Dinners With Ruth

As the subtitle of her work suggests, in Dinners with Ruth, Totenberg develops a theme about The Importance of Friendship. While Totenberg describes how her friends helped her cope with personal hardships, she especially highlights how friendships transformed her experience of work and helped her to build a productive and enjoyable career. She recalls, “The other crucial aspect of friendships in that period […] is that they were different. For women of my generation, it was not natural to find an immediate group of friends at work […]. It was lonely at work. That’s the only way to describe it” (58). She contrasts these feelings of isolation at her early jobs, where she did not have female colleagues, to the close “sisterhood” of friendships she formed at the National Public Radio (88). Totenberg credits these close friendships with not only increasing her enjoyment of her job, but also providing her with the mentorship she craved and needed to develop her skills. Totenberg considers how the sexist discrimination that was so prevalent at the time made her and her colleagues “natural allies” for each other (59). The author credits her closest NPR friends, Cokie and Linda, with teaching her how to be a generous role model and pass on mentorship to other women, too. The author demonstrates the intensity—and necessity—of these female friendships by revealing that some of their male colleagues “resented the fact that we were a pack” and called their hangout area “the fallopian jungle” (60). Totenberg points out that the “pack” mentality was hardly accidental, since she and her colleagues felt that “There was safety—and power—in numbers,” neither of which she could have attained alone (60).

Totenberg shares that Ginsburg also coped with feeling like an outsider at work, something the two bonded over. The author remembers, “We were both outsiders to the world in which we operated. We both had our noses pressed up against the windowpane, looking inside, and saying, ‘Hey, men in there, let me in!’” (40). Ever an outsider in the legal profession, Ginsburg had to wait until she joined the Supreme Court at the age of 60 to experience the comfort of female friendships in the workplace. Totenberg writes, “For the first time in her life as a judge, Ruth was also part of a genuine sisterhood” (130). Ginsburg called Justice Sandra Day O’Connor “the most helpful big sister anyone could have,” and was grateful for the advice and encouragement O’Connor gave her as she began her new position (131). Totenberg suggests that having two women on the Court helped to normalize women’s presences in that workplace, and their mutual support helped both of them succeed. For instance, according to Totenberg, when Ginsburg joined the Court, the institution finally provided a women’s washroom. The author also argues that Ginsburg was not as easily dismissed by her male colleagues at the Court, which she was in previous positions, because of O’Connor’s supportive presence. Totenberg concludes, “They really were a team” (132).