The Swedish Influence on Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020), a section from today’s obituary in The New York Times

Since I’m currently reading a novel by a Swedish author, who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, I took particular note of this:

“The Swedish Influence

After her graduation from Columbia [law school], Ms. Ginsburg received no job offers from New York law firms…

…Ms. Ginsburg returned to Columbia to work on a comparative law project on civil procedure. The project required her to learn Swedish and to spend time in Sweden. The experience proved formative. Feminism was flourishing in Sweden, and there was nothing unusual about women combining work and family obligations. Child care was readily available. An article by the editor of a feminist magazine caught Ms. Ginsburg’s attention. “We ought to stop harping on the concept of women’s two roles,” the editor, Eva Moberg, wrote. “Both men and women have one principal role, that of being people.”

Between 1963 and 1970, Ms. Ginsburg produced a treatise on Swedish civil law, which remains a leading work in the field, along with a dozen other articles and books. But more than this impressive academic output, the most important product of her Swedish interval may have been the effect on the young lawyer of directly observing a different way to organize society.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-dead.html