Wendy Williams

I am not cognitively impaired. You know what I'm saying? No, but I feel like I am in prison. You understand what I'm saying? She's there in New York in this place, essentially like what some would call a luxury prison, right? This is her room. That's literally her apartment. But the thing about this apartment is, And you know this, Aunt Wendy, because you're there. It's small.

She has a bed, a chair, a TV, a bathroom, and she's looking out one window. The building's across the street.

Before all that. Ruth Ginsburg. She was at the ACLU. This was in the 70s. And one of the characteristics of Ruth Ginsburg, which exists to this day. You can hear this.

When you'd ask her a question, there would be silence. Enough silence to make a person nervous and start trying to help her answer the question. You had to wait.

It didn't matter to her if the plaintiff was a man or a woman, because in most of those cases, the discrimination against the man was derivative of a prior and worse discrimination against the woman.

It was the case that the Supreme Court had never once met a distinction between men and women it didn't like. Wendy Williams, law professor emeritus at Georgetown.

This case, it was called Gessert v. Cleary that went to the Supreme Court. And the issue was whether women could be bartenders. The court thought that that was pretty humorous, that it made sense that women could not be bartenders unless their husbands or fathers were in charge of the bar.

Yeah, right? Those two cases represent attitudes almost 80 years apart that women belonged in the private sphere. That was not only their place, it was built into their bodies.

But just about 67...

Things had started to come to a boil.