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Retropod

The rabble rouser who inspired Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Retropod

The Washington Post

History, Education For Kids, Kids & Family

4.5670 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2019

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dorothy Kenyon was an early leader in the legal fight for women's rights.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Retropod is sponsored by Tiro Price. Are you looking to learn a thing or two about getting your finances

0:04.4

in order, saving, and investing? Check out the Confident Wallet, a personal finance podcast series by

0:09.4

Tero Price and the Washington Post Brand Studio. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

0:14.8

Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

0:23.9

There's a new film out about the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

0:29.9

or, as she's been dubbed recently, R.B.G. Gensberg, I mean R.B.G. has become something of a pop culture icon.

0:40.7

The new movie, titled On the Basis of Sex, focuses on the Early Law Career of RBG,

0:47.5

played by Felicity Jones and her key role in the women's rights movement.

0:53.2

It's a riveting legal thriller in its own right,

0:56.2

but the film also serves as a historical canvas on which several forgotten heroes of those

1:02.4

times spring back to life. One of them is Dorothy Kenyon, lawyer, activist, rabble-rouser. About halfway through on the basis of sex,

1:16.5

the Hollywood version of Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes her daughter Jane to a decrepit office building

1:22.2

in downtown New York in the early 1970s. They are there to see Kenyon, played by Kathy Bates.

1:31.0

The moment, according to Ginsburg's daughter, is pure fiction, though.

1:35.6

The future Supreme Court Justice, now 85, never visited Kenyon.

1:40.4

Yet, in the narrative arc of the movie, the scene is pivotal, just as Kenyon was a pivotal figure in the arc of Ginsburg's legal career.

1:50.6

Why?

1:51.9

Well, in the movie, Ginsburg is there to ask Kenyon about Gwendolyn Holt, a woman who Ginsburg spoke of on the first day of her Supreme Court nomination hearing.

2:02.6

A woman, Gwendolyn Hoyt, had a philandering husband who had humiliated her to the breaking point regularly.

2:11.6

Maybe we didn't have names like battered women in those days, But she did not have a happy marriage.

2:19.2

One day, in rage at the humiliation to which she was exposed,

2:24.7

she turned to the corner of the room and spied her young son's baseball bat.

...

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