Justice Ginsburg, as she drily replies that she is at Harvard because she wants to learn more about her husband’s work. But when I watched that scene, I thought: What about those other women, giggling in the background at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s response? Those women, pioneers all, are now just extras in movie scenes about their famous classmate. But who are they? What drew them to join a class of 500-plus men to study the law, and what did they hope to do with their degrees?
Beyond that, I was determined to know what became of them at Harvard, and beyond. Did they band together amid the sea of men, supporting one another in the face of occasionally hostile professors, and later, hostile workplaces? Did they marry the loves of their lives, as Justice Ginsburg did, and find fulfilling work in the law? Did they spend their careers cheering on their petite classmate from afar, as she shattered glass ceilings and built a constitutional system that protected gender equality? Or did they secretly believe that but for a twist of fate here and there, they too could have been seated at the highest court in the land?
Well, it took more than a year, but we found them. Of those who survive, we took oral histories and turned some of those interviews into a two-episode podcast series. Of those who do not, we spoke to their family members in order to try to assemble a complete picture of the divergent paths of that class of 1959. We collected photos and notes and stories to try to build an archive of these women’s lives and careers. We even tracked down one woman we had missed at first, because she had dropped out of Harvard Law and wasn’t in the yearbook—we found her only because Justice Ginsburg herself told us that we’d gotten the number of women in her class wrong, as one of her female classmates had dropped out before graduating. (What we learned when we tracked her down is that this classmate eventually went back to get her law degree and became so involved in advocacy work that she’s been arrested for protesting in her 80s.)
