When I’m sometimes asked, when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court, and I say, “When there are nine,” people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that. Ruth Bader Ginsberg

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died I was shocked. I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked, she had been sick for a while but she had a whiff of immortality about her. While, it turns out, she wasn’t immortal, RBG was famously in good shape for her age, saying at one time that her personal trainer, Bryant Johnson, was “the most important person in her life”. Like everybody her age, she was born in a different universe than the one she died in, but unlike most people, she was one of the reasons that old universe changed.

Her death marks the end of an era; an era in which white women campaigned for white women’s causes thinking they were universal. For some reason that I’m clueless about, the baton of change, of growth towards equality, has been picked up by women of color. Maybe when RBG – hummm, RBG, not Ginsburg, like Scalia or Roberts – started her career, she was a woman of color. Maybe it’s just because it is hard to be an agent of change when one is a comfortable insider. Maybe it is easier for an outside to see past the artifices of the patriarchy. What ever the reason, Ruther Bader Ginsburg was an agent of change, to my way of thinking change for the better. May her memory continue to energize a new generation of young women and middle age women, and old women, and men of all ages. Rest in peace, RBG, your fight is over and you mostly won.