Wendy Williams
Appearances
Radiolab
More Perfect: Sex Appeal
Before all that. Ruth Ginsburg. She was at the ACLU. This was in the 70s. And one of the characteristics of Ruth Ginsburg, which exists to this day. You can hear this.
Radiolab
More Perfect: Sex Appeal
When you'd ask her a question, there would be silence. Enough silence to make a person nervous and start trying to help her answer the question. You had to wait.
Radiolab
More Perfect: Sex Appeal
It didn't matter to her if the plaintiff was a man or a woman, because in most of those cases, the discrimination against the man was derivative of a prior and worse discrimination against the woman.
Radiolab
More Perfect: Sex Appeal
It was the case that the Supreme Court had never once met a distinction between men and women it didn't like. Wendy Williams, law professor emeritus at Georgetown.
Radiolab
More Perfect: Sex Appeal
This case, it was called Gessert v. Cleary that went to the Supreme Court. And the issue was whether women could be bartenders. The court thought that that was pretty humorous, that it made sense that women could not be bartenders unless their husbands or fathers were in charge of the bar.
Radiolab
More Perfect: Sex Appeal
Yeah, right? Those two cases represent attitudes almost 80 years apart that women belonged in the private sphere. That was not only their place, it was built into their bodies.