Born Joan Ruth Bader to a working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1933, Ginsberg faced plenty of sexism in her early life. After her beloved mother died the day before her high school graduation, she was refused the right to attend the minyan, a traditional Jewish prayer service, because she was a woman.

Despite having gone to Cornell University on a full scholarship, she was only able to get a job as a typist after graduation – and was demoted with a pay cut upon becoming pregnant with her first child, aged 21.

In 1956, Ginsburg and her husband Marty (who she described as “the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”) began attending Harvard Law School.

She was one of only nine female students in a class of around 500, prompting the dean to ask her why she’d taken a place that “should go to a man” (a moment immortalised in the 2018 film On The Basis Of Sex, starring Felicity Jones). After graduating, one of her professors recommended her for a job with a Supreme Court justice, but she was rejected on the basis that the judge wasn’t ready to hire a woman, especially a mother. The list of indignities went on and on.

Farewell Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a true feminist icon for the ages