Thankfully for women everywhere, the feminist movement has embraced intersectionality as a foundational piece of the effort to advance equality for all. It's a part of feminism that's crucial for women of color, lesbian women and women with disabilities -- basically anyone who's not white and straight -- and it's a cause that's been long championed by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
According to Irin Carmon, co-author of the new book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the judicial titan fits right into what feminism means for women today.
"This generation of young women's feminism is extremely concerned with intersectionality and all of the different aspects that women experience in terms of the different, interlocking kinds of oppression, be that racial, economic, environmental," Carmon told HuffPost Live on Wednesday.
Carmon cited Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case as evidence of that. In the dissent, Ginsburg argued that forcing low-income women to pay for their own reproductive care is tantamount to taking away their choice in the matter of their own bodies because of often prohibitive costs.
"When Justice Ginsburg talks about reproductive freedom, she often talks about the fact -- and she said this when I interviewed her -- that there will never be a time in this country when well-off women don't have access to abortion," Carmon said. "I think it's intersectional before its time, to be primarily concerned with the fact that you can say women have a constitutional right to reproductive freedom ... but to say that only the rich can enjoy those rights, that just doesn't seem right under the Constitution."
Intersectionality is all about supporting the rights of women as a whole, including the least influential and powerful, and Carmon said Ginsburg's record shows that.
"Justice Ginsburg has always shown an interest in the people who are left out of the dominant story," Carmon said.
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