Friday Feminist Super Hero!

One of my main goals in writing this blog is to have a little humor, but to also increase and underscore the message that Feminism is a GOOD thing, we like it. It makes sense. While I don't want to ignore the mysogynistic douche-baggery that is pervasive in our fine country, I do want to focus on positive messages about the F-Word.

Which leads me to Survival of the Feminist's Friday Feminist Super Hero

The criteria is: 1) Feminist 2) Super 3) I like them 4) Friday.

I am really grooving on the news around Sonia Sotomayor's nomination by President Obama lately. The NY Times has a couple of articles on her today. Conservative white guys are all in tither about her statements of valuing her gender and heritage and saying something like "a wise Latino woman would make a better decision than a white man would." She has been explaining the relevance of that statement all week as the talking heads of Conservative TV and Radio have been jumping all over it and calling her a "reverse racist." And, does the White House back her up? Not totally. They say those were an "unfortunate choice of words." WTF, Barack?

That got me to thinking about who the inaugural FFSH should be. During lunch with my bosses yesterday, we were talking about Sotomayor and how Ruth Bader Ginsburg is currently the lone woman on the bench of SCOTUS and Bader Ginsbnurg has an ENORMOUS contribution to fighting gender discrimination and reading her dissent out loud to the court.

The Friday Feminist Super Hero is: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg!!! YAY!!!




From the NY TIMES:

Justice Ginsburg expressed dismay at being the only woman on the Supreme Court. “There I am all alone,” she said, “and it doesn’t look right.”

And again from the NY TIMES:

Justice Ginsburg has generally been a quiet presence on the court, both in her demeanor during arguments and in her opinions. But in 2007, as the Court moved to the right following the replacement of Justice O'Connor by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., she wrote a series of stinging dissents, and took the unusual step of reading two of them from the bench.

In one case, in which the court upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act seven years after having struck down a similar state law, she noted that the court was now "differently composed than it was when we last considered a restrictive abortion regulation." In a discrimination case involving a woman who had been paid less than her male peers, she summoned Congress to overturn what she called the majority's "parsimonious reading" of the federal law against discrimination in the workplace.

And, that is why, my friends Justice Ginsburg is the inaugural FFSH!