Jonathan Wenk / Focus Features
On the Basis of Sex
In the gray flannel tide flowing toward Harvard Law School, one person stands out. Dressed in blue and clutching a handbag instead of a briefcase, Ruth Bader Ginsburg advances, eyes aglow with hope and determination. On the Basis of Sex opens in 1956, when Ginsburg was one in a handful of women attending Harvard Law. The school had only recently begun admitting women, and barely a generation earlier, Harvard restricted the number of its Jewish students.
Just being there was a challenge but Ginsburg was up for it. On the Basis of Sex folds her crucial college years and her first landmark case into a Hollywood mold, complete with stirring music at moments pregnant with expectation. Yet, anyone familiar with last summer’s popular documentary, RBG, will recognize the new film’s overall truth. On the Basis of Sex didn’t have to work so hard to be inspiring. The story practically tells itself.
Felicity Jones is a believable Ginsburg, both as a young law student in the ’50s and—after the film jumps to the ’70s—the campaigner who challenged the inferior legal status of women in federal courts. Although her Brooklyn accent wavers, Jones conveys an inner life composed of vulnerability and stubbornness. On the Basis of Sex is a love story as well as a law story. While her husband, Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer), was sidelined by cancer treatments, Ruth attended his law classes and helped him graduate. Martin became a successful tax attorney and supported Ruth professionally and personally. They shared parenting—and he was the better cook.
Some of On the Basis of Sex’s best parts reflect on the early years when intelligent women weren’t necessarily taken seriously or afforded opportunities. Despite her sharp mind and prodigious memory, Ginsburg was hard put to establish a legal career. Even as a Rutgers professor, she felt patronized and dismissed. But a renewed women’s movement brought the lower status of women into question. According to On the Basis of Sex, a lasting impression was made on Ginsburg during a Harvard lecture on precedents. Judges are bound by them, the professor said, but added that significant social and cultural developments—not a shift in weather but a change in climate—should lead courts to new interpretations of basic principles.
On the Basis of Sex is also good at showing the evolution of Ginsburg’s ideas and approach in context of the rising women’s movement. It was collaborative. She took her crucial early test case, involving discrimination against a man in a tax matter, at her husband’s suggestion and against the initial advice of the ACLU. On the Basis of Sex is a reminder that only half a century ago, women were usually barred from many responsibilities by law as well as social custom. Ginsburg went to the forefront as a leading intellectual in the fight for change.
