In her dissents she sometimes appealed to Congress to correct the law and occasionally, to her delight, it did. Her legal hero was an incrementalist: Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the court, who had laboured to dismantle segregation. Even when she was (as she operatically liked to say) a flaming feminist litigator, bringing cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s on behalf of the Women’s Rights Project at the aclu, she saw herself first as a teacher, instructing the all-male court how women felt about laws which “protected” and thus demeaned them.

When she joined the highest court her success rate fell, but her approach, as only the second woman there, was often the same: to explain to the male justices how it felt to be barred from the Virginia Military Institute or, as a teenage girl, to be strip-searched. Because the court just did not know these things. The role of women’s champion was too narrow, though.

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