I was lucky enough to get to watch Dahlia Lithwick interview Ruth Bader Ginsburg this January. We were doing a project on the other women she started Harvard Law School with. What struck me was the way RBG told us outright that she was not the smartest woman in that class.

She thought her classmate, Alice Vogel, was smarter. Many things stood between Alice and the kind of law career RBG had—an (ex) husband who didn’t want her to succeed, pregnancy discrimination, other tragedies. And Ruth knew that.

Here is a note that her daughters shared with us, that RBG sent to them when Alice passed.

Today, it’s worth remembering that even in all the fame, RBG remembered that she was also very lucky, that many woman had the capacity to do what she did. And as Dahlia writes in her beautiful remembrance, that's what we need to do now: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/ruth-bader-ginsburg-remembrance-what-now.html

(I also recommend spending some time with our project today, reading about those women's extraordinary lives https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/the-women-of-harvard-law-rbg-1959.html, and listening the Ruth's memories of that time in her life: https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2020/07/amicus-class-of-rbg-part-1)