Elias Frank

Jessica Montoya Moreno: When I found out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died I was shocked. Before she died, she was a woman who I looked up to, but as I read more about her life and everything she did, I am coming to understand that she is even more inspiring than I understood her to be. One article that I read says that when she was close to graduating her high school like a day before her graduation her mother passed away and eventually she graduated from her college first class. Even when her mom had passed away, she tried and didn’t give up.  She had a family and put her studies on hold for her family, then eventually got back to furthering her education.

She faced high gender discrimination because it was a male-dominated school. She’s so inspiring to me. It’s the way she didn’t give up when they didn’t want to hire her in law firms, or the way that they wanted to pay her less than the males who worked there because she was a female. She kept going and trying to do something new even though she was discriminated against for being a woman whom they thought less capable. She proved them wrong so many times and so many ways. The way she was the first female tenured professor at Columbia. The way that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with a powerful dissent, inspired Congress to pass the first bill that President Obama signed into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

I admire the way she was so influential in realizing women’s rights. She also stood up for men who were discriminated against. Ruth is proof of how to keep fighting even when things aren’t going so well, to push for a better tomorrow even when it seems so far away. Even when Ruth’s husband passed away or when she had cancer and had chemotherapy, she kept going. Ruth is beyond inspiring. She’s a woman who won’t be forgotten, who fought for a better tomorrow until the end. She inspired a lot of people. Ruth will forever be in our hearts.