In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and in 1973, she became the Project's general counsel. The Women's Rights Project and related ACLU projects participated in more than 300 gender discrimination cases by 1974. As the director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. Rather than asking the court to end all gender discrimination at once, Ginsburg charted a strategic course, taking aim at specific discriminatory statutes and building on each successive victory. She chose plaintiffs carefully, at times picking male plaintiffs to demonstrate that gender discrimination was harmful to both men and women. The laws Ginsburg targeted included those that on the surface appeared beneficial to women, but in fact reinforced the notion that women needed to be dependent on men. Her strategic advocacy extended to word choice, favoring the use of "gender" instead of "sex", after her secretary suggested the word "sex" would serve as a distraction to judges. She attained a reputation as a skilled oral advocate, and her work led directly to the end of gender discrimination in many areas of the law.
Ginsburg volunteered to write the brief for Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), in which the Supreme Court extended the protections of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to women
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In 1961 the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, unanimously upheld the constitutionality of a jury selection system that discriminated against women on the grounds that "women are at the center of home and family life." The observation reflected dominant social values at the time, but the Court was unable then to see how such values thwarted the promise of equality for women implicit in the Constitution.
A decade later, the newly established ACLU Women's Rights Project took the case of Reed v. Reed to the Supreme Court, challenging the automatic preference of men over women as administrators of estates. Congress had already passed statutes such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, barring some forms of sex discrimination, and the women's movement had become recognized as a major political force. In Reed, the Supreme Court saw sex discrimination in a new light, and agreed with the ACLU. For the first time, the Court held that a classification based on sex was unconstitutional, in violation of the equal protection clause.
That legal breakthrough set the stage for the Women's Rights Project's systematic effort over the next several years to urge the courts to treat sex discrimination in the same constitutional terms as race discrimination, to attack various forms of sex discrimination permitted by law, and to fashion strategies to overcome practices which, even if they were not explicitly sanctioned by the law, effectively denied true equality to women.
