How Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped break gender barriers in SC before Supreme Court days

Long before the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a famous justice on the U.S. Supreme Court known for trail-blazing decisions on equal rights for women, her impact was felt in South Carolina.

In the 1970s, Jean Toal, a young SC lawyer, who eventually became a SC Supreme Court chief justice, reached out to Ginsburg, then an unknown New Jersey law school professor with a growing reputation on women’s rights cases to assist in a Columbia lawsuit.

That lawsuit against South Carolina lawmakers who refused to let a young woman — a first-year University of South Carolina law school student — be a page in the S.C. Senate. (Then, as now, a page was a coveted job for a young person, because the Legislature is a place where young people make friendships with powerful lawmakers, greasing their entry into South Carolina’s world of politics and law.)

And on Thursday night, during a candlelit street memorial for Ginsburg in downtown Columbia, that former law student — now a veteran Columbia lawyer named Vickie Eslinger — said she learned a few things from Ginsburg in her quest to become a page, including “if you want to make any meaningful change, you have to grow a backbone.”

Second, Ginsburg “aimed for perfection in her work” and that quest for perfection, Eslinger said, was illustrated by Ginsburg’s reaction to a slip-up a lawyer on her case made in a draft of a legal document.

Ginsburg grew angry and “pointed out that a comma was misplaced ... and she said she would never ever put her name on anything that sloppy and there was no excuse for such lack of attention to detail. She also said she didn’t ever expect to see anything like that again if she was going to work with us. I never forgot that.”

Eslinger, who never became a page because her case dragged on so long, and Toal were among the 100 people who came to a candlelight vigil on Thursday night that blocked off a stretch of Gervais Street in Columbia to honor and share stories of the late supreme court justice.

Ginsburg, the second woman to become a justice, died Sept. 18 at the age of 87 and was on the high court 27 years. On Friday, her casket lay in state in the U.S. Capitol, the first woman in U.S. history to have such an honor.

Toal, who also spoke to the those at the vigil, said Ginsburg had a tender side.

“The Ruth Ginsburg I knew for 50 years was a truly humble person, kind to a fault, always interested in your family, your career, your triumphs and your sorrows,” Toal said.

But Ginsburg could be tough, said Toal, who recalled Ginsburg argued a woman’s rights case before an all-male US Supreme Court, closing by quoting a South Carolina suffragette, Sarah Grimké: “I ask no favor for my sex.... I ask simply of our brethren that they take their feet off our necks.”

Columbia City Council Member Tameika Isaac Devine told the crowd Ginsburg would want people to continue her legacy.

“Now it’s time for us to take the torch,” Isaac Devine said.

Lessons from Ginsburg’s life, Devine said, include courtesy in the struggle — “fight for the things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you” — and embracing obstacles — “so often in life things you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.”

Rabbi Jonathan Case reminded the crowd that Ginsburg, who was Jewish, died on one of the special holy day Rosh Hashanah, which ancient Jewish tradition designates as a day when the most righteous pass away.

“We reckon that God chose very wisely the day to take Ruth Bader Ginsburg from this world, because he knew that we would understand that this was a woman who was larger than life,” Case said, “(One) who has created great change in this world and is deserving of her place in paradise.”

On Ginsburg’s office walls, three times, Case noted, was a verse from Deuteronomy, “Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue... this is what she left in our hands, she showed us the way.”

Case sang a prayer in Hebrew and ended with, “May her memory be a blessing to us all.”

Ed Madden, Columbia’s poet laureate, read a poem that wove together quotes from Ginsburg, U.S. and S.C. history and her legal battles, finishing up with “today, we are Ruth-less, but we speak not for today, but for tomorrow.”