Remembering RBG

We owe so much to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  I spent the last week remembering how much she changed my life.  Soon after I was divorced, I was shopping at Dillards and remarked to the clerk that I was no longer the Mrs....that was listed on my credit card.  She was horrified and so was I when I found how difficult it was to get a card in my own name.  

When my automobile insurance came due, my agent informed me that the present company was dropping me because "divorced women have more accidents."  I got a policy with a different company and the next year I got a different agent.

When a fellow speech-pathologist and I opened our private practice in 1975, we could not set up a bank account unless our husbands signed for it.  

Imagine any of those incidents happening today.  We owe much of our success as women to RBG's influence.

The year after my second husband died, I submitted a poem to a forthcoming book entitled The Widows' Handbook. I was delighted when it was accepted and both amazed and thrilled when I got my author's copy and read the forward written by none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  A widow herself, she took the time from her extremely busy life to write about her own widowhood and her compassion for those of us who had lost our spouses.

In my heart, there will always be a vacant chair in the Supreme Court in memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Here is part of a poem that fits her perfectly.  It's called The Dissenter's Hope:

Never surrender the fight for today

And never give up the dream of a better tomorrow

For this is the dissenter's hope

That one day,

Some enlightened day in the future,

When truth is given full voice

Justice will win the majority

And the bell of freedom will ring

With new clarity.